AMD have recently announced their new "Spider" platform -- and it's doomed to failure right from the word "Go".

The Spider platform isn't any specific chipset or video card. Like Intel's Centrino, It's simply a specification. Centrino's marketing campaign was quite frankly, fantastic. It's on-par wit the marketing of the Pentium brand in the early 90s. Consumers associate Centrino with "wireless".

For the last few years, Java has been the dominant platform on lower-end mobile phones (e.g. S40 Nokias, or Ericssons other than the P900 series). It's easy to see why: the same game can be run on any of these phones without the need to be recompiled.

The case for compile once, run anywhere died at least two years ago. Increasingly, mobile phone manufacturers are extending the capabilities of the runtime. Java applications written for one particular phone are unlikely to run on phones of a different brand. Which raises the question: Why bother doing it in Java anymore?

One of the first observations I made of Second Life was that there's three ways to get money ("Linden Dollars", or L$):

• Buy it
• Make something in Second Life and earn it (such as clothes, models, etc).
• Do online surveys.

The last one's an odd one, but there's hundreds of examples of it in Second Life. The first one I came across was the "Money tree":

Being bored over my four-day weekend, I decided to give Second Life a go. I mean, a game that has a real currency exchange which changes around US$250,000 per day can't be all that lame, right?

There's one fundamental flaw with Second Life: The client (they call it the "Viewer"). It's poorly written, and usability is terrible.

As an ex-gamer, there's three things that'll make or break a game for me:

In days of past, Google was once considered the pinnacle of interface design. The "less is more" paradigm. Google had a logo, a box to type stuff in, and two buttons. That was basically it.

Those days are sadly, long gone. It's not often I see the actual Google front page. As a predominantly Firefox user, I see Google's Firefox start page. I was horrified when I saw a friend navigate to Google's front page, only to be confronted with this:

I'll never understand why some people's hearts weep over old buildings. Perhaps it's nostalgia or something similarly deluded.