If you like widgets, there's about to be a whole lot more of them available for use in your blog or profile page.
Sounds interesting, I put my email in to get an invite, to try this out, it may be interesting....
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If you like widgets, there's about to be a whole lot more of them available for use in your blog or profile page.
Doom and gloom for hubble fans? The Advanced Camera for Surveys is out of action with a power supply problem. NASA will spend the next week diagnosing the problem. The good news is that remain confident the camera can be fixed.NOOO, that isn't good, they definatly need to send up a shuttle to fix it! There is a connection to that telescope and to my family, because a relative of mine worked on the, I think the main lense for the Hubble Space Telescope in the early 90's. From that, I'm a proponent of wanting them to continue to fix the Hubble, because it still brings alot of high quality pictures from space still....
Five years ago one journey ended, and another began....June 22nd 2001: A small Czech game developer with the name Bohemia Interactive Studio releases their debut military action PC title Operation Flashpoint, published by Codemasters. None of us could have predicted just where the story would lead. Five years later we find ourselves looking back at the incredible journey that the game and company have since embarked on."The dream and ambition we had for a deeply involving, large-scale, military combat simulation game, a game which offered freedom of choice, large numbers of forces and vehicles clearly struck a chord with hundreds of thousands of gamers which swiftly led to the game surpassing 1 million units sold.""These last few years we've been busy working hard on our new PC technology, driven by our ongoing vision of an open and extremely large living virtual world that will find its latest incarnation in our new game Armed Assault."Says Marek Spanel, Project Leader of Operation Flashpoint and Armed Assault and co-founder of Bohemia Interactive.It seems its OFP's 5 year annaversery, and even today OFP is still a fun game to play, even though it has been out for about 5 years, thanks to the large ammount of mods.
Operation Flashpoint PC Release: 5 Year Anniversary
technorati tags:Operation Flashpoint, OFP, Video Game, PC, Gaming, PC Gaming, Bohemia Interactive
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A quick proof-of-concept Java application that lets you view the desktop of a remote computer using a just a web browser!
AN INQUIRER READER attending a conference in Japan was sat just feet away from a laptop computer that suddenly exploded into flames, in what could have been a deadly accident.
Yea, that sucks for whoever had that Dell, because its smoking, and looks burnt to a crisp. What I really hope is that this doesn't happen again, especially on an airplane, because that would be worse; at least the guy wasnt using it, it would of turned into an "explosive" report for him and the laptop. In the end it is good that noone was harmed, except for the laptop.
What's the absolute bleeding edge in Intel CPU design for the next five years? "Penryn," "Nehalem" and "Gesher"
Nintendo President Satoru Iwata revealed that Wii development kits would now cost as low as $1,732, opening the doors to even more 3rd party developers and lower game costs! For that price I might just buy one!
His project, the "Embedded Secure Network Bridge" has already attracted some attention; not bad for a sixteen year old.Now thats one talented person, and It sounds that his future is set on a good track. He must be a very talented programmer at the age of 16, and with that type of talent, he should go far in the computer hardware industry. I wonder how long until we see encryption via hardware appear commercially....
After a three week saga, that involved a taxi, a stolen sidekick, a girl from corona, a man from Manhattan, and thousands of internet fans, the stolen sidekick saga concludes.
This is my own blog entry but I feel it is important enough digg because it could be such a massive deal. Looks like telemarketing has finally invaded Skype and may already being seriously hampering its connectivity and quality.
"It sounds like something from a science fiction film--a doomsday vault carved into a frozen mountainside on a secluded Arctic island. But Norway's ambitious project is on its way to becoming reality Monday when construction begins on the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, designed to house as many as 3 million of the world's crop seeds."Seems sorta doomsday paranoid to put all the worlds crop seeds, though, in reality, anything could happen to them, or a species of grain may dissapear. In reality it may be a good theing that Norway is doing it, we'll just have to see.
TVUNetworks let's you watch TV for free from your PC...channels include ABC and ESPNThis is at least at the moment, free, and it includes some channels including ABC, ESPN, ESPN2, and CNN. The system seems to be p2p based, with some of the bandwith being distributed via other viewers. Though the bad thing is that for at least ESPN2, there is at least 30 seconds to one minute delay, so it wont really be truly live. Besides that it is a neat service.
While it's obvious that an Xbox 360 would have higher energy demands then a Playstation 1, the curious question is by how much? Even more importantly is the question of whether your console might be costing you money while you sleep. Preposterous you say? Actually quite the opposite!Well, people who own Xbox 360 might want to have there console unplugged when not in use when the read the ammount of wattage it uses in standby. This is a very intersting article that brings up points of how much power your console is really using.
GamePolitics has confirmed with her staff that Governor Kathleen Babineaux Blanco signed HB1381 into law last night. Under terms of the legislation, it takes effect immediately. The bill defines violent video games as "harmful to minors" in much the same way as pornography.He is really annoying, and with the government officals not understanding what needs to be acutally done to help this, they are just going to restrict the freedom of the developers of games. The raitings of games were just as a guideline, not to be a law or such, this is just all driven from both the GTA issue as well as Oblivion. If noone comes into focus that can truly help senators and representitives of state and of the national government, then this is going to continue to happen without resistance...
Entirely new footage from the upcoming first person shooter Crysis. Developed by Crytek, the makers of the award-winning Far Cry. A must view for any serious gamer or anyone with an interest in where 2007 will take gaming.Now this game is looking good, completely destructable environments, ablity to punch down walls and people using a "strength" mode, customizable weapons and more! I'm definatley looking forward to this game...

The design is pretty simple and uses gravity for downward movement, so you don't have to worry about a motor slamming the head into the desk.It may look crude, but I think its cool!
Here are a pair of homemade headphones, all the way from the Takoradi Technical Institute, Takoradi, Ghana.Now this is neat, if your a DIY person this may be in your alley, for anyone else, the instructions to make your own headphones seem pretty simple, but the end result looks neat also!

"Got a box of old hard drives doing nothing? Put them to work housing your new computer components."Now this guy was creative, using old hard disk platters as a decoration/case mod, somebody really does have some time on there hands, and alot of spare hard drives :).
Don't get all PETA on us, we're just the messenger, but a University of Texas scientist has grown a living "brain" in a petri dish using 50,000 nerve cells from a dog. We're sure there are many noble things to be done with a brain in a dish, but this scientist has instead opted for a bit of Quake 3: Arena. Sure, he says it's all about "how the brain makes decisions based on enormous amounts of real time information," so that "we can design adaptable computer systems capable of better pattern recognition." But we know he just wanted a better alternative to getting completely pwned in Online multiplayer. The brain is hooked up to the game via 120 electrodes, and while at first the neurons in the dish are separate and unconnected, over time they start to naturally form connections and fragging like only a brain in a dish can. Be sure to check videos of the Quake 3 action, which track the progress from 4 hours of learning all the way to 9 days of learning.Interesting.....though I also went to the offical page of the experiemnt, which shows videos of its progress, and it seems to be improving quite abit, after 9 days it does pretty good with combat. What would be neat if they would allow people to actually fight the brain in quake, to give it some more varied learning from other human competitors. The offical article can be found at this location.
Dog brain in a dish plays Quake 3: Arena - Engadget
technorati tags:Quake 3, Gaming, PC, PC Gaming, Brain, Dog Nerves
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Tokyo's futuristic image as the world's most technologically advanced broadband internet-enabled city is under attack from a vicious but decidedly low-tech foe: the crow.Now this is hilarious, the most simple crows are bringing down Tokyo's infanstructure.....I didn't think crows would be that fixated in "eating" fiber optic...
"They can be shocked for behaviors including ’failure to maintain a neat appearance’, ‘stopping work for more than 10 seconds’, ‘interrupting others’, ‘nagging’, ‘whispering and/or moving conversation away from staff’, ‘slouch in chair’ ''I've heard of this place before, of them using techniques to treat disorders including Asburgers Syndrome, or Autism, and I was disgusted when I read this on wikipedia. I personaly am AS, and I'm even more disgusted by what they are doing to help them, including shock therapy, and threating them with various things. Now with public, and viral networking, they will finally be attacked for the things that they have done, because people with Autism and Aspergers syndrome are still human, and should be treated as such, not to be tortured.
Apple's Windows page on their 'Get a Mac' site now mentions Parallels Desktop instead of Boot Camp.Odd that they would shelve boot camp, because parallels can only do so much, while boot camp allows native boothing, so GPU and other things that are not able to be emulated well, work better, though the trade off from that is that you have to reboot, obviously. Maybe they have something under there sleeve with parallels, we'll just have to wait and see what they are doing.
Some crazy and useful computer setups.Some of these look just plain weird, and there are other set ups that look really neat, especially the super Quake 3 setup. There is even a computer in a whisky bottle! This article is definatly worth a look.
The Chairman isn't always right.A good article, that tells of the many microsoft products that floped, with, you guessed it, BOB at number one, and a whole slew of others down the list.
While Microsoft's outgoing Chief Software Architect Bill Gates has been ahead of the curve in predicting many technology trends, he also has backed some notorious flops.
We already know that the entertainment industry loves to try to get people to pay for every possible use of their content. Remember the filmmaker who almost couldn't release his documentary because there was a four and a half second clip of The Simpsons playing in the background in one scene? It seems that with the rise of user-generated video, a lot more people are learning about the fun of licensing rights. The RIAA is apparently sending out cease-and-desist letters to YouTube users who dare to put up videos of things such as themselves dancing to music they haven't licensed.
Neowin.net - The RIAA Says No Dancing To Music On YouTube
technorati tags:Neowin, RIAA, Muisc, Youtube, Dancing, Web
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June 15, 2006 - S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl is one of those games that's going to have a lot to prove when it's finally released. In development before we wrote our first article on the game back in 2002, the game suffered delay after delay and had pretty much disappeared off of the radar until this year's E3, where THQ demonstrated, behind closed doors, what's been done with the game. We were lucky enough to be invited to participate in the showing. Unfortunately, we had to wait until today to share our thoughts. The sad news is that the engine, one of the original selling points, while certainly still decent, isn't quite as lovely as it once was. The good news is the game looks to be on track, thanks to a little guidance from a THQ producer more familiar with working on large-scale products. Features have been shuffled in a positive way, goals have been realigned, and entertainment has become the focus. The most painful thing was having to sit four feet from a screen and watch someone else play instead of getting our hands on the game ourselves.A very intersting reviwe, getting into the details of a game that his sort of gone off the radar for many years, because I remember when they were saying that STALKER was at the pinnacle of graphics technology, and that was when the Radeon 9700 was mainstream. From the description of the game, it still looks promising, though there are some factors that could lead to its downfall..
IGN: S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl Preview
technorati tags:S.T.A.L.K.E.R, Games, PC Gaming, Preview
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Paul Stamatiou reviews the latest beta from Flock and even shows a few screencasts of nifty features. It's definitely something worth checking out.I've been using the new flock beta, and it is very promising and is worth it if you use flickr. I honestly perfered useing the orignal flock blogging tool, but the one that they have now is actually stable, which makes me interested because, now I can select text and tell it to blog it and put tags into it, which blogger does not have. So overall if you use many of the web 2.0 sevices, it is worth getting flickr.
GamePro.com recently compiled a list of the most influential, revolutionary, and just downright ground-breaking video game controllers ever released. Did your favorite controller make the list?Intersting collection of controllers, alot of them are recent including the Wii remote, the XBOX small controller, and more. Its worth a look.
In addition to adding a speaker, there have been numerous usability changes to the Nintendo Wii remote, and the overall shape and size has been tweaked a lot as well. Check out these overlapping photographs.A good comparison of how the original prototype Revolution controler has evolved into the more mature, streamline Wii Remote. It is worth it to look at the comparison shots.
Which ones are your favorites?An interesting article, though many of the items could be considered novelties (Like Toshiba’s Micro Hard Drive), and others are neat. Though, I woudn't want a micro flash drive, I would definatley loose it easily :).
It can sureley be hard to see the connection between heavenly buns, some crazy people from Stockholm, a bunch of retards in a car and dinner from McDonalds, right?But just stay calm and read on, and you will find answers to your questions!On Wednsesday June 7:th around lunch, we all arrived to DICE:s office on Maria Skolgata 83 to, as many of you already knew, test an early alpha-version of Battlefield 2142.
BF2142.se - BF2142.se previews BF2142
technorati tags:Gaming, Battlefield Franchise, BF2142, PC Gaming, Preview
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According to latest EGMVery interesting revelation, if it is true. If it is not a rumor, then its one of the many nails that will be hammered into the coffin that is the PS3. From many articles that I've read, the trend of what analyists and many major tech news sites is that the PS3 isn't going to do so well, but we will have to wait and see about that.
"The MacBook effectively defies it's own ancestry and surpasses all anticipated performance levels for a sub-14" laptop. It has even outclassed the MacBook Pro on more than one occasion. Best of all, the MacBook is one of the most affordable high-performance laptops on the market today. "Good for Apple, that there laptops are getting these great reviews. Though there is one that that I'm curious about, is when they are going to release the new power macs with the intel chips, they have been pretty quiet about that. Though I heard something either on TWiT or on the web that it may sometime in the fall come out, though I'm not sure.
For the week ending May 28 Japanese hardware sales figures show that the Nintendo DS outsold the PSP by a factor of 10. The DS Lite sold 295,103 units, while the PSP managed to sell 27,191.It still bugs me that there are still people who praise there PSP for certain things that is its weaknesses. Actually, the only good thing it has is the large homebrew community, and easy installing of homebrew (with the right firmware), the DS on the other hand is slightly harder, requiring certain hardware, though not that hard. I'm personally a die hard DS person, though the PSP was an interesting product. Though in this battle of the portable consoles, it seems that Innovation has beat pure horsepower, for now at least.
TwitchGuru explores the video game industry's development hell to find the greatest games never published.Very interesting article mentioning about many games that have not come out. Sam and Max: "Freelance Police" was one of the games on that list, as it was good that it did get on the list, as well as Duke Nukem Forever. There are some interesting other games, including something called Sim Mars, which I didn't know existed, apparently it was under development while Maxis was being aquired by EA in 00'. I'm not going to spoil any more about the article, and some of the other interesting titles that didn't either come out, or come to the US....
Roughly a quarter of U.S. high schools require students to take computer science courses, due in part to a misperceive that computers are for video games and surfing the Internet, says a new report.A sad statistic to see, and I've already been aware of this, from both my AP Computer Science A teacher, and from average scores here in the US on the exam. I'm personally grateful that the high school I go to has a computer Science program beyond that of other schools, though its still locked into the AP guidelines in a sense, but not completely. Sadly what we need is to shake up this issue, if we can get some good programmers to come out of United States, to get rid of this stereotype once and for all. I'm hoping to become one those, with my obsession of programming, as well as my other talents, not to brag or anything. This will take more than one good programmer to bring it up, and if this issue isn't brought up, its going to be like the Cold War all over again, just instead of the Russians, other countries have more talented programmers, as well as better mathematics and other fields we are lacking in. If we do not wake up to this, the US will not be the technical country it once was. That era brought us Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Linus Torvald, and other great people, that could be attributed to the past of us trying to out educate children better than the Soviets. Unfortunately we've been lazy and have not kept up to those high standards, though that isn't always true. The high school that I go to has strong math programs, as well as a strong CS program, though the math and the CS could be stronger. Unfortunately if the teachers and administers of high schools do not wake up and understand that if people aren't trained, even decently to use computers, and get people who are interested in them, involved with programming, we won't continue to be a tech hub, Japan, for example, will. This issue isn't something to shove back, nor should it be ignored, we need to bring this into the open and solve this quickly, so we don't loose our lead in the Technology Industry.
Today at 3 pm PST they are releasing their first public beta version, available for Windows, Mac and Linux machines.
Nintendo released an E3 CD that has a Wii on the cover with the front flap open. It looks like there is some sort of eye behind the slot!Well It seems Nintendo is actually following one tech fad, video cameras in consoles. With the Xbox360's camera, and the reportedly PSP upgraded version with a camera, Nintendo has apparently jointed the ranks of consoles with webcams. The only question that hasn't truely been answered is what will it be used for?
Extracts from a British newspaper about the people that make iPods. One plant has 200,000 workers!Wow....sometimes people just don't understand that the things that we tried to overcome during the turn of the century, have now just seemed to move over to third world countries, though there conditions may not be as bad as the workers of the past, but to the standards of today, there conditions are still not great.
Blizzard, in an effort to crack down on cheaters and gold farmers, announced that they banned another 30,000 accounts from the game last month. Will their efforts prevail, or is the problem too big to handle?Hmm, Blizzard has been critisized by there means of catching these cheaters, because of there use of a program called warden, which runs on people who play WoW, and scans the active processes to see if any program are suspicious. Though with the huge popularity of WoW, or any game of this type, they are bound to have a decent ammount of gold grinders, as well as cheaters, many mmo's have had this problem, inclusing Star Wars Galaxies, thought not at this extreme.
Japanese Airline (JAL) is now offering passengers DS Lites to pass time on flights. The DS Lites's WiFi capabilities have been gutted as wireless devices' use is prohibited on planes.Now that is nifty, enjoy your flight and get to play there free DS's. Though I've taken my DS, and played on it on an airplane, and they didn't stop me from using it....though, there will be an airline soon (I forget who exactly) who will have WiFi in there planes, now thats something I can't wait for.
Another post about "Digg Spam", which is a continuation of the series of posts on options and reactions to what many, and I have been doing since the feature appeared on digg...
When davechan asked his sister for a Macbook for his birthday he got what he wished for, sort of. The height and width are actual size but sadly it doesn't run Mac OS X. Mmmmmmm Macbook.
There are really only two reasons these sorts of blogs exist - advertising and pagerank. By taking Digg's content and putting their own ads around it they can suck a little traffic and earn from ad clicks. With any pagerank they aquire they can boost their own legitimate or other spam sites.
Here are 50 digg users' and their spam blogs. :)
Here is a tip to get rid of these undeletable files.
Using a specially designed skull cap fitted with electrodes, scientists are now able to control a computer, and write characters onto the screen.
As Dr. Brunner concentrates on the "B" of "bonjour" in a keyboard-like grid of letters and symbols taking up half the screen, a computer randomly highlights lines of characters in rapid succession.
Each time the row -- vertical or horizontal -- containing the letter 'B' is illuminated, Brunner's brain emits a slightly stronger signal. It takes the computer about 15 seconds to figure out what letter he is looking at. The system is doubly adaptive, with both the software and the person using it becoming more efficient over time.
There are really only two reasons these sorts of blogs exist - advertising and pagerank. By taking Digg's content and putting their own ads around it they can suck a little traffic and earn from ad clicks. With any pagerank they aquire they can boost their own 'legitimate' or other spam sites.
These blogs are of no or negative value to Digg, and just dilute the value of Digg's unique content. Search engines generally penalise sites for having duplicate content, there's no guarantee G/Y/M will find Digg's original version first.
Here are 50 chumps who cannot write content for themselves. :)
The film starts on a picnic blanket in Chicago and zooms out 10x every 10 seconds until the entire universe is visible. And then they zoom all the way back down into the nucleus of an atom. A timeless classic.It is a classic, I've actually saw it this year in Physics, and it is a neat video. It may be old, but it has that element of neatness of going to the ends of the universe and back. If you haven't seen it, shame on you! Its on both Google Video and Youtube, so check it out!
The Norwegian Consumer Ombudsman has ruled that the Apple iTunes service breaks the law, and has given the company two weeks to fix the problem.
Almost in the wrong place at the wrong time...
As most people know, Tass is getting married tomorrow.. So Tami and I run down to the mall to get clothes for the wedding (all our stuff is still in storage from our house fire).
We run down to the cingular store to replace my phone and hit JC Penny's. We are just inside the Penny's door when we hear a gun shot. I tell Tami to hit the floor (she doesn't of course - not realizing it was a gun).
A few seconds later we hear another shot that was A LOT louder. Now she hits the floor. hehe
This all went down about 30 feet from us.
What happened....
2 guys get in a fight in the mall.. right in front of Penny's and the arcade. There are tons of people and small children around. One guy pulls a hand gun and shoots at the guy that he was fighting. Now the guy was running away though the crowd in the center of the mall. The shooter hits the other man he was fighting. A Sherrif was having lunch in the mall and pulled his gun. The shooter turns to go after other kids that was with the guy he shot.
The sherrif one shots the guy in the head. Killing him instantly..
I think that sherrif should get a medal. The potential for this to have been real bad. His qucik thinking I feel saved lives.