Microsoft
Obligatory Tech Prediction for 2009
TinyURL'd
If not only for the attempt of looking cool, here we go;
More companies will start joining Twitter
Recent news showed Dell making a good $1M, now, compared to the rest of the income, that is not necessarily a large quantity. But it was enough to show off, to both fan and exec’s, how useful advertising deals and the like can be.
Apple TV/ Mac Mini upgrade:
The Mac Mini has not updated in over an entire year, which at least in comparison to the iPod, looks like its death. Apple has been treating the Apple TV as more a hobby project, but has been doing well with it. Also, with the recent update to the HP MediaSmart to work with iTunes and Time Machine, a relative upgrade would seem appropriate, but since the Apple TV and Mac Mini are so similar, upgrading both would be redundant.
The iPod Classic won’t fit any more songs
A rule of thumb where buying an iPod, is that if its been a few months since the last update, wait a week or two and the iPod will be upgraded. When the iPod Touch was introduced, they dubbed the next generation of the iPod Video’s as the iPod Classic. The second generation of the Classic, if you can call it that, denoted the hard drive space from 160gb to 120gb, but what they really did was take out the 160gb hard-drive and replaced with a dual 60gb solid-state drive. The rumors of a iPod Touch-esque, tablet-esque Apple product just prove how whole-heartedly Apple is going towards the touch interface.
Kevin Rose will re-publish Pownce
To much anger and confusion, SixApart bought Pownce and hired the devo team. Although they did publish their plans to incorporate the Pownce software into their products like Vox, MoveableType and TypePad. But why did they close the original website? Well, SixApart has said that, in the new year, they will be releasing the Pownce engine for either purchase or beta. A large portion of the Pownce community was there just for the affiliation with Kevin Rose, and he definately has the cash to pick the software back up.
SMS in Canada will come back to Twitter
Or imma beat some ass, beat some ass real bad.
More countries will be turned into more TinyURL websites
Because we dont have enough; b65.us, c-o.in, dn.vc, faceto.us, fly.ws, hurl.it, is.gd, Just.as, x.se, LNK.IN, turo,us, Twitty.ms and Xil.in, and that is just the ones that use county URLs…
Sony PS3 will team with Blockbuster (or someone like that)
With release of Microsoft’s NXE for the Xbox 360, they included a NetFlix client; letting you order and stream their entire catalog of movies for no price in addition to a normal NetFlix account service. I dont use it for reasons that are legal in Canada, but I have heard nothing but praise from friends that do use it. Recently, it was announced that Blockbuster was (finally) doing an online service, and besides the fact that both of their main colors are blue (OMFG COINCIDENCE?!) I would not be alone in assumption that the PS3 will follow suit, as the only thing the PS3 has over the 360 is space, and movies take space. And people that bought a PS3 are going to be looking for cheap rentals for a while now…
9 Podcasts for 2009
TinyURL'd
Although these all like to the iTunes Store, they shouldn’t be hard at all to find them on other Podcasting services by entering the same name.
Scene Unseen Movie Reviews is a new podcast that offers a unique spin on the movie review process. The catch? Every week one of our reviews sees a new release… the other does not. Also featured - “Letterboxing” banter, DVD picks and special guest appearances from professionals in the film industry.
Vancouver’s top comedy podcast? Hosted by Graham Clark and Dave Shmka, with weekly guests. Hilarious weekly guests? Yup.
EPIC FU is what happens when tech and culture get it on. It’s your weekly geek-out to the coolest art, tech, and music from the online and offline world. Subscribe to get a fresh new episode each week!
Mars Hill Church: Mark Driscoll -
Mars Hill Church in Seattle lives, breathes and is generally OCD about Jesus. Pastor Mark Driscoll is the lead preaching pastor for Mars Hill and regularly distribures video content via this channel, including sermons, event teaching and the occasional one-off video created for our internet audience. You can find more content like this by visiting our web site at www.marshillchurch.org
By Tech Fans, For Tech Fan! Product reviews, tech tips, viewer questions, gaming and great guests, all brought to you by Robert Heron and the DL.TV crew. We go live every Thursday, then we encode and make available for download.
Diggnation is a weekly tech/ web culture show based on the top digg.com social bookmarking news stories.
The Totally Rad Show is the summer blockbuster of geek news shows. Every week, hosts Alex Albrecht, Dan Trachtenberg and Jeff Cannata rip into the world of movies, video games, tv, comics, and more and pull out what’s rad.
Embrace digital technology. Join the Tekzilla cew and make your tech work better for you. Or you can go live in the woods with an axe. Every Saturday, Patrick Norton and Veronica Belont deliver product reviews, computer help, tech tips on everything from Ipod to camcorders, HD to the Internet, plus do it yourself projects.
The Hour with George Stroumboulopolous
Want a different look at the news? Watch to The Hour. The Hour isnt your average newscast, its more lik hanging out with someone whos really interested in the world. The Hour - a current affairs show hosted by George Stroumnoulopoulos. Watch new video clipos every weekday.
‘08: The year people plug in their PS3?
TinyURL'd
On this second day of e3′ness, Nintendo and Sony both had their first speaches. I wont lie to anyone here, I just did not catch the Nintendo one, so let’s just talk PS3.
I admit myself impressed this year. At least by the pricing. SCEA has just announced a they will now be selling an 80GB PS3 for the price of a current 40GB PS3 - $399. Thumbs up for that one.
For the Microsoft speach I did not cover the entire thing, just Fable . And in that article I commented on Peter’s lack of speach goodness. I mean, there was no “Riiiiiiidge Raceeeeeeeeer”, but Sony was pretty bad either way. He did have some good quotes tho…
“If you have really creative developers [...] you can create stuff”
Sony Home has been something they have been barking about for ages. Something I never saw much reason in, as it is just a Second Life for the PS3. They did add game rooms that are particular/ out of a certain game, and in the video it appeared you can start/ join games from there. So it is slightly less pointless.
The next is… disheartening, in some aspects. For years I have been a rabid fan of the Sly Cooper series. Sly Cooper 2: Band of Thieves was the single best ‘impulse buy’ I have ever had. It is a cartoony stealth platformer game with some hilarious characters and witty inside jokes. That game was created by the developers SuckerPunch (I thought that was just a sound effect on the poster I have for Sly 2) and they showed off their new game. It involved no Raccoons, Sly or non 
. That being said, Infamous looks really damn cool. I mean, even for the fact it is an FPS about a super hero, it is actually unique in ways. From what I have seen and heard, it appears to be a combination of Crackdown gameplay, Fable good/ evil’ness and the FPSness of every other game made these days. Only for PS3 though.
There was even more praise for GT5: Prologue, but with that they added and apparently “revolutionizing” idea: GT: TV. Its kinda like Sony at Home, but only in the sense that it is retarded. Pretty much, you get to download some GT5 videos. Yeah, revolutionary, eh?
The last part of their show was actually really damn cool. I think it made up, almost, for a lack of actual game footage in their whole show. That being said, there was still no game footage of MAG either. The exciting part? It’s sporting 256-player battles. Teams are split up respectively and, in the end, you are in a team of 8. But each part of the original team is run by other human players. It is apparently “not possible anywhere else” but really, is it not but an issue of server load than anything else?
All in all, the PS3 looks nicer, but they are still thinking too highly of themselves.
OSXP?
TinyURL'd
Windows Vista has 18 thousand different versions, all will poorly placed changes. An example would be the Photo thinger in Enterprise (I think). And from what I have heard, there are three major groups developing Windows. There is the core group, they develop the kernel and the things around it, and then Windows and Windows Server. The latter two are based off of the first.
There is a new Windows every 4 years, generally, and an update every 2. Wherein Mac has smaller updates every year. There are two major consumers using Windows, company and personal. As Mac does not have a company version and I cannot use it as an example. But generally, as someone who helped in my school with computers, companies do not want a vast amount of smaller updates. Wherein the personal side, in this internetz age, we are used to frequent updates.
Businesses want a secure OS that works. Plain and simple. They do not want updates all the time that can fuck up a system. They are not as concerned about pretty OS effects, they would find more use with a very stripped down version of an OS.
Mac has these nice, frequent and small updates. Would that not be very nice with Windows? Not only updates you go and buy for, downloads and updates and more personal things. I know Windows Update does this, security and the like… I guess a better example would be the XP SP3 update, although I have not used it, it has the new Vista Aero theme. The OS would be updated more frequently, but less disruptive. And not having the big bang with new Windows OSs.
A really cool way I can think of would be if you could buy a stripped down Windows and instead of buying different versions, why not just let you buy small packs for updating. So instead of paying for a feature in a certain version, you could buy the ‘Media’ packet, and the ‘Gaming’ packet and stuff of that nature.
And everyone needs to adapt the package downloading that Linux does. Let the OS check the internetz if there are updates and let you download them all together. It would be so much nicer and safer if you were told when there were updates (I mean for smaller programs, not just Nortons and shit) and not have to go around and checking the internetz.
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