Amazingly enough, despite appearing on Wired’s vapourware list, the Phantom game system actually appeared at CES. (Or at least a box appeared at CES)
The Phantom offers a sort of video game on demand system, which I’m not totally convinced about, but the box looks nice and it seems to offer an interesting collection of features. I think given the choice the XBox2 would be a better bet, or the PS3.
TheTechLounge has the pictures (about half way down).
New smoothie recipe that I tried:
2 bananas
250ml Orange juice.
Put bananas in blender. Add orange juice to blender.
Blend until smooth.
Not exactly impressively innovative, but it tastes quite good.
I was just doing a quick search for Lemony Snicket books (of which there are apparently now 11) on Amazon.com
Oddly enough when I did the search I got the following within the search results:
It appears that they are using google ad words, and one of the advertisments offered was for a competitor.
It does seem a bit odd to say the least, to be advertising a different online store …
This article:The Long Tail in the October issue of wired is really interesting. It offers the idea that the sucess of the most popular media titles is actually less than the cumulative totals of the other titles.
The article also offers a key point. Shelf rental value is a key factor when determining stock levels. The example is a CD-store that must sell two copies of a particular title each year to stock it at all. However amazon doesn’t really work like that. Internet retailers have a lower cost base and thus it doesn’t really matter how many copies get sold, as long as some stock exists somewhere. Similarly revolutionary changes are also occuring with dvd-rental services. Online rental outfits have thousands more titles than even the largest physical store.
What this may mean is a revolution in consumer habits. People up until now have been buying stuff because it is available (as I often seem to do) but now they can buy whatever they actually want. The smaller, better, but less populist titles may win out against the heavily promoted mainstream titles.
Suddenly, popularity no longer has a monopoly on profitability.
(Maybe?)
Weird things seem to be happening in the Palm OS sector. PalmSource recently bought China MobileSoft which is a Chinese linux smartphone developer. This comes after spending about $11 million to buy BeOS from be back in 2001.
One obvious motivation in buying a Chinese company is to get access to the Chinese market (which is always going to be huge real soon now. IBM is thought to have similar motivations in selling it’s PC division to Lenovo. But PalmSource is now also talking about basing future Palm OS versions on Linux. So maybe they were after technology as well as market access.
The alternatives aren’t pretty. PalmSource hasn’t been making much progress since the incremental Palm OS 5. Licensees have yet to ship a PalmOS 6/Cobalt device. The software seems to be available to device developers but everyone is still on the PalmOS 5 platform. Not one Cobalt device has yet been released commercially by anyone. It almost makes one question what exactly is wrong with Palm OS 6. Performance? Memory footprint? Price? The about box?
In the operating system market it seems anyone writing operating systems and selling them (as opposed to open source things like Linux) always has a major failure when trying to develop the next big operating system. Apple had Copeland (which would have been Mac OS 8 if it had been released but was actually abandoned) before Mac OS X. Microsoft had OS2 (with IBM) before developing Windows NT/XP. Now perhaps Palm OS will fail on Palm OS 6 before releasing a new platform based on Linux?
This evening I went along to the Edinburgh BCS talk on Ethical Hacking. It was really eye-opening and made me suitably paranoid about my own security.
Peter Wood of First Base Technologies gave a remarkably useful, informative and funny talk on the subject. (and left me totally paranoid as I said before).
Some interesting points and some thoughts
Overall fascinating and really interesting.
“Rabbit in Sauce Sublime, a recipe that sounds right out of a Warner Brothers cartoon”
There are several really odd websites with recipes from a time when taste was lacking and people cooked the oddest things.
Some words on nutrition (kind of)
To fit in with my views on websites (only as dynamic as absolutely necessary), I have installed this plugin. Hopefully this will not cause too many problems.