Recent Comments:
Virtual WoW pet sells out [update: the Monk is back!] {Joystiq}
Nov 11th 2009 12:38PM Does this pet offer some buff or advantage to the player, or is it purely cosmetic? Is it transferable? Is there any balance issue?
Viacom: The Beatles: Rock Band sales strong, overall RB growth slow {Joystiq}
Nov 5th 2009 12:26AM It may sway your decision, if you haven't heard yet, that Lego RockBand can transfer its songs into RockBand 2, just like RockBand 1, meaning that your RockBand 2 music ecosystem will be around 150 songs from those three titles together.
Spore Creature Creator builder creates iPhone game about destroying {Joystiq}
Oct 29th 2009 10:02PM I spoke with Chaim a few times while I was at Maxis. He was a very nice guy.
He also removed any pressure I might have felt to "dress up," so to speak. Whenever I felt that my wrinkled t-shirt and sandals might not be cutting it, he'd walk in barefoot and wearing pajamas.
Albatron's 42 inches of optical touch monitor get examined on video {Engadget}
Oct 28th 2009 12:35PM If these are cmos sensors, does that mean that you can theoretically use this for Surface applications?
Microsoft borrows Apple Store blueprint, manager (video) {Engadget}
Oct 26th 2009 11:48AM For those of us in the know, i.e. connections to Apple Retail, there's been a none-too-subtle concerted effort to on the part of M$ retail to actively court away managers, sales staff, and geniuses to work at their stores, with additional bonuses if you can recruit your former teammates as well.
M$ pays quite a bit better, and I personally know of at least one mgr lvl employee who has switched over, and several more (non mgr) who have have been approached.
So, it really is not just one manager, its a real drive to poach away Apple's talent. Makes good business sense, and might actually get Apple to pay better, or start promoting internally (which they're also bad at).
Uruguay becomes first nation to provide a laptop for every primary school student {Engadget}
Oct 18th 2009 1:30PM The india initiative was some combination of a mistranslation, and/or a deception, and/or grossly unrealistic expectations.
After XO wanted to be the first sub-$100 laptop, and clocked in around $180, Some Indian group decided they would make a $10-12 laptop. Then, they hemmed and hawed a few times, re-estimated the costs up, and changed the actual hardware specs.
What the ended up with is a small desktop box costing around $70-80 that is a lot like the Geode reference designs AMD made. You need to plug it in, and bring your own keyboard, mouse, and monitor. How this would be useful for students who can't afford a computer to start with is beyond me.
Stateside PS3 sales up 300% following Slim introduction {Engadget}
Sep 13th 2009 1:57PM Wow, you guys have some crazy currency that's worth almost $4 per unit? Can you get a McDonalds value meal for like 1 KD and change?
Stateside PS3 sales up 300% following Slim introduction {Engadget}
Sep 13th 2009 1:54PM @aaronage: For me, it was never about not having a choice, its about having the best gaming console. Xbox360 is still clearly the best for games. PS3 is clearly the best for certain kinds of media box functionality, namely bluray, although X360's streaming, store, and netflix more than out-match the PS3 in those areas. It is clear to many now that the PS3 will never out-shine the X360 in terms of pure gaming, although this was clearer to us in the industry from an earlier point in time.
If I wanted some sort of Hybrid media box with gaming, I might consider a PS3, since I don't have a windows media box to feed an X360, although my media is entirely handled by a MacMini (and, I worked for a company that makes media center solutions for Macs for 2.5 years, so I have professional expertise in the field of media boxen).
And for the most part, I am ambivalent on the PS3 taking off. There's this very real dichotomy that having a "Clear Winner" in console gaming is good for games, and bad for gamers. Developers can standardize on a single platform, the titles are stronger, and the development costs go down resulting in more 'cream' on top.
At the same time, whoever ends up at the top has the latitude to go and be the biggest prick the world has ever seen. Sony was this prick for years, and they've been loath to give up their prickishness even when their console was not on top. And, I think that people will agree that M$ needs no encouragement or rationale to embody this prick persona, and will deliver it every time regardless of their position in the particular industry.
But the point is that having two platforms vie for first place will be bad for games, but good for gamers. Console prices stay lean, console makers will aggressively add features and value to entice gamers to their platform. Developers, on the other hand, end up having to deal with exclusivity, cross platform titles, and higher development costs and complications that make games incrementally worse.
Boston prep school nixes all the books in its library, replaces them with 18 e-readers {Engadget}
Sep 6th 2009 2:50PM Dude, eReaders and portable computers can completely replace books. I've got a few thousand pages of case books for classes, but about 1/3 to 1/2 of our reading is online, or pdf/.ppt/.doc files. The convenience of online resources, compared to carrying around 20 lbs of books. I'd love to have all ebooks for all of my class materials.
You do realize that you can annotate, highlight, link, search with digital files. It's cleaner and more readable than marked-up books (in my case, as my hand writing sucks). My ophthalmologist even told me that reading from a display is better for my eyes than printed pages because print is more near-field and causes more strain.
Report: Only 35 songs from Guitar Hero World Tour work with GH5 [update] {Joystiq}
Sep 1st 2009 10:48PM @Brodo: I'm hugely in favor of RB over GH, but with the "Beatles" title, RB is just giving up on their inter-operability, creating a segregated experience with a segregated track store to boot, I bought HMX's games, and I bought their kit because I agreed with the way that they do things, and now they're giving me a big fat finger in the face. So, even though I know that RockBand: Beatles is not exactly a sequel to RB2, the way it works out practically is this:
GHWT -> GH5: 35 songs carry over, or 35 songs per game change in series.
RB1 -> RB2 -> RB:B: 55 songs carry over, or 27.5 songs per game change in series, and I'm back to having two rhythm games I'm playing instead of one cohesive musical ecosystem. They just took their biggest, most salient advantage, and threw it away. I can't wait for RB 3 to see how much dumber HMX can manage to make it.
