So maybe all the protesting over at Ruined iPhone and other places on the web have paid off. The whole iPhone outrage even hit mainstream news media. Basically Rogers and Fido (which are the same company) will allow you to take a phone plan and add a $30 6 GB plan to it. This is a temporary “deal” you can buy into with a 3 year contract before Aug 31st. It is a much better deal, but a lot of people are asking why it’s only temporary?
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The web is on fire with angry Canadians and even sympathetic support from other countries on the Rogers iPhone pricing. One website that’s getting a lot of buzz is the ruinediphone.com petition. It had a much more colourful domain name earlier, but I’m assuming they realized it would gain more support with a less explicit name.
It really is amazing how a popular video, cool website or even an online movement can go viral and spread throughout the Internet like wild fire. As I was searching around tonight, I found something that really stirred my interest. Something that could have far more impact than the Ruined iPhone petition, because the issues on price gouging and misleading advertising go far deeper than the iPhone. It’s Bill C-555 which was actually proposed a few weeks ago.
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Today Rogers announced no unlimited data plan and a ridiculous 3 year lock in for Apple’s highly anticipated iPhone. Rogers announces iPhone 3G plans, unlimited data isn’t one of them on Engadget has all the details. The official Rogers iPhone voice data packages are online too.
This is pretty disappointing, you have this really cool phone, but if you actually use it much you will pay through the teeth. No YouTube for you! I hope some day Rogers has some real competition, and I hope everyone remembers their monopoly and horrible prices. The rumours appear to be wrong, nothing is going to change up here in the north.
Now the question is do I give in and get one anyway? I’m not sure yet, but I’m leaning towards no.
I think I’m usually a pretty nice guy, but the other night I got snappy with a sales person. I’ve been doing laptop research for the past few weeks and I finally picked the HP Artists Edition Laptop which was on sale at Future Shop. I know, everything is always on sale there and if it’s not, you’re probably paying too much for it. That said, I was picking it up for someone else and we had pretty much settled on which one we wanted.
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I have a great Wordpress plugin called CyStats. This allows me to see in real time who is visiting or crawling my blog. I recently started posting my blog entries to Twitter and noticed two web crawlers called HTTP://TWITTURLS.COM and TWITTURLY/V0.5. Later a friend sent me a link to Twitturly and that led to finding Twitturls. These sites were the source of the crawlers.
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I’ve followed this followed this game from the start. I was a hardcore Street Fighter fan back in the days when there were lines-ups around the Street Fighter II arcade machines, and I have owned various version of this game on earlier consoles like the Super Nintendo. Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix (Wow that’s a mouthful) will be released in beta if you buy Wolf of the Battlefield: Commando 3 on Xbox Live arcade for the 360. I have tried Commando 3 and it’s really not my kind of game, but I think I may have to bite the bullet and buy it just so I can play the Beta of Street Fighter, I’m that much of a Street Fighter geek.
Every single frame of animation has been redone in this game, and it aims to tweak game play and add a few new moves while still staying true to the original. The game will even run in wide screen. Capcom has also mentioned the possibility of expansions in the future. The original Xbox live file size restrictions have also been overcome.
Now for the bad news, the controllers. For some horribly bizarre and sadistic reason you cannot use a high end controller on the 360. If you have a 500 dollar DDR mat or a 200 dollar arcade joystick, it’s pretty much useless on the 360 unless you want to do some serious modding that will require an extra 360 pad. This really sucks, and it’s always been a huge beef of players on the 360, why do they even use a USB plug? Last time I checked the U stood for Universal.
Anyway, enough of my rant, I will still give in and buy this game because I can taste it. Check our the screenshots on IGN and there are a few game play videos on Gametrailers.
Check out my last article on Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix
Okay, lately more and more I’ve been noticing that my middle click doesn’t work. Why do so many website developers and designers insist on breaking basic usability? Why on earth would you ever want to annoy your users and take away an expected browser behaviour?
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The first browser wars ended years ago and now it seems they are back for a second round. I don’t think they will ever match the Netscape vs. Internet Explorer days, and today there are many more platforms to consider. Before reading this post further, I should mention that I am a web designer / developer and I have an axe to grind with Microsoft, especially when it comes to their browser. I will actually be completely blunt and say that this browser is downright horrible and the only reason it has any market share at all is because it is included with practically every mainstream computer sold on the planet. The very fact that Firefox has gained so much ground over the past three years against such incredible odds is testament not only to how great Firefox is, but also to how horrible Internet Explorer is.
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After over a year of non-stop problems with vista I have returned to Windows XP on my home computer and plan to do so at work within the next week. I know we all complain about Microsoft, but in the case of Windows Vista it’s exceeding well earned.
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Okay, here we go again with more great news from Microsoft. For anyone following my blog for the past week or so, or Xbox Live’s Major Nelson’s blog, then you know that due to the very long outage over Christmas (or intermittent outage as Microsoft claims) Microsoft will not be refunding us, but instead giving us a game of their choice.
I won’t go on about the details, you can read that in my previous posts titled “Xbox Live, what are we paying for? Could the tides change?” and “Xbox free arcade title announced“. Now today it has been announced on Major Nelson’s site that we have a whole five days to download this title. How is this compensation for an outage? I think they should have given us nothing; it probably would have generated less negative feedback than this. As one poster mentioned in a previous entry here, what about the people with the red ring of death? Or the ones that are away this week? Or… the ones who just don’t know. There is little to no advertising of this free game. Wow, some compensation. This is just to appease the angry hoards and I don’t think its working.
Undertow, the temporarily free and previously released game is also the Arcade game of the week. This has also upset some users who look forward each week to Wednesday’s new Arcade game. People are also still asking about what to do if they already have Undertow. Major Nelson posted in the comments section that people can call Xbox support, but obviously lots of people haven’t read that and will thus miss out. Couple this with the fact that many users are still having trouble connecting to live and that this very game is giving errors to some people when they attempt to download it and you have a sad state of affairs. Now if only the PS3 could get in gear and get some good games out.
Read more comments on Major Nelson’s post.
