Well, it’s E3 this week, and like many
other gamers I have been kee­ping up to date with the buzz of the industry. I’m
not going to post facts about new con­so­les or anything, I mean, who wants to
come here for a news source!? Suf­fice to say, I will post my opi­nions on the
upco­ming enter­tain­ment mammoths.

Xbox
360 was the first of the three con­so­les to be
revea­led, albeit on the shitty MTV extra­va­ganza. The 30min advert pac­ked show pro­vi­ded
us with a brief glimpse of the con­sole shell, 10 seconds of game play foo­tage
and some happy hob­bits tal­king to pro­fes­sio­nal no life gamers and the
inva­lua­ble opi­nions of the all kno­wing pimp my ride team. Fan­tas­tic, luc­kily I
down­loa­ded this mons­tro­sity and could skip all the shit, such as the Killers
per­for­mance. Of inte­rest was Per­fect Dark Zero. Of what I could glimpse I was
exci­ted, things loo­ked nice and really I was just happy to see that the game
phy­si­cally exis­ted. Upon reflec­tion, the graphics weren’t ama­zing and at no
point did I feel myself saying ‘wow’. Moving on to the Our​Co​lony​.net video, “a
flip­ped and goo­sed” ver­sion of the MTV show that gave a little more
infor­ma­tion; I began being exci­ted about the pros­pects of the new live
fea­tu­res, the video inte­rac­tions, the new con­tro­llers, the wire­less fea­tu­res,
the three core pro­ces­sing power and the USB device out­look. Howe­ver, being a
gamer, the prin­ci­ple error in the unvei­ling of the Xbox 360 sys­tem cove­rage was
the dis­tinct lack of GAMES. Nowhere to be seen were game trai­lers, game
foo­tage, game announ­ce­ments, game deve­lop­ment. Aside from the EA deve­lop­ments
(tweaks) and PDZ, I’ve seen nothing. If I am buying a game con­sole, the most
impor­tant thing to show me are the games, who cares about Xbox live if the only
game to sup­port it will be Mic­ro­soft Soli­taire 3D. So, while in the few days
run­ning up to E3 I was exci­ted… the thun­der has since been sto­len, by Sony.

lang=EN-GB>Playstation lang=EN-GB> 3, wel­come chang3. I was awake in the
early hours of the Bri­tish mor­ning to lis­ten to the Sony con­fe­rence and the unvei­ling
of their new sys­tem. I watched the two hour con­ven­tion with awe. I’m not a
par­ti­cu­lar Plays­ta­tion fan boy, yes I own a ps2 but
my favou­rite con­sole of the current gene­ra­tion is easily the Xbox. I wasn’t too
sto­ked about the ps3, I had sub­cons­ciously igno­red the
hype asso­cia­ted with it. In watching the con­fe­rence I had no real expec­ta­tions,
I’d heard of the cell pro­ces­sor but nothing of its capa­bi­li­ties. When the 2
tera­flop per­for­mance power of the cell, the graphics pro­ces­sing of the class=SpellE>nvidia RSX, the high band­width ram and bus, the 7 wire­less
con­tro­ller capa­bi­lity, the 1080p sup­port and the back­wards com­pa­ti­bi­lity were
announ­ced there was a glea­ming grin across my face. Then I saw Vision class=SpellE>Gran Turismo, Motorc­ross

and Kill­zone trai­lers, I saw the real time Unreal Tour­na­ment
pro­ces­sing power and I was astoun­ded. This is a con­sole I so dearly want. I have
abso­lu­tely no care for the Xbox 360, des­pite their release of the sequel to my
favou­rite game, Per­fect Dark. I honestly can’t wait to get my hands on the raw
power of this machine, wha­te­ver the price. And I may just have to get a PSP to
com­ple­ment it.

Nin­tendo
Revo­lu­tion. Not much on this yet but I’m hea­ring
some sig­ni­fi­cant buzz con­cer­ning “touch” patents, a revo­lu­tio­nary con­tro­ller
and back­wards com­pa­ti­bi­lity. I have faith in the inno­va­tion that is Nin­tendo
and I look for­ward to their future announ­ce­ments (Mario 128? Please).

Goo­gle lis­te­ned to my idea! January 7th, I sent this email to their ideas factory:

I often search for mul­ti­ple things and find the ans­wers I am loo­king for. Howe­ver, it is rare that I book­mark the pages or the search strings I ente­red after gai­ning the know­ledge I seek. My his­tory keeps only a limi­ted num­ber of searches made and sif­ting through the past pro­ves time con­su­ming. So; say I wished to once again find the page which held the infor­ma­tion I searched for over a month ago — if I did not remem­ber the site or the search term, or say the site appea­red on page 90 of results, it could once again be awfully time con­su­ming fin­ding the page again.

Any­way, this is my idea and I hope you like it.

Two days ago they relea­sed this:
Goo­gle Per­so­nal Search History

Labour –20
Con­ser­va­tive –21
	Libe­ral Democ­rat 40
	UK Inde­pen­dence Party 17
	Green 38

You should vote: Libe­ral Democ­rat

The Lib­Dems take a strong stand against tax cuts and a strong one in favour of public ser­vi­ces: they would make long-term resi­den­tial care for the elderly free across the UK, and scrap uni­ver­sity tui­tion fees. They are in favour of a ban on smo­king in public pla­ces, but would relax laws on can­na­bis. They pro­pose to change vehicle taxa­tion to be based on usage rather than ownership.

Take the test at Who Should You Vote For

Phy­sOrg: Opti­cal com­pu­ter made from fro­zen light
Scien­tists at Har­vard Uni­ver­sity have shown how ultra-cold atoms can be used to freeze and con­trol light to form the “core” — or cen­tral pro­ces­sing unit — of an opti­cal com­pu­ter. Opti­cal com­pu­ters would trans­port infor­ma­tion ten times fas­ter than tra­di­tio­nal elec­tro­nic devi­ces, smashing the intrin­sic speed limit of sili­con technology.

This new research could be a major breakth­rough in the quest to create super-fast com­pu­ters that use light ins­tead of elec­trons to pro­cess infor­ma­tion. Pro­fes­sor Lene Hau is one of the world’s fore­most autho­ri­ties on “slow light”. Her research group became famous for slo­wing down light, which nor­mally tra­vels at 186,000 miles per second, to less than the speed of a bicycle.

Pro­fes­sor Lene Hau is Gor­don McKay Pro­fes­sor of Applied Phy­sics & Pro­fes­sor of Phy­sics at Har­vard University.

This is a sta­tion based on my Audiosc­rob­bler pro­file, i.e. the site that logs what I lis­ten to, it plays songs from other people’s pro­fi­les that are simi­lar to mine. Not quite the library of LAUNCH­cast but impro­ved bitrate, no anno­ying adverts and Audiosc­rob­bler inte­gra­tion make this extre­mely good. Not quite as advan­ced as LAUNCH but it has a lot more user friendly fea­tu­res and is more com­mu­nity orien­ta­ted; groups, friends, musi­cal neigh­bors, RDF feeds, favou­rite albums, artists and songs, ava­tars and advan­ced fea­tu­res at a frac­tion of the cost.