Yikes! Don’t drop your new iPhone 4S!

Posted on Oct 18, 2011

Found this video online, courtesy of SquareTrade, an insurance company (oddly enough!).
In the video at the bottom, they’ve dropped an iPhone 4S and a Samsung Galaxy S2.

This stood out to me because ever since I got my Samsung Galaxy S2, I’ve been afraid of dropping it.
My fear is mostly because the phone is so light and thin that it just doesn’t have that ‘reassuringly solid’ feeling of my older iPhone 3GS. Read the rest of this entry »

The Return of the Commodore 64!

Posted on Apr 2, 2011

I never owned a Commodore 64, I was a Commodore Amiga player when I was younger, and I remember those days with great pleasure. Games like Walker, Project X, Body Blows, Lemmings, Clockwiser and many classic others like Another World, Flashback and Cannon Fodder still echo in my mind with the ‘click-click-click’ of the double-but-still-single button joystick. I even remember a certain sibling would hog the damn thing playing epic marathon sessions of Sensible Soccer. So I had some mixed feelings of joy and regret when I heard about the return of the Commodore 64. Joy because it reminds me of the old Amiga days, and regret because I never got a C-64 and wish that I had, so that I could fully embrace its return with the deep nostalgia that it deserves…

Still, the new C-64 looks very cool, in a retro way.
At first glance it appears very similar to the original, with the same chunky keyboard and retro asthetic and feel. Upon closer inspection, especially toward the ports on the back and side, there appear to be more than initially meets the eye. I’m not really surprised, but still find that it looks odd having modern ports on such a retro piece of technology (Though to be honest, it wouldnt get very far in todays world with an antenna pass through or even scart port on the back). Commodore have clearly put some effort into bringing the machine upto modern day standards, at least in the connectivity department. I even see what looks like a HDMI port on the back, but it looks like a very PC-like back plate around the ports. I’d be interested to find out more about whats inside, but would not be surprised if there is an x86 Intel or AMD processor lurking there.

With some more investigation, there is also a choice selection of media card ports on the right side of the unit, suggesting that perhaps games (ROMs?) can be loaded from SD cards.

Somehow I get the feeling that the new revamped C-64 delivers the retro experience to the modern age, despite not physically seeing one. Lets hope the firmware or Operating System supports more modern offerings too.

Here’s hoping for the new Amiga to come out soon with similarly retro feel, though from details on the site, the ‘new’ amiga looks distinctly modern.
There are more details of the ‘new’ C-64 and upcoming Amigas on the Commodore USA site.

And here is a video from the Commodore Site:

Microsoft says “IE6 bad! IE9 GOOOOOD!”

Posted on Mar 15, 2011

Yesterday, Microsoft released to the world its first non-testing version of Internet Explorer 9.
To go with this, Microsoft has recently launched a duo of websites aimed to convince people both that IE6 should be dropped, and also that people should upgrade to IE9 (Or at least 8, since IE9 is not available for Windows XP).

This is clearly quite a bold move by Microsoft, which made a lot of effort over many years to make IE6 the de-facto browser. There was also a lot of work put into making ‘IE-specific’ sites that worked best on IE6 due to subtle (Also some obvious and painful) changes in web code. This is hopefully becoming a thing of the past with IE9’s much touted compliance to web standards, and is welcomed by web developers far and wide. They have even launched a new site showcasing performance and web standard tests to prove IE9’s apparent greatness.

By visiting the ‘Internet Explorer 6 Countdown’ site, you can see some interesting statistics (Provided by Net Applications) of the global distribution of IE6 usage. At first it seems like a non-issue, when you consider that only 12% of IE users run IE6, when you really consider it, that 12% represents a lot of people. Try as I did, I could not find anything at all that could tell me what numerical value that 12% represents but if you consider that roughly 10% of people on this planet have access to the internet via computers, that is around 600 million people. That 600 million is obviously subdivided by people using Macs, PCs, etc, and that the total share of browsers subdevide that still, but IE still has a ~57% share of the browser world. At the end of the day you can reasonably say that at the end of all of it, thats Millions of people.

Furthermore, when you consider how some countries like South Korea (And I think China) have required their citizens by law to have IE6 Active-X plugins to access their online banking, the scale of the problem starts to become apparent. Again, that is the country of South Korea (48,747,000 people in 2009) required everybody to do this by law in order to access their online banking. South Korea represents 24.8% of that 12% of IE6 users.

Pretty serious stuff, that 12%.

Here is a snapshot metric of the IE Countdown site:

Links:
The Internet Explorer 6 Countdown
Beauty of the Web (IE9 marketing site)