Sony has ended Japanese production of its best-selling PlayStation 2 (PS2).
The hardware first went on sale in March 2000 in Japan and since then more than 150 million PS2 consoles have been sold.
Given how long the PS3 has been available, it may surprise you to know that the PS2 is still being made. But it has been. Sony routinely keeps older systems alive for some time after their replacements become available.
The final PS2 game, a Final Fantasy game called Seekers of Andoulin, is expected to be released (in Japan only) in March, 2013.
The Internet has taken the place of the telephone as the world’s basic, general-purpose, two-way communication medium. All Americans need high-speed access, just as they need clean water, clean air and electricity. But they have allowed a naive belief in the power and beneficence of the free market to cloud their vision. As things stand, the U.S. has the worst of both worlds: no competition and no regulation.
An interesting analysis of why things have turned out as they have for the average American Internet user. Crawford wants to see 1Gb fiber to the house standard throughout the country, instead of the paltry 4Mb goal offered by the FCC’s National Broadband Plan. How slow is your Internet connection, and how much do you pay for the privilege?
It seems like only yesterday we were planning for the Mayan apocalypse, but like so many other products, the 14th b’ak’tun (next era) has been delayed due to bugs and lack of pre-orders.
No doubt, in 2013, several long-rumored products will come to market. However, next year won’t be the year for these 13 gadgets and technologies.
Some of these are obviously not going to happen in that time frame – no chance for adoption of self-driving cars in less than a year for example – and some can be argued vehemently (can you say “Apple TV”?). What do you think – is Gizmodo wrong on any of their predictions?
Let us take a moment to remember a few of the companies, brands, and products that went to the great electronic recycling center in the sky in 2012. Some you may still have traces of in your sock drawer; others may be slowly decaying in a stack somewhere in your IT department. Some of them will be sorely missed by their loyal customers. Others…again, not so much.
I don’t know if I would describe many of these as “beloved” – after all, if they were, they might still be around. But I am saddened by the demise of Buckyballs. I even ordered a set but sadly it was never completed before the company shut down.
The New Yorker magazine has posted what they call “The Hundred Best Lists of All Time”. Leaving aside the impossibility of this actually being true, it’s an interesting “list of lists” nonetheless.
It includes everything from the obvious (The Ten Commandments) to the humorous (Late Show With David Letterman’s Top Tens) to the obscure (The Beatles’ set list, Majestic Ballroom concert in Luton, U.K., April 17, 1963).
Thanks to Macroplant for sponsoring this week’s RSS feed on The Loop with iExplorer.
iExplorer makes a great gift this holiday season for any iPhone or iPad owner. The app’s one-touch music transfer seamlessly copies all your music and playlists from your device back into iTunes. Its messages feature allows you to search and export all your messages to PDF files or other formats. The app also offers access to your device’s voicemails, photos, and much more.
For while Liverpool has John Lennon Airport and New York JFK, the record company boss who discovered Black Sabbath is calling for Birmingham Airport to be named after Sabbath front man Ozzy Osbourne.
Last month Apple asked to add the Galaxy S III Mini and other Samsung products, including several tablet models, to its wide-ranging patent litigation against Samsung.
In response, Samsung said the Galaxy S III Mini was not available for sale in the United States and should not be included in the case.
Of course, that’s just one product listed in the claim — there are plenty others.
“If you just took away the jump in Apple, we’d be down for the year,” said Marc La Vorgna, the mayor’s press secretary.
On the radio, Mr. Bloomberg said that Apple products appeared to be the preference for many thieves, noting that he was not including thefts of competing devices, like the Samsung Galaxy, in his count.
Just when you think politicians can’t possibly be any more stupid, along comes Mayor Bloomberg and his press secretary.
In order to appreciate the magnitude of new devices activated on Christmas Day, Flurry established a baseline using the average from the first 20 days of December. Over this period, daily activations averaged around 4.0 million per day, with variance of a few hundred thousand in either direction per day. On Christmas Day, activations soared to more than 17.4 million, a 332% increase over the December baseline. By comparison, Christmas Day 2011 held the previous single-day record, having reached 6.8 million device activations. Christmas 2012 is more than 2.5 times larger than Christmas 2011, which surpassed its own baseline by more than 300%.
“For every 100 iPad impressions, other tablets have 14.75,” Gabe Donnini, Chitika’s data solutions engineer, said today. “Eighty-seven percent of the tablet web traffic in North America is generated by iPad.”
Chitka’s been tracking this stuff for a while, and while the number’s down month over month (above 88 percent for November, to 87 percent for December), it shows that iPad owners continue to use their devices fundamentally differently than Android tablet owners do.
More Americans than ever are reading e-books on e-readers and tablets, though they still rank in the minority. Pew Internet Research reports that e-book reading has gone up in 2012 while print book reading has declined.
A minority of Americans aged 16 or older read books using e-readers and tablets, but the number rose from 16 to 23 percent. At the same time, printed book reading declined in that same age group from 72 to 67 percent.
Pew says that as of November, 25 percent of Americans own a tablet computer like an iPad. That’s a significant increase from last year, when only about 10 percent of Americans had a tablet device. Nineteen percent of Americans have an e-book reader like a Kindle or a Nook; that’s up from 10 percent last year.
Pew sampled 2,252 Americans for its poll, which it conducted from October to November.
Apple this week released a preliminary proxy statement in a filing to the SEC. The filing is an announcement of the 2013 annual stockholders meeting, as well as questions that will be voted on at the meeting and details of executive compensation arrangements.
Facebook’s Poke app, a copy of red-hot Snapchat rose almost to the top of the iTunes appstore on launch. A few days later it has tanked, making me wonder: can Facebook really invent any new Internet behavior or is it destined to be a copycat forever?
It seems to me that Zuck did great creating the concept of Facebook, but that’s where things stopped. The ability to invent or create beyond that initial concept has escaped everyone at Facebook.
Gerry Anderson, the man who along with his wife Sylvia created the cult-favorite TV series Thunderbirds in the 1960s, has died, the BBC reports. Anderson’s work was honored by a special set of moving-image stamps in Britain last year; he had suffered from Alzheimer’s Disease, which he spoke out against this past summer.
Thunderbirds, the sci-fi TV show featuring “Supermarionation” puppets, was hugely popular in its day and remains a beloved favorite to generations of fans, along with other Anderson creations like Stingray and Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons. The shows were aimed at kids, but adults enjoyed them too, and those who grew up with them love them to this day.
I fully admit that the Thunderbirds craze really passed me by. But I was a huge fan of Anderson’s later work: My first exposure to Anderson was Space: 1999, his final collaboration with ITC.
Space: 1999 was a live-action SF show featuring Martin Landau and Barbara Bain, set on base on the surface of the Moon, which had improbably left Earth’s orbit and gone wandering through the stars. I watched the show religiously as a young grade schooler when it was in first-run syndication on American TV. (It helped that my mom loved the show too.) Begged for the toys, too. Many an afternoon was spent flying my Eagle transporter around the back yard.
Being a member of the Facebook founder’s family won’t protect you from having your privacy breached on the social network. On Tuesday night, Randi Zuckerberg — older sister to Facebook’s CEO — posted a photo from a family gathering to Facebook (of course), showing her sisters using Facebook’s new Snapchat-esque ’Poke’ app on their phones, with Mark Zuckerberg watching with a confused look on his face. It popped up on the Facebook newsfeed of mediaite Callie Schweitzer who subscribes to Zuckerberg. Assuming the photo was a public one, Schweitzer tweeted it to her nearly 40,000 Twitter followers. Zuckerberg was not pleased.
Facebook’s privacy settings make the most technically sophisticated of us scratch our heads. I’d like to think that this is a wakeup call for Zuckerberg to untie (or perhaps just cut through) this Gordian knot, but I doubt it will be.
Unfortunately, not every crowdfunded project lives up to expectations. Often, these projects ship later than expected (roughly 75%) and sometimes the actual product doesn’t quite match what you’re shown in the pitch video. Why is that?
The color scheme of the website is an indispensable part of ensuring a healthy and effective user experience. It is the color scheme of the website which determines its success or failure. You may have the best content possible on your website, may provide the most lucrative product deals and etc, but if the color scheme is not inviting and engrossing enough, you may better bid adieus to your aspirations for online business success.
I would argue that layout is equally important, but color choice is vital.
The lawsuit, filed by San Diego-based law firm Finkelstein & Krinsk, says customers who do not agree with Instagram’s terms can cancel their profile but then forfeit rights to photos they had previously shared on the service.
“In short, Instagram declares that ‘possession is nine-tenths of the law and if you don’t like it, you can’t stop us,'” the lawsuit says.
I’m not sure that this is worthy of a lawsuit, but clearly Instagram did not think through these changes.
The outage impacted Netflix subscribers across Canada, Latin America and the United States, and affected various devices that enable users to stream movies and television shows from home, Netflix spokesman Joris Evers said. Such devices range from gaming consoles like the Nintendo Wii and PlayStation 3 to Blu-ray DVD players.
It’s amazing how often I find myself at GitHub these days. Whether it’s a WordPress plugin or a developer’s app, more people are using it all the time.
Microsoft on Wednesday announced the first plans for its retail strategy in 2013. The company says it opened 51 stores this year, and it’s already revealed where it will open the first six next year.
Microsoft stores are coming to Texas, Florida, Ohio, California, Utah and Missouri. They’ll be good places to chill out if the Apple Stores nearby are too crowded for you.
Building a central multi-user iTunes server that works consistently and well— that’s also easy to configure and maintain without needing remote administration tools or command line hackery—is annoyingly difficult. However, it is relatively easy to take your iTunes library and simply move it to a NAS. It’s not the house iTunes server we wish we had, but it does get your data off of your computer’s local hard disk drive.
It’s worth noting up front – as Hutchinson’s article does – that this isn’t about setting up an iTunes server for all the clients on your network. This is, instead, about offloading your iTunes library from your machine to a network attached storage device instead. There are some really good reasons for doing this.
My impetus for wanting to give this a try is my increasing reliance on my MacBook Air, which has a fairly skimpy Solid State Drive (SSD) that isn’t nearly large enough to hold my ever-growing collection of music and movies.
iExplorer makes a great gift this holiday season for any iPhone or iPad owner. The app’s one-touch music transfer seamlessly copies all your music and playlists from your device back into iTunes. Its messages feature allows you to search and export all your messages to PDF files or other formats. The app also offers access to your device’s voicemails, photos, and much more.
