Repeat after me.
I am not in the market for a very sexy 20" TFT monitor.
I am not in the market for a very sexy 20" TFT monitor.
I am not in the market for a very sexy 20" TFT monitor.
I am not in the market for a very sexy 20" TFT monitor.
I am not in the market for a very sexy 20" TFT monitor.
I am not in the market for a very sexy 20" TFT monitor.
I am not in the market for a very sexy 20" TFT monitor.
Kind of nearly affordable in a 12 months interest free credit kind of way.
I mean, as they rightly point out, it does match my PowerBook...
*sighs*
Popularity: 10% [?]
Hopes for Tiger
Hmm, yes. Tiger. To be previewed at tomorrows World Wide Developers Conference.
I don't really care about all the new widgets (I find it quite hard to see how they can better Panther - it addressed pretty much all my concerns with Jaguar), I just hope they fix these two incredibly irritating things:
1. Safari's URL Autocompletion.
Should go from the smallest URL visited at the site who's address is currently being typed to the biggest, not the other way round. Duh...
2. Page Up/Page Down/Home/End
On my PowerBook, as with most laptops, in order to page up/down or go to home/end on a line, i have to use a funky key combination due to the lack of dedicated keys. This I don't have a problem with. No, what I have a problem is that Apple can't seem to make their mind up whether to standardise it as fn+Arrow or Command+Arrow, instead leaving it up to individual developers it seems.
Consequently you get used to doing it one way in one application, switch to another and go flying all over the page.
Here's to hoping...
Popularity: 11% [?]
I’m a star man, blah blah blah-blah-blah
I arrive on the edge of the solar system, the high pitched whine of the hyperdrive fading to a deep, distant hum, the central star is visible out of the left viewport while it's lone orbiting planet is a distant disc of green.
Engaging the jump drive, the nearby stars turn into long streaks as I speed towards the planet and it's orbiting space station.
Suddenly, the drive becomes mass locked and as I look at my nav computer, three yellow flashing blips representing pirate vessels appear and are approaching at speed. Pivoting the ship towards them, I unleash a fearsome barrage of laser fire. One Krait attack craft bursts into a fiery explosion, the tenrils of flame licking the hull of a second Krait, which decides the risk is too great and turns tail, running from the fight. The third ship, a Gecko - fast and highly maneuverable - bobs and weaves towards me with an agile, eerie grace.
It shoots past my starboard side and I brake and turn, hoping to catch it from behind. Unfortunately it is too fast and I turn and turn, eventually crashing into it (as these things seem to happen), depleting one of my four shields, but destroying the pirate vessel. I shrug. My on board computer contacts the Galactic Navy and my account is credited with the bounty offered for the pirate's destruction.
I turn back towards the planet and once more engage the jump drive looking forward to the profit I will make on the contents of my cargo hold and making a quick mental calculation as to how many more runs will be required before I can fit that beam laser to the front gun mount.
Soon I approach the space station and expertly pilot my Cobra Mk III towards it. I approach at dead slow speed for the last hundred metres, when suddenly the businessman next to me turns the page of his overly large newspaper, nudging my arm and sending the stylus skidding over the screen of my PDA. My ship slams into the side of the space station destroying my cargo, my ship and sending another Commander Jameson to an early grave.
Shit.
I hit the pull down menu button and reload my game, hoping to be a little more fortunate this time.
My name is Alex, I have Elite on my Palm, and I no longer dislike travelling into work.
Popularity: 10% [?]
iTunes, eh?
iTunes Europe (well, okay, UK, France and Germany) lauched the other day.
79p per song? Better (ie. cheaper) than Napster, but still not great. As Will pointed out to me the other day, a whole bunch of albums are only partially available which means a) you can't but them as a whole album for £7.99, you have to buy the tracks individualy which often works out as more (getting dangerously close to CD prices) and b) it's just going to encourage people to fire up KaZaa to find those missing tracks.
*sighs*
LemurGene? Now that's what I'm talking about...
Popularity: 18% [?]
Amazon gets randy
Fucking Amazon. While browsing around I found this story about how if you search for "Panasonic NV-GS55B Digital Camcorder" on Amazon, it seems to think that you will also be interested in "Shaven Nudists by Dieter Nagel". Then another article surfaced (scroll down to the bottom) about how if you search for "Sennheiser HD202", you are recommended "A Hand in the Bush: the Fine Art of Vaginal Fisting by Deborah Addington".
After a bit of messing around, I found that the word Sennheiser threw up all sorts of bizarre recommendations when combined with the 'Search All Products' option - Feminine Anarchy: Girls Pissing in Public by Amanda James and Paul Compton anyone?
Unfortunately I foolishly did all this while logged in. As Amazon builds customer profiles and recommendations on your recent browsing history, my "The Page You Made" is now full of such delights as "Sexy Sports: Maximal Crazy Girls by Ralf Vulis", "Shaven Beauty Mystery by Torsten Seidel" and perhaps rather worryingly "The Ultimate Guide to Strap on Sex: The Complete Resource for Women and Men by Karen Lotney".
Oh well, just going to have to browse lots of electronic goods pages to counter all this pr0n...
Popularity: 11% [?]
A worring social trend
Ah, summer balls. The dodgy marquee, the tribute band, the cheap tuxedos, the ladies in their beautiful gowns and oh so meticulously applied makeup.
All this leads to the inevitable question. It runs along the lines of..
Darling, I'm a girl and as such have no pockets and only carry this tiny little bag which is only big enough for 10 cigarettes and a lighter. Could you put this large wallet/camera/backup fag packet* in one of your many suit pockets.
Note the lack of question mark.
At the risk of sounding like a metrosexual (a word I learnt the other day refers to a straight man who preens, pouts and poses like only a gay man can), I like to think I cut a rather dashing figure in a suit and the last thing one needs is for the line of said suit to be ruined by a large object in a pocket.
The only other alternative is to wander around carrying said items and worry all night about losing one of them.
*sighs*
* = delete as applicable, or if the bag is very small, include all three.
Popularity: 11% [?]
Napster, eh?
So the traditional darling of file sharers around the world, Napster, launched it's UK paid for service the other week, and I have to say, I'm not in the least bit impressed.
For your £9.95 a month, you get to listen to their five radio stations (it's like ShoutCast or Live365 never happened), download as many tracks as you want, but pay 99p to burn them to cd, or £9.95 for a full album. Alternatively, you can not pay the monthly fee, only stream 30 seconds of each track and pay £1.09 per track or £9.95 per album.
£9.95 per album. There is a quote on the BBC website from Mino Russo (marketing head at ace cheapo record shop Fopp) which could almost be paraphrased as "hahahahahahaha" as their (solid, tangible, lickable) CDs (with packaging - cover art and liner notes. ARE YOU LISTENING, ONLINE MUSIC STORE PEOPLE?) start at £5. And £1.09 per song? In Yankee dollars, at the time of writing, that's about $1.99 - compared to the iTunes Music Store's $0.99 (can't find the 'cent' symbol on my keyboard...), it doesn't stand up too well.
Now, I don't buy into this whole 'Napster isn't Apple so it must be crap' thing that you get on some websites, but the figures speak for themselves. I get the feeling that the folks at Napster were in too much of a hurry to get the jump on rival services to negotiate a decent fee for their wares.
What really gets me is the brazen short sightedness of Napster, MyCokeMusic, OD2 and the like. By this I mean the way you can only use their services if you use Windows 2000/XP and have bent over to receive Microsoft's Windows Media Player 9 EULA. Now, before you dismiss this as another anti Microsoft rant, consider this. My laptop does not run Windows, granted, but neither does my phone, or my PDA, or my fridge.
With a separate ring tone download chart now accompanying the singles, albums and airplay charts in Music Week (industry rag), the providing of digital music in various forms to mobile devices (although why stop there? - hence the fridge thing) is big business, and one that is only set to grow.
The major problem here is that the bandwidth available to telephones is nowhere near sufficient for transfer of files of that size, but that is set to change. Indeed, as more phones become GPRS enabled, downloads become more feasible, but the real biggie is just starting to appear on the horizon. I mean 3G. Not 3's commendable, but ultimately misguided efforts (look, watching footy clips on your mobile might look good on paper, and in TV adverts, but how many people actually do it?), but the advent of other mobile networks 3G support. Bear in mind that pretty much every phone company bought a 3G license at great expense, they are not going to want to write it off, so it's only a matter of time before they start to appear. Indeed, Vodafone have already launched a 3G service, although sadly only trading on the data transfer rates for laptops.
The biggest problem for 3G at the moment, is that all the handsets are crap. Every now and again, I head on over to 3's site, and am mightily tempted by their admittedly very competitive pricing, but then I hit the 'phones' page and my interest starts to wane, although the handset situation is set to change later this year, with major vendors such as Sony Ericsson adding to the 3G handset line up alongside Nokia's rather strange stab at it. But I digress.
3G networks have the capability to transmit data at up to 384kbs through EDGE (believe it or not, this stands for Enhanced Data rates for Gsm Evolution - urgh). 384kbs. Via your mobile. All it needs is support from networks and the handsets themselves. This, I feel, is the untapped potential of 3G (and probably the untapped network management nightmare, but that's another blog). All this doesn't make much sense from the point of view of a mobile, with it's shitty little speaker (or headphone output, if you are lucky), but why should 3G be limited to mobile phones? Vodaphone have already proved it doesn't need to be, so why stop at computing devices. Getting that kind of bandwidth into cars, even vending machines (you download your song at the vending machine, and then Bluetooth it to your non-3G handset/watch/or whatever, innit?) could create a wealth of opportunities to part unsuspecting punters from their readies.
But back to online music vendors. By buying into a proprietary technology, like Microsoft's Windows Media Audio (WMA) format with their proprietary DRM, they are also tying themselves to Windows Media Player. Now, Microsoft have yet to release a version of Windows Media Player that supports their own DRM scheme on any platform apart from Windows 2000/XP (not even their own 'Media Center' edition, I note), and never the quickest to get into a new game, are unlikely to. Even if they do, it'll probably be tied to their bloatware PocketPC/Windows Mobile OSs.
This is great for Microsoft, because if people want to purchase music, they'll have to do it from a Microsoft device, but the record labels will ultimately lose out, as not everyone has a Microsoft device, and at the moment, there aren't even any 3G handsets that look remotely close to running a Microsoft operating system. At least Apple did well by using an open standard (AAC), although it is not Free, and they did bolt on their own proprietary DRM, but you can't get everything right...
Using an open encoding standard levels the field for multiple vendors to provide playback devices and software, which prevents the vendor lock-in so inherent in the Microsoft model. If they would at least use an encoding/protection method created by a company willing to licence it out to third part developers, it would be a step in the right direction (think mp3 - playback is free, but encoding apps require a minimal fee, usually eaten by the app provider). It would allow more players to get into more devices used by more people, and after all, should the record labels not be using the Internet to reach a wider audience?
Of course, I realise that any deal done by the record labels for digital distribution is not likely to be exclusive at this point, but wouldn't they be better off with some sort of coherent game plan rather than jumping on the back of the latest and greatest bandwagon that happens to be rumbling along at the time?
Popularity: 10% [?]