About a week after I got a new title – and a new gamertag – I went ahead and ordered new business cards… I don’t use them very often, but they are still a requirement for conferences and the like. It was a rehash of the existing business cards: XBOX logo with “MGS – Tools and Technology” as the group. They came in a day or two after we go re-org’d into a new group with a new name:
XNA Game Platform Extensions or XGPX for short.
The fallout…
Continue reading xna
Can I talk about this one yet? It seems that CompUSA has been selling it early and Major Nelson is talking about it so I’ll take some liberty since I also got my copy a couple of days early. And while there’s been a lot of hoopla about the invite to the Halo 3 beta via the game, something needs to be said about the game itself…
Wait, lemme put on my flame proof suit…
I like Crackdown better than Gears of War.
Continue reading Crackdown
A first look? Months after the initial release? Fine. My first look. I held off buying one because I was on the fence over it – a special offer for MGS employees sucked me right in. I picked up the drive earlier this week, but I didn’t get around to getting a HD-DVD movie until today.
What are my thoughts?
Continue reading Xbox 360 HD-DVD Drive: A First Look
QJ.net: Halo-style Matchmaking for ALL 360 games recommended – If you ask Phil Spencer, Microsoft Game Studios’ head of game development, he’ll tell you that he wants every new Xbox 360 game to have Matchmaking. So 1UP asked him, and they also asked him why, of all the games on the Xbox, Halo 2’s Matchmaking service outclassed them all. Spencer gave a sensible answer: Bungie spent a lot of time on their Matchmaking code, and it works like a dream. Lucky them.
Heaven knows that I’ve suggested this for ages.
Yahoo! Messenger: Built from the ground up specifically for Microsoft Windows Vista, this all-new version combines the reliable and easy-to-use features you’ve always loved from Yahoo! Messenger with the cutting-edge experience of this new operating system.
Holy crap – it looks like it might not suck!
Continue reading Rare Comment
Well that didn’t take long.
From http://psp.connect.com:
See the car? Looks familiar, some how… in fact, I remembered this: Project Gotham 3 Screen shot via http://www.bizarrecreations.com/ for the Xbox 360.
Sony… Sony… you’re t3h suck. Shame on you for passing off someone else’s game for your own, especially when you claim the PS3 is so much better than the 360…
Pwned.
In a nutshell… iTV is right around the corner as Apple TV – is to iTunes what the 360 is to Media Center with 10GB more on the HDD. In fact, I don’t think it can download from iTunes directly – like the 360 can – but it does stream from iTunes directly…
The iPhone is live and looks pretty slick, but I refuse to go ga-ga over it until I see it in person which won’t be until June unless Cingular fucks it up. I like the spirit behind the design. If I can’t sync over the air, it’s a deal breaker. The multi-finger thingy has promise but historically I haven’t like touchscreens due to fingerprints, grease and icky experiences. Love the idea of a sensor that turns off the touchscreen; should help with taps in the pocket. Dig on the idea of widgets on the phone.
If it was a proper iPod – meaning no phone and no wireless – at $250, I’d be ordering it now and selling my PSP. The PSP? 4GB Memory Stick Duo is like $400. How can you justify a memory accessory that is more than the damned device?! Anyway…
Other things of interest: no Core Duo 2 in the Mac mini, no mention of Leopard [should be called a slip but never will me], no mention of iLife/iWork [historically a ship, but won’t be called that] and no music only players.
At least my portfolio is glowing green for a change!
Thanks to a couple of those high powered energy drinks I’ve had 6000% of recommended daily amount of Vitamin B12 over 12 hours. Not only am I very awake for class tonight but I think I’m glowing.
WHoO!!1!eleventhousand!!1
Make: “I bought one of the Sony eBook readers and wanted a way to read my blogs and other documents offline. So I wrote a tool using a variety of Perl modules to transform RSS feeds into LaTeX and a style sheet to make it formatted for the small screen.”
Have you seen the Sony eBook Reader? The local Borders has had one on display for a while… I think I’m the only one to have noticed it, though. I have to say, it’s a pretty slick device. Great screen, looks just like a piece of paper, and a nice size device. First thing from Sony to support a media format in addition to MS/MS Duo in… what, years? Maybe a decade. The problem? Content.
Not that putting blogs on it isn’t neat… it would be really cool to do all of the data updates wirelessly, but that is out of the scope of a typical e-book reader, IMHO. Personally, I’d love to carry just this on a flight or to class, rather than lugging around a book. Add to that the ability to search in real time, and it’s an incredible tool. The problem is content: publishers have a bigger bug up their ass about electornic distrubtion than Hollywood or the RIAA does – that’s one huge bug but it’s still there. Well that, and if yer battery dies mid-flight or mid-class, yer screwed, but I could even live with that…
Consequently, it’s a totally useless but well designed and well conceived device.
Axiotron: First Tablet Mac Solution to be Unveiled at Macworld by Axiotron and OWC […] The ModBook is a high-end slate-style notebook computer solution, which was designed in California by Axiotron’s team of German and American engineers and will be available in the U.S. through an exclusive joint-venture arrangement between Axiotron and Other World Computing.
Interesting product… not because it’s an OSX based tablet – I type faster than I write – but the question is what does Apple do? After all, you legally can’t run OSX on any hardware except for Apple-made hardware. Doesn’t that make this entire product “illegal”? Or does this mean that Apple is going to allow OSX to run on any hardware, announcing it at Macworld this year?
I’m betting Apple sues before the end of the month.
Do you really need T9 – or in the case of the T-Mobile Dash xT9 – when you have a phone/PDA that sports a full thumb-keyboard? I say “no”. Problem is that on my Dash, xT9 was already turned on. With a “normal” phone, you can change text input modes by pressing and/or holding the * or # key. I tried that with the Dash but to no avail: that switched between cAPS lOCK and NumLock. Would living with xT9 be so bad? Yeah, in my opinion: with it I have to watch the screen and press space or “select” to accept a word: it makes typing awkward and slow…
A quick look online reports that you can switch between xT9 and alphabet mode by tapping ALT + SPACE – whoo! Score!
RedVsBlue: PSA “Let’s All Go To The Movies” If you go before 4pm tickets are only $75 for seniors
I’ll be honest: it’s not their best PSA but the picked four annoying movie behaviors that I’ve Ranted about before which – along with their choice of on screen movie selection – earns them some Rants related lub.
Lotta churn in Randy’s house lately – thought I’d recap the problems and solutions that I’ve been through over the last couple of weeks…
Continue reading Game Console Round Up
Talked to Bose today about my probably issues with my speaker system… The one that is out of warranty and will have to be shipped to Framingham, MA for service. It’s big and it weighs about 35 pounds. Ugh. The UPS Store is going to hate me.
However, the good news is the level of support – no stress at all during the call… the convo went like this: I said that I might have cable troubles. They told me they’d send me out new cables, free of charge. I said that I didn’t have a box to ship the subwoofer in; they’re sending me a box with the cables. I asked how much it would be to repair something like this; they said flat fee of $75, no matter what is wrong with it. And you get a one year warranty with it. Booyah!
Props to Bose for great [and rather cheap post warranty] support!