Credit to Reuters for the original article. It appears as though one of Europe’s leading mobile phone networks Orange paid for people to stand in queues outside twenty Apple stores in Poland to increase interest in the product.
While the first thought that comes to mind is “why do they even need to?” there are other issues involved. It’s not illegal in anyway and we have had fake announcements using viral marketing before so it’s kind of a shock that it hasn’t taken place earlier.
Considering the way the real people actually waited outside stores when the product was released long ago in the United States having to pay dozens of actors to wait outside and do the same thing is a bit of an injustice to those who didn’t get paid in the US. Perhaps it could be justified for compensation for having to wait? Just like when Sony gave away big screen televisions to anyone who queued for the midnight launch of the PS3 in London.
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Let’s face it, most of us are not made of money. When it comes to everyday life we have two priorities when not using our PC for work and those are to play games or surf the Internet. With oil prices going higher and costs of things like electricity going up and hardware prices going down perhaps you should consider having two PCs.
To explain the reasoning, since you need such high performance hardware to play games at a high quality surfing the Internet instead of playing on the machine is not a good idea. While it doesn’t take up nearly as much power as when playing even having high spec hardware turned on is a serious power drain and a costly measure. When all you want to do is surf the net why not have two PCs? That way you can buy a cheap little system with lower spec hardware like a Pentium 4 that can just surf websites at a low power usage which after a while would pay for itself. Even if you don’t use the net enough to justify the cost right away it would still make you feel better when surfing.
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With this one there’s a lot of techno babbel about how it will improve our lives by giving us X amount of this and Y amount of that. The long and short of it is DirectX 11 has been officially announced by Microsoft including all it’s detailed specs.
The key bits of information that can be understood by everyone is that yes it will be backwards compatible with DX 10/10.1 hardware and in addition to various graphical tweaks you would expect will be Vista only. Bad news for those of you still using XP and DirectX 9. In theory, still it’s nearly impossible to tell the difference in visual comparisons between DX9 and DX10 at the moment bar the slower framerate that comes from DX10. The interesting bit of info is that DX11 will allow for “use of the GPU as a parallel processor” which could make things interesting in the future.
No release date as yet, but we can expect it within the next 18 months or so to be in public beta if prior versions are anything to go by. If you want confirmation see the Shacknews article.
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