25
Latest
At 25, eBay is a reminder of a bygone internet
eBay celebrates its quarter-century anniversary this week.
Adele's '25' heads to streaming services now that you bought it
Chances are you've already purchased Adele's 25 if you really wanted to hear it or obtained it through other means. Now that the artist has enjoyed seven months of albums sales, the collection of songs will debut on streaming services tonight at midnight ET. According to Billboard, Apple Music, Amazon Prime, Spotify and Tidal confirmed that the album will be available in their respective libraries this evening. Mashable reports that Google Play is a landing spot for the singer's latest work as well.
Distro Issue 25: Ultrabook overload, Snap Analysis and Gina Trapani
Distro is 25... weeks old, today! And to celebrate we're debuting a new page that puts you, our readers, front and center. We've been sending out questions over various social networking channels and collecting your answers for the inaugural run of Snap Analysis. Among other things, you weighed in on RIM's CEO switch up, as did our own Darren Murph in his editorial, "RIM's New CEO Isn't the Shakeup It Needed." We have more editorializing coming your way from the desk of Donald Melanson, who's taking the Ultrabook marketing hype to task. Also in this issue, we test drive the BlackBerry Porsche Design P'9981 and review the Panasonic Lumix DMC-GX1 and Huawei's Honor. Lifehacker's Gina Trapani takes on the Distro Q&A, IRL goes back to CES and Ross Rubin explores Apple's education push. There's a lot to soak up in this issue, so hit the appropriate link below and get to reading!
Sony Handycam celebrates 25th birthday, can now film itself renting a car
Remember the Sony Video 8? No? Well, let's recap: it was 1985, and the company releases the CCD-M8 camcorder, capturing life on 8-millimeter cassettes at just under 2.2 pounds. "Back in my day" references notwithstanding, Sony is now celebrating the 25th anniversary of its Handycam line, from that progenitor recorder all the way up to today's SD card-equipped lineup. All the festivities and a pretty detailed trip down memory lane can be found via the source link, or if you're looking for something infinitely more cornball, Sony's produced a "commemorative movie" of sorts in honor of the anniversary -- that's after the break.
Raid Rx: 14 patch 3.2 trinkets to check out
Every week, Raid Rx will help you quarterback your healers to victory! Your host is Matt Low, the grand poobah of World of Matticus and a founder of No Stock UI, a WoW blog for all things UI, macro, and addon related. It's been a while since I looked at trinkets. What options are there available since then? Yes, the linked article goes to the Priest column on trinkets. Not every healer's going to use them. But truth be told, there aren't that many new options for healers in the current game since Ulduar and Trial of the Crusader opened up. Let's look at everything available since Malygos. So what do we have to work with?
BlizzCon tickets: how it went, and what's next
Yes, if you were around on Saturday, you know that the first round of BlizzCon tickets sold out, and sold out fast. Tickets went on sale right around 10am PST (which was 1pm EST), and sold out just about 28 minutes later. If the queue numbers are trustworthy, over 21,000 people (we've heard as high as 25,000 at a time) logged in to buy tickets that day, and from unconfirmed reports around the web, it seems like about 5,000 to 8,000 tickets were sold: most people who got in line around number 5,000 were able to pick a ticket up, and that was a few minutes in already. Some of those people are already selling tickets on eBay as well.We believe (though aren't sure) that they'll be selling more than 15,000 tickets this year, since that's what they sold last year and they're using even more of the convention space. If that's true, then Blizzard probably went through only about half of the tickets, and will sell the rest during the second session on the 30th. But that's probably not much of a consolation -- given the frenzy around this last Saturday, there'll probably be more people trying for tickets, and given the prices on eBay, possibly more scalpers clogging up the queue. We'll see.Update: Lots of people point out, rightly so, that I missed something in my guesstimates of how many tickets were sold: you could purchase up to five. My personal guess is that the majority of people bought only one or two, but even if you go with three as the average, 5,000-8,000 people in the queue is actually 15,000-24,000 tickets. Blizzard probably did sell the majority of tickets on Saturday then, not just half. So the process on May 30th will presumably go even faster.BlizzCon 2009 is coming up on August 21st and 22nd! We've got all the latest news and information. At BlizzCon you can play the latest games, meet your guildmates, and ask the developers your questions. Plus, there's some great looking costumes.
DS releases for the week of June 25th
We can only guess someone has designated this the official week of licensees. Two movie-based games are hitting shelves, along with remakes, remixes, and redux titles. What a weird week! But how can we complain when there are several new games on the shelves? Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix Hoshigami: Ruining Blue Earth Remix Nervous Brickdown Ratatouille Touchmaster DS Vegas Casino High 5! Hit the jump to see what's out this week in the rest of the world.[Update: Now with the actual Japanese releases.]
