Cambridge has one Apple Store (in the seemingly Bioshock-inspired Grand Arcade), one O2 shop, and two Carphone Warehouses.
Having decided that it’s finally time to replace my venerable Motorola RAZR V3, and never having been to an Apple product launch before
Perhaps WordPress has become slower in recent releases, perhaps I’ve broken something by running a non-prelinked system – but in any case, running this blog from my trustworthy SGI O2 was just getting too slow.
So this morning at about 7:30am, O2 sent out an email to what is probably millions of punters (judging by the fact that their pre-orders site has crashed and burned) with the headline:
iPhone 3G is here and its free*
Anyone spot the problem with this?
Let’s see what Wikipedia has to say about this:
ITS, it’s or its can mean:
- “its”, the possessive adjective and possessive pronoun form of the personal pronoun it
- “it’s”, a contraction of “it is” or “it has”
- The “It’s” man, a man with torn clothes and unkempt beard who appeared at the beginning of episodes of Monty Python’s Flying Circus
It comes to something when a corporation the size of O2 can’t even be bothered (or doesn’t have the knowledge – a more worrying conclusion) to get basic grammar and punctuation correct on what is unquestionably its biggest launch of the year.
Time was, you bought a new Nintendo game and got a code with it, which you entered into a Nintendo website and got points in return. Never mind that anything worth buying with these points sold out immediately (the used to give away Gameboy Players for the GameCube, and certain NDS games) – people were generally happy. Or, at least, not gnashing their teeth in frustration.
With the rumoured (hopefully) imminent launch of new MacBook Pro models, I thought I’m commit to blog a collection of thoughts I have about how Apple could improve it, how much I’d like to see them make the suggested change, and how likely I think it is that they’ll do so…
There are several things which annoy me about Nintendo right now… amongst them the shameless price-gouging for Virtual Console games, the DRM which prevents you from backing up your saved games from your console to your SD card (what was the thinking behind this one??), the hopelessly slow SD write-speed when you do actually find something that you can copy, the inability to run copied data from the SD card, the lack of any form of online mass-storage support – I could go on.
However, right now, it is Nintendo Europe who are in my cross-hairs – and I’m left wondering exactly what they think they’re playing at.
(Incidentally, how do you write that? “Mac OS X.5″ is just wrong, whilst “Mac OS 10.5″ isn’t as aesthetically pleasing… oh well, I guess it fits into our multiply-redundant world of “PIN numbers”, “tuna fish”, and “software programs” 
Anyway, on to my initial thoughts on Leopard!
The excellent Phoronix have a series of benchmarks of Enemy Territory: Quake Wars on Linux and on Vista… and, using a 512Mb ATI Radeon HD 2900XT with the latest drivers for each, the exact same machine managed a frame rate just over 19% higher on Linux than on Vista!
It looks as if the roadworks at the top-end of Milton Road are finally complete… the net result seeming to be that where previously there was a lane for traffic headed for Cowley Road, the Business Park, and the Park and Ride and a lane for heading into town, there is instead now but a single lane for all of this traffic. The dual-carriageway to the Science Park seems as unused as ever (I’ve never seen more than three vehicles between both lanes) – but now the queues down that single lane which carry all of the other traffic are enormous. By 10am each day, the queues go right back to the roundabout, so goodness only knows how bad it must be at 9am.
More to the point, it’s downright dangerous: this insane road layout encourages, almost ensures, that people will drive straight down the (empty) left-most Science Park lane, and then try to cut back into the traffic stream between two sets of lights. I guarantee that this will cause an accident sooner rather than later.