Month: May 2018

So... Peter Bright's new home for tech support, right? (credit: antxoa)

Ten years ago around this very time—April through June 2008—our intrepid Microsoft guru Peter Bright evidently had an identity crisis. Could this lifelong PC user really have been pushed to the brink? Was he considering a switch to... Mac OS?!? While our staff hopefully enjoys a less stressful Memorial Day this year, throughout the weekend we're resurfacing this three part series that doubles as an existential operating system dilemma circa 2008. Part three ran on June 1, 2008, and it appears unedited below.

I've already described how misfortune and adversity left Apple with a new OS platform free of legacy constraints; and I've also discussed how Microsoft had failed to do the same, choosing instead to hobble its new OS with way too much legacy baggage.

Now, let's look at why I'm even considering the big switch: what has Apple done with its platform to make it so appealing? Of course, if you're already writing software for the Mac, then I'm not going to tell you anything you already don't know. But all of this was new to me, because it wasn't until I became so thoroughly disappointed with Windows that I really looked in earnest at what the Mac had to offer. My mistake.

Enlarge / Roulette is a particularly silly form of gambling. (credit: Yuki Shimazu / Flickr)

Game companies now lean heavily on loot boxes to monetize their products. Legislators around the world are threatening to impose regulations on the boxes, claiming that they're gambling. Industry groups, however, insist that the boxes are not.

I play games that are funded with loot boxes. My favorite game of all time, Dota 2, is funded almost exclusively through loot boxes. Regulations that tightly restrict or absolutely prohibit loot boxes will definitely hurt the gaming industry and will hurt, perhaps even fatally, games I love. There will definitely be economic harm, and games companies will have to figure something out to fill the monetary gap. It's no surprise that game companies are defending the practice.

But here's the thing: loot boxes are gambling. The essential features of the transaction match those of gambling, the reward pathways and addiction mechanisms are those of gambling, and playing dumb about it, as the industry is currently doing, is a bad look.

Enlarge (credit: Amazon)

Ahead of the United States' Memorial Day weekend, Ars staffers were milling about the virtual water cooler when someone happened upon some intriguing data: their personal Amazon shopping history. This spreadsheet, which consisted of years of purchases and thousands of dollars of receipts, was easy to compile within the Amazon account interface, and it fit nicely into that day's chatter about other companies' issues with data privacy and GDPR compliance.

So, for funsies, a bunch of us reviewed our past decade-plus Amazon existence by grabbing a giant spreadsheet from our individual "order history" pages. As Americans who've spent many years ordering things off the Internet, we at Ars all have Amazon shopping histories in common, but that doesn't mean we all use the site the same—or feel the same about Amazon's reach, quite frankly. See below for charts, examples of our first non-media (book or film) purchases at the site, and personal recollections about how Amazon has figured into our shopping lives over the years.

If you want to play along at home, by all means. This link should force you to enter your own Amazon credentials and then redirect you to an "order history" page. The first drop-down menu on the resulting page should already say "items." Confirm that's the case, then set the date range from January 1 of the earliest year on record to today. Then pick "request report" and you'll receive a CSV spreadsheet file that can be parsed by Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets. You may need to split this into multiple reports (like, 2005-2009, 2010-today), should your shopping history be as big as some Ars staffers'.