Category Archives: Technology

Apple figures

Tomorrow Apple will announce earnings figures for the second quarter. The fact that Mac sales showed healthy growth is irrelevant to most observers — it’s all about the iPhone, which went on sale over the last two days of the period in question. The company is thought to have sold 200,000-700,000 of the little beauties but will confirm the figure in its report, which Reuters should have here. If it’s not I’ll update the link to Bloomberg or some other source.

It’ll offer some good iPhone news to counter claims a flaw in its web browser can lead to the phone being hacked.

UPDATE: AT&T says it activated only 146,000 iPhones. As the company is Apple’s exclusive carrier in the States, that does not bode well. The news wiped about $7bn off the tech firm’s share value.

FINAL UPDATE: Apple says it sold 270,000 iPhones. Hmm… I know there were activation problems but they weren’t on that sort of a scale. That said it’s possible a lot of people bought their phones but only activated them the day after the second quarter ended. At least that’s the excuse I’m offering for the disparity.

Ads from your hard drive

Microsoft has filed a patent for an “advertising framework” that uses “context data” from your hard drive to show you advertisements and “apportion and credit advertising revenue” to ad suppliers in real time. From Ars Technica via Slashdot.

Eek. I don’t like where this kind of adware is heading… I’d write a longer post but I don’t trust myself to be entirely calm or coherent.

iPhone fine print

Bruce Kushnick has trawled through the terms of service accompanying the world’s current favourite gadget, the iPhone. All is not as rosy as it appears: limited wi-fi access, a hefty termination fee, double billing, being billed for calls that don’t go through.

I hasten to add that these are the terms for its US usage. We’ll just have to wait and see what happens when it comes to Europe. If you want to read Kushnick’s analysis, click the “read more” link below.

read more | digg story

Online gaming

According to ComScore (via Techcrunch), 217m people play online games. That’s 28% of all people online, doesn’t including gambling sites and marks a 16.% increase on May 2006.

According to ComScore Europe managing director Bob Ivins:

With one in four Internet users visiting a gaming site, playing games online is extremely popular. The fact that these websites are pulling in over a quarter of the total worldwide Internet population shows what a global phenomenon gaming has become. The potential of the online gaming arena should be especially appealing for advertisers, as the average online gamer visits a gaming site 9 times a month.

The site gives a regional breakdown which shows certain gaming sites are favoured in certain regions. For example, Zylom attracted 10.3m Europeans but only 484,000 Asia-Pacific users (these two geographical regions had the most online gamers overall).

I haven’t done much in recent years, in fact I’m pretty sure the last time I played over the net it was either going head to head with a friend in Command and Conquer: Red Alert or getting my backside whipped by somebody at Quake II.

I feel so old…

Steorn insanity

Scienceblogs.com has an article up detailing how creationists have latched onto Steorn’s free energy device (which has yet to work) as “evidence against materialism”.

As quoted from overwhelmingevidence.com:

Steorn’s findings totally undermine the basic premise of materialism, simply by demonstrating a confirmed physical effect that materialists predict cannot happen. These clever Irish researchers have demonstrated that the principles of thermodynamics function in a manner far closer to the predictions of William Dembski and William Brookfield than the clearly flawed thermodynamic claims of Hawkings and Maxwell.

The same scientists who tell you that Intelligent Design is impossible also dispute the hard-facts of Steorn’s peer-reviewed findings. I predict that this humble contraption will show the world just how much materialists have misled mainstream-science.

Sweet zombie Jesus. Did I wake up in crazy town?

Steorn’s Orbo device was supposed to have been unveiled online on July 5, but due to technical difficulties which were “primarily due to excessive heat from the lighting in the main display area” the streaming video and public exhibition have been cancelled.

The streaming video — which showed the Orbo device on a table surrounded by five computers in an otherwise empty room — was up and running earlier in the week at this URL, but surfing there now redirects to the company’s news section.