It has been a quiet week computer wise. I gave up on Dragon Age 2 and started Fallout 3 which is made by the same people who did The Elder Scrolls. Basic story line is that in 1950 everyone went into bunkers due to a nuclear war with China and this is some time later when the landscape is post-apocalyptic. Not many colours, everything is brown or grey but there are some cool weapons. Decent sized worlds and some interesting add-on packs.
Some readers will recognise this title as being over three years old. Yes. I currently live in Australia where computer games are the most expensive in the world. We pay on average three times the price in the US most recent games cost $90 here and remember the A$ is stronger than the US$ at the moment. Three year old games are almost ancient and as a direct consequence a lot less expensive, i.e. in the US these are disposal bin prices by here in Oz still closer to $40, i.e. still more expensive that when it came out in the US. To be fair it was banned for a while but the prices are just plain stupid here.
I guess most of you saw the story about the Chinese student, last name Wang, who sold a kidney so he could get an iPhone and an iPad. The kidney fetched a bit under $34,000 of which Wang received a tenth. He is now suffering from renal failure that could be fatal. I guess some Apple lovers will do anything to get the latest products. The iPhone, compared to alternatives, is just not that good.
The iPad 3 is not doing so well in the forums. The main claim is that the 3G and 4G connectivity doesn’t work properly. There is a mountain of complaints from Apple lovers, from all over the world. The second problem is the responses from Apple e.g. “Just avoid using it or holding that way” and “It's normal” according to the posters at least. This reminds me of the iPhone antenna issues.
According to the Russian anti-virus firm Dr Web a Mac-specific Flashback Trojan created a zombie army of 550,000 Mac machines by exploiting a Java hole that Apple. This was finally patched six weeks after Microsoft had fixed it for Windows based machines. The infected machines were mostly in the US, Canada and the UK. This says something about the demographics that make up Apple Mac owners and their belief that no virus can ever infect a Mac.
Other Industry News
It is official support for Windows XP will end in two years on April 8th, 2014. It first shipped to users, well OEMs, on August 24th, with real users getting it on October 25th. Gartner estimates it ran on 144 million machines as of July 2011. In a later survey, March 2012, they found that 79% of business desktops and 45% of notebooks ran XP. Gartner recommends upgrading ASAP but if it is still working so well how many people really contact Microsoft with problems? I thought so, no need to rush then.
Sony has not been doing so well in recent years and it may have never really recovered from strange decisions like removing MP3 as a supported format earlier in the Millennium. The forecasted loss in 2001 for example was recently doubled. No not because someone forgot to carry a one but because they had more taxes to pay than anticipated. The culprit here was their US concerns; it seems that the US has been putting up taxes, probably to cover their 15 trillion of debt.
This will make it four years in a row with a loss. I have an idea Sony how about bringing out a Media box like those from A.C. Ryan but with better features and no copyright controls built in. It would be an Instant best seller. My predicted change of this happening 0%. Of course having someone from the US leading their organisation for a couple of years was probably not a very smart thing to do either. Looks like about 10K workers will be losing their jobs within Sony as well.
I saw this headline recently “Toshiba's NPEngine hardware directly streams video from SSDs to IP networks without using host server CPU cycles or memory.” My response was a very big yawn as anyone else familiar with the Commodore Amiga will understand. About three decades ago Commodore brought out a new computer that had a dedicated chip for graphics and I watched a demo of a panther walking back and forwards across the screen. The CPU usage counter showed zero as well. At the time it was a very cool demonstration. Since then no one else has had the guts to come out with a similar product hence my yawn at the Toshiba announcement.
In related and sad news the founder of Commodore, Jacek Trzmiel, has died at the age of 83. This guy spent time in Auschwitz concentration camp during WW2 and after being rescued by the US Army moved to the US and started up Commodore Business Machines, selling typewriters. From here it went to calculators, its own chip making business (MOS). Turning down an offer to build the Apple II they came out with the Commodore PET in 1977. This had a whopping 1 MHz processor and your choice of 4 or 8 KB of RAM. It used a cassette player to load programs with disks coming later. One of the best sellers was the Commodore 64.
That report about Iran cutting off the Internet in August? It was an April Fool’s day story.
According to Gartner India is starting to soak up the world’s chip supply. The biggest driver is mobile phones followed by LCD TVs and the PC manufacturing industry. As the Indian middle class grows so do the sales to the tune of $9.2 B out of the world’s $313 B. Manufacturers are also starting to expand production facilities in India to soak up the low paid but better educated worker that the alternatives. OK obviously I mean China here. The other big users are Brazil and China. At the current rate of growth India will pass the UK, currently in third place, sometime during this year.
Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3), the object storage companion to the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) compute cloud currently holds around 905 billion objects and processing requests at 650,000 requests per second.
So did you feel that? Every minute or so a WIMP (Weakly Interacting Massive Particles) hits you. Well according to a recent paper titled Dark Matter collisions with the Human Body. WIMPS are one candidate for Dark Matter and they are “electrically neutral and do not participate in strong interactions, yet have weak inter-actions with ordinary matter.”
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