ThePowerGeeks.com

M.U.L.E. gets an update, and it’s free! (JP)

In 1983, Electronic Arts released a game called M.U.L.E, a strategy game with a heavy focus on supply-and-demand economics

• Feats, Seeds, Rule Bases, Pretty much a treasure trove for old school RPG’ers

• Twitter mobilization for texting donations $5 & $10 (90999 was a popular one for the red cross) (18 million total to charities and counting)
• For Katrina (2005) and the Tsunami (2004), same things attempted back but 400,000 and 200,000 was collected
• Text messages and cell phone calls were used to find people in the rubble after the earthquakes
  • (JP) – One man tells a story of how his iphone saved his life
    • Trapped under rubble with a compound fratcure to his leg
      • He used the light from his iPhone and a 1st aid app to diagnose and treat his wounds…
      • Later using the same app diagnosed and treated himself as he went into shock – (read the full story at the link)
• Cell Phones were being used for command and control by most agencies after the earthquakes
• News correspondents were using streaming internet feeds to do their reporting
• users from Haiti were relaying messages through twitter to the outside world
• Live blog style pages were in use by all the major carriers to break news stories

• Apple Does Big Business in App Store in 2009 (JP)
  • to the tune of 4.2 billion dollars
  • Apple first opened the App Store in July 2008,
  • Sales were brisk, with 300 million apps sold by December. After the holidays, that number had jumped to 500 million.
  • Earlier this month, Apple announced that sales had topped 3 billion;
  • that means iPhone users downloaded 2.5 billion apps in 2009 alone. (its possible i’m responsible for at least a gazillion of those downloads kdr)
  • Gartner’s figures show another 16 million apps that could come from other platform’s recently opened app stores, giving Apple at least 99.4 percent of all mobile apps sold for the year.
    • Now I ask: What would the impending tablet mean to this business if it uses the same or a similar store to deliver content and software??

• German Gov’t to Users: Stop using IE (SM)
  • IE has a pointer error that under certain circumstances allows users to run malicious code on your machine
  • This exploit was used by chinese hackers to gain control of PCs at Google and 20 other companies and attack from within
  • France joins in the outcry
  • Fix: run in high security (useless in this day and age on the Internet), run vista protection mode (puleaze), Upgrade to IE8 even though its vulnerable also
  • Still no patch in sight…
  • Silver lining? IE 5.01 was unaffected