War of Consoles

War of Consoles

Following are excerpts from my yahoo360 blog, posted few weeks back. Contain outdated information. Planning to write a script to autopost the same contents in both.

The big story this week, well, not one, but three. Three exciting new products were launched. Engineering and technological brilliance, well beyond the years. The battle of consoles heats up with 3 contenders fighting for the crown. Initially all the critics relegated Nintendo's contention and were focussing on the Redmond Giant and the Japanese Techlord, but lately Nintendo's unique gameplay and competitive pricing, have made them the favorites. Innovative and sporting a revolutionary new controller for playing console games, Wii tops my list of must haves.

Who wants 6 cell processors and Blue Ray or HDD devices. The essense of console gaming is having fun and not a super computer which can do anything. So whose the real winner ?.... IBM .
Kudos to IBM for develop the processors of all the 3 consoles. Amazing super power and architectural brilliance. Cell processors of PS 3 will pave way to next gen CPUs.





ZUNE CASTING


Microsoft loves entering new market segments. Why can't they just stick to what they are good at, i.e developing softwares. Well, not many have the guts to compete against Sony and Apple at their own terrains. MS launched their Zune player to compete against the Ipod. Zune touted as the next ipod killer has been facing bad reviews everywhere, specially by die hard ipod fans.
Personally, I admire Microsoft 's attempts to overthrow the ipod as I personally am bored by their dominance in the mp3 player segment. Apple's revenue from ipods is 3 times their Macs.
Who would have thought a music player will resurrect a PC vendor. Ipod nano is technological wonder, no doubt about it. The way their engineers put in so much in such a tiny package, itself is a wonder. But too many ipods spoil the fun. Let's have something new. Competition brings in innovations and is great for the economy. I hope people like the Zune.


No doubt, this week is my most cherished week, all this year. Great technology, nice articles, video coverages and cool reviews . Go to digg.com now. The hot topic is the one we are discussing here.
Anyways, next time. Laterz and happy teching.
....................

Gears of War, Heroes and more

After a very long time,
Gamespot gave such high points to a FPS.

Whooping 9.6 !!!. Last time I remember any FPS to get more than
9 was Fear. After that, its been a drought of good FPSs.

Gears of War, is touted as the next big thing to the XBOX genre
after Halo 2. Only time will tell how true it is. Anyways, its unanimous, If you have X360, go and get ur GOW now.



This week was, the latest Heroes - 107.
The directors have done a good job interconnecting lives of all
the characters who seem to posses some amazing superpowers.
Though, some of them are rip offs from the XMen series, but efforts to
make them look original is clearly visible. Every ep, some new superhuman
is introduced, and it keeps the show alive.

Save the cheerleader, save the world.!!!. They can do better than this ;)

Google's Expansion, Microsoft XBOX and more..

Tech-Me

My last 2 blogs were about two Tv shows which I saw during the weekends. That must give the general audience, a couch potato image of me. A fat, short guy with glasses, who loves to watch tv shows.

Here is a different side of me, a tech addict side. Doctors may wanna call this a "technomaniac" syndrome. I browse internet 15+ hours/day, visit Cnet.com and digg.com every 15 mins, and need a cool gadget review to make me high.

I was writing my security report on PayPay, when I stumbled accross Google's checkout. A solution which simplifies online buying. Initially people thought google was competing against PayPal but later it clarified that checkout is trying to solve a different problem, problem of keying in account details for every purchase. With checkout, google promises users to keep their account information safe, and start purchasing stuffs with a click of a button.

Who are they trying to fool ?

The Google I know, strives on competition on innovation. That's what the world loves about them.

Other hot news flying around digg these days is the 4.7 million+ lines of code of their new HDDrive support software for XBOX360, which microsoft proudly announced. Wow, thats shitload of code. Thats 1/10th the size of Windows XP. Wonder what Microsoft is hiding ?

I have had this crazy feeling that Microsoft has concealed control override codes in their products, and when the time is ripe, they will initiate Project World Domination ;). Software world over will takeover and a new society will be born. Oh. Ok that may be over exaggeration, but I hope you all got the picture.

Anyways, Best of luck to my two favorite companies. Hope both of them become successful projects.

Spiderman-Unlimited

Youtube really rocks . Recently I realised that youtube has a really good collection of old tv shows that are not longer aired anymore. One such show is SpidermanUnlimited. This series aired in 1999 and continues where the first one, Spiderman the Animated Series, left. As compared to the former, this one takes place in Counter Earth where spiderman gets stuck after his spacecraft crashes, trying to rescue Jameson's Son.

The plot is a very intresting one, which involves an Alien planet, rebellions, freedom struggle and newer strong enemies. Counter Earth, an exact replica of the original earth, faces a problem of
extinction of humans, by the more dominant Beasts (Mutants). How Spiderman joins forces with the humans to fight for the liberalisation of Humans, is what the series is all about.

Season 1 had 13 eps, but the next season was scraped off as the tv ratings was dominated by a show called "Pokemon". The ending is a cliffhanger, leaving the audience wanting for more.

In 2 days, I finished watching 2 good series, Grey's Anatomy and Spiderman, both of which were amazingly good and a must watch.

I Hate Weekends

Another weekend comes, and passes without me even realising, how valuable free times are.
After a really boring and hectic week, with full of frickin labs, tutorials, presentations, term papers, I spent my entire friday night, watching the complete season 2 of Greys Anatomy. A marathon 25 episodes.

After a satisfied sense of accomplishment, I went to sleep, just to wake up 16 hours later. Saturdays gone man, nothing done.

Doc Izzy : My fav character from Grey's Anatomy

Frustration sometimes leads to hasty acts. I was so pissed my oversleeping that I deleted WMedia Player and all my special hand picked codecs. So now even when I click on a video file, nothing happens, which is supercool.

My friend remarked that majority of the seasons are online on youtube and dailymotion, so I can still watch them without any codecs. So, I wasn't as smart as I'd initially thought.
This is where Linux came to my rescue.60% of the time I use my Red Hat Linux, which is notoriuos for codec support. Imagine watching a flash video without sound. Sucks eh ?
Not anymore,, bad support can be a blessing, sometimes.

I have now virtually watched everything that I could find on my shcool LAN. My re-runs will begin after my exam. Lets give these eyes a break.


On a more positive note, I am still waiting for my internship letter from JP Morgan. Yeah, 6 months of corporate environment, without coding for a single day. That's life. Really excited about it.

Anyways, time to get back. Saturdays are boring. I am not sure what I need to do but I will think of something. Fk, How I hate lame boring uneventful Saturdays.