Well, it looks like after a good run, Wizards of the Coast will not be renewing the Star Wars license with Lucasfilm. Both the minis and RPG lines will go away, with the license officially ending this May.
The license has been interesting for WotC at times, with limits imposed on print production of RPG lines, and rare supplements appearing for thousands of dollars on Amazon (yes, really).
‘Mixtape’, a wonderful short film by Luke Snellin brings back the memories for those of us who used to spend hours making music mixes on cassette tape.
There was also the charge of hypocrisy; if Steve Jobs truly hates DRM so much and wanted it gone from iTunes Store music, why does he continue to lather it onto all video content from Apple, and why did he voluntarily add it to iPhone apps?
ArsTechnica had a small tidbit regarding iPhone 3.2 OS (iPad only).
Thankfully, Apple has addressed this in the iPad-only iPhone OS 3.2. The documentation for the SDKindicates that it uses a \”shared folder\” that any iPad application can read and write. This shared folder will also mount as a disk whenever an iPad is plugged in to a Mac or PC, allowing easy file transfer.
This shared folder solves the problem of transferring files, and allowing one app to read data from other app\’s files. Nonetheless, Apple could take this capability and extend it further. Apple could leverage iDisk to keep this shared folder in sync between a Mac and an iPad over-the-air, instead of relying solely on a wired, USB connection.
One complaint with the iPhone / iPod Touch, that I often hear is that there is no longer any way to easily use it as external storage for your computer…
Well, this certainly does solve the problem, especially if this is backported to the iPhone / iPodTouch versions of the OS. Â Since the OS is the same, I would assume that this has already been done, just not released yet.
The term comes from the idea of a clumsy, \’fat-fingered\’ typist, who presses extra keys without being aware of it.
As the practice of high-frequency trading continues to become more widespread, concerns are growing that erroneous trades carried out by \’algos gone wild\’—a sort of digitally amplified version of the \’fat finger\’ phenomenon—could cause a market crash at Internet speed, a meltdown that no one could stop. Two recent market glitches could provide a preview of what\’s to come.
On November 14, 2007 at 3:20pm one of Credit Suisse\’s trading algorithms suddenly went haywire, and, in a few moments, sent hundreds of thousands of bogus requests to the exchange. This sudden surge of requests, which were cancellations for a large batch of orders that the machine had never actually sent out, acted like a denial-of-service attack on some parts of the New York Stock Exchange. The messages clogged the tubes and caused parts of the exchange to freeze up, affecting trading in 975 stocks.
After an extensive investigation, the NYSE assessed a $150,000 fine for Credit Suisse\’s \”failing to adequately supervise the development, deployment and operation of a proprietary algorithm, including a failure to implement procedures to monitor certain modifications made to the algorithm.\”
The exchange\’s filing, released a little over a week ago, has the details of precisely what drove the algorithm haywire—it was a trader who accidentally double-clicked an icon in a trading program\’s interface, when he should\’ve single-clicked. No, I am not making that up.
(View the rest of the article at How a stray mouse click choked the NYSE & cost a bank $150K)
It seems as if Half-Life and Left 4 Dead developer Valve is looking for a few good men to engineer things for Linux and Macintosh. Several sleuth sites, as well as more than a share of Mac-focused sites, have been reporting on a rogue sentence not-so-tucked-away in Valve\’s Chris Green\’s LinkedIn profile, indicating that the studio is indeed doing as much.
\’I work at Valve,\’ it reads. \’You should work at Valve.\’ A hard enter. \’REALLY looking for senior Linux (plus) Mac engineers.\’
This would be really nice, after all, I use Steam for the majority of my Windows gaming, and it would be excellent, if I could use Steam on the Mac side as well…
Why Steam? Well for two great reasons…
One, the weekly sales… Yes, I don\’t always find something that I want in this weeks sales, but when they are interesting titles, it\’s usually a price point I am willing to purchase at.
Two, I never need media, and can\’t lose the media. I have a 5 year old, I won\’t count the DVDs that I can\’t find, or that were damaged by here (Okay, I lie, it was less than 6… but, you get the point…And the cat\’s have destroyed 2… )
The only risk is that Steam may close up shop, but they have a good track record… Or that Time Warner starts quota-ing, which could reduce my desire to purchase through Steam (due to potential bandwidth charges when downloading the games initially).
Here\’s a first hand experience (not mine), about a stolen iPhone, and a little bit of deterimination…
The whole thing started when my plane landed in Los Angeles on Monday afternoon at 2:55pm coming from Cabo San Lucas. The guy sitting next to me on the plane asked me to loan him a pen so that he could fill out his customs form. I watched him fill out the form and clearly remember his birth year of 1984, but am a bit unsure about his name. I think it was —–, but in this story, we will refer to him as Pinche.
How It Was Lost
As we were about to disembark from the plane, I sent my friend Ramiro a text saying that I will be out of customs in about 30 minutes. I placed my phone back in my right pocket. I was sitting in seat 27A, next to the window, and Pinche was sitting in seat 27B. When it came time to move into the aisle, an old lady sitting in 27C started moving and so I stopped, but Pinche saw this as an opportunity. He bumped me, then jumped in front of the old lady and ran off of the plane. I waited for the old lady to step into the aisle, and I walked behind her. Five seconds later, I reached for my phone and it was not in my pocket anymore.
Apple today introduced the iPad. The 0.5\’-thick tablet weighs 1.5 lbs. and touts a 9.6\’ LCD (IPN) display. It features built-in Bluetooth and 802.11n connectivity, accelerometer, and compass and will be available in sizes from 16GB to 64GB. It uses a proprietary 1GHz Apple processor; the battery is purported to feature up to 10 hours of runtime (or at least a month of standby). Most existing apps in the Apple App Store are supported, although they\’ll run either as a tiny box in the center of the screen or in a 2:1 pixel-doubled mode.
So we now know what PA Semi-conductor has been working on since Apple purchased them in April 2008. The 1Ghz A4 chip is the main processor of the new iPad, and from the Demonstration seems to be very efficient and powerful. Especially with the iPad having a 10 Hour active life, and a 30 day standby mode…
$499 for 16GB of iPad. That\’s the base model. 32GB is $599, 64GB is $799. 3G models cost an extra $130. $629, 729, and 829 with 3G.
I am impressed… Will I run out and purchase it, not right now. But I suspect once there is a round of price drops, that I will be in the line to purchase it. I suspect without the 3G built-in, but that would certainly be a nice feature to have.
There are still plenty of questions to get the answers for. What ebook format does the iPad support (MDB, PDF, HTML, Mobi, PDB)? What DRM is on the eBooks? According to CNBC information, it appears that they are supporting the ePub ebook standard.
The size appears to be equivalent to a 8.5×11 sheet of paper (roughly)… And the weight seems to be dead-on (1.5 lbs).
But I believe this moves Apple solidly into the tablet market…
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