The most highly awaited and anticipated Apple’s iPhone 4 white, and yet the release date of that has been delayed. The postponed has raised a number of rumors, some may be true some may be not, and questions. Among the rumors one say that iPhone 3 white shall be released somewhere in September, according to [...]
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All that talk of UFC not “getting” the Internet? Yeah, it’s time to put that idea to rest. The company’s longtime TV partner, SpikeTV, launched ultimatefighter.com earlier today, a place where mixed martial arts fans can watch the entire Ultimate Fighter library online. For free. Let that sink in—still think Dana White hates the Internet? In addition to serving up all 231 fights in the show’s history, fans can also interact with each other on social networking services like Twitter and Facebook . Not a bad job, really. The site mirrors MTV Networks other “verticals,” like those associated with The Colbert Report and The Daily Show . Full episodes can be streamed, or fight fans can pick out individual fights from the 11-season library. Perhaps you fancy seeing Kimbo Slice’s first fight again? Or maybe you’re a newcomer to the sport, and want to see how Forrest Griffin made his name? It’s all there for you, free of charge. Oh, and the videos are fully embeddable. Handy. The site serves advertisements à la Hulu , so be prepared for the occasional U.S. Marines commercial. Gotta pay the bills somehow, folks. Web sites don’t build themselves. One thing to note: season 11, which begins next week on SpikeTV, won’t be available on the Web site for a little while. The current rough plan is to make the episodes available after the season’s conclusion, to sorta bridge the gap between season 11 and 12. In the meantime, though, fans can check out the Web site after every new episode that airs on TV to watch exclusive coverage of said episode. Terribly constructed sentence, yes. You know, things like post-show analysis (Dana White chips in after the first episode), unseen footage, etc. And not just “meh, lame” bonus footage, either. We’re talking full fights that, for whatever reason (time constraints, I’d imagine) never made SpikeTV in their entirety. Twitter, darling of the Internet, has been integrated into the site pretty visibly. On the right-hand side is a small box that monitors UFC-related hash tags, including #UFC, #TUF, #DanaWhite, etc. This might not seem to exciting on a random Thursday afternoon, but during UFC events—pay-per-views, The Ultimate Fighter, SpikeTV Fight Nights, and so on—the trash talking should really fly. Just as easily accessible is the show’s Facebook page, where you can view photos and post comments about, I don’t know, how amazing GSP is, or whether or not you think Frank Mir is a jerk. (He is, but he’s the greatest jerk in history.) The very idea of UFC giving away fights is pretty much unthinkable, when you consider that three-quarters of the company’s revenue comes from pay-per-view buys. In the kick-off meeting this morning, SpikeTV explained that it took “many meetings” to convince UFC brass to go along with the idea of putting fights—any fights!—online for free. We all know that UFC actively pursues people who go offer illegal streams of their events—the company just recently sued the owners of two Web sites that were offering illegal UFC 111 streams —so finally making at least some of its content available online is a move that should be applauded. Remember, this is a company that lived and died (well, mostly lived these days!) on its pay-per-view buys, so giving away fights for free may felt a little strange at first for Dana White & Co. And now we wait for Frank Mir to choke out Shane Carwin, setting up Lesnar v. Mir II. That has pay-per-view buys written all over it.
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The world’s first manned commercial spacecraft flight took place just a few hours ago, and it was a smashing success . Within a few years, we’ll all fly to Jupiter on our lunch breaks, drink a café com leite while doodling away on our iPad 5GXs, then come back to the office to pretend to do work for the remaining 2.5 hours of the day. Virgin created the aircraft, the SpaceShip Two (though rechristened the VSS Enterprise) quite possibly merely to stroke Richard Branson’s ego. But ego-stroking is simply a part of big business. Why, it was only a few days ago that some banking bigwig referred to Congressional staffers as “ little punk staffers .” That has nothing to do with anything, I just though it was a funny moment in American history. Back to the SpaceShip Two. It test-flew over the Mojave Desert, accompanied by its “mothership” WhiteKnightTwo, for nearly three hours. This was but a small step in the process of being able to hop aboard and fly into the heavens. Actual flights aren’t expected until 2012, provided the world doesn’t explode by then. How much would such a flight cost? The current estimate is that each seat will set you back $200,000. It might actually be cheaper to earn a PhD in engineering, join NASA, then become an astronaut. Plus, you’d have a pretty cool career going for you.
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I’m a sucker. It’s true. As much you guys think we rail against Apple , we’re like abused puppies, slinking back to our master’s hard ankles, shivering and awaiting praise. Why did I pre-order the iPad ? Well, first I’m a gadget blogger. Second there is no certainty that mother Apple will grace us with an early review unit so I want to hedge our bets. Third? I want to see where computing is headed. Bear with me here. Apple is not the bringer of fire to a benighted world. Far from it. In my recent writing I’ve been struck by a few parallels with Steve Jobs to Abraham Louis Breguet , a French watchmaker who lived in the 18th century. He was a mechanical genius, to be sure, but he was also a salesman. While the rest of the benighted world was sloshing around in an admixture of feces and mud in the streets of Paris and telling the time by whether the pikemen were stabbing them for being out after curfew, Breguet was selling watches that would not be out of place on the wrist (had they had straps) of a whale in Las Vegas. He invented secret anti-counterfeiting measures but made them part of the allure and not part of a DRM scheme. He designed elegant and beautiful watches in an age of rococo designs but wasn’t above creating a “subscription” watch for the masses who wanted to own a piece of the good life without paying an exorbitant sum of money. Other watchmakers were making commodities and following Breguet’s lead. That’s what’s happening here. Like Steve Jobs, Breguet knew what his hipster, nobler-than-thou audience wanted and he supplied it. Sure it was expensive and sure it wasn’t generally popular but he made a boatload of money and in the end moved on to explore new avenues of inquiry, improve the general perception of scientific precision, create new forms of telegraphy, and his kids even became pioneers in airplane design. Linux and Windows geeks often put Apple down for locking things up but I say I can do more in the OS X command line terminal than I ever was able to in the Windows DOS window. I usually installed Unix tools under XP just to get any work done when I ran Windows. Look at the watch above. It was one of the most complex watches in the world when it was made. It came with two dials – the crystal one you see and a while enameled on that hid the innards. If you put the white enamel dial on that watch, you’d have four visible hands. That’s it. It was as austere and beguiling as an early iPod. You saw it, you knew what it did, but there was nothing to get in the way of reading the time or, the the case of the iPod, playing your bluegrass albums. Behind it – complexity – in front – elegance. I’m also not saying the iPad is the Marie Antoinette Watch of our day. It’s definitely not. I would wager that our current business climate does not allow for the sort of advances in the state of the art that the MA represents. Sure, there are better watches right now, but the MA was finished in 1827 using tools little removed from what was available in the previous three centuries and by 1900 watchmaking was a dead art and is now, at best, relegated to shoe repair bodegas that also specialize in watch battery replacement. The MA wasn’t just a watch, it was that generation’s mechanical moonshot and the ultimate steampunk artifact. Nothing Apple has done is worth that level of praise. Also nothing – and I mean nothing – about the iPad is particularly new or particularly appealing to the geek in me. It’s a slate that I’ve seen countless times running an OS that is underpowered at best with a trade dress that we’ve seen a thousand times. But the whole is great than the sum of its parts. Apple is about to change how I browse the Internet in the bathroom, on the couch, and on the train. I bought a WiFi enabled model because I figure I’ll have WiFi more often than I’ll have 3G coverage with AT&T (HAR!). So anyway, flame on, flame warriors. I’m sticking by my decision. Did you pre-order?
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We featured a so-called leaked video showing MW2 ’s upcoming map pack last week but had no idea when players will get access to the new maps. Activision finally came clean, though, and announced that the DLC will hit PCs first on March 30, with consoles getting it sometime afterwards. Oh, and yeah, it will be named Stimulus Package just like the rumor stated, which is a kind of appropriate name, actually. March 30 is almost a month after Battlefield: Bad Company 2 launched and you have to imagine that many MW2 players defected to BC2 after it launched. But the map pack’s 10 new maps might be just enough to draw players back. The free DLC might indeed be MW2’s stimulus package. Activision didn’t officially announce the new maps, but here’s the list that’s been floating around the ‘Net over the last week. Abandon DCWH-The White House Compact Revolt Complex Storm It’s supposed to also have these COD 4 maps. Shipment Vacant Overgrown Crash I would embed the preview video again, but Activision all of them. Losers.
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The original complaint about music games like Guitar Hero and Rock Band is that they convinced kids that playing the guitar was actually easy. A few taps, a few strums and you sounded like Jack White or Ozzy, right? Well Powergig wants to change that perception by offering a real six-string guitar that you can really play and, with the flip of a switch, you can dampen the strings and strum along to your favorite tunes on the XBox 360 or PS3. The company, Seven45, is also making a guitar game with its own downloadable content that will be something like Brutal Legend , and the guitars are made by their parent company, First Act makers of “entry level” AKA toy guitars and instruments. Nice synergy, eh? Anyway, more on this from GDC when we have it but until then, feel free to thank me for sticking Summer of ‘69 in your head. via CNET
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