This website summarizes all of the features and product information of the Xbox 360. On this website you are able to do everything from submit warranty claims to managing your xbox live account. You can preview all of the upcoming games and hardware.

All of the news about upcoming updates can be found on the main page of the website.

Other great features of this website is the ability to find all of the manuals and how-to’s for the xbox system and features.

2. Apple Computers homepage: http://www.apple.com/ca/iphone/

This website summarizes all of the features and product information of the iPhone. On this website you will find everything from product features to video how-to tutorials. On this website you can watch all of the current ads and view new and current applications available for the device.

This website also allows you to find relating products that will make your iPhone experience even better. You can locate everything from portable speakers to phone cases.

There is an extensive database of known issues and support information on this website as well.

3. Rogers Canada homepage: http://www.rogers.ca

This website has all of the product information for Roger’s products. The website is useful to find out all priceplan information for the iPhone. Press release information can also be found here.

4. The Escapist homepage: http://www.escapistmagazine.com/

The Escapist Features cover digital entertainment culture with a progressive editorial style. This publication has great updates and articles for the computer industry.

The Escapist Features is published every Tuesday.

References

Sorenson, Chris. (2008, July 15). 1 Million iphone 3gs sold in 3 days. The Toronto Star, p.D1.

Stenvold, Terry. (2008). Don’t Locate Me!. 2600 The Hacker Quarterly, 6-7.

Click on the read link below to read more.

Before getting too into this article I feel that a little bit of a history lession is in order.

Before the iPhone came to Canada people had to purchase the phone from an online source or go down to the U.S.A and purchase the phone at an Apple store. At that time if you wanted to use the phone in Canada you had to hack the phone to allow it to connect to our services. The question of hacking the phone or not was really a no brainer. Unless you wanted a very expensive little brick you had to hack the phone.

Times have changed though. Now you can go to your local Rogers store and purchase a phone that will work the minute you leave the store.

So why would someone still want to hack the iPhone? The answer. Free programs.

There is a huge online community that is developing free applications that you can download to your hacked iPhone. Apple now has what they call an App Store where they offer programs for free and for purchase. Most of the free applications offerered from them do not come close to compairing to the free programs you get from the hacked iPhone.

An example is the ability to apply themes to your phone. Apple does not give you the ability to do that however someone with a locked iPhone can change everything.

Is it worth the effort? I think so. Considering you will take about an hour to learn how to hack the phone and to find all the necessary files on the internet. To give you a head start click on this link. iPhone Dev Team

Check out this video.

Personally I think these people are crazy.

Microsoft lost US$3.7 billion on the first generation Xbox. Microsoft has re engineered the 360 so that it only costs $323 to manufacture. According to the article PS3 is estimated to cost $840 to build. “Microsoft is in a position to introduce price cuts that could drive Sony deeper into the red”. The Escapist, 2006

Some people would argue that the 360 has some hardware problems. People complain about “the red rings of death”.

Personally I have never had a problem with my system but then I do not leave my system running on a carpeted floor. Afterall these systems are basically computers. People have over heating problems but they do not realize that you cannot stack other electronics on their systems.

Microsoft currently has the market cornered with its online aspect of the system. People from all around the globe connect and play together via Xbox Live.

Currently the Xbox 360 is gaming heaven but perhaps in the near future it might be taken over by the likes of Playstation 3.

Go buy one now.

]]> http://georgianprojects.wordpress.com/2008/07/15/xbox-360-gaming-heaven-or-complete-failure/feed/ 1 georgianassignment http://georgianprojects.wordpress.com/2008/07/15/drobo-the-home-data-storage-device/ http://georgianprojects.wordpress.com/2008/07/15/drobo-the-home-data-storage-device/#comments Tue, 15 Jul 2008 21:20:42 +0000 georgianassignment http://georgianprojects.wordpress.com/?p=12 ]]>

So how does it work? Well short answer. Exactly as it should.

Hit the read link to read more.

Okay, before I get too far into the details a few things have to be said.

If you were wanting to purchase this item to speed up communicating with the Drobo you are going to disappointed. The Droboshare connects to the Drobo via a usb cable just like it would connect to your pc or mac so if anything the speeds are going to be either worse or the exact same.

Okay, on with the review.

First off plugging in the Droboshare is simple and well thought out. This device comes packaged with a Y cable for power. Personally I have never seen a company do this but it definitely doesn’t mean that I am complaining. I don’t have to worry about another power brick sitting beside my UPS. I just use the same plug that comes with my Drobo to plug in both devices.

Connecting the Drobo to the Droboshare is done via a usb cable just like it would be on your mac/pc. When it came to this part I was thinking “oh great now I am going to have a brutally long usb cable sticking out behind my cabnet.”

Not the case here. Following suit of the handy power cable was a short handy usb cable. At this point your done hooking up the Droboshare to the Drobo.

Simply plug in the supplied (or your own) network patch cable to your switch or home router and its all done.

I think it is important to note that I am connecting the Droboshare to an Apple Airport Extreme. I mention this because it will directly effect the performance I get out of the Droboshare.

I have found the Airport Extreme to be an extremely fast device. Gigabit Ethernet is supported along with wireless N. Keep this in mind if you purchase one of these devices. If your only connected via wireless on B wireless or G wireless your transfer speeds might suffer.

Alright, So the Droboshare is all connected to the network and to the drobo. Now all you have to do is run the cd that came in the box.

This next part will happen almost the exact same on both pc and mac.

The cd will auto run and ask you to install the Drobo Dashboard. When you are done updating everything you can uninstall the Drobo Dashboard but for now you are going to need it.

If you have Drobo Dashboard installed your program is going to be updated here.

After a minute or so you the program will be installed. Next you have to update the firmware on the Drobo itself. This is done by going into the “Advanced Controls” and clicking Check for updates.

It is possible that this will automatically pop up as an option depending if you had automatically check for updates selected from before.

Everything from this point is automatic. The Drobo has (in my case) 2 updates to apply and will have to restart a couple of times.

Okay so all of that is out of the way. You get to configure the DroboShare options. You get to name your share and you can choose if you want a password to access the files.

At this point I should tell you that you do not have the ability to make more then one username and you cannot setup different shares. You get the choice of username or no username and share it all or don’t share anything which would really render the point of the Droboshare.

The Droboshare uses Samba or as some of you know it SMB to share files across multiple platforms be that windows, mac os or even linux. If you were to make your own linux box with smb serving you files you would have the option to setup different shares and different users.

It is very likely that the friendly Drobo people could add this ability in future updates but for the time being no dice.

So there you are. You have the Droboshare connected and configured. Great.

Keeping with the companies idea that these products are simple to use they have done a few things.

When you are sitting on your beloved mac system with the Drobo Dashboard you will find that there is another volume sitting on your desktop just like your Mac hard drive. I will note for the more mac mac techie people that this is not an actual volume like when you connect it via usb. If you option click and go to “get info” you will see that its a share via smb://sharenamehere/folder.

I found this function to be pretty handy. I use my macbook a lot for work therefore I come and go between different networks a lot. When I walk into my house the Drobo Dashboard automatically picks up the fact that I have a Droboshare setup and mounts my share to my desktop.

This function works on both windows and mac. Currently Drobo Dashboard does not exist for the linux world.

Now this next part that I am going to tell you is the most exciting part. Well I think it is anyway so here goes.

It doesn’t matter what file system you have formatted your Drobo in. Before if you formatted your Drobo for windows via NTFS file system you could read the files on your mac but you could not write to the drive at all. Now because the Droboshare is using samba it doesn’t matter! Droboshare does all the translation for you.

The Drobo site doesn’t mention this little gem anywhere. I have no idea why. This is a pretty big thing. Before you had your Drobo shared to one type of computer mac or pc. Now it doesn’t matter. You have one device shared to any platform. That to me is a huge plus to this device.

Alright, time to talk about the transfer speeds.

The transfer speeds are pretty much the exact same as normal usb2 connectivity kinda… I have not used any fancy programs to measure actual transfer times but I was pretty used to how long it took to browse my directory of 100 gigs of music among a few other things.

Please remember that I am testing all of this while connected via wireless N and wireless G.

I am on wireless N when I am on my macbook. I would say that browsing the Drobo and moving large files around are the same speeds as being connected directly.

I am on wireless G when I am on my mac mini. I found that transfers of large files and browsing big directories a bit slower then being connected directly.

Looking at the difference between G and N wireless you will see that the nature of N is indeed a lot faster so the performance difference shouldn’t come as a shock.

I am going to be connecting via a network cable soon and I will test both 100 mbit and 1000 mbit connections then. My educated guess about this is that there will be no difference in speed on single transfers.

That is to say a one to one comparison of transferring the same file under the same network load.

Obviously if my buddy is sitting at my mac mini streaming a dvd quality movie from the Drobo I am going to see a drop in performanc but that all has to do with total available bandwidth and throughput that, in my case the Airport Extreme can handle.

It is also important to keep in mind that usb2 has a bandwidth capacity of 480Mbit/sec. To put that into English you if you have 10 people transfering files to the Drobo over the network via 1000 Mbit/sec wired connection you have to take the following into account.

Drobo limits

480 divided by 10 = 48 meaning that each person can have a maximum transfer of 48 Mbit/second.

Your network limits

1000 divided by 10 = 100 meaning that in this situation the network can keep up to ten people transfering at 48 Mbit/sec. At this point you are maxing out the usb2 connection if everyone is transfering at 48 Mbit/sec to the Drobo however, you are not maxing out your network.

Now what happens when you only have a 100 Mbit/sec wired connection?

100 divided by 10 = 10 meaning that each person is limited to 10 Mbit/sec. Sucks doesn’t it? well welcome to the wonderful world of networking that I deal with on a daily basis. If you can comprehend what I have just explained then you are better off then one hell of a lot of people in this world.

So you can apply this train of thought to wireless G. It has a bandwidth capacity of 54 Mbit/sec and wireless N that has a limit of 300 Mbit/sec.

The even more painful fact that your going to have to live with is the physical write speed limits of hard drives and the fact that when it comes to networking be it wireless or wired you never really get a full speed transfer.

I suppose the point of me tell you all of that is that if you purchase the Droboshare and you start to notice that accessing your Droboshare is slower then when you were directly connected to it you need to think about all these other variables. It may not be that the product is poorly designed or that it is somehow a stupid product that you should take back because it made your Drobo slower.

You have simply added a lot more variables into the mix then simply being the only user and connecting directly to the device.

Am I happy with the Droboshare and its performance? Yes absolutely I am 100 percent happy with this product. It does exactly what it advertises. The device itself is not degrade transfer rates it just works exactly like my Drobo does.

In the future I would like to see that added ability to have more then one user and the ability to set permissions on different shares. With that said though, I am not going to start crying if it doesn’t come.

Thanks for reading everyone.

Is the iPhone the greatest phone ever made? Read on to find out.

In this review I will start with the hardware aspect of the device.

Design
Some would go as far as to say that the device is the best looking phone ever created. Yes, it’s a matter of taste, I am sure some will not agree, but I find it hard to ignore the simplicity and clean lines of this device.

The iPhone’s size and shape make it incredibly comfortable to hold. It fits well in the hand horizontally and vertically. It’s slim profile allows you to slide it in and out of your pocket with ease. Holding the phone you will not feel any cheap plastic or materials that seems to move around.

Display
The iPhone features a great screen. It has a 160ppi resolution and is extremely bright. The screen measures 3.5 inches and uses a 480 x 320 resolution. Text on the iPhone is smooth and easy to read at almost every angle. Photos displayed on the device look more vibrant than a printed picture.

Software
The iPhone comes with all of the software that you will require. For browsing the internet you are given Apple’s own browser called Safari. Navigation is done all with your fingers. To follow a link you simply press on it and the phone moves right along.

What phone wouldn’t be complete without a clock? Well the iPhone certainly does not fall short on this point.

As you can see from the photo you can program the phone to tell you what time it is in many different locations. The white clock symbolizes day time and the black clock follows suit showing you that it is night. You also get an alarm, a stop watch and even a timer for all of those times you forget the cookies in the stove.

In this screen shot you can see the home screen of the iPhone. From here you can move the icons where ever you please. You can access the phone portion of the phone along with text messaging and e-mail.

The phone comes with a handy camera and even a great day calendar that automatically synchronizes with the one that you have on your computer.

With normal daily use I have gone for 3 days before having to recharge the device.

The phone does get a lot of finger prints as you might imagine but I have yet to scratch the screen. Apple has put an anti-scratch coating on the glass that does its job perfectly.

If my phone were to get destroyed or broken somehow I would not hesitate to replace it the next day.

For me this phone fits perfect.

You can pickup your own iPhone from Rogers. So go and buy one now.