Apple and Gaming

As a gamer, I feel the frustration that this man felt when he first wrote this open letter to Apple on his blog. He is a newly switched Mac man, and still uses his PC to be the hard-core gamer he is at heart. I do the same thing, I also would like to eliminate the PC from this whole picture just as he would like to. Unfortunately, there are problems standing in our way. The compatibility of many many games with Apple hardware is limited. We all know Apple has the utilities to produce a great gaming computer, as they have shown us this with the newly released 8-core Mac Pro. Apple needs to open up this market so they can rake in even more money, and more importantly, new long-term users. Imagine if Apple made contracts with some of the most influential, award-winning game-producing companies of today. Oh the money would just roll in. There would no longer be a reason for consumers to stick with PCs. The only remaining issue is running Windows application, but that’s been made easy with Boot Camp/Paralells There are a few games that are compatible with Apple, such as Warcraft and Sims, but I want Counter-Strike and so many others. I understand and feel the same frustrations towards Apple that all of you Apple-liking-but-cannot-buy-one-because-of-compatibility-issues people. I think we should get a petition started and get thousands of names on it and send it to 1 Infinite Loop in Cupertino, CA. -Evan Doyle

Man Completes 3,272-Mile Amazon Swim

Slovenian Martin Strel has reason to celebrate. He just finished a 3,272 mile swim through the entire Amazon River. He’s lucky he made it safely considering how dangerous the Amzin river is. But, after nine weeks, Martin Streal arrived near the city of Belem, ending a swim almost as long as the drive from Miami to Seattle. He has been swimming an average of 50 miles a day since early Feburary. Just before he finished, he was struggling with dizzineess, vertigo, high blood pressure, nausea and delirium. He was ordered by his support doctor to discontinue the swim. However, he went against the odds and finished the river length.

He’s hit point zero,” Borut Strel, Martin’s son and the project coordinator, said by telephone from the Amazon. “There will be a ceremony Sunday in Belem, but he finished today.”

Speaking in fluent accented English by satellite phone during a break aboard his support vessel, the elder Strel said that the going got tougher the closer he got to Belem.

“The finish has been the toughest moment so far,” he said Thursday. “I’ve been swimming fewer kilometers as I get closer to the end. The ocean tides have a lot of influence on the river’s currents and sometimes they are so strong that I am pushed backward.”

Well, after several months of severe pain, he has accomplished his goals. He could have easily turned back when his arms and legs could barely move, or when he second-degree burns were developing on his face, but he didn’t let them stop him.

When sked about new adventures, he said: “I am not thinking about that right now … But I’ll find some other crazy swim, maybe in a lake or in an ocean.”

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We’re Expanding: The Green Factor

Just wanted to pop in to let you know that I’ve been working on expanding the blog. In the next few days, we’ll be launching our new blog: The Green Factor, which I hope will inspire people to be more concerned about the enviorment. Keep an eye out for the new blog.

Apple: 100 million iPods sold.

 

Apple® today announced that the 100 millionth iPod® has been sold, making the iPod the fastest selling music player in history. The first iPod was sold five and a half years ago, in November 2001, and since then Apple has introduced more than 10 new iPod models, including five generations of iPod, two generations of iPod mini, two generations of iPod nano and two generations of iPod shuffle. Along with iTunes® and the iTunes online music store, the iPod has transformed how tens of millions of music lovers acquire, manage and listen to their music.

 

“At this historic milestone, we want to thank music lovers everywhere for making iPod such an incredible success,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “iPod has helped millions of people around the world rekindle their passion for music, and we’re thrilled to be a part of that.”

 

10 Things We Can Do To Reduce Global Warming

 

I think we all understand that it is important to be concerned about our enviorment and the effect we are all having on it. However, I think it’s hard to figure out what we can each do to reduce our enviornmental damage. Here is a list of 10 things you can do to help slow down global warming. Also, you can calculate your carbon waste in the carbon calculator at the bottom of the list.

Install a programmable thermostat
Programmable thermostats will automatically lower the heat or air conditioning at night and raise them again in the morning. They can save you $100 a year on your energy bill

Plant a tree
A single tree will absorb one ton of carbon dioxide over its lifetime. Shade provided by trees can also reduce your air conditioning bill by 10 to 15%. The Arbor Day Foundation has information on planting and provides trees you can plant with membership.

Do not leave appliances on standby
Use the “on/off” function on the machine itself. A TV set that’s switched on for 3 hours a day (the average time Europeans spend watching TV) and in standby mode during the remaining 21 hours uses about 40% of its energy in standby mode

Take a shower instead of a bath
A shower takes up to four times less energy than a bath. To maximise the energy saving, avoid power showers and use low-flow showerheads, which are cheap and provide the same comfort.

Buy intelligently
One bottle of 1.5l requires less energy and produces less waste than three bottles of 0.5l. As well, buy recycled paper products: it takes less 70 to 90% less energy to make recycled paper and it prevents the loss of forests worldwide.

Buy fresh foods instead of frozen
Frozen food uses 10 times more energy to produce.

Air Dry Your Clothes.
Line-dry your clothes in the spring and summer instead of using the dryer. Save 700 lbs. of carbon dioxide and $75 per year, and add longevity to your clothes.

Run your dishwasher only with a full load.
Save 100 lbs. of carbon dioxide and $40 per year.

Avoid products with too much packaging.
Save 1,200 pounds of carbon dioxide if you cut down your garbage by 10%

Use Recycled Paper
Make sure your printer paper is 100% post consumer recycled paper. Save 5 lbs. of carbon dioxide per ream of paper.

If you want to learn how much of an impact you could be making, test your own carbon standards in the carbon calculator.

Picture of the Week

A spider monkey that escaped from a Mexico City zoo boarded a bus and attacked a passenger, Red Cross officials said Tuesday.

Apple Surprises Us

Well the Apple store was down for a bit today and now it is back up with a foreseen upgrade to the Mac Pro, which now carries 8-cores. This was rumored about many times and now has happened. 3Ghz and the same price at 2499 with the new Xeon processors. Also the Apple Cinema Displays have gone to the barber and got a price cut. now starting at 599 for the 20”, 23” at 899, and the 30” at 1799. No built-in iSight yet

Also the site has been updated a little bit too. Now with a new section for Apple Software and a section for Xservers too. Oh yeah, do not forget about Adobe’s CS3 is here! -Evan Doyle

Apple and EMI Announce DRM-Free Content

Update:  Apple today announced that EMI Music’s entire digital catalog of music will be available for purchase DRM-free (without digital rights management) from the iTunes Store worldwide in May. DRM-free tracks from EMI will be offered at higher quality 256 kbps AAC encoding, resulting in audio quality indistinguishable from the original recording, for just $1.29 per song. In addition, iTunes customers will be able to easily upgrade their entire library of all previously purchased EMI content to the higher quality DRM-free versions for just 30 cents a song. At this time, content from other studios will remain at it’s current price, sound quality, and protection standars. However, it may not be long until other labels make the switch to this standard-premium download system.

From the rumor mill…EMI and Apple may be holding a press conference in London tomorrow at 1PM London time(8AM EST). It was said earlier that this will have to do with the Beatles’ and Apple deal, but soruces have been telling Idolator that it will not have to do with the Beatles. This could be a joke seeing how it is April fools day but I doubt it. It could be the beginning of the end of DRM. Maybe any EMI owned song will be without DRM on the iTunes store! I Love You Steve Jobs. -Evan Doyle

 

Google Launches Sewer-Based Wifi System

It’s April Fools day, and Google decided to get in on the fun. Today they are launching Google TiSP, a home wifi system that uses access nodes via fiber-optic cable strung through your local municipal sewage lines. It’s really quite easy to set-up…

#1   Remove the spindle of fiber-optic cable from your TiSP installation kit.#2   Attach the sinker to the loose end of the cable, take one safe step backward and drop this weighted end into your toilet.

#3   Grasp both ends of the spindle firmly while a friend or loved one flushes, thus activating the patented GFlush™ system, which sends the weighted cable surfing through the plumbing system to one of the thousands of TiSP Access Nodes.#4   When the GFlush is complete, the spindle will (or at least should) have largely unraveled, exposing a connector at the remaining end. Detach the cable from the spindle, taking care not to allow the cable to slip into the toilet.

#5   Plug the fiber-optic cable into your TiSP wireless router, which has a specially designed counterweight to withstand the centripetal force of flushing.#6   Insert the TiSP installation CD and run the setup utility to install the Google Toolbar (required) and the rest of the TiSP software, which will automatically configure your computer’s network settings.

#7   Within sixty minutes — assuming proper data flow — the other end of your fiber-optic cable should have reached the nearest TiSP Access Node, where our Plumbing Hardware Dispatchers (PHDs) will remove the sinker and plug the line into our global data networking system.#8   Congratulations, you’re online! (Please wash your hands before surfing.)

It’s great to see Google getting in on the fun. Even more amazing, you can find a link to the TiSP on the main Google homepage. They’re calling it the “Dark Porcelain” project. Unfortunately, it’s not quite ready for the big time. I’ll think on wait on this one. I’d rather not have to experience what Google means when they say that “When things go wrong with TiSP, they go very, very wrong.”