waffle

Two Bing atrocities revealed today:

• “Bing Cashback” can actually hike the price of products for three months if you click through.
• Bing is approaching companies (like News Corp.) about “Bing exclusivity”, meaning that they’d block Google and others.

This is the kind of vintage Microsoft market strong-arming that makes me both sick and bewildered. Are they really this desperate to take over a market just because it involves money and there’s someone else in it with stature? Do they really think it’s okay, market-wise, to be a complete dick? (Yeah, yeah, iPhone apps, but at least there’s a good, well-produced product with interesting technology. Bing’s just sad.) Don’t they think this is both completely transparent and will catch up with them?

If anyone can think of a compelling reason to use Bing besides “I work at Microsoft and I am concerned for the health of the office furniture“, I’d sure like to hear it.

I’ve got one word for you, just one word. Ready?

Physics.

For a series that is well known for impeccable control, it’s a bit strange to claim that NSMBW is the first Super Mario 2D game with physics. Obviously every single game before had some concept of it. But what I mean by this is that NSMBW is remarkably consistent, to the point that it may well feel like it’s the first to have them.

If a snow ball is going to freeze you solid in a block of ice, it’s going to do that whether that snow ball emerged from an ice flower, a penguin suit or one of the snow Hammer Bros. The block stays in the air for a while until it falls, the block floats in water and responds to incoming pressure by sinking, the block is crushed when it is suspended on a ledge that is moving upwards towards the business end of another platform. And I never thought I’d see the day, but Mario himself actually stands tilted on inclines to the point where his shoes and stance are parallel to the surface.

It’s a shame that Mario’s handling feels so slippery and that he decelerates and accelerates in and out of his stationary pose in a way that bears almost no resemblance even to New Super Mario Bros. (for DS). I guess I can adjust to that.

Furthermore, the visuals are stunning (even if I still prefer the Yoshi’s Island visual direction) and the levels are the right sort of wonderful. And I can’t remember the last time the world two boss in a Super Mario game put up that much of a fight. Nintendo may save their face yet.

Here’s the premise upon which Chrome OS builds: Web apps are the worst form of multi-platform applications, except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time. With profuse apologies to Winston Churchill, it’s a good premise. I didn’t even much get the latter part until embarrassingly recently.

What I’m wondering is: will it be good enough that it will distract from the more adequate native platform applications that could be had on the side, and which I imagine also form a part of useful daily computer use? Will they, maybe, not even be an issue? (Likely on netbooks; questionable above that.)

Also: If HTML is now really becoming the last layout framework we’ll ever need, we had better fucking fix CSS layouting.

Compatibility, better deployment, better linking, better compilation, JSON support, ri generation, 1.9 lambdas, and a partridge in a pear tree. Also, this:

We are also able to run simple Rack and Sinatra web applications on MacRuby, using a simple GCD-based web-server that will be covered in an upcoming blog article.

Intriguing. I still remember the hoopla when Apache 2 first came around about how it was multithreaded; I can’t wait until every web server moves to task-based programming and smarter queues and we can start doing long polling without worrying about overturning the average web server.