I thought it would all be good. The .Mac service wasn’t amazing, and certainly wasn’t worth the money for the yearly subscription unless you had more than one Mac and needed to keep them in sync. iDisk was slow, Sync routinely broke iTunes contacts syncing with my iPhone and so on. Then Apple announced MobileMe at WWDC, which looked absolutely amazing. Instant push updates between my Mac and iPhone - even my Windows installation - of calendars, contacts and any mail sent to my @mac.com (now @me.com) email address.
Trouble is, it doesn’t work and has been an amazing cock-up on Apple’s part, a company normally renowned for their flawless execuation of product launches.
It came alongside the iPhone 3G launch, which was predictably insane with demand far outstripping supply and the inevitable server issues as O2 and iTunes tried to handle thousands of people all activating at once. The iPhone 2.0 software update was good despite a small delay in pushing it to iTunes, but the iPhone and the new iTunes expects the MobileMe infrastructure to be in place.
It isn’t. It’s been up and down and unreliable for around 48 hours now, and I still don’t have the update which enables my Mac to talk to MobileMe, rendering it useless. Apparently there was a 1.1 patch hovering around briefly, but this has been pulled, despite some people still not getting 1.0 (Me included).
Here’s a rather trippy bit of art/gadgetry from the BMW Museum. I want one in my multi-million pound mansion. Well, when I get a multi-million pound mansion that is.
So, the judge has decided that Jack Thompson is guilty of being an idiot (That’s technical law-speech), but now instead of the 10-year ban on practising law in Florida she is now recommending a permanent disbarment. On top of that, she’s recommending he pay $43,675 in costs as well.
Sorry for this being so dreadfully old, but I’ve only just seen it and thought I should share the laughs with other people who, like me, are perpetually two years behind the inane stupidity of the rest of the world.
I’d also like to point out the awesome bit in the url:
Apparently the folks over at ICANN, the body responsible for all the IP addresses and domain names on the internet, have unanimously voted to allow arbitrary TLDs to be registered. This is a monumentally bad idea.
Certainly, some organisations will make good use of this system. We could have a nice set of stuff from Google:
http://google/
http://mail.google/
http://maps.google/
All of which is very nice. Trouble is, we’re also in for a huge swathe of new domain squatting where irritating companies with lots of money will buy TLDs just to clog the system. All it takes is one company to register the “con” domain and they receive all the mistyped .com requests. This is not good. Perhaps Pepsi will register “cola”, so http://pepsi.cola is good, but http://coca.cola will then be blocked.
I’m personally all in favour of more restriction, and forcing sites back into their appropriate country TLD and keeping the global domains for global companies and organisations. Screw .cola, .facebook, .google, .microsoft and the rest.
It’s been raining for a few solid hours now, and everything is getting soggy. Oh well, at least it keeps the air cleaner and washes all the chavs out of the gutters.
Spore Creature Creator is good fun, and I’m delighted to discover that both it and the full Spore game will arrive in a native Mac version, so I don’t have to mess around with Parallels to play what looks to be an extremely fun sandbox game. Sadly, however, I can’t buy the full version for my Mac in the UK, or pre-order the full thing. How irritating.
The procedural animation and texturing is simply awesome by the way, hats off to the team.
You need to leverage the new digital paradigm offered to us by Web 2.0 and the Semantic Web to effectively harness and integrate user-generated and user-driven content in a dynamic framework accessable over a simple user-oriented interface via a wireless broadband multiplexed link.
