Europe: my guide

Long time no post - well I went to Europe for a while. This is my second trip to Europe, but this time we were determined to see more places over a longer period than the first two week trip allowed. I thought I would share some tips. You may want to check out my photo collection hosted by the wonderful people at Flickr or on my .Mac website while it still lasts.

European capitals are expensive

But that still does not mean you have to be ripped off. Expect to pay more for food and accommodation, however, do some investigation. We travelled during low season so we were able to haggle prices down. Other things like food can get you though, people really want you to pay top euro for cola. Grab some in larger bottles from grocery stores before you go out. Fill up bottles with water, apparently it is safe - I had no problems doing this and I even used a public fountain in Venice. Don't buy food or drink around tourist attractions. Certainly don't get your money changed under the Eiffel tower where an obnoxious little man sits in his booth, pretending not to speak any English but apparently understanding everything we said, adding extra charges for no readily apparent reason. I wish I took a pic of his grey bearded angry red face for the blog. Just to balance it out, everyone else we met in France was extremely friendly and helpful.

If you have a Eurail pass make sure you investigate time tables on the internet before you go. Also, check out alternative times and train types. There are a couple private train companies that like to think their trains are so much better than the standard ones that they can charge a very large premium above the Eurail ticket. Don't go on these, there is always an alternative and every standard train that we went on was fine to at least as good as the private company trains.

Accommodation

My partner found a great site called Trip Advisor which shows reviews posted by the general public about hotels. We were initially very concerned as many of the hotels we were looking at had some poor reviews in amongst some glowing reviews. Then after looking at some five star accommodation I realised that some people complain about anything. You have to read the negative review with suspicion to try to determine the psychological state of the person who wrote it. Some people will tell you the hotel is a write off because the desk clerk wouldn't pay them enough attention. Phht, welcome to Europe you self indulgent idiot. Others find a stain on the carpet or a crack in the wall and think they whole place should be condemned. Or perhaps the bathroom isn't an acre wide for their fat American backsides to fit in. Some are legitimate, like the one I am going write about the appaling Brodies Hostel in Edinburgh.

Again, low season is great. In Edinburgh we abruptly left the horror of Brodies Hostel and I decided to splurge. I knew the train station was close by, which had a "last minute" hotel booking place. They mentioned a couple places and I asked if she could get us in for 20 pounds less, a quick call confirmed that this was fine and we were in a very pleasant four star hotel rather than the barely better than a dumpster zero star Brodies Hostel.

To save ourselves a night of accommodation we decided to try a sleeper cabin from Zurich to Venice. I had never been in a sleeper before and was quite happy that we were trying it out. I was surprised that it was 100 euro over the eurail pass, but thought that was reasonable ... until he explained that it was 100 euro each. I was hesitant, I still wanted to experience a sleeper. Then the attendant said "I would not regret it, the sleepers are wonderful." So I got the sleeper tickets. He lied. They were crap. It would have been much better to travel in on an earlier train and get an extra night in Venice. Still, now I know. Maybe there are better sleeper cabins around but I won't be game to try them.

Time of year

Low season has fewer and smaller crowds, more free seats at events and on trains, you don't get hot and sweaty while trudging around, most things are cheaper or negotiable, you get to see snow (except global warming seems to have prevented that for our trip) or at least frosts and fogs. The downside is that some places are closed (the chocolate museum in Belgium) or close early, you have a lot less light to work with, fountains are empty in the north (Venice and Rome were fine), many trees are leafless and no flowers (although Amsterdam still had heaps), it can get bloody cold and windy. Despite the cold, we had an awesome time! Frankly I gladly accept the chill to avoid the crowds.

Travel guides

Travel guides are hugely useful. Lonely planet, Frommers and Let's Go seem to be the common ones about. I got the "Let's Go" guide and picked up plenty of great tips on what to see, eat and places to stay. Not all the places to stay are that good, but a little research on your own and you will find plenty of accommodation bookable over the internet.

One of the tips in the guides was about pick pockets and how they worked. Very interesting. So when we encountered them I knew exactly what they were and how they were going to operate. We actually encountered them in Rome at about the exact place that the guide told us we would. I was so amused that I stopped in my tracks and said to my partner "Oh! They're pick pockets! Cool!" and then realised that there were about to make a grab for my pocketed camera so I launched into a run, knocking them out of the way. I reported them to a nearby policewoman who only spoke Italian but understood my mime. So rather than be the event where I lost my camera, it was the event where I foiled pick pockets thanks to the warning from the guide books.

Europe is enormous and there is lots of good information to put in these guides making them quite bulky. You can get pocket guides which are specific for only one city which have the same sort of information, usually in more detail, as the large guides, as well as containing really good quality maps. Certainly the pocket books fit into my pocket, but I was wearing a nice warm winter jacket with deep pockets. During summer they would be more of a pain. You would have to carry them around in your backpack, but they are far easier to carry than the complete Europe guide. Each hotel usually has a good tourist map for free which is usually pamphlet size and often the hotel clerk can offer you great tips about the local area.

Non-smoker's guide to Europe

Only go to Italy, everywhere else stinks. Switzerland was particularly nasty because of the combined effect of the very smelly cheese fondue. In each country we visited we were told that they were considering or about to ban smoking in public places / bars and restaurants, but nobody could name a specific date. In Italy this had already taken place. We also noted on the news that Hong Kong had gone smoke free. Really, Europe would have you believe they are all about high culture, but I think they are an oldish culture that plays catch-up on many issues. They have their fair share of rude, ugly, ignorant, aggressive, unhelpful people like any other culture.

If you have to visit France, Amsterdam, Germany, Switzerland or what ever country that has not yet been enlightened about their responsibility of keeping the local air breathable for others then your best bet is to have dinner early and ask the restaurant about the non-smoking area. If you get placed out of the way in an ugly spot near the toilet or the kitchen doors then just get up and leave - there are plenty of restaurants about. One particularly lovely Indonesian restaurant in Amsterdam put us way at the back almost in our own private quiet softly lit room - it was excellent, as was the meal. Alternatively, a restaurant in Wales had the non smoking area next to the kitchen surrounded by the smoking area, at which we just chuckled at the waiter, politely informed him of our disapproval and left.

You should not be impolite as these people are not as well educated on the issues of smoking so you must make allowances for their immature cultural differences.

You must go!

Apart from the caveats ... just go to Europe, have a big budget, make sure you check out the hotels somehow before you go. It is awesome. Europe is a romantic setting - the perfect place to pop the question. She said yes :)

Electronic Arts

In Brief:

* Electronic Arts make it difficult to sign up and use their facilities
* Electronics Arts makes it difficult to get updates for their software
* Electronic Arts has a faulty feedback script, they don't want to hear from you
* Electronic Arts install spyware on your system (except, possibly, Australian versions)
* Electronics Boutique is a rip off in Australia
* Australian middle man importers/distributors are money-grubbing bastards
* I'm in a grumpy mood

Computer games

I have been known to play a few computer games in my time. I used to have over three shelves full of game boxes alone until I decided to discard the mostly empty boxes and just keep the manuals and disks, possibly even the covers of the box. I stashed them all into a cardboard box hidden away in my wardrobe. Only current games that I dabbled in would grace the shelf.

BattleField 2

Recently I have taken to occasionally playing Battlefield 2. This is currently selling for around $70 (all prices in Australian dollars unless specified) at Electronics Boutique, but was available from Pizza Hut in a $35 combo deal which included two large pizzas, garlic bread and Pepsi. Awesome value that disappeared quite quickly. You could also get Sims 2 + University, or some awful car game ("Need for Speed Most Wanted" I think) instead of Battlefield 2, but who cares; the local Pizza hut still had Sims and Need For Speed left over and were selling them for $15 on their own. All the while, Electronics Boutique continued to sell Battlefield 2 for $70-$90 depending on if they had a sale or not.

Battlefield 2142 demo

Battlefield 2142 is a futuristic setting battle ground. The game is basically the same as Battlefield 2 but with different graphics. I downloaded the >1Gig demo from one of a suggested mirror, but it was corrupted, so I downloaded again on a different computer from a different mirror and had the same corruption. I tried to report the download problem, but met with issues details below (complaints). I eventually found the 2142 demo file on an unofficial torrent site which downloaded over 10 times faster than either of the official mirrors, and voila, installation! Unfortunately the installation from EA was incomplete and required you to diagnose an error message which you can figure out with the help of Google to get to a Microsoft article that allows you to download and install a missing DLL.

Battlefield 2142 full version has spyware

Battlefield 2142 was to be available to the world as a download then simply get an activation code for US$50 which is Aus$65. Naturally Electronics Boutique has it for sale at $110. Unfortunately, Electronic Art's online purchase form does not have Australia as an allowable selection, so I cannot purchase legitimately online. I have to wonder if I need to change the region settings on my machine, do the servers have the smarts to pick up the country when looking at the IP and will the software stop working because of it. I actually contacted them about being in Australia and being excluded from online purchase but never received a reply. This is the only time that their contact-us support system worked for me.

I find out later through a wikipedia article that Battlefield 2142 is spyware laden but was prevented from distributing the software in Australia because installing the spyware would be illegal. Does this justify the price hike from a game that should to $65 to be sold for $110? Electronics Boutique has dropped the price to $99.95 recently. Still, they are a pack of bastards and I will never shop in there again. I will, however, report their extortionate prices and better ways to get the software.

Buy elsewhere

You can search eBay or find alternative overseas companies to purchase legitimate copies of the software. Such as the good people at Zest (Thailand) who will email you the key if you already have access to the Battlefield 2142 software for Aus$25, or deliver for Aus$40 if you are prepared to wait. Not a bad saving at all! Battlefield 2 is available for $22. Check it out. There is always a level of trust you have to place in ANY online company, let alone one from overseas. In Thailand they don't have to feed the good-for-nothing middle man as much plus the average wage is lower so the software companies can't scam the customers for as much as the market will bear. In my opinion, the marketers in Australia have it so wrong. Sure, we are a smaller market, larger area, higher distribution costs, but that should mean smaller profits and not higher pricing. Poor software marketing strategies are encouraging piracy or forcing customers to look at cheaper alternatives overseas.

I don't think I will be buying Battlefield 2142 any time soon tho. I don't want their spyware on my computer. I don't want to encourage companies that install spyware onto a computer. I am particularly sick of Electronic Arts and all their antics.

Patches

Battlefield 2 is quite buggy until you patch it with the updates available from Electronic Arts. You can online play online with servers that have the same patch level that you have installed, the servers are usually pretty quick to update when a patch comes out so you will see all your favourite online servers vanish. Just recently a new patch came out for Battlefield 2, version 1.41. Unforunately the idiots at Electronic Arts forgot to place the patch in the right spot. You click on upgrade on the Battlefield 2 menu and you get the old 1.4 patch. You search around Electronic Arts and find the same situation most everywhere: patch 1.41 is not listed but 1.4 is. Well it is available somewhere or the servers could not be upgrading. Finally, after prowling the forums I find the 1.41 patch. It also appears that the 1.41 patch is a complete patch from version 1.0, I could be wrong but the patch is >500Meg. Would be much nicer to download a small patch to upgrade from 1.4 to 1.41. Maybe it is out there, but EA have just hidden it. *sigh*

Complaints

So while on their site I thought I might tell them about the patch location problem. I click on the support and contact us links, I go through their hoops about specifying platform, game, problem, etc, filling in every field. The page offers me some bogus information that they think might help and asks if I still want to submit the comment, which I do, then I get a message saying that my javascript is turned off, which is complete crap because javascript needs to be enabled to even fill out their stupid form. I go back and fill out the forms again. Same error. I change computers and use a different browser type. Same fricken error.

I keep getting the idea that big companies do NOT want to hear from their customers.

Electronic Arts, I hate you and believe that you are evil in every sense of the word.

Mac articles now at Mac Tech Switching

I have been "invited" to submit articles over on a new Mac blog called Mac Tech Switching so I will probably post none (or very few) Mac based articles here from this point.

My first article was about a list of laptops that met the minimum specs required for my place of work. One of them happened to be a MacBook Pro, which also happened to be the cheapest. I thought this worthy of reporting as people who are looking at high end laptops in the same way that I was might automatically discount Apple as an option. Clearly Apple is an option even if you want to run Windows only. There are a lot of factors that you will want to consider apart from what I listed which has been argued to hell on the blog and on Digg. So many insecure Windows users; which is what I expected: plenty of Apple hate. I use Windows, Mac and Linux. Each has their place and is interesting in their own right.

Digg is a very popular site and if your article makes it to the front page then it will send a LOT of traffic to your site. The very rough view stats as of about 30 hours after posting the MacBook Pro article; we had 6000 views of the blog article which would be mostly digg users, 600 diggs of the article (10%), 60 digg comments (1%), 30 blog comments (0.5%), 6 clicks on Google ads (0.1%).

So Mac Tech Switching is yet another blog I write on including Blogger, .Mac and Vox. I like Vox, excellent article editing and image insertion, however blogger integrates better with my web site thanks to template editing.

I also post items to Whirlpool, Slashdot, Digg and even write to some newsgroups (USENET) when the fancy takes me. Yes, my hordes of fans out there can find my text all over the place. Joy.

70% of casual gamers are females 40+ years old

"Quality" analysis and reporting not at all influenced by marketing or complete rubbish?.

70% of casual gamers are females 40+ years old by ZDNet's ZDNet Research -- "“Middle-aged" women rule the $458 mln US online casual game market, Real Networks and PopCap found. 70% of casual gamers are females over the age of 40.

Are these just lies fudged for marketing?

I can't see how this is a ZDNet research article, when they refer to a Yahoo article that clearly refers to separatete research done by RealNetworks Inc. and PopCap Games. RealNetworks doesn't provide any ready access to such research that I could find. PopCap Games has a press release which describe the survey conducted by Information Solutions Group who appear to be nothing more than a web page hosting company, which is probably just a company with the same name. Yellow pages has "Information Solutions Group 425-373-1111, 227 Bellevue Way NE, Bellevue, WA 98004" but no URL. Odd for an internet research company not to have a web presence.

This alleged "research" has been cited a number of times from many different web sites: Gamasutra, Lexdon, GamePlanet, GameDaily, etc.

The articles also refer to Dr Carl Arinoldo who apparently is an author. Amazon tells me he may not be a doctor, or published before his got his PhD. He has two books on their list: How to Control Your Eating and Essentials of Smart Parenting. If he was a psychologist for 25 years I would have thought that he would have been using the "Dr" for his books. Maybe amazon strip off titles like "Dr". I found 3 articles recorded in PsychInfo by a Carlo Arinoldo, but nothing else. Not very prolific (or I am looking in the wrong places).

Many of the articles say "Leading publisher and developer of casual titles, PopCap Games" and also "leading market research firm Information Solutions Group". Firstly I have an issue about the definition of "casual games" and then that PopCap Games is the leader of said game genre. Secondly, how is Information Solutions Group a "leading" market research firm? I can't even find the buggers. What does "leading" mean?

Now for the results. It is all crap, or at least the interpretation of the results by ridiculous media organisations like ZDNet are crap. To start with, the survey was biased towards females; of the 2191 totarespondentsts, 528 were male and 1,663 were female. Comparisons between gender would have to be done exceedingly carefully, which Arinoldo would have done, I'm sure. If you look at the press reports that cover the numbers well enough (like Lexdon) you will see that all sorts of interesting information can be extracted from the results, but not what the ZDNet is masturbating over. The media headlines highlight the lack of education of the reporters. Or the deceptive intent of marketing.

To me this sounds like an attempt to market advertising space to companies that would like to target the 40+ year old female group. Possibly even selling some PopCap games to companies who focus on this demographic. I have nothing to back this up, it is just my feeling.

Spam junk email

Freaking junk email, otherwise known as spam has been a growth industry from the early days of the internet.

How do these evil junk emailers get your email address?
* Your ISP might stupidly post a list of their clients' email addresses (yours) on a web page
* You sign up for any service on the net, and they request your email address as part of registration
* You give your details to a company like Telstra, for a product or service that they provide
* You post a message to a bulletin board or newsgroup using your real email address
* You have a web page and want to include information such as contact details, including your email address. The spammer has software that reads the pages on the internet and collects all the email addresses it find.

Damned annoying. My ISP gave me a free email account that I *NEVER* use or give out. I don't like being tied to an ISP address as it causes problems when I change ISPs. GMail, Yahoo, Hotmail all provide excellent services for free. Use them! These services even filter out the spam email quite nicely. Since I never use this account, or give the details to anyone, imagine my surprise when I accidentally logged in and found it full of junk mail. Since nobody had the details except for me and the ISP then I assume the ISP sold the details or they stupidly left them around somewhere.

I have a very old Yahoo email account that I freely give out when registering for anything and this account receives nearly 6000 spam messages a month. I have heard of worse, but I have not been truly prolific about spreading this address. Fortunately Yahoo provides some excellent spam filtering and this account is still usable.

Spam comes via the telephone too. I moved house and got a new land line telephone number. I had to give the number out to a couple companies to have the power connected, insurance, the bank. Then I started getting junk telephone calls the second day I had the number. They already knew my name. At least one of these "respected" companies (Telstra, Energex, WestPac) is selling my details. I know that Credit Card points collecting schemes like FlyBuys recently altered their privacy policy in order to "share" my information.

Sure, Australia might cause a lot of stress to the telemarketers, but then maybe they have that karma coming their way. Come on, I mean, if someone had Telemarketer written on their T-Shirt, would you really slow down your vehicle when you saw them cross the road?

The toughest is the web page deal. If you have a web page, you usually want to include your email address. Spammer programs just trawl the web and harvest these email addresses at will. What are the alternatives? Well have a nice email script program that has your web server send the email. This is awkward for the emailer as they no longer have a nice email program formatting the text and they don't have a record in their email software that the message was sent, or what they said.

CertainKey, known for their cryptographic code, have an idea of using graphics on your web page. In the top right corner of this article is an email address in wobbly script. This is actually an image of the text, not the actuall text of my email account. Spammers require the text to be on your web page, not a picture of the text. This should foil the spammers. You may have seen similar sorts of images on web based registration forms that ask you to register and enter the text in the image. This sorts out automated spamming software from real people quite well. The down side is that visually impaired people will still have problems and sending an email isn't as easy as a single click to collect the address.

When registering for a sight you might also consider using a very cool service such as mailinator which gives you a temporary email address for a short period of time.

For day to day use, I would highly recommend getting a free email account from GMail, Yahoo, or Hotmail. All of which provide excellent spam filtering. Only give out your ISP email address if the free email addresses are not accepted (happens occasionally).

Your email software may very well have spam filtering built in, and if it doesn't you should hunt around for alternative software that does. Your ISP should be filtering for spam, and it should be free (you hear that Telstra?!) If not then you should redirect email (which should also be free) to your yahoo or gmail account and let that account do the filtering.

Lastly, never ever buy anything advertised in spam. Never buy anything from a telemarketer or door to door salesman. They rely on 2% of the population using their services and this makes them rich. Just don't do it. Ever.

Anti Virus Software

Anti virus software has been with us since the days of DOS. For the Microsoft Windows people the virus scanning software is pretty much essential for a multitude of reasons.

There has been a claim that at one stage the virus problem was solved. The operating system would make a check sum of every file, securely store this file, and check every program before you ran it to make sure that the file had not been altered. Not exactly sure how effective that method would be, but it certainly sounds like a start. A free community monitored net based registry might be a similar solution. The story continues that the anti virus software companies realised that it is far more profitable to sell subscriptions to a virus signature scanner rather than checksum protect existing software. Being a profit oriented business they went the signature route.

Now with holes appearing in things like the widely used WEP wireless security, RFID tags used in credit cards and passports, the easily crackable US electronic voting system, and CPU level virtualisation with the Blue Pill proof-of-concept undetectable virus, all indicate that security concerns aren't quite at the forefront of the closed source businesses on the hardware front as well as the software front.

In the early days there pretty much was only one virus scanner, McAfee. These days there are a few dozen. The big mother of all scanners comes from the utility consuming company Symantec. In the early days, Symantec Anti Virus, aka Norton Anti Virus was quite good. Nowadays, Symantec is a piece of poop. Bloated resource hungry software that has every chance of kicking your machine over as it does of defending your computer from attacks. We have numerous complaints at work from users about their computer running slow, these are reasonably spec'd machines with 1.5GHz and 256Meg RAM. Basically these systems are just used for word processing and run quite slickly until the corporate edition of Symantec Anti Virus is installed, after which start up and shut down of applications and the operating system takes far too long. I regularly remove Symantec Anti Virus from the software from systems belonging to friends and relatives, replacing with a free software alternative. They are shocked at the speed increase and ask "Why?". My (possibly ill informed) answer is that Symantec is a company of profit oriented business people who have a passing knowledge of programming. They are more concerned about documenting for certification of their code rather than optimising it. They spend far too much money on suits to market their crap than they do on making their software work properly. This is the Microsoft model of software production.

One school of thought is that if you are going to make a new virus then you would make sure it got past the most popular virus scanners: McAfee and Symantec, so you are far better off installing a non-popular brand of scanner.

The question is: which software should you install? I'm glad you asked. There are a wide range of opinions. If you have huge amounts of RAM, the fastest CPU and don't care about the performance drop then Symantec isn't a completely terrible option. However there are many more alternatives out there that are definitely worth thinking about. Popular amongst the squeakers (adolescent computer nerds) is NOD32, it stands up to the big guys very well, regularly rates higher in detection, is exceedingly fast and is very frugal with computer resources. Kaspersky always rates very highly, regularly at the top in most tests. The free Anti Virus software don't always do so well but aren't the worst, except Avira AntiVir which sometimes rates with the big names.

ThePCSpy did an excellent article on what really slows windows down. Briefly, results were no real surprise.

Software that SLOWS your computer the most:
(1) Norton Internet Security 2006;
(2) McAfee VirusScan Enterprise 8;
(3) Norton Internet Security 2007;
(4) Trend Micro PC-cillin AV 2006;
(5) ZoneAlarm ISS;
(6) Norton Antivirus 2002

Free Anti Virus Software:
Avria AntiVir
Avast
AVG (AVG has some ethical issues, and not a very good performer)

Paid for Anti Virus Software:
Kaspersky (avoid)
NOD32
Bit Defender (avoid)
F-Prot
Norman (is not Norton)
Sophos

Reviews of Anti Virus Software:
Virus.gr
av-test.org
Consumer Reports
av-comparitives

Which brings me to the last bit of my discussion. A consumer group "Consumer Reports", who makes claims to be independent from business interests, and I have no reason to suspect otherwise, has taken it upon themselves to test a hand full of the various virus detecting software out there using methods that has the anti-virus companies up in arms. Apparently ConsumerReports created thousands of new computer viruses to see how the various anti-virus software handled detection of viruses that they did not have signatures for. Sounds perfectly reasonable to me. However, some software companies think otherwise. I would put these companies into the small minded, suit-oriented, lounge lizard type companies, but that is just my opinion (like everything here).

From Digg:
More than 100 security experts from companies like Microsoft and HP as well as anti-virus vendors F-Secure, Kaspersky, McAfee, Sophos, Symantec and Trend Micro signed their names to a declaration denouncing Consumer Reports' methods, stating that it is "not necessary and ... not useful to write computer viruses to learn how to protect against them.

Check out the comprehensive article on The Washington Post.

UPDATE: I had a virus infection which AVG totally ignored. Thankfully other people had different/better software (Sophos) and figured out that I was infected. So I bit the bullet and bought Kaspersky, which is still ranked as best by nearly all measures. Kaspersky found heaps of issues, going back to files that I have not touched for nearly 15 years. AVG never even blinked at these. I can't, in good conscience, recommend AVG anymore.

In the end, I think as long as you have some sort of Anti Virus on windows and you aren't monkeying around with dangerous software from disreputable sites, then you should be ok. The companies will probably also want you to buy other security packages like spyware filters, a firewall, antispam and/or email virus scanners (most virus scanners will scan email), and even parental control software (block naughty web sites). All worth your consideration to one extent or another, just remember that each extra software program will have to be active and running on your computer, using up RAM and CPU time. You don't want to make your computer so secure that it becomes too slow to be usable.

Kind of like the situation in the world, you have a government so concerned with security that they are prepared to sacrifice your freedom, making it very difficult to do anything just so you are more secure.

Or just get a Mac. (free version of Malwarebytes)

Aug 2006 Apple Developers Conference (WWDC)

Uninspiring journalist, Leander Kahney, whines about not being pandered to at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC). Because Leander didn't get any toys he writes some drivel along the lines of "Steve Jobs' keynote speech on Monday was the most uninspiring he's given in recent memory. It hints at the trouble Apple will be in marketing-wise if he ever steps down."

I watched the presentation, and it is the same style and pacing as all the other presentations that Steve Jobs has given except that he lets other people have centre stage for sections.

Leander Kahney went in believing the various rumours and were going around (Apple mobile, video iPod, all Macs updated to Core 2 Duo etc) and because he didn't get his toys, he went away disappointed.

However there was quite a bit of cheering by the developers about what was on offer. Very similar to other key notes. And it is a DEVELOPER'S CONFERENCE, not a gizmo conference. The sessions are aimed at OSX developers, and Leander got bored wondering why they weren't pandering to his need for flashy lights and shiney objects. Poor journalist was disgruntled that he didn't get his video iPod, or that it wasn't an all-Steve show.

Really, after watching the whole keynote from Apples website, I was hyped! I want Webclips, I want the new voice synthesis, XCode3, Spaces, Time Machine, and I definitely want the new iChat! Hot damn that looks sweet. Not to mention the new Mac Pro and XServe.

Watch the keynote and make up your own mind. Warning: you will want to switch.

After you have watched the keynote, you should visit Digg, log in, mark the article as inaccurate.

digg story