Google's cool maps feature is incredibly cool.  Howerver, Microsoft has something in the works too over at MSN.  In two weeks, it should be unveiled and according to Microsoft, their satellite imagery is far more detailed and supports 45 degree angle viewing.

Which means, finally, tech pranksters be able to say to the unwary, "This is god, stop touching yourself."

Read the whole thing..

I wouldn't normally put up a news item on this but I've been traveling a lot lately and airport security is almost certainly one of the biggest reasons why I try to avoid it.  I just hate having to take off my shoes, unpack my carefully packed laptop bag, and wait in long lines.  But now they want to introduce X-ray machines that let people see through our clothes?

Here's a fact check: Number of hijackings that have occurred due to someone getting an illegal item through security in the US? Answer: 0.  9/11 happened because the terrorists took box cutters - items that were perfectly legal -- onto the plane.  This is a solution for a problem that doesn't even exist. A "solution" that merely puts up even more obstacles to flying.

Search is a hot topic, and the latest generation of search engines is finding new ways to scour the Net for images, multimedia, news and--lest we forget--Web pages. Search engines are also helping us find the nearest (and best) pizzerias, directions to Aunt Betty's house, reviews and showtimes for current movies, and the latest forums for every topic under the sun. Want to mine thousands of magazines and journals for your search terms or get someone's most recent mailing address, phone number, or credit history? Online search engines make it easy--too easy, some might say.

Read the full thing over at CNET.com

We've had a bit of a hiring freeze this past Winter because we physically could no longer cram anyone else into our building.  But this June, we begin migrating to a new building and we will once again be looking for talented people to help take Stardock to the next level.

The specific areas we are looking to fill in include:

Director of Business Development. This is one of our biggest holes in our corporate structure.  In between the other things I work on at Stardock, I and a few others work together to try to fill this in.  But we really need a single talented and experienced person to be in charge of Stardock's business development strategy.  This is a person who should have at least 5 years ir not more of experience in a related area.  This person also needs to be quite technically knowledgeable.  We're looking for very high caliber talent for this position.

Channel Sales Manager. Stardock is a multi-million dollar corporation.  That's nothing particularly surprising or interesting until one realizes that a good chunk of that is sold directly through our website.  Other than a couple of games our software is not in any real channels.  We have virtually no VAR relationships, few relationships with integrators, and few relationships with distributors (retail or corporate) even though a lot of our software is ideally suited for channel sales.  That's because we don't have any experienced people, with extensive contacts and background in this area, to take our product line and move them into channels.  We are looking for someone with at least 10 years of experience for this position. They must be fairly technical and ambitious.  We believe this position holds great opportunity for the right self-motivated person who can see the potential in our product line and know how to get them into lots of channels.

Game Developers. We're working on the game, Society. It's getting a lot of attention. And to make sure it reaches its potential, we're going to need talented game developers with some experience (i.e. game development experience) to help us reach it.  There are a number of opening in this area.  So if you want to work on one of the hottest titles in the game industry, let us know.

Graphics Developer. We need someone with "The eye" as a developer.  That is, someone who knows how to code things that looks really cool to make sure our games have incredibly cool effects in our games. 

In all cases, we need people to work here in our new South-Eastern Michigan office -- located in Plymouth Michigan.  No applications from people who want to "telecommute" please.  Send to [email protected] with the subject being the position you're interested and a resume.

Stardock is able to do what it does because we hire in the best and brightest.  We have a pretty fun working environment that has a very high retention level (very low turn-over rate).  One of the reasons for this is that we don't work crazy hours. Typical non-crunch time hours is between 40 and 50 hours per week.  And crunch time is infrequent.  We are able to do what we're able to do by effectively planning things out in advance and relying heavily on productivity boosting technologies (that either we develop or license from others) as well as some unique project coordination techniques.  In short, we try to "work smarter, not harder". 

To repeat: Send resumes and other info to [email protected]

Last week I had my first really bad experience with the power of JoeUser's automated category syndication.  You see, when you write an article on JoeUser.com, the system will look at what category you filed it under and then syndicate it out to other sites on the Stardock.net system.  So if I write a blog on politics, it will show up on JoeUser.com.  Write a blog on skinning and it shows up on WinCustomize.com.  The system does work both ways where those sites feed into JoeUser.com as well.  But those sites have much more restricted choices for what category something can be filed.

Well, back in April I wrote a couple blogs on gaming.  The first one was about Will Wright's Spore and how I think his concept could be revolutionary because it puts the player in the role of the content creator.  If developers can find clever ways to make the player part of the content creation team, costs can be reduced, quality kept high, and players made happy. 

I reposted my blog on a semi-private forum I hang out on called Quarter To Three where many gaming professionals hang out.  On there, one respondent indicated he worked at a major game developer and strongly disagreed with my points.  I debated the issue on there but also wrote a follow-up blog on JoeUser.com that quoted his material and mentioned what game developer he worked for.  That blog, categorized as a PC gaming article, got syndicated to several sites such as GalCiv2.com, SocietyGame.com, and TotalGaming.net.  And then got featured on TotalGaming.net by a forum moderator (along with the original).

The guy who worked at the game developer was ticked off (to an extreme) that I would put his comments on a "corporate" website.  I think he thought I was trying to get him into trouble or something, I'm not quite sure as the profanity-laiden emails did not make the exact issue very clear to me what exactly the issue was. 

But what I did learn is something I should have already known -- blogs ain't private. Whether it's via a auto-syndication engine or a search engine, what you write publicly is -- well public.  It's is the blessing and curse of the blogsphere.  A blog someone might toss off in 15 minutes one Saturday afternoon could end up one day being quoted 2 years later on some major site. 

While the incident definitely was unpleasant for me, it was a good wakeup call too to be more aware that what I write might be taken very differently than intended and may get out there a lot further and wider than I had ever thought.

Michigan drivers are not polite. Each state seems to have its own character of drivers.  Michigan drivers rank amongst the most annoying because of their mid-western tendency to be passive aggressive.  For instance, the turn signal is an indication for car behind you and in another lane to speed up to cut you off. 

By contrast, in California, residents seem all too willing to drop back to let you merge with them.  On the surface, this may seem like a good thing.  But as I pointed out to a friend, I think it's one of the causes for their traffic problems.  People merge poorly and inconsiderably because they can get away with it -- no matter how much someone cuts line to jump ahead in merging, someone always will let them in at the expense of slowing down everyone else.  I saw numerous examples in which we didn't move for minutes because people were letting others who had decided not to wait in a given queue or merge when they were supposed to move in.  In Michigan, those people would have been SOL.  You don't merge, you don't follow etiquette and you're not going to get in.  This discourages people from trying to "cheat" and get a little ahead at the expense of slowing down everyone else through a poorly planned merge or traffic queue. 

I've been trying to talk my wife out of living in Michigan for something like a gagillion years.  Not that Michigan is awful. It's not.  It has beautiful Spring and Falls and summers are quite pleasant.  And our part of Michigan (south eastern), is no more north than Northern California. 

On the other hand, Michigan has terrible roads.  Sure, there's no traffic compared to say New York or California but they're full of pot-holes.  The excuse is that trucks in Michigan are allowed to have far more weight on them than in other states.  But I don't buy that fully. I think other factors, including corruption, are significant issues as well.

According to Scientific America, much of Michigan just plain sucks when rated for weather, natural amenities, cultural activities, and other issues that poll high in the area of desirable elements to have when choosing a place to live.  But such models are typically incomplete too.  For while say Ohio and Indiana rate poorly, they rate California very high.  I've spent more time in California than most other states and while it is pretty and I love the weather, I wouldn't want to live there.  If we could just eliminate..the people (traffic jams, intense politics, etc.) it would surely be more attractive.

I was surprised that Texas didn't do better.  It's mostly rated as "yellow" (not bad, not good).  So much for my calls to move there.  Florida did very well but on the other hand, it has its own issues to deal with.

I guess as a wise woman once said, it's not loving what you want but loving what you've got.

For all the talk about how Dubya is ruining the environment, the reality is somewhat different.  When it comes to auto emissions, the US has the tightest auto emissions laws in the world.  For instance, starting this year, US autos are only allowed to put out 1/4th as much NO2 as their European counterparts.  But across the board, from cars to industry emissions, the US air quality laws are far stricter than other industrialized nations.  When it comes to clean air, the US - Republican or Democrat, is taken very seriously.

Though Society won't even go into beta until mid 2006 (final release target is Christmas 2007), IGN takes an initial look at what we have so far and gives their impressions. Check it out.

GameSpot has a pretty thorough preview of Society.  Check it out!