Are you a Canadian University or College student eager to be a part of a world-class software development team?  We’re are looking for talented students for 4 and 8 month co-op positions.  You can read a description of the position here.  If this isn’t your style, there also many student positions available.

If you broke the bank buying an iPod during the “boxing week” sales or are looking for something other than Justin Timberlake to load onto your MP3 player, you may want to check out LibriVox.

LibriVox is a great service for anyone that enjoys audiobooks, especially classics.  Here’s the description from the website:

LibriVox volunteers record chapters of books in the public domain and release the audio files back onto the net. Our goal is to make all public domain books available as free audio books. We are a totally volunteer, open source, free content, public domain project.

I noticed that iTunes lists Joseph Conrad’s unabridged Heart of Darkness audiobook for over CAD$ 20.  You can download it for free from LibriVox.

The horror, the horror, the horror…

The market research firm, NPD Group, has released the 2006 US holiday video game console sales figures.  You can read the story at Yahoo.

Considering the supply problems that affected both Sony and Nintendo, it’s not surprising the Microsoft Xbox 360 outsold all other next-gen consoles.  NPD claims Microsoft sold 1.1 million units.

Interestingly, the legacy Sony PS2 took first place honours with 1.4 million units sold.

Forbes.com breaks down the cost of next-generation video games.  With the production cost of some games rivalling the cost of a Hollywood movie, the video game industry is big business with a lot of risk.

Analysts predict that some other [video game] publishers will need to clear 1 million units to get in the black–and start making about $1 per game sold.

By now, you’ve probably heard about Apple’s iPhone.  It appears to be a fantastic piece of technology.  I’ll admit I was surprised they combined the video and phone capabilities into a single iPod.  There had long been rumours of these devices.

Although Blaine seems excited by it, I’m starting to have my doubts.  For instance:

• What’s the standby battery life of the phone?  This specification is missing from the Apple website.
• Is it durable?  It looks great, but people are pretty rough with their phones.  Will this hold up?
• If it’s a video player, why only 4 or 8 GB?  This isn’t large enough for my music, podcasts, and audiobooks.

CNET’s Crave blog raises a few more questions.