Channel register writes a not quite so favorable review of Tiger.
Ars is running a series of articles entitled "Inside the Xbox 360". Part I covers the Xenon memory and cache architecture and how it relates to Microsoft's gaming concept of procedural synthesis. I'm a hardware guy at heart so I really dig stuff like this.
This article has a Geek Factor rating of 4 stars. ****
What is 'Geek Factor' you ask? It is the Nullstream rating of nerd technical spicyness where 1 is; yawn, a TLA was used and 5 is; break out the turbo propeller beanie, my brain is on fire.
Info on how to play h.264 video files on a PC can be found here. I have not tried it yet however.
Paul's seen the new Star Wars movie with his illustrious company, and the rest of us will be doing the same tomorrow. In fact, we had to rent a whole chunk of the Galleria to fit our whole crew.
Let's get your first impressions...
It's a pretty good year for Sci-Fi and Fantasy movie buffs... I grew up reading The Hobbit, LoTR, The Narnia Series, Hitchhiker's Guide and The Phantom Tollbooth, and most of these have become fantastic movies. I guess I can add the Harry Potter books to that list.
Here are the movies that I'm looking forward to this year:
The captain sent me this link to the colony video on the 360. This five minute video is more interesting and informative than that dumb Mtv special.
The more I think about it the 'guide' is one of the coolest things coming. Just think about the possibilites here for delivering content to the TV such as movies, music, news, feeds etc. I'm not sure how they will use it in the end but the possibilities are impressive.
Shiri is the biggest budget action movie to come out of South Korea at about $5 million It's pretty a pretty standard plot, with some typically asian ultra violent scenes out of the blue. The depiction of North Korean troops and training reminds me a lot of how US films used to portray the USSR, and I found that interesting. It's worth seeing if you like this type of movie, and it stars the Korean gal from the "Lost" TV show. Now that that's out of the way...
Shiri has a scene or two where characters are typing on the computer in Korean characters. I noticed that in order to get the characters with a western keyboard, they were hitting the same key multiple times to cycle through to the right one. If I have this wrong, please let me know. It's one of those things I can't believe I haven't run across before, but I guess I never thought about it.
The interesting thing about this input method, is that it provides a clue as to one of the reasons text messaging is so popular in Asia! Obviously in crowded spaces and such, it's less intrusive to text message than just talk, but I've never been able to get over the nastiness of 10 key input for typing out full messages. "Press '7' 4 times for 'S'" - No thanks! But if I was used to each key (on the keyboard) cycling through an Asian character set, I wouldn't think twice about doing it on a cell phone number pad. Does this seem like a reasonable factor? Is this already painfully obvious to people?
In case you're wondering where the third season of Dave Chappelle show is. If you haven't seen the show, both of the first two seasons are on DVD now. There's a point in each show where you'll say "I can't believe he just said that on TV". If you don't like Eddie Murphy or Richard Pryor, you probably won't like Chappelle.
I don't want to make fun of people's problems - this just goes to show that Chappelle can make us laugh even in his worst times. Click through for another picture.
By now this is floating around everywhere. Engadget seems to have more illustrations that some other sites. This is just filling in some details on info from last August. My question is 'what' are they patenting? There is obviously prior work here so it must be something specific. Some have speculated that is might be more of a 'smart display', but there is prior work here as well. Viewsonic is still selling them under the name 'wireless monitor'.
My microdrive died this weekend. Spinning media really sucks, especially in portable devices. I didn't drop it or anything. I put it in my USB reader and copied over a video file, it all worked fine. Then I removed it and put it into my Ipaq (power off) and it was no longer recognized. Now it seems to have a mini 'click of death' sound coming from it.
What makes this an even larger shame is that I was on a forum a week or so ago defending their reliability. Oh well.
I looked online to see how much they are now, and they have really come down in price over last year. About 160.00 now for 4G. They also have the 6G generally available now. Flash is still too expensive for large sizes.
Continue reading "U2 Tour"...The Matrix in Ascii Vision. This one done at the U dub.
So my wife decided that we should take a few days off and get away from it all, probably not a bad idea. Maybe I should take a break from all this high tech stress and get back to nature. This picture was taken from my balcony, not a bad view. Its been pretty relaxing kicking back with my feet up reading a book and listening to the wildlife. As for the tech break, well I wouldn't exactly be making this post if I were cut off from my toys now would I? turns out this bed and breakfast has wifi access now. Oh and I confess the book I'm reading is on design patterns. Sigh, maybe I should get some help, but man 12 steps really seems like a lot. Oh well at least I'm not working.
He's obviously nitpicking and a trying to justify why the pricing is too high. But I have to say that I've been there. In general, the way the mac works just doesn't make sense to me now. Whenever I use one, I'm frustrated by so many little things. Like not being able to resize from any edge of the window, etc. The biggest thing recently was that I had a CD of photos from a trip I wanted to show on a laptop. I put the CD in, but couldn't figure out how to get the OS to do a slideshow. So I brought up iPhoto to cycle through the images on CD. NOPE - you have to import the pictures off the CD to the HDD. A picture slideshow off a CD is something my $50 DVD player will do!
I'm not familiar with a lot of the little things he dislikes, but I agree with two of his main points about apple being too expensive and too proprietary (the QuickTime cost and inability to save mp3s is a great illustration of this). The thing is that THIS IS NOT NEWS. It's been a complaint about Apple for years. The two options are: accept Apple as the BMW of computers and allocate enough cash for them so you'll be happy - or switch to Windows!