From the monthly archives:

December 2005

PC gaming dead?

December 29, 2005

Paul Thurrott: While I would never question the success of Steam, which is a wonderful tool through which I’ve made several PC game purchases, this is a terribly uninsightful article. Facts are facts: The PC game market is slowing, and the consoles are kicking ass. Game over, sorry. Well, Paul, what are those five million [...]

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“Really bad” security exploit

December 29, 2005

Sunbelt Software blog has details of a rather horrible security exploit that’s already out in the wild. As Ed Bott puts it: This is a zero-day exploit, the kind that give security researchers cold chills. It works by exploiting a weakness in the Windows engine that views graphics in the Windows Metafile (WMF) format. You [...]

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Google feed API

December 29, 2005

Niall Kennedy has an exclusive on Google’s plans to open up the API to its news feed system: Google plans to offer a feed reader API to allow third-party developers to build new views of feed data on top of Google’s backend. The new APIs will include synchronisation, feed-level and item-level tagging, per-item read and [...]

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Never travel at Christmas

December 29, 2005

The plan for this Christmas was simple. After heading to Kim’s parents for the day itself, we’d be embarking on a plane to visit my wonderful sister and her family in France for a week in a house in the middle of the country, as much cheap wine as you can drink, and tormenting my [...]

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A step too far

December 23, 2005

Perhaps because I grew up in the era when the sight of a camera on the corner of the street was reminiscent of Orwell’s 1984 rather than safety, I’ve often found the number of cameras scattered around the streets a little disturbing. Yet, there’s no doubt that the evidence of cameras has been useful in [...]

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iTunes/QuickTime security issue

December 22, 2005

Mac Net Journal points to stories from eWeek and Cnet on a flaw which may make Apple’s software on both Windows and Mac susceptible to attack.

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The guys in line

December 21, 2005

Chuq Von Rospach is getting a little stick from some quarters over his assertion that the kind of people who queue all night to get an Xbox 360 are a little weird. He responds – and reiterates his point – here: And as to the folks standing in line — I don’t personally care what [...]

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Advent Calendar

December 20, 2005

Mr friend Leslie is doing an Advent Calendar. It’s a beautiful thing, full of little delights, and including some “Guest Memories” of Christmas from various folk. One of which is from my favourite girl, and whenever I read it it make me want to cry, because it’s so sweet and reminds me exactly why I [...]

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Technology and laws

December 20, 2005

In an good post by Nicholas Carr on “dark markets”, Doug Lay posts the following interesting comment: This sounds like the sort of half-thought-out homily that Hollywood uses to convince gullible Congresscritters to support DRM legislation. Let’s look for *legal* means to address illegal, predatory behavior, and not pretend we can hit the “rewind” switch [...]

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