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Tuesday, November 20, 2012

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Sharp's plan for 2,000 early retirements proves popular as 3,000 staff exit

Sharp’s latest round of cost cutting has seen the Japanese tech struggler grant close to 3,000 staff voluntary retirement, that’s despite the company only setting out to let 2,000 employees go. The... Keep reading →

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That's all for now. See you at Kings of Code Festival 2012 (December 1 - 4) in Amsterdam? 
 
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Give the Gift of Better Gadgets This Year

November 20th, 2012Top Story

Give the Gift of Better Gadgets This Year

Give the Gift of Better Gadgets This YearWho says gadgets can't make for a personal gift? No matter what your giftee's passion is—music, cooking, tech, or DIY projects—we've got great gadget gifts for every person at every price range.

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How Will You Defeat Black Friday?

November 20th, 2012Top Story

How Will You Defeat Black Friday?

By Caity Weaver

How Will You Defeat Black Friday?With Black Friday a mere three days away (two, if you go by Target's definition of "Friday"), many people are already feeling overwhelmed at the prospect of leaving their homes, walking into a store, and purchasing the goods they find therein.

Walmart, the ninth circle of Black Friday Hell, looks like it will be even more nightmarish than usual, and "usual" is that someone gets trampled to death. Lots of retailers are planning to open Thanksgiving night. Many stores have already been open for weeks. It's bedlam, but less organized.

How will you defeat the great Black shadow looming over Thanksgiving?

With the use of Gawker's handy shopping guide.

50 Shades of Black

There are many kinds of Black Friday shoppers, and the very first thing you must do is identify your type. The quickest way to learn your type is to determine the emotion you feel when you hear the words "Black Friday." Do you feel:

  1. Ambivalent: You do not plan on going out on Black Friday. You are a Conscientious or Lazy Objector. Thank you for clicking on this post. Please share it on social media.
  2. Nervous and Excited: Like a LAX bro who enrolls in an intro Women's Studies course, you are "just here for the experience." As a Black Friday Rookie, the horrors you witness in the field will either break you, or harden your soul so that you become:
  3. Grimly Determined: Like the line outside Toys R Us at 7 p.m., you've been around the block around the few times. You are a Black Friday Black Belt.
  4. Skittish: The Crazy 8 of Black Friday, you're going into this with the unpredictability of a cornered animal. Was that orange juice you gulped down this morning, or was it a big glass of adrenaline? You might leave your first store without buying a single item, or you might emerge as Black Friday's greatest warrior. Wildcard.

OHMYGOD, I DON'T HAVE A PLAN

Calm down. You do have a plan. We're making the plan now. You are pretty much directly in the middle of the plan.

  • Tuesday/Wednesday (or Thursday, fuck your family): Reconnaissance
    If you're planning to visit a store you're not super familiar with, head over ahead of time to scope out the layout, traffic flow, and parking options. Just because you went to Best Buy to buy a TV two years ago does not mean you know where things are stocked.

    You know that old cliché of the scout who can taste a finger of dirt and know that a pregnant deer walked east from that spot 24 hours ago? That is you in Best Buy. Lick the ground. Smell the headphone boxes. Ask where the netbooks are kept.

  • Thanksgiving Day: The Ads Arrive
    Comb through the phonebook-sized advertising insert of your local paper for coupons and deals. Circle the items you want with a big black marker ("LOL, I will use whatever color marker I want," you say – NO. These ads have a lot of different color backgrounds. Some will be red. Some will be green. CIRCLE IN BLACK.) Keep notes on the front page of the ads detailing the specific items you want from that store, as well as the coupons offered, in an ink of your choosing.

    To consolidate your shopping, verify if any of the stores you're considering participate in "price matching" (that is: honoring a competitor's coupons). Check here to see whether this is the case for stores you were planning on visiting, and be sure to make sure that the price-matching policy does not exclude Thanksgiving sales (Target's does; Walmart's doesn't.) Also note whether coupons are combinable with other offers.

  • What Should I Bring?

    • A good attitude. Just kidding. That's for suckers. Do NOT bring that. A murderous attitude will do.
    • A snack. Many stores have rules against eating indoors. These stores also have rules against acting like fucking animals, rippling up displays, and throwing clothes on the ground that everyone ignores on Black Friday, so feel free to snack openly. You WILL get hungry and irritable otherwise.
    • Distractions. For the average Black Friday shopper, the worst part of the day isn't the energizing fights over 70% off Ugg Boots, but the lines whose lengths test the boundaries of credulity.

      Don't count on your phone to bail you out; friends won't want to entertain you with texts at 4 a.m. and even your most fun games will grate after forty minutes of playing. Instead, download podcasts or bring a book to give yourself the illusion of accomplishing something. ("Wow, I listened to that whole podcast.")

    • An accomplice? There are two ways to look at this. On the one hand, a friend could help you procure items more quickly, and will give you someone to gripe to while you wait in line. On the other, unless your friend is a slave, they probably are intending to do some shopping for themselves on this trip, which could leave you operating on discordant shopping rhythms. I advise against bringing an accomplice unless you can treat that accomplice like a servant (my mom brings me).

    • Dress for Excess

      Because I like to try on clothes, my outfit of choice consists of: black tights, a skirt (non-pencil),and a shirt that can be pulled on and off easily.

      Avoid one piece garments like dresses so you don't have to grab two items of clothing (a top and a bottom) every time you want to try on one.

      With the right outfit (and/or a flair for exhibitionism), you won't even have to wait for a dressing room to try on clothes. Thinking about buying a skirt? Pull it up under the one you're wearing, then rutch that one down over it to step out. At this point, you might as well steal the skirt you're trying on because, fuck it, you look great.

      It's Not Called "America's Next Top Best Friend"

      Enemy Tactics: On a normal day, a shopper's enemy is the mean store charging him money for things he wants. On Black Friday, a shopper's enemy is his fellow shopper. These bastards know your strategies and want your bargains. They have also read the very blog post you are reading. Your only option is to become the Stranger Danger they fear.

      Defense Maneuvers: Tuesday or Wednesday, head to your nearest grocery store and practice a couple basic defense and sabotage maneuvers. Reach for a box of cereal at the same time as a stock boy, then elbow him to the face. Grab a cart, then practice cutting around corners with it and using it to block people's paths (of exit or entry). Practice falling in a way that distributes your weight evenly. Get a feel for what kinds of displays provide the greatest distraction when overturned. Take an introductory physics class.

      When Normal Passes for Nice: Tips for the Psychopath

      If you go shopping on Black Friday, you guarantee yourself a supporting, if not starring (depending on how ornery you are), position in at least one store employee's personal hell. These people have the same Black Friday stresses you do, except that they aren't granted release from the miserable chamber of horrors until the end of the day. They are in a fragile state. Use it to your advantage, by being kind (or even just normal) to them.

      A "Secret Menu" of Savings: A few Black Fridays ago, my mom and I were chatting in line while waiting to be rung up at Macy's, when the cashier started looking over at us and apologizing.

      "Thank you so much for waiting patiently. I'm so sorry. Thank you for waiting. I really appreciate it. Thank you."

      Let me make it clear: we were not doing anything other than standing in line normally, chatting with one another. After a couple minutes, we made it up to that cashier and she thanked us again for waiting patiently. Then she gave us an additional discount just for having been normal people in a line.

      The lesson: it pays to be kind, or anyway, normal, when dealing with frazzled employees.

      Blue Crush State of Mind

      Ride the waves: If a store opens at 5 a.m., following an initial wave of determined early birds (that lasts until, say, 7 a.m.) there will be a brief lull period until the next wave of shoppers hits. The people who are committed enough to wake up at 7 will have been committed enough to wake up at 5. The people who want to get in early without acting crazy will wait til 9. You sneak in in between them.

      If you wait to slip in during less busy times (look for another lull late-afternoon, when the 5 a.m.-ers go home to nap), you might miss out on some of the best deals, but you also are less likely to suffer a stress-induced heart attack or be trampled.

      Anything else?

      Don't forget the reason for the season: There is none! (It's not Christmas yet.) The reason for the season is anarchy. Embrace it, and ride the winds like a wraith, snatching up door busters.

      Please share your Black Friday tips below. And be sure to take pictures and video (HOLD YOUR PHONE SIDEWAYS, JESUS) of the mayhem when you're out and about on Friday — we'll collect everyone's horror stories in a post later that day.

      Image by Jim Cooke.

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The State of the Wii U, Just Three Days In

November 20th, 2012Top Story

The State of the Wii U, Just Three Days In

By Stephen Totilo

The State of the Wii U, Just Three Days InNintendo's new console is just three days old and already one of the most controversial creations the company has ever produced. The Wii U is better than you may have heard, but it's in some ways worse. It's also changing. Constantly. And mostly for the better.

Just as new issues are being discovered some of its problems are already being addressed.

The state of the Wii U seems likely shift day by day. Here on day three, here's what's going right, what's going wrong, and what needs to change.

Good

  • There are lots of games. There are more than two dozen at launch, which is a healthy amount for a new console. Just look at this bunch… not too bad:

    The State of the Wii U, Just Three Days In

  • There are several very good launch games. New Super Mario Bros. U, Nintendo Land and ZombiU are all very fun. There are so many games, in fact, we've yet to be able to spend a lot of time with some of the potentially interesting titles like Scribblenauts Unlimited or the apparently-improved Ninja Gaiden 3.
  • The GamePad controller is light, comfortable and useful. It turns out you can add a six-inch screen to a twin-stick console controller and you wind up with a better device, one that, at minimum, makes map and inventory displays bigger and more accessible.
  • The Miiverse is amusing and handy. Nintendo's promising new social network functions as a message board for any of the system's games and apps but also functions as a handy source of advice if you're stuck in the middle of a game. Just screencap where you're stymied, multi-task your way to loading the Miiverse, post you screen and a query, go back to playing and, inevitably, someone will answer with a tip-and you'll be able to know if they had played the game, to boot. Posting in Miiverse is moderated after the fact, so fears of delays in message-posting have proven unfounded. Moderation may be heavy-handed (we have too few examples to make a judgment), but we can confirm that users are being creative within the confines Nintendo allows. Go to any Miiverse page and you'll see as much.

    Also, after a Sunday of instability, Miiverse seems to be staying online. A rep for Nintendo told Kotaku: "Due to an overwhelming response from the public on Miiverse, the servers supporting this feature went down. The service is now functioning normally." The company also claims that what appeared to be a hack of Miiverse on Sunday was actually a case of a user accessing a "mock-up menu" in the service. Nintendo says that the menu "has now been removed and is not accessible."

  • The eShop needs work, but already rivals its console competitors. Nintendo's online store on the Wii was slow and confusing. Its DSi shop wasn't much better. The 3DS one was a step up. The Wii U one is actually good. You navigate it on the GamePad's touchscreen, which makes reading the listings and tapping through the menus a cinch. Better still, most of the launch games, including a few download-only titles, were available for purchase on day one. The system saves credit card info, though it could use a shopping cart and a purchase history display.
  • Wii transfer worked well. Moving content from an old Wii to a new Wii U is easy and is accompanied by an adorable animation. The Wii U emulates the Wii and keeps old Wii content relevant. There's a flip-side to this, though… see below.
  • The WaraWara plaza is already evolving. On day one, the Mii-filled plaza you see on your TV when you turn on your Wii U was just showing Nintendo-made Miis and the Miis on a user's friend list. But last night, Nintendo switched things, and the plaza now features clusters of Miis representing players who have commented on various games on the Miiverse. In the center of this ring of players are the user's Miis and those of their friends. Speech balloons can pop up from any of these Miis, which pretty much means that the first thing you'll see when starting the Wii U isn't an ad nor a publisher-created image of a game. What you'll likely see are the ideas and opinions of Wii U gamers. As a result, when I'm booting up my Wii U, I'm seeing people troubleshoot Black Ops II headset support, rave about Nintendo Land, grumble about IGN's review of ZombiU. This isn't buried. This is how the system is welcoming me. It's an extraordinary gesture on Nintendo's part to put the voices of its users on the launch screen of the console.

    The State of the Wii U, Just Three Days In I even saw someone making a Virtual Boy joke.

Bad

  • The super-slow OS is worrisome. A console powerful enough to run Assassin's Creed III and Mass Effect 3 should not struggle and take 20 seconds to go from its system menu to its system settings app. It should not take 15 seconds to close a game and go back to the main menu. This kind of tardy performance was barely tolerable on the Wii in 2006. It's worse on the Wii U and desperately needs improvement. But when I asked Nintendo if they could or would make this better through a firmware update a rep said that the company had nothing to announce at this time.
  • Controller sync problems abound. The most common complaint we've seen from readers about Wii U functionality is that they can't get the GamePad or Wii Remotes to sync to the console. We've fielded a couple of complaints per day on Twitter and in e-mail. This is not a plague, but it is the most common malfunction we've heard. Users either need to wait a long, long time for the sync to take or they have to trade their system in. We can say that we've had no problems on our team's three Wii Us.
  • The Wii emulation hides all the Wii content (and your money). It's nice that the Wii U can pretend to be a Wii. It's disappointing that it keeps all of a user's Wii content, including Virtual Console games, inside the app that puts the Wii U in a Wii emulation mode. This would not be as big a bummer if the Wii app loaded quickly, but as with all other system apps, it takes its time. It's also worrisome if this signals that Nintendo won't let Wii-purchased VC games be moved to the main menus of the Wii U. And if Nintendo has the audacity to make people pay for those games again… just to have them on the Wii U menu? Let's hope they're not considering that. Sadly, any unspent money in the Wii's shop stays in the wallet held in the Wii U's Wii shop. The money doesn't transfer to the Wii U's eShop where Wii U games are sold.
  • The GamePad screen lacks multi-touch. As good as the GamePad is for games, its lack of multi-touch control makes the system's web browser feel archaic. Using control sticks and tilt as well as single touch is a poor substitute to modern touch-screen web-browsing standards. Good thing no one's buying the Wii U for web-browsing.
  • Slow, mandatory installs are another drag. The Wii U is a system that makes its users wait too much. It's nice that eShop purchases download in the background by default, but, as is the case on PlayStation 3, downloaded games must be manually installed. The system can't do anything else during installation. No problem, if the installation is fast. It's not. The 2GB Trine 2 required a 17-minute installation. Smaller games required a proportionately smaller amount of time.

Needs Fixing ASAP

  • Patch-nation. The Wii U simply requires too much downloading and updating. Buy the system, take it home, wait an hour while a patch downloads so you can use half of the machine's advertised features (otherwise: no online, no Miiverse, no Wii compatibility, no Netflix, no eShop). Pop in any game that uses online features? It needs a patch too. Nintendo needs to ship consoles that are patched ASAP. And it would be nice if the system, which knows which games you have once you pop them in, would start pulling down patches while I'm not using the console. The PS3 can do this; so should the Wii U.
  • Nintendo Network ID migration needs to be added. It's nice that Nintendo has created an account-based system to track online purchases and to save a user's profile. This is a great improvement from their old tricks of locking people's purchases to a machine and forcing people to re-buy games if they got a new console. The Wii U launches with a promise from Nintendo that Nintendo Network IDs will be transferable from one machine to another-just not yet. For now, you're stuck with the ID on the first Wii U that you register it to. Although… when asked about when migration would be permitted and about user concern that, should their Wii U break, they'd lose access to their ID, a rep for Nintendo said, via e-mail: "Anyone who experiences any issues with a Wii U console can troubleshoot at http://support.nintendo.com or contact 800-255-3700." Perhaps Nintendo tech knows something about how to migrate NNID's that we don't.
  • Friend requests are confusing. Nintendo promised that the Wii U, in ditching the Wii's notorious friend code system, would make adding friends on the new console easy. But friend requests only seem to pop up if people send you the request via Miiverse. You get an alert. You can choose to accept the friend request. But it seems that if you are friended via the Wii U's actual friend request app, you don't get an alert. You have to friend the person yourself to discover they did the same. So you have to communicate in real life, as you did with friend codes. That's weird. Nintendo needs to have a consistent friend request system in their console.
  • GamePad battery life is wretched. The GamePad needs charging every few hours. It's best used wired, plugged into the wall. As soon as possible, Nintendo needs to get a better battery in this thing.

It's good to see that the Wii U was packed with ambition. It's understandable that in reaching further on day one than probably any other console maker ever has, Nintendo has made several gaffes. It's gratifying to see some problems already being fixed and to see functionality improving. It's nevertheless worrisome that some issues may be inherent to the machine, and it's disappointing to see that in cases like Wii backwards compatibility, Nintendo has delivered an experience that technically fulfills its promise but doesn't provide an ideal user experience.

The Wii U is no more shaky at launch than the PS3 or the 360. All these machines sputter at take-off before they soar. There's potential here. Let's hope there are no fatal flaws and that Nintendo prepares to be a proper pilot for the journey that many people have already spent a lot of money to be a part of.

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