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“I think it’s wrong that only one company makes the game Monopoly“ – Steven Wright
So, we’re back after another enforced break, my fault this time. Parents are a bad idea, and I don’t think they’ll ever catch on. Anyway we dived right in to the big story, the iPad is available to buy, on Gareth’s side of the pond. If you buy it now you still won’t get it till the 3rd of April, but will have the satisfaction of being the earliest of early adopters. Tech wise it’s been pretty slow for both of us, I came across a fab HTML5 drawing app called Harmony, and we both bought the MacHeist nanobundle, and as always, it was great value.
Then on to the stories proper…
Apple selling 20,000 iPads an hour – So, the ‘magical’ device is available for pre-order, and it seems plenty of you are happy to splash the cash. In the first few hours they sold, at an estimated, 20,000 an hour. And after the initial surge, they topped out at 150,000 in the first 24 hours. The makers of hotcakes were quick to point out that, their products were selling like iPads.
The Mac is a gaming platform, seriously! – After years of being frankly derided, in gaming terms anyway, the Mac is being considered again as a serious gaming computer. Valve are porting their Steam platform to the Mac. With the improvement in graphics cards standard in most of the recent Macs. It looks like us Mac users can lose days of our lives fragging zombies, just as well as our PC using friends.
Tech site recommends IE5 to mac users – Mark this one down under bizarre. ‘Tech site’ Soft Sailor has suggested that mac users run IE5 as their browser of choice. It is said to be ‘doing a fairy good job’ and ‘lots of features’. Where this came from I have no idea, I checked the date to see if it was April the first, but apparently it’s a serious recommendation. A 7 year old browser, that even MS have abandoned, hell I’d rather dual boot with linux so I can install Mosaic.
A ‘David versus Goliath’ story, with a twist – The particular twist in this case is that the self-styled ‘David’ is Microsoft, yeah that’s what I thought, and the ‘Goliath’ is Google, the battleground, search. MS are going to spend a huge sum of money to try to push Bing into the consumer mind-space, and break Google’s 90% market-share in the UK. I know that someone has to take them on, but can Bing and all those advertising bucks defeat Mountain View? Let me just Google that.
XP needs some TLC to use next-gen hard drives – The aged and now out-dated OS, Windows XP is starting to get a little ragged at the edges. As the inevitable march of technology goes on, more and more things turn out not to be compatible with the older software. This time it’s next generation hard drives, traditional mechanical and newer SSD’s, which are causing the problems. I almost feel the pain of these users, as I’m trying to wring the last useful life out of my G4 iMac, but these are windows users, they should be used to pain.
BBC ‘breaks’ iPlayer – The wonderful, wonderful BBC iPlayer has been crippled, and unfortunately in this case it’s the BBC doing the hobbling. They have enforced ShockWave Flash (SWF) verification, thereby breaking ‘unauthorised’ open-source software apps. It used to be the case that I could download and re-encode BBC programmes out of Flash and into a less processor intensive format, for later viewing, but now I have to use the Flash based iPlayer software. It enforces the DRM, that is stripped out by the open-source software, which limits the time you can keep the shows. Also it means Gareth is going to run screaming back to the bit-torrent sites to get his fix of Doctor Who.
