Monthly Archive for April, 2006

Weekend Web News

Published
by
GrantGochnauer
on April 22, 2006
in News from the Web
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Apple to release iPod Nano 8GB and 10GB versions

Google Search Cheat Sheets. VERY COOL!!

New BMW 3 series revealed
http://www.automotoportal.com/media/images/vijesti/060421006.jpg

RIAA can’t stop it’s terror! Goes after family once they lost the case!

More details on AOL’s MySpace Killer

Scientists narrow in on genetic cause for Obesity. Now just give me that quick fix! thanks!

They always say that most innovation happens in the sex field first.

Cringley predicts new kernal in Mac OSX 10.5
Why? Speed. Quite simply, a monolithic kernel like the one used in Linux or most of the other Open Source Unix clones is inherently two to three times faster for integer calculations than the Mach microkernel presently used in OS X 10.4. That’s why the world hasn’t embraced xServes, for example, because for simple web or database service they are slower and serve fewer users.

Humorous: The most manly ways to die

Lucas Arts shows off what “next-gen” really means with their new physics/AI system

Google pondering idea of charging for API usage?

Friday YouTube round-up

Published
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GrantGochnauer
on April 21, 2006
in You Tube
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Titanic 2: Too the Surface

Cooking with Liquid Oxygen

Dry ice in a bottle in a pool

I have SERIOUS gas problems

$10,000 car wax. I’ll take 2

XBOX 360 Mini-review

Published
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GrantGochnauer
on April 21, 2006
in Mini reviews
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Thanks to my buddy Riyad for this AWESOME write-up about his experiences with the XBOX 360.

—————–

Ok so I got this: http://www.walmart.com/catalog/product.do?product_id=4213561

In the mail earlier this week and have had what I think is enough time with it to do a mini. The 4 games I got were Oblivion, Burnout Revenge or Revolution I forgot which, Fight Night 3 and DOA 4. Right off the bat I am going to say that not only does Fight Night 3 look f-ing AWESOME, it’s a blast to play if you take the time to learn the fight controls. Kelly and I beat the sh*t out of each other the first night for like 2 hours, she knocked me out twice and I only knocked her down once… I’m not a man aparently.

I went online the next day and fought a few people, that was awesome.
I have the headset so talking with them was fun and screaming profanities into their faces.

Overall the Operating System on the 360 is tight, it’s really smooth, good looking and all that stuff. I would say at first glance… like first 5min type glance it is information overload… but you learn how each section is laid out in like 1min and then you understand it.

XBox live is cool but the actual online play per game doesn’t seem iron clad. I had to reattempt connections to Fight Nights servers twice before getting in… it can also be really confusing. Lots of controls and you don’t realize that pressing the on/off button on the controller gets you back to the “Dashboard” at first.

I also installed Windows Media Connect on my PC so I could share over pictures and music, that’s tight but movies don’t share, I guess the fags want you to have a goddamn media center PC or some sh*t, oh well.

One thing I don’t like about the XBox OS is this whole concept of “sign in”… there are like 3 different kinds of sign in and I have no goddamn clue what they mean. You “sign in” when you turn on your controller, and that’s a separate name from the sign in you use when you login to Live, and then there is of course another type of sign in for each game, or preference loading… basically it means you can’t just turn the thing on and smash buttons until you are playing… there is this new level of “accounting” that you have to care about all the sudden. While I’m not fond of it, I don’t know of a way around it now that these console systems offer online play and accounts and sh*t.

Controls are easier to learn then I thought they were. Obvlivion is requiring the steepest learning curve right now, and I wish there was a gamma setting for dark dungeon scenes cause my TV isn’t HD, but that’s minor. The game rocks.

The console performs well, but you can hear it when it’s on. If you are used to fanless systems like Dream Casts, Nintendos and stuff like that, this will seem “strangely computeresque” to you. Is it loud? No way, but white noise doesn’t bother me. My computer tower is like 5x as loud as this. It just sounds like a little small form factor computer with a single PSU fan in it or something… it’s probably just as loud as a Shuttle. I don’t know HOW loud it can get though, some folks said it can get insanely loud, but then again microsoft will fix that I think under warrenty.

Over all, if you look at the package I got, I think the experience of all the hardware is worth about $400. So the package I got was $750, but that included a lot. So subtract $200 for the games, that gives you $550. So I think the bundle (minus the games, sinc eyou can get GameFly) is about $150 overpriced. This is comming from someone that likes games, plays casually and values money. If you are looking for something totally mind blowing and revolutionary to make you sit up and say “F*CK!”, wait for the revolution. If you are looking for your computer games on a controlled and integrated platform that is easy to use and sort of computery, get an XBox or a PS3.

After having this for a while, I *would* most likely not buy it myself if this hadn’t been a gift… if I could have gotten this entire pack plus the games for $400 I would have thought about it and probably gotten it, but really it’s just a computer with nice looking computer games when you boil it all down.

I’d give it a 9/10. If I missed anything ask away.

News From The Web

Published
by
GrantGochnauer
on April 21, 2006
in News from the Web
. 1 Comment

WOHOH. TGIF! It looks to be another beautiful day here in Chicago. One nice thing about owning your own company is being able to take your laptops outside, work in the sun with a nice refreshing beverage and enjoy the weather. I think I’ll be doing the same today!! :)
ATI allowing developers to use DirectX10 already
ATI Technologies, one of the world’s largest suppliers of graphics processors, has unveiled its first DirectX 10 software development kit that provides programmers examples of DirectX 10 code and samples to allow them to start creating the content using next-gen application programming interface (API). However, the company has not supplied its partners among developers with DirectX 10-compliant hardware.

High priced oil here to stay :(
Futures contracts for light, sweet crude, available for delivery within a month, changed hands on the New York Mercantile Exchange well above $72 a barrel, extending a run that has lifted prices by more than $10 in the past month.

Google posts higher revenue — beats expectations
Google’s first-quarter revenue rose nearly 80 percent and, along with an increase in profit, beat analyst expectations as the search giant continued to grow market share, the company said Thursday.

Myspace — actually a good story about how they foiled a school shooting
Five teenage boys accused of plotting a shooting rampage at their high school on the anniversary of the Columbine massacre were arrested Thursday after a message authorities said warned of a gun attack appeared on the Web site MySpace.com.

Seagate 750GB Hard drive.
That’s a LOT of storage. I think I’ll buy one when they hit 1TB. DROOL!!

New software tracks the mood of the blogoshere
Software that tracks mood swings across the ‘blogosphere’ and pinpoints the events behind them could provide more insightful ways to search and analyse the web, researchers say. The software, called MoodViews, was created by Gilad Mishne and colleagues at Amsterdam University, The Netherlands. It tracks about 10 million blogs hosted by the US service LiveJournal.

Google testing expanded search result feature

Treo 700p coming soon?
Bah, I’ll keep my Treo 650 for the time being now that I actually have it working and not rebooting every 2 seconds. It’s been a great phone thus far. I need something way more to justify dropping another $500.

Do you need 6,500 calories a day to survive? This guy does!! (Jealous)
A 5-foot-9, 22-year-old man who eats 6,500 calories a day — two and a half times the average intake for an adult male — has earned a special reward for breaking the 100-pound mark.

Big Brother IS WATCHING. Thanks to Bush of course.
Interviewed an engineer at ATT about the massive funneling of data and voice traffic into the NSA’s analysis centers. At first we looked into doing the interview directly with this guy, who we call Deep Packet, and masking his voice with digital effects. When we realized just what sort of processing power the NSA has available to them we decided that was not good enough to protect our source.

Top 10 Strangest gadgets. I need all 10, clearly.

This one is for my friend Mark: Mercedes SLK beats Ferrari Enzo

News From The Web

Published
by
GrantGochnauer
on April 20, 2006
in News from the Web
. 0 Comments

One more day until TGIF!! It’s been absolutely beautiful in Chicago lately. Let’s hope it continues through the weekend! I think the weather here has been better here than in Southern California, MUAAHAHA.. OK, onto the news!

AMD kicking Intel’s behind in sales
Intel was stung by excess chip inventories and slowing PC sales in the first quarter and it won’t get better soon.

Setup GMail to automatically e-mail you backups. Very handy!
Customize this “blat” script to automatically throw files up to your GMail account. Or you can check out Gmail Drive which works great too.

Get your Google Calendar API On!
There are many possible uses for the Calendar data API. For example, you can create a web front end for your group’s calendar that uses Google Calendar as a back end. Or you can generate a public calendar for Google Calendar to display, based on your organization’s event database. Or you can search relevant calendars to display a list of upcoming events on those calendars.

Mac OSX Cocoa based FireFox builds coming soon. Find out more here
A ongoing project on the Firefox team is to bring OS X’s native widgets (ala Camino) into the Firefox fold, and assauge a lot of the common complaints heard from Mac users. Josh Aas has been the point-man when it comes to implementing Cocoa widgets in Firefox and recently wrote a bit about his progress.

Moon may contain clues to life on Earth. Let’s go back!
In the early years of the solar system, meteorites and comets crashed into planets, sending vast clumps of rock into space. Some of the rocks crashed into active planets such as Earth, but eroded away. Those that landed on the moon are likely to be preserved, holding inside them evidence about fledgling life forms or the environments they lived in.

Windows XP faster than Mac OSX on a MacBook Pro. Apple might have a problem on their hands. uh oh.

Microsoft readying “GDrive” competitor
Check out GDrive here
According to sources, Google is working two other storage-related services: GDS and Lighthouse. All three projects are focused on delivering “infinite storage” and “infinite bandwidth,” according to slides Google shared with analysts.

Tiny reactor boosts Biodiesel production
Now all we need is more biodiesel cars. What is up with these damn gas prices lately?! I mean $3.30 for premium in Chicago. SERIOUSLY!

Intel takes on AMD Opteron with “Bensley”

Site Outages: Comcast sucks

Published
by
GrantGochnauer
on April 19, 2006
in Website
. 3 Comments

So some of you may have noticed that the site was offline all day Friday and Saturday.. Well our Internet connection has been EXTREMELY flaky lately which has been partly due to the fact there is all this construction next door. The construction works cut our cable line a few months back so there is this temporary cable strung along the street to feed our house. Anyway, the biggest problem with Comcast is that they have the WORST internal communications of any company I have ever dealt with. I have been having ongoing problems with our cable modem for probably 6 months now (outside of this cut line). Each time it’s a different issue: line balancing, bad cable modem, bad cables in street, line being cut, accounting confusions, etc. I think I’ve experienced all the problems possible. Well, the issue with Comcast is that every time you call to follow through on a problem, it is like you are calling for the first time, even if you have a case number. Not only that, but nothing will ever be resolved unless you keep calling them to constantly check on the status. They have no clue about the case history so you have to sit and explain it every time. The next big problem is that whatever I tell the Comcast technical support guys on the tech hotline number is COMPLETELY disregarded. I know what the problem is, I describe it in detail and tell them exactly what kind of tech guy to send (they have 4-5 different kinds). Anyway, it never fails that they send the WRONG one every time. When the tech guy gets there, I ask him if he can look at a certain aspect of the line and he would answer with “no. I’m not that type of tech guy”. So they I show him the issue, and he is like: “yup, you’ll need so and so. I’ll have to call him. Why did you tell Comcast that you needed this type of person in the first place” and of course I had told them at least 5x to 5 different people that I needed a specific person but again, they have no internal communication what-so-ever. One time it was so bad, there were 4 technicians out over a period of 48 hours because each one that came was the wrong guy. If they had listened to me in the first place, the issue can have been resolved in only a few hours.

Another example is when our cable was just shut off. We called Comcast asking if there was an outage and had tech guys out and they could not find the problem. Turns out, the billing department stopped sending us bills because they confused our account with another one and so they shut off our cable without any warning. We had to spend the better part of 2 days trying to figure out the problem, dealing with frustrating customer support people that were no help whatsoever to figure out they screwed up and the resolution to their screw up was to shut off our cable. Seriously!

I’d have to say that Comcast has some of the WORST service of any company I have ever dealt with. However, the tech guys that have come out to help fix the issue have been great. The problem is getting them to the house, and getting the right guy. Apparently when I talk to the tech guys, they even agree that Comcast sucks ass. They have to sit on hold just like the customer does to find out their next job apparently. I was told the internal communication is getting worse all the time as Comcast tries to outsource their internal infrastructure and everyone is running around with no clue what they are supposed to be doing. When I heard that, I wasn’t surprised in the least bit since the customer can clearly see that they don’t have their act together. It’s a shame really.

OK.. Rant over :D