Welcome to Virtual Earth, the best way to find what you’re searching for.

Give it a try. It’s pretty neat – among other things, you can soom in super close in Mountain View!

My favorite feature? You can control zoom using a mouse wheel. Finally!

Check it out!

UPDATE: This entry on the Virtual Earth team’s blog answers the question that you’re wondering about: “Why Would I use VE? Isn’t it just like Google maps?”

UPDATE 2: Be sure to click on the “Locate Me” button. I can’t explain it, but this video can. (It’s about 1/3rd in)

Scoble posted this tonight:

Scobleizer: Microsoft Geek Blogger

1) You get positive buzz everytime you ship a new product. Apple has shipped several in the past few years aimed at the consumer space. So has Google. Google’s “moon” thing alone got tons of positive buzz.

I call this The Scoble Law of Buzz. And I think he’s right. Nothing excites people like shiny new cool things that work and that they can see making a difference in their lives.

(On the other hand, nothing bores people like shiny new thing that they can’t see making a difference in their lives.)

A good first step? Get outside and see what’s going on!

A good second step? Do something cool! Produce something that’s relevant to people’s lives! Be a little controversial!

(Hint: This is why I work on the MSN Search Toolbar team!)

Oh wow! Check out this link on Eater, the new Curbed website for NY food reviews.

Eater: At Long Last, a Review of Per Se

If you click on the word “have”, it comes here!

Of note, I’m subscribed to Curbed in Newsgator. You can take me out of New York, but you can’t take New York out of me!

WSJ.com – Film Review

Still, product placements are scrupulously protected. The main one here is a proliferation of Chrysler 300 sedans, not one of which is dented in all the wrecks. In fact, Chrysler 300’s are seen as police cars in the Los Angeles of the mid-21st century, which may speak well for the cars’ durability, but makes you wonder about the city’s solvency. The whole movie makes you wonder about the ratings system, which has blessed this production with a PG-13. A glimpse of nipple or a burst of bad language and the rating would have been R, but beat kids’ sensibilities into submission with mindless, ugly violence and it’s considered all in the spirit of summer fun.

Indeed. It’s peculiar how violence is completely acceptable according to the ratings authorities.

Sun plans to make all its software free – Yahoo! News

By commoditizing technology, markets are built up, according to Schwartz. “I think our view has been that commodity markets are the best markets in the world,” he said. Schwartz referred to markets such as financial services and telecommunications, where services are commoditized but lots of revenue is generated nonetheless. Commodity produces perpetual demand, Schwartz said.

Hm… according to the wikipedia:

a commodity is an undifferentiated product whose market value arises from the owner’s right to sell rather than the right to use. Example commodities from the financial world include oil (sold by the barrel), electricity, wheat, bulk chemicals such as sulfuric acid and even pork-bellies and orange juice.

In the original and simplified sense, commodities were things of value, of uniform quality, that were produced in large quantities by many different producers; the items from each different producer are considered equivalent. It is the contract and this underlying standard that define the commodity, not any quality inherent in the product. One can reasonably say that food commodities, for example, are defined by the fact that they substitute for each other in recipes, and that one can use the food without having to look at it too closely.

Commodity markets are the best market? Do you really your product to be a commodity? Where you have no pricing power? Do you really want to be a salt seller?

I’m not sure I do!

What troubles me the most is Schwartz’s constant references to “revenue” in that article.

Having $1 trillion in revenue per year would be great… but not if it comes with $999,999,999,999 in expenses since that’d be exactly $1 of profit. Would that be a worthwhile investment?

Revenue is great – but profit is even better.

Parents group urges recall of ‘Grand Theft Auto’ – Games – MSNBC.com

SAN FRANCISCO – A media watchdog group said Tuesday it has demanded Take-Two Interactive Software Inc. unit Rockstar Games recall ?Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas,? the blockbuster title at the center of a swarm over a hack that helps players unlock a sexually explicit mini-game.

The move added the Parents Television Council?s voice to a growing chorus of critics of the game

The Parents Television Council (PTC), as you may recall, is a small activist group that filed 99.8% of the indency complaints to the FCC in 2003.

99.8%. And let’s not forget that of the 90 complaints that the FCC received for the Fox show, Married by America, that all but 4 were identical. Which is surprising when you learn that it took 23 individuals to send those 90 complaints.

Anyway, back on this topic – it amazes me how no one noticed that GTA:SA, and the ones before it, alowed you to carjack average people, kill cops, and perform all sorts of other outrageous violent acts.

Yet the game only receives attention when sex is involved.

This is especially ironic considering that in places like Sweden, nudity on TV is ok – but violence (especially with machine guns) is strict abhored.

I’m not quite sure what this says about our American culture.

Wow, this review is by far a lot better and more colorful than my review of Per Se.

Food Blog: July 2005 Archives

I hinted that I’d be eating at Per Se in the previous post, Thomas Keller’s 12 million dollar restaurant in the Time Warner Center. Famed for, and even studied for his pursuit of perfection, Keller’s staff, ingredients, and preparation get about as close to perfect as I’d be able to detect, and he didn’t even need to be there, since he was out at the French Laundry at the time.

[snip]

But my review has a picture of the menu

To be honest, I’m not a big fan of taking pictures of food in a restaurant – among other things, I find the flash to be rather ruinsome to the ambiance.

This was a fascinating piece I saw in the WSJ:

WSJ.com – Lessons From The Brain-Damaged Investor

The 15 brain-damaged participants that were the focus of the study had normal IQs, and the areas of their brains responsible for logic and cognitive reasoning were intact. But they had lesions in the region of the brain that controls emotions, which inhibited their ability to experience basic feelings such as fear or anxiety. The lesions were due to a range of causes, including stroke and disease, but they impaired the participants’ emotional functioning in a similar manner.

The study suggests the participants’ lack of emotional responsiveness actually gave them an advantage when they played a simple investment game. The emotionally impaired players were more willing to take gambles that had high payoffs because they lacked fear. Players with undamaged brain wiring, however, were more cautious and reactive during the game, and wound up with less money at the end.

[snip]

“There was no such thing as stock in the Pleistocene era,” says George Loewenstein, a professor of economics at Carnegie Mellon University, and a co-author of the study. “But human beings are pathologically risk averse. A lot of the mechanisms that drive our emotions aren’t really that well adapted to modern life.”

Wow that’s fascinating. I’m going to go find me some penny stocks to invest in!! ALL IN!