October 24, 2008 – Brian.Carnell.Com

Xbox 360 vs. PS3 War on Metacritic

In a hilariously titled article, Fanboy Dorks Ruin Metacritic, Kotaku has the low down on an Xbox 360 vs. PS3 war going on at Metacritic. According to Kotaku,

Trouble started when LittleBigPlanet seemed to have an unusually low user rating – currently at 6.4, compared to 95% approval by ‘real’ critics.

It soon became apparent that Xbox fanboys had been posting deliberately low user ratings to spite the PS3-touting infidels. The PS3 nation was quick to respond with an equally daft Gears of War 2 review bomb that has left the Xbox shooter with an embarrassing score of 2.8 at time of posting.

UN Peacekeepers are on standby.

Frankly, I think that’s awesome, especially since these games are so well known that few if anyone is going to be fooled into thinking the low ratings are legitimate (just as the low ratings for Spore at Amazon in protest over that games ridiculous DRM likely had far less impact on game sales than did the folks who Torrented the game rather than buying it).

Maybe for election week we could have a ratings war between blue and red products at Amazon.

Post Revision Display WordPress Plugin

Post Revision Display is a WordPress plugin that will display a list of all the revisions of a post so you can establish, as the author of the plugin puts it, an “audit trail” for how the post has changed.

Advanced-Light Weaponry

Advanced-Light Weaponry produces custom science fiction props, especially lightsabers. Nice, but expensive ($200-$1,000) since these are made by and partly intended for filmmakers and extreme fanboy cosplayers.

WordPress Carbon Footprint Plugin – Ugh

Somebody just had to go and write a Carbon Footprint plugin for WordPress,

The script searches through every post and every page on your blog, counting the total number of words and images in each post. It then works out how many pages the text would take up assuming a standard of 794 words per page. This was worked out by taking the most widely used fonts, font sizes, the word processor being used and other print options. It also works out how many pages the images would take up, again based on DPI, margins and other factors. The most widely used paper is around 120gsm (grams per square meter) and standard A4 paper is 210x297mm. This means that we can approximate that there is 0.0074844g of carbon per sheet of paper which we multiply by our number of pages to give the total amount carbon saved by the blog vs it being printed out on paper.

Um, yeah, ok I guess. But what about the carbon generated by a) the computer hosting the site, b) the computers of the folks accessing the site, and c) the computer used to write the post. For example, I know I have about 6 computers (including this server) that are on 24/7 sucking up sweet electricity while they gradually kill the planet (mwahahaha).

Simply saying “oh, if you had printed all of your blog posts out it would have used X grams of carbons” is just a silly metric.