America lagging behind in broadband access?

Acoording to this article, the US has dropped from third to tenth in country-wide broadband penetration across the globe. And some articles in the media indicate that America has "missed the high speed revolution" and is a "broadband backwater". Sure, South Koreans and Swedes "enjoy 100Mbps connections" - but they are more compact geographically the the US. No denying though that I personally would LOVE to have a 100 Mbps broadband connection (by comparison, the best available cable modem connection in the area I live in is 6 Mbps download and 512 kbps upload). Heck, who wouldn't want to be able to download a 72 megabyte file in like 6 seconds?

The new iMac

The new version of Apple's iMac was unveiled at the Apple Expo on France on Tuesday. Here's the info from Apple's website, and here is a picture of what it looks like "under the hood".

Don't Panic!!!

This is awesome news from the BBC - new version of Hitchhiker's Guide To the Galaxy text adventure game to launch on BBC Radio 4's website. The original version was created by Douglas Adams and Infocom back in the 80's, and I loved that game. The online version of the original game can still be found through this website, but read the description on the page carefully to learn how to play the game online. EDIT - Apparently the website's online java version of the game is not always available, so some times it may not work. You can try again later in the day. Just an FYI.

It's still a really funny (although sometimes exasperating) game, and it really brings back memories of the old days when I played it on my old Atari 800 (64K of RAM, baby!!). The packing for the game was the best - all the neat stuff you got with it. It came with Peril Sensitive Sunglasses (black cardboard wrap around sunglasses), pocket fluff, a miniature space fleet (empty plastic bag), Hitchhiker's Guide brochure, and "Orders For Destruction". They just don't make games like that anymore.

Go see Napoleon Dynamite - it's fricken' AWESOME!

Forgot to mention this a couple days ago, but my wife and I went and saw Napoleon Dynamite last Saturday. It was really funny, and we thought it was pretty good. The website is kinda fun too, has some quizzes based on events from the movie. Anyway, I'd recommend the movie pretty highly - and stay till the end of the credits!

Not sure about this idea...

Sorry for the lack of posts recently, and the brevitiy of the few post I made within the last week or so, I've been kinda out of it. But I think I'm finally over being sick, so that's a good thing! And hopefully I'll be able to post more often now, which would be an even better thing, right?

This is kind of interesting, but I'm not sure it's a good idea - Nintendo's new handheld gaming system, the Nintendo DS, to have free Voice over IP chat feature. The deal with it is you can connect a headset to your DS and use it's built in 802.11b WiFi capability to connect to a wireless hotspot and then chat with other Nintendo DS players. But the maybe not so good part mentioned in the article is that you can also make free phone calls. I'm hoping that isn't actually the case, but I suppose it is theoretically possible. Nothing on the company website specifically confirming or denying this - there is some pre-release DS info on their site here. It does mention voice chat and wireless networking for multi-player, but not VoIP calls. We'll hear more about this in the coming months, I'm sure.