Kev's Development Toolbox

‘This generation gaming hardware’ is a bit vague to say the least, but David Braben of Frontier Development and one of the co-developers of the original ‘Elite’, a hugely successful space-trading game originally on the BBC Micro computer (and then many other 8 bit machines), has said that it is penciled in for a release.

It will be interesting to see how it translates to the current hardware and whether it still retains the compelling game play that the original had back in the 1980s. Elite is definitely up there as an all time gaming classic, having spent many many hours playing it on my 48k ZX Spectrum in the ’80s.

This is an interesting post – some basic tests opening large files with WinRAR showed it ran faster when running under Wine (a Windows API emulator) than on ‘real’ Windows. Now there’s a turn out for the books…

Oracle’s $6.7 billion offer to acquire BEA stands until this Sunday, at which point they’ll withdraw their offer. No other counter offers have come forward higher than Oracle’s bid so far, but Oracle says it does not want to go into a drawn out fight to acquire the company. Time will tell.

Apple reported last quarter had it’s highest ever sales up 34%, 400,000 more than the previous best quarter, selling 2.2 million Macs. That’s a sizable amount of hardware. News.com comments that at that quantity sales are no longer due to a ‘halo effect’ of the incredibly best selling iPod, the Mac is growing faster than the overall market.