Why Microsoft’s Xbox 360 sales milestone isn’t so impressive
…So while Microsoft’s claim that being first will help them win may sound good to corporate ears, the truth is that the Wii is on track to outsell the Xbox 360 rather handily.
Ars has a nice graph of January-March sales for different systems, too.
I’ve read articles on remapping keys on Windows, but here’s a handy command line utility that makes the registry changes for you: Windows Scan code remapper. No idea if this works on Vista, but I’d imagine so. Especially useful for VMware Fusion.
Now that Internet Jackass day is over, I can share my favourite April foolery. From the April 1, 2004 edition of TidBITS: iChat AV 2.2 Public Beta Adds MSN Support. I read this one in isolation from the rest of their April Fools edition, and it was subtle. I spent a few minutes looking for the beta before deciding it had been withdrawn. It took me months to realize it was all a joke.
Form the CBC, a story about participants in a mock disaster being (really) poisoned.
I don’t know about you, but I sure am glad that Transport Canada is practicing for a real disaster, like poisoning.
Rogue Amoeba’s list of enhancement requests against the iPhone SDK file in Apple’s bug reporting system. Most of these are more philosophy than technical issues, but I know there’s some I plan on filing, too.
In an effort to remedy this and remove some of the limitations, we’ve submitted a number of bug reports to Apple. Some of these are useful specifically for us, while others are beneficial to anyone, but our goal here is the same with all of them - we want to make the iPhone platform as robust and powerful as possible.
Some of the comments show people not getting it. Filing enhancement requests in Apple’s bug reporting system is not spam. That’s the feedback mechanism. Further, a hundred people filing duplicate bugs means more than one developer filing a single bug.
So if there’s something you don’t like in the iPhone SDK, file a report on it. I know I plan to report some of these.
Of course, we know this. But it’s still a bit shocking to me to see something like this.
John Terry, the apparent creator, hard coded his username and password to his gmail account in source code. All right, not the smartest thing in the world to do, but then I noticed that every time a user adds their account to the program to back up their data, it sends and email with their username and password to his personal email box!
Craig Hockenberry writes Hello App Store. Not sure I agree that $99 is too low, though. I think most of those who downloaded the SDK will never buy a signing key.
Interesting look at iPhone application development. Although there’s probably a few wrinkles we haven’t heard about yet, it’s reasonable to expect the basics will be the same when the SDK is released. (via Daring Fireball)
Gruber’s “plain English” translation of Yahoo’s “Ack! Microsoft!” memo is funny stuff.
Coding Horror’s plea to programmers: Don’t pollute user space. I totally agree with this one. Microsoft and Palm, in particular, need to get their ugly mitts off my Documents folder!