Reviews
C|Net News has an interesting blog post highlighting Spore from EA Games. This game has been in the works for a couple of years now and its unique gameplay and concept have stoked the fires of anticipation for some time. However, one of the biggest things to come out with its release has not been its intriguing gameplay, but the strategies used to curb piracy. Spore uses a anti-copy protection scheme called SecuROM, which is considered by some to be much more than just an anti-copy protection scheme, but system subversive malware.
The controversy seems to seems to revolve around EA's...
It seems that the arena of search has been relatively quiet since the search wares of the late 90s, so it has been a welcome surprise to see someone else rise up to challenge the search status quo since Google rose to the top. What's interesting is that Cuil, the new 'contextual' search engine, hails from Stanford lineage, like its Google predecessor. Even still, it's gray and blue on black color motif tries to distance itself both as much as possible from the giant. This only serves as a distraction, since it displays results in 2 or...
Today I added another Apple product to the ranks of computer junk I have. After adding upgrading my wireless access point to WPA, I found it to be sluggish, and at times, outright unresponsive. Sometimes it would take up to two minutes for my iPod to connect! I attributed this to the access point itself. The previous firmware revision for it didn't support WPA, and the latest (and likely last) firmware update for it didn't seem very stable. It all came to a head yesterday when I accidentally got locked out of my house and I couldn't join my access...
There are a few movie franchises that have certain nostalgic value to me over the years. Star Wars (the originals of course), to name one, the other being Indiana Jones.
I remember when I was young and Raiders of the Lost Ark came out on VHS. My parents rented it along with a VCR machine (yeah, can you imagine renting a DVD player?), and we watched it at home. It was a pretty cool movie for a young kid, until the very end. Watching the bad guys' faces melt, explode, and vaporize wasn't a delightful affair, but all in all it...
It's been well over a month since my last post. I've been preparing a new home, moving in, getting situated, etc.
CNet News has a good article on how Microsoft Windows needs a new start. I've been saying this since Vista came out, so it's nice to see someone in the industry speaking out on it.
To put it succinctly, Microsoft needs to start over. Windows has so much feature bloat that it really detracts from the experience. Windows XP pretty much had everything anyone could want as far as features, and if MS had built a new presentation layer just for...
With the announcement that Firefox 3 had entered release candidate status, I finally decided to install it and check it all out.
Installation is pretty simple and for those who are already Firefox aficionados, there are only a few subtle, but powerful differences in this new edition of one of the best browsers out there.
One of the key differences in this latest release is FF's new look. Mozilla made a concerted effort to make the browser feel integrated with whichever OS it is installed. This means that FF on OS X *looks* like a native Carbon app. FF on XP looks...
I've had an iPod Touch for a little while now, and have found it to do pretty much everything that I had hoped for it. It didn't take me very long before I jailbroke it, and the fact of the matter is, you'll never maximize the potential of it until you do. Apple's core set of applications leave the device wanting, but jailbreaking it brings out all the things that peoplle want in a mobile device, especially one as innovative as this.
I bought the device primarily to surf the net. It does It fantastically with the caveats of...
Today I was able to sell my old 80GB iPod to subsidize the cost of buying a new 16GB iPod Touch. I'd been stewing ever since it came out last September, but really didn't get too excited until the SDK was announced earlier this year.
The one thing I really wish this thing had is Flash player. Many of the sites I frequent have Flash videos, so it kinda defeats the purpose of surfing the Internet without. Oh well, this is a pretty sweet piece of hardware, and I look forward to cruising the 'nEt with it.
I've been able to get my hands (through legitimate means) on a copy of Visual Studio 2008 Professional Edition. I installed it this evening and wanted to take it for a spin.
Initial reaction: just the same as VS2005. One of my biggest gripes about the VS environment is its complete, utter lack of getters/setters generation. Sure, you can right click on each of your private fields and generate them, but that takes a long time, not to mention that it places the property at the top of your code and clutters it up. This should have been fixed in Visual...
Guitar Hero III has indisputably been a smash hit on all three of the major game consoles, but one glaring mistake has tainted the Wii release of the acclaimed music game.
Apparently, Activision decided to ship the game with mono sound, not the advertised Dolby Pro Logic. How could they not have known??? Not that the game is any less fun, it just doesn't sound as good. Activision had admitted to the problem, but it wasn't until last month that they announced that a replacement disc would be in the works sometime 'early 2008'. What? A replacement...
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