Random Geeking Out

• Universities such as Princeton are seeing a large increase in the use of Macintosh computers. 40% of the students and faculty use Macs and as much as 60% of the computers sold on campus were Macintosh. Other universities were cited as seeing increases as well, including Dartmouth, Cornell, and the University of Virginia.
• Waiting to buy memory for your computer? Your ship has come in. The international price of DRAM has dropped to an all-time low, meaning the prices for memory chips will soon be dropping. Go ahead, you know you wanted to max out your computer!
  
• Bungie, the Microsoft video game developer known for the Halo series of games, has become an independent company again. They started out in the early 90's as a Mac game company with classics like Halo-precursor Marathon, which I played constantly in college. Now that they're free of the control of Microsoft, Bungie will be able to develop more great games for the XBox and perhaps for the Mac. The only major game developer that really stands out in my mind as Mac-friendly is Blizzard, the makers of Warcraft.
• We may have to wait a wee bit longer for a Wii. The family-friendly gaming console by Nintendo has already sold nearly 3 million units so far this year, but the company announced that they expect to be behind demand until next year. I'd love to play video games with my boys, but we're patient and there's lots of other things to do. We're still reading the Chronicles of Narnia which will take us through the end of the year at least.
• Another gadget I'm eyeing carefully for down the road sometime is the iPhone. I'm a Verizon customer and the iPhone is only available with AT&T. But a Verizon customer support guy told Shannon that the iPhone would be available soon on other carriers, including Verizon! Yeah, right. There doesn't seem to be any truth whatsoever to that rumor, though I'd love to find out differently. My contract is up next year and if the prices drop a bit more, hmmm… my inner-geek is holding on to hope.
  
• Here's a neat Easter Egg. Go to Apple.com and type in "virus" in the website's search field. Funny.
• Oh yeah, I meant to mention it earlier but October 4, my birthday, is also the anniversary of the first man-made satellite, Sputnik. Sputnik was launched on October 4, 1957, making last Thursday the 50th anniversary of space exploration.