Posted on Apr 30, 2006
Posted on Apr 29, 2006
Links for Saturday 29th of April 2006
- Night Flight Training Completed (by Jeremy Zawodny)
- jkOnTheRun: BitLocker Encryption in Vista: good for mobile PCs, bad for dual-booting
- Henner Malchert – artmac – Mac mini SATA mod
- Second Annual MySpace Stupid Haircut Awards
- Did Nintendo Punk Us with Wii? – Kotaku
- Mobile Desktop : MobileWhack.com
- Insecurity Assessment – The Daily WTF
Posted on Apr 28, 2006
Go Play with Your Wii
What is in a name? When it comes to marketing a next generation console, I would imagine quite a lot. Nintendo’s choice of name for its new console is certainly a popular topic around the Internet at the moment, but is this really a marketing blunder?
Look at it this way, just because Nintendo chose a, in my opinion, ridiculous name, it is getting a lot of coverage for its new console. Not just on gaming sites, but there are blogs and news sites everywhere that are giving it hell for this. All of this is getting the Wii into the mind of the gaming population, which will make it easier to market when the shipping date comes around. While I doubt that Nintendo would name a console based purely on getting it covered on countless blogs, giving it an interesting name does create a talking point, thus half of the marketing department’s job is already done.
When it comes down to it, it is going to be the gaming experience that sells this console anyway. It was never Nintendo’s intention to build a console that could compete with other next-gen systems on a hardware bases – it is competing on a ‘fun’ level, giving the owner a new way to play. If it makes full use of this ‘wand’ type controller, and it turns out to be super-cool, who is really going to care what it is called?
Posted on Apr 27, 2006
Posted on Apr 26, 2006
A Sentence
Sure Kent, I’ll play. Here are the instructions:
- Grab the nearest book.
- Open it to page 161.
- Find the fifth sentence.
- Post the text of the sentence along with these instructions.
- Don’t search around and look for the coolest book you can find. Do what’s actually next to you.
My sentence is: “We’ve seen conditional statements and loop statements in this book already, and they were introduced in Chapter 1, but this is the chapter where we nail down all the facts on these statements.”
It’s a C++ book, and page 161 is the very early stages of the language. I haven’t picked up the book in years. What really makes me think, is the fact that I don’t have a non-fiction book in my office – maybe I should change that, and have a really great book at hand when I need some inspiration…
Posted on Apr 26, 2006
Posted on Apr 25, 2006
Posted on Apr 24, 2006
Posted on Apr 23, 2006
Motorola’s Shock Alert – Prior Art?
I received an email from Daniel Holth this morning, pointing me to this page on Halfbakery. It seems as though he described almost the same device as the Motorola shock alert system for mobile phones that was patented a couple of days ago, back in July 2004. See my article on MobileBurn about the patent here.
I wonder if something like this can be used as prior art?
Posted on Apr 23, 2006
Does The Register Know it Sucks?
I’ll admit that I’m not the biggest fan of The Register – its style, ethics, or content – but I will also admit that this letter that was sent in to them is taking it a little far. Sure, write in to have your say, but keep it civilised.
The thing that really strikes me as amusing though, is that The Reg just posts the letter, teases it a little, and invites more of the same. Is it just me, or should the folks over there be looking into the reason why they are receiving letters like this in the first place? I have never received anything like this in response to my writing, and I hope I never do.