I’m prone to bouts of idiocy. I think everyone is, it’s all part of being human. Sometimes though these bouts of idiocy actually get me thinking and when that happens the whole world needs to watch out.
I’ve started a little experiment, which is pretty small scale at the moment but which I will no doubt expand on. For many month I’ve been using Amazon S3 and JungleDisk to make sure that my data is safe in the cloud. On the whole it works pretty damn well, with problems only occuring when Amazon decide that I don’t need access to their servers.
Over the last month, whilst pretty busy at work, I’ve started moving some of my most used aplications over to the cloud too. Using JungleDisk’s drive mapping, I have literally started installing my applications into my secure Amazon S3 space. Let me start by saying, this is completly idiotic. There are no benefits to doing this outside of general backups - and it would be much cheaper and easier just to setup an NTFSLink between the datafiles in, say, Digsby and my Cloud storage rather than put the entire application there also.
The issue I’m having however, is justifying my position of this being a stupid thing to do. Sure, it was slow as hell to install there, but its actually pretty damn quick to use. My data is safe and if i have a catastrophic drive failure, I just need to buy another and install again (which would overwrite very little) and I would have lost NO data. Lets face it, lugging around a 500G USB drive is horribly inneffective - it’s heavy, noisy, takes up a load of space and more importantly isn’t exactly the best place to store your data securely. But for around £40 a month, you could store 500G of data in the cloud and only have to heft the laptop around - much easier to get through customs.
I led me to think, what with the massive proliferation of netbooks and cheap cloud storage such as Amazon S3, how long will it be before people install a simple O/S and then installing and running EVERYTHING through the cloud? I mean we already have seperate drives for our picture, music, movies and games why not just push that out to someone who can look after that data a lot better than you can?
junglediskinstall.exe
Featured, Online
People sure do love xkcd. I saw the latest comic last night, thinking it was amusing, but I’ve never been this deluged with submissions from people saying that we absolutely need to post it here. Either way, it does make the universal point about why you shouldn’t buy anything that includes DRM. Since any change to the DRM (such as shutting down DRM servers) means you’ll probably need to break the law to actually keep using the content you thought you “bought,” at some point, people realize they’re going to be considered a criminal either way and just vote to pirate stuff in the first place
Online
Although a little late in announcing, had to wait for permission to name the winner, Steve from Carolina was the winner of last months XBox live giveaway and has confirmed the code to have worked!
Hopefully we’ll have something even bigger to give away next month, so keep looking for more updates!
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Remember those tacky laminated menus with photos of the food in dodgy roadside caffs? Well, one chic London restaurant has taken the idea to a whole new level by kitting out its restaurant with digital projectors that beam interactive menus onto the tables, as well of photos of what the dish will look like.
We’d have to admit that the tackiness element of those laminated menus is largely absent in this very futuristic dining emporium, with touch-sensitive tables allowing you to interactively browse and preview the grub on offer before placing your order from the table.
Diners at the West End restaurant, Inamo, can even change the ambience of their table by selecting the coloured patterns projected onto their table, play games other than footsie, and even use the table to check out local services, including getting your stuffed, drunk arse into a cab.
Featured, Hardware
One of the most significant announcements to come out of Nintendo’s otherwise abysmal E3 press conference (and even this was announced before the conference) was the Wii MotionPlus. With this adapter, which attaches to the bottom end of the Wiimote, the controller will be capable of a 1:1 response to the user’s movement. Great, right? But there’s one nagging question about MotionPlus that was raised immediately after it was first announced: Why wasn’t this technology in the Wiimote from the beginning?As we’ve now learned, it all comes down to cost. Chatting with VentureBeat about the MotionPlus, Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime explained that Nintendo was aware of the technology while designing the Wii but implementing it would have proven too costly for the business model Nintendo was looking to employ. “By waiting about three years, the costs come down substantially and it becomes a viable product,” he offered.
While it excites us to know the Wii will be capable of more precise controls, it’s difficult to avoid wondering if it was the right move to make. The MotionPlus will segment the Wii’s market and potentially cause confusion among the casual crowd — the same audience that Nintendo has to thank for returning it to the position of top dog in the videogame hardware biz.
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Now, I know I already blogged about these guys a couple of days ago, and I don’t want to look like I’m advertising for them too much, but I’ve just got off skype with the owner of the site because he wanted to thank me for the users I’ve already sent his way, but also wanted to let me know about 2 features going live Monday, and one which is already installed (as of today apparently).
The Instant Blogger is a free blog service, which is making its name by not charging a penny (which isn’t all that new) but giving away quite a bit of webspace for free. In fact, from my last post, this free space has been finalised at 50 MB. Which means that you should be able to run a pretty useful blog without ever needing to upgrade.
The new feature which was installed today is actually quite a big deal, The Instant Blogger has started hosting all uploaded files with Amazon S3. This may not sound like such a big deal, but if you think that the average blog maybe has a dozen images on every front page, and some are now including video and audio, it means that all the work in hosting those files has been moved across to someone more adept at hosting them. This in turn means that, when the site is under high load (which a site offering free blogs is bound to be) the problem isn’t made worse when people start downloading large amounts of data.
The two features being added on Monday are also a little exciting for the new startup. The first is the ability to host podcasts for free. Apparently the functionality is already there ready to be used, and the S3 hosting has been integrated here as well, all the TIB team are waiting for is the correct instructions to be written up. Now 50 MB of free space to host a free podcast which is hosted using bulletproof servers sounds like a good deal to us, but 50 MB isn’t all that much when you think the average 30 minute podcast is about 20 MB. This is where the second addition comes in, for $25 a year (about £15) you get an additional 2,000 MB (not 2048 interestingly enough) to host you files using the same S3 hosting. Now this is a huge gamble, as a very popular podcast will probably use about $25 a month’s worth of fees, but TIB promise us that except for exceptional circumstances they will stand by their pricing.
I’m going to be following the progress of these guys over the next couple of months, so far the service is looking extremely useful, but maybe they’ve bitten off more than they can chew.
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Although hideously resource intensive, the lack of Flash and Java on the iPhone and iPod touch has caused apple a few problems. Not least the pulling of an ad over here in the UK for saying that you got the full internet, when without the support of the above this was just not quite true.
We may be getting one step closer though, with adobe announcing that it is working on an official flash player for the iPhone, Whether it will work from within safari (would be a bit rubbish if it didn’t) and whether apple actually allow it, which after the Ad fiasco they’re bound to, is yet to be confirmed but seeing as the software already works on jailbroken phones, it probably wont be that long before those few of us who haven’t jailbroken get that warm fuzzy feeling that comes when someone flashes at you - through the internet.
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Hardware, Uncategorized
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