(ABC/IGN)
They’re changing Wonder Woman!
Comic book vixen Wonder Woman is trading in her star-spangled hot pants for an updated look featuring leggings and spurs, according to an IGN interview published Tuesday.
View full post on Entertainment
As the sun started to set on the west side of the Reichstag on Wednesday evening — and perhaps on Chancellor Angela Merkel’s centre-right government as well — delegates to the Bundesversammlung (Federal Assembly) began switching to beer from the preferred beverage earlier in the day — coffee, water and apple juice.
There was an unmistakeable air of “Endzeitstimmung” (doomsday atmosphere) on the comfortable rooftop terrace of the historic German parliament building, where the catering is superb and the view of Berlin breathtaking.
The conservative delegates on the Reichstag roof were easy to spot — they were the ones with worried looks on their faces after a couple dozen unidentified “rats” from within their ranks twice failed in votes during the afternoon to give Merkel the votes she needed to get her candidate elected.
The conservatives were drinking their beer and trying to forget the day’s humiliation before going into battle for a third and final round later in the evening.
”It was a bit like Germany vs Serbia in the first two rounds,” said David McAllister, a leader in Merkel’s Christian Democrats in Lower Saxony, referring to a 1-0 World Cup loss earlier this month. “But the third round will be more like Germany vs England,” he added with a smile, referring to Germany’s 4-1 win over England on Sunday.
The opposition delegates were also easy to spot on the Reichstag rooftop terrace — they were the ones with smiles on their faces (and beer glasses in their hands) after seeing Merkel humiliated twice by her own coalition. Her candidate, Christian Wulff, fell short of the 623 votes he needed even though there are 644 delegates in the centre-right bloc.
Wulff got 600 in the first round and 615 in the second round. Even if he wins the third round later on Wednesday evening, Merkel has been badly damaged by the debacle.
The question on everyone’s mind is: How can someone lead one of the world’s most important countries if she can’t even keep her own coalition in line?
What is most unsettling for delegates in the centre-right bloc is that they don’t know who the defectors are. It has brought instant comparisons to the beginning of the end of the previous centre-left government of Social Democrats and Greens in 2005.
Early that year, the SPD and Greens were betrayed by someone from their own ranks on three votes in the state assembly of Schleswig-Holstein and state premier Heide Simonis was forced to resign. That humiliation sent tremors through then-Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder’s centre-left government and after a similar SPD-Greens government in North Rhine-Westphalia was voted out of power a few months later in May, Schroeder dramatically pulled the plug on his government. He called for snap elections — and ended up losing power to Merkel.
Will Wednesday’s debacle in the Reichstag mark the beginning of the end of Merkel’s reign?
View full post on Global News Journal
He may not garner the attention of Diego Maradona, incur the wrath like Dunga or keep the world on the edge of its seat like Loco Bielsa, but Oscar Tabarez is making a name for himself in the inane world of South American coaches.
It’s largely due to the exception “start” – if you can call it that – of Uruguay, but it certainly helps that he’s still throwing in his little quirk of naming the lineup days ahead of a match. Even so, you’d think he’d play his cards close to the vest for a World Cup quarterfinal.
Never. The lineup’s below, and he dares Milovan Rajevac & Co. to scheme against it.
The coach, known as The Master because of his days as a schoolteacher, often names his team well before a match. Asked by reporters to do so on Wednesday, he simply shrugged his shoulders and rapidly reeled off the names.
They were Fernando Muslera, Diego Lugano, Mauricio Victorino, Jorge Fucile, Maximiliano Pereira, Diego Perez, Egidio Arevalo, Edinson Cavani, Alvaro Fernandez, Luis Suarez and Diego Forlan.
Part of the reason he’s able to do this is that Uruguay is so adept at changing tactical faces on the fly the personnel is largely irrelevant. They could play four strikers – and it’s close – and still run out a 5-4-1 team picture in front of Fernando Muslera. One of the most versatile teams at this World Cup, and to scheme against them means long, sleepless nights with a crack team of analysts and a minority stock in Red Bull.
That said, it’s still incredibly ballsy to lay one’s cards on the table and say “beat me now”, whether that’s only half the story or not. One could even say he’s really laying his beef on the grill, and unveiling a whole lot more than his Little Diego given what’s on the line.
View full post on World Cup Soccer – South Africa 2010
It’s easy for the fanboy in me to get excited, enthralled and simply out of control fired up for a new piece of hardware. I’m the guy who you will find camping out overnight for Mac OS updates, so the iPhone announcement had me jumping up and down when the first photos appeared back in April. I’ve read over 300 blog posts from pro and amateur bloggers recounting what they think of iPhone 4 and have come away with what I feel are the biggest missteps Apple made with this product.
It appears that, for the first time since the hockey puck mouse, Apple let design win over function. Apple bashers would argue that this is the case for every product but the design of products like the 27″ iMac, MacBook Air and iPad show that Apple has successfully merged technology with liberal arts in a way that enhances our lives and makes technology more fun and accessible to everyone. The iPhone 4 got the technology right but failed at packaging it in a way that everyone can enjoy without being overcome with gripes and issues that only lead back to the device’s design.
Let’s get one thing out of the way and touch briefly on those pesky reception problems discovered a few hours after the device began shipping. I’m going to take the middle ground and say that Apple is completely correct in saying that this issue affects all modern mobile phones and that holding the phone differently will yield improved results but I also believe that a design mistake was made in how the band was formed where the rubber connection shouldn’t be in a place where most users hold the phone. I am confident Apple will improve this with its 4.0.1 update, but the only solution now is to purchase a case that keeps the user from making physical contact with the band. Reports that Apple was negligent for testing the iPhone 4 out in the field without a secretive protective case (like the one found shrouding the iPhone 4 when it was discovered in a bar in April) makes sense to me.
I hope this is something that’s easy to fix because asking the user to hold the phone a different way is unacceptable and not something that most people will even think about. When creating consumer products, the user grabs the device, tries to make a call and it drops time and time again and Apple’s refinements in hiding the technical details from the end user means they will just go to Apple and not think of changing hand positions or buying a case.
My first complaint upon seeing the field test unit acquired by Gizmodo was that glass on the back of the device would be a terrible mistake. Glass is glass no matter how strong you make it or how much you enhance its ability to reflect scratches. Glass breaks more easily than plastic and metal. It’s a material only used out of necessity when you must see through it such as a car window or to peer inside of an oven to check on your food that’s cooking. Using painted glass on the back of a refrigerator (where all of those coils are) is not something you’d see yet Apple finds a way to bring glass to the back of the phone. My first thought upon seeing this design decision was joyous as I assumed Apple would finally have resolved and improved the reception of the iPhone 4 because a radio masked behind glass would be a huge improvement over the original aluminum and plastic iPhone back we’ve grown accustomed to but, we all know Apple chose the stainless steel band for that, so the glass is just a design decision that makes the device far more fragile.
It took a little under three hours for the first iPhone 4 devices to shatter from accidental drops and Apple’s only replacing these on a limited basis, so if you drop your iPhone and the pretty glass on the back of the device breaks, you can deal with it or purchase a new iPhone 4 at full price ($599/$699).
The aluminosilicate glass used in iPhone 4 is 30 times harder than plastic. The issue is, it still scratches and it still breaks. Even GDGT editor, Ryan Block has shown that a normal iPhone 4 test unit he had was scratched after a few days of use. It was a poor choice for a mobile phone and one that Apple decided to risk for awe factor.
Moving on, let’s discuss the choice of making the iPhone a perfectly rectangle device with no curve. Curves on the back of devices enhance the feel and handling and you see this on most mobile phones including the Palm Pre which has a terrific feel in the hand in how it feels like you’re holding a stone. Even Apple’s iPad has this curve which makes it easier to grip. By squaring off iPhone 4, Apple was able to make the phone 24 percent thinner than its predecessor but it removed the aesthetic and comfort of holding a phone of the 3G’s shape. The other downfall of the boxy design is that you have no idea what orientation the phone will be when you decide to pull it from your pocket unless you’re keen enough to locate the home button before pulling it out.
Finally, as Macworld.com notes in its design commentary:
I put my iPhone 4 in one pocket of my jeans, and my old 3G S in the other (with the curved back facing out), and you can’t even tell the 3G S is in the pocket, whereas the iPhone 4 is clearly visible.
If you have both handsets, hold one in each hand, then put one in each of your front pockets. You’ll see for yourself that Apple chose design elegance over usability.
I don’t quite agree that it’s an impossible differentiation and extremely noticeable between the two, but it’s something worth noting especially to my friends who opt for tight jeans where the square iPhone 4 design will show through with much more definition than the iPhone 3G/3GS.
Core77.com spoke briefly with Jony Ive, Apple’s VP of Industrial Design of Apple. These quotes from him completely contradicts what I see when holding the iPhone 4.
“So it’s assembled first, the band, and then the final machining and grinding are performed, so the tolerances are extraordinary…. Whatever people’s feelings are about the actual design of the product is of course subjective. But objectively I can say that the manufacturing tolerances are phenomenal. And we determined this, we designed it from the very beginning to meet those goals.”
He continues:
“The best design explicitly acknowledges that you cannot disconnect the form from the material–the material informs the form,” says Ive. “It is the polar opposite of working virtually in CAD to create an arbitrary form that you then render as a particular material, annotating a part and saying ‘that’s wood’ and so on. Because when an object’s materials, the materials’ processes and the form are all perfectly aligned, that object has a very real resonance on lots of levels. People recognize that object as authentic and real in a very particular way.”
Apple has long been applauded for its design and attention to detail in products and regarding the technology that’s built into every iPhone 4, it’s amazing that so much was crammed into such a small package but it’s more clear that design took a front seat and reliability, usability and quality of the iPhone 4 was removed in an effort to please design experts and be ready for display in an art gallery instead of being used day after day as a phone.
It’s a matter of fact that if you drop your iPhone (any generation), the chances of it not recovering from that drop are pretty big, but we’ve long accepted that Apple has the best touch screen because it uses glass, but Apple’s decision to use glass on both ends in a form factor that disrupts knowing which direction the phone is pointing when you pull it out and the decision to place antennae connections where a normal person would hold the phone is frustrating. Apple needs to truly merge technology and liberal arts in a way that my own mother could understand and not in a way that has consumers shelling out $699 just for missing their pants pocket and dropping the phone on the ground.
View full post on TheAppleBlog
Never shy about showing off her body, newly-single “Bachelor” winner Vienna Girardi is going to bare it all for Playboy, Star magazine reports.
The 24-year-old former Hooters waitress tells the magazine that she will grace the cover later this year. The news comes in the height of drama between her and her ex-fiance, “Bachelor” Jake Pavelka, including claims of abuse, affairs and homosexuality.
Girardi says her decision to pose for the magazine was a financial one.
SLIDESHOW: Playboy Celebrity All-Stars
“”The Bachelor didn’t pay me a dime, and I ran through my savings living with Jake,” Vienna says of her decision, which she hopes will bring in $250,000. “I need the money. And I want to do something fun and happy for myself!”
Girardi has also secured a day job in the field of marketing and tells Star she hopes to live “a normal life.”
Girardi has previously claimed that Jake is a “fame whore” who refused to be intimate with her. She has been accused of being unfaithful following their television courtship
What do you think? Will Vienna really pursue a “normal life?”
View full post on Entertainment
The important thing when getting knocked out of the World Cup is not to overreact. It’s not the end of the world. It’s just the end of your tournament. So you dust yourself off, get ready to start again and prepare to do better in the next tournament. Goodluck Jonathan disagrees.
The Nigerian President was apparently so disappointed with the Super Eagles’ World Cup performance (finishing bottom of Group B) that he’s suspended the team from international competition for two years.
“Mr President has directed that Nigeria will withdraw from all international football competition for the next two years to enable Nigeria to reorganise its football,” Ima Niboro, Jonathan’s senior communications adviser, told reporters.
“This directive became necessary following Nigeria’s poor performance in the ongoing FIFA World Cup,” he said.
So if Goodluck Jonathan gets his way, Nigeria won’t even enter qualification for Africa Cup of Nations 2012. Because… that will help Nigeria prepare for future international tournaments? I don’t follow. What I do follow, is that Jonathan appears to have found a loophole in FIFA’s strict policy against government meddling.
Usually any government interference results in FIFA suspending the national team from all international football. Which is usually a punishment too great for the government to risk. But in this case… since President Jonathan actually wants to suspend Nigeria from international football, FIFA’s reaction plays right into hands. So well played President Jonathan, if you pull this off you are officially the first politician to outmaneuver Sepp Blatter. So well done. But it’s still a terrible idea.
View full post on World Cup Soccer – South Africa 2010
Johannesburg, South Africa (CNN) – The World Cup has never been a tournament that respects form or status. In 2006, an unfancied Italy came from nowhere to triumph over all opposition, their feat an echo of the Azzurri’s win in 1982 as dark horses. West Germany overturned an awesome Hungary side in the "Miracle of Bern" to win in 1954, and a star-studded Netherlands side lost in two successive finals in 1974 and 1978 despite their revolutionary "total football" tactics.
And so the 2010 tournament has in many ways conformed to type, with some of the so-called giants of world football being downed by plucky Davids.
Defending champions Italy fell at the group stages after the test of Paraguay, New Zealand and Slovakia proved too tough for a side of increasing age and apathetic players.
France, world champions of 1998, also fell apart in dramatic fashion before failing to reach the knockout stages. After poor results on the pitch, a fall-out between coach Raymond Domenech and striker Nicolas Anelka and a subsequent player revolt saw a farcical disintegration of a much-touted squad.
England, always a team set up to fall by their domestic media, dashed the hopes of a nation by not only losing their pre-tournament form — they were Europe’s most prolific goalscorers in qualification — but also exposing the world’s highest-paid coach Fabio Capello as being less infallible than previously thought.
Before kick-off there was genuine feeling among many pundits that it was England’s time to regain the world title they last won in 1966, but those wearing the three lions on their chest stuttered and stumbled through the group stage before being soundly beaten by a young, stylish German side in the last 16.
Africa has also had its disappointments. No credible journalist put too much hope in a winner from the host continent, but many felt that in Ivory Coast, Cameroon, Nigeria and South Africa there was enough talent and experience for those nations to set the tournament alight.
Alas, Didier Drogba’s Ivorians failed to progress from an admittedly tough group, Nigeria's Super Eagles squandered chance after chance and suffered an early exit, while Cameroon and South Africa — despite showing moments of great football — failed to show the clinical finishing needed to progress. All hopes now rest on the shoulders of Ghana, who with youth in their ranks, have their eyes on a semifinal berth.
Big-name players also failed to deliver. England striker Wayne Rooney came into the tournament off the back of a prolific season with Manchester United. His goalscoring form led many to see him as a contender for the world player of the year. But, whether through injury or fatigue, Rooney seemingly lost the ability to do the most simple of things. Soporific when on the field of play, the once hotshot couldn’t hit a barn door with a banjo in South Africa.
Cristiano Ronaldo had a similar fate with Portugal, as his side were knocked out by a superb Spain team in the last 16. The Real Madrid man failed to make an impact of any note despite his top-billing status after almost single-handedly keeping "Los Meringues" in the Spanish league title-race last campaign.
Franck Ribery helped German side Bayern Munich progress to the final of the European Champions League and win a domestic double, but could do nothing to inspire a fractured France to perform.
Samuel Eto’o will also have left South Africa ruing his inability to make a mark on the biggest stage of them all. The Cameroon striker won a treble of titles under Jose Mourinho at Inter Milan before the World Cup, but due mainly to being played out of position, he was unable to transfer the form that saw him lift the European Cup for the third time to anything more than two goals for the Indomitable Lions.
Many giants of the game have fallen, but part of the magic of the World Cup is it creates new legends with each edition. Only time will tell who will be the new Goliath to leave South Africa as champions.
View full post on CNN World Sport
By now, a lot folks with an iPhone (4 or otherwise) have been running iOS 4, the new name for iPhone OS. The new operating system for these great devices is nice, and overall seems to be a hit. But more interestingly, Apple made the jump to renaming its mobile OS — even going so far as to license the name from Cisco, who uses the IOS moniker for its routing and switching software.
And the move makes sense too; I mean, with the iPad and iPod touch, “iPhone OS” is a misnomer. But if Apple has seen the point in renaming the OS, at what point will it admit that iTunes is horribly named at this point in time, considering all the functions it fulfills?
More to the point, is iTunes in need of a new name for all of its functionality? Or is there perhaps a different/new application that should take on the tasks that iTunes has handled for the past few years? This line of thinking isn’t a new one, but now that the mobile operating system has gotten the new treatment, and brings additional functionality which allows PDFs to be synced and reviewed using iBooks, there’s a better argument than ever.
Here’s a quick review of the things that iTunes facilitates a sync function for at this point in time:
With so many disparate pieces of information and media content being pulled in from so many different applications, I don’t understand the need for iTunes, in its current state, to remain the hub for syncing all this data to our mobile devices. My point here is that iTunes isn’t the single repository for all of the stuff we push to our devices — while it does manage some media, it also tries to play middle man to various applications’ data sources that we decide to pull from.
OS X still includes a little utility (that I’m not sure many people even use anymore) called iSync. Seems like a good name — it certainly conveys the idea of what one may want to do with such a program! So a possible solution could be to re-purpose iSync as the central place to push/pull all of the content listed above, to the iPhone/iPod touch/iPad.
The other, less invasive change (though Apple marketing would have a big job with re-branding efforts) would be to slap a shiny new name on iTunes. iMedia? iStuff? iHub? iXfer? But I don’t know where to begin with such a nebulous collection of functions iTunes is in charge of.
So, what names would you give to iTunes, to better relate all that it does? Or should iTunes even continue to be a jack of all trades?
View full post on TheAppleBlog
The TV-on-the-web service, Hulu, is now offering a free iPhone & iPad app for Hulu Plus, its recently launched subscription service.
The service is currently in private beta, but you can sign up for the opportunity to try it out. Invites appear to be going out already, though who knows how many folks will get a chance early on in the private program. The subscription will run $9.99 per month, and give season pass type access to full seasons of television shows, as well as past seasons for some programming. All of the content will purportedly be presented in glorious HD.
Though the service itself is in private beta, the iPhone/iPad app is available right now for download. There is a gallery of free sample content and a tour of the content offerings as a whole, but otherwise you must have a beta invite to log in and do more.
It looks fairly similar to the ABC television layout — and interestingly, highlights some of the ABC programming that’s freely available via its iPad app. The app works and feels much like the browser-based and desktop interfaces, which was a good move to keep things simple for anyone already familiar with the service. The search functions in real-time and gives an immediate listing of available content for consumption in an easy to navigate layout. You can even hide the top horizontal pane to focus on the shows that you’re looking for without distractions. From a player perspective, you can pause and play, but like the existing service, there are intermittent commercials to sit through which you cannot skip.
I’d be lying if I said this premise didn’t piqué a little bit of interest for me. However, a couple of things seem odd. The first, is that they aren’t clear whether the private beta is allowing you to try it for free, or try it with the $10-a-month subscription. I would hope the former if, but it doesn’t seem to be stated where I could find any clarification. The other odd part, is enabling this subscription service and content for web-enabled television sets. Content-wise, we’re talking about free, over the air network television programming, not cable which may be limited to some people who would pay $10 a month for this access. We can already watch this stuff on our TVs without paying for it. Oh, and we’re still getting commercials while paying for this otherwise free content? Hm…
Yes, there are older shows available, and yes, it’s cool to see this stuff on the go via iPad or iPhone, but with many people having DVRs and Sling devices — not to mention Netflix and the ABC apps for iPad — how enticing will Hulu Plus actually be? If you’ve gotten an invite and have some insights to share on the topic — or even have an opinion (we know you do) about the attractiveness of this new offering — we’re all ears. Guess Flash on the iPhone wasn’t such a big barrier after all.
View full post on TheAppleBlog
I am not happy with Netherlands forward Robin van Persie right now. But very happy with Netherlands coach Bert van Marwijk. Here’s why:
Before the World Cup, I posted my 10 World Cup stereotypes, and argued that said 10 stereotypes were not necessarily accurate. Near the top of that list… #2 The Netherlands team is always arguing in public. Yes, this had happened in the past. But it wasn’t happening in 2010. Until now.
Robin van Persie was subbed out in the 80th minute of the Netherlands 2-1 win over Slovakia on Monday, and did not take kindly to leaving the field. There are even reports (via lipreaders) that van Persie complained that Wesley Sneijer and not himself should have been taken off. Which is dangerously close to the start of a squad rift. That’s the same Wesley Sneijder who scored four minutes after van Persie left the field by the way.
Spotting a stereotype about to be reinforced, coach Bert van Marwijk stepped in to end the drama:
“I will never accept anything that could upset the next match,” Van Marwijk told Dutch national broadcaster NOS.
“I spoke to Robin and he is supposed to have said something about Wesley. I’ve spoken to Wesley and after that I called the team together … told them what I think and then drew a line under it.”
…
“I’ve always said I don’t mind if something happens — that can make you stronger — but I don’t like to leave problems dangling,” he said. “It’s over. For everybody.”
I hope van Marwijk’s right. Because because many of the stereotypes on this list have been disproved at World Cup 2010 (Germany have looked more inspired than efficient, for example) but also because I want to see the strongest Dutch team possible take on Brazil this Friday.
View full post on World Cup Soccer – South Africa 2010
