The Smidgen

So I’m reading a BBC News article and firstly, there’s no author that I can see so the part of my rage the would be directed at said author goes unfulfilled, crafty British.  Anywho, the article is about “Raz”, a “massive Xbox gamer” who uses his console every day after work and all day on the weekends.  You know, a socialite.  Well it appears that after “acquiring” the latest record setting Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, he was “gutted” to learn that Microsoft has banned him from playing games online.

Why, you might ask?  Well he’s a theif, plain and simple.  Raz has a modded Xbox and pirates his games.  Now no one get all uppity about pirating software one way or the other, I don’t care how you feel about it if you don’t realize that a company or person will be disinclined to let you use a product they’re trying to sell for free, you’re a friggen idiot.  Anyway I would ordinarily think nothing of this article, that kind of thing happens fairly frequently, people steal games and sometimes they get caught, boo-hoo, he’s not getting some sort of ridiculous RIAA fine or jail time, just no more online gaming because you’re a criminal, whaaan.

What sets me off on this is that this guy is literally flabbergasted by this fact.  He’s astounded to learn that his openly admitted, publicly communicated theft of £600 worth of games (just under $1,000 to us Yanks) has earned him a ban.  Furthermore he states that, while he won’t mod another console, he’s unsure if he will buy another Xbox or get a PS3 now instead.

Let me get this straight, you essentially stole one large worth of games, got a slap on the hand and now you’re so mad at Microsoft you’re going to get a PS3 instead?  Wow, guess what chief, I don’t think they’re going to miss you.  Maybe Sony can use this for some creative marketing, “Xbox Live won’t let you play because you’re a dirty criminal, welcome PSHome!”  Somehow I don’t think Sony will exactly be thrilled with that sort of support either.

Some good quotes from the article after the break:

continue reading…

Got that spiffy new Zune HD but feel like your squandering your Tegra powered goodness?  Well fret no more as the latest firmware update 4.3 (released last Friday) opened up the world of 3D gaming to Microsoft’s plucky little PMP.

Along with fixing that odd little playcount issue, the 4.3 player update added support for upcoming 3D games and apps which have now arrived on the Marketplace.  Though the list is still rather small the good part is that all the games are (as promised) free!

On a personal note I seriously hope this means that support for full-on community development, and a paid marketplace to encourage said community, is on the way.  The day of Xbox Live Arcade merging with the Zune Marketplace is coming, I can feel it.

Here’s the game list:

• PGR: ferrari edition, a 3d racegame
• Lucky lane bowling, a 3d bowling game
• Vans Sk8: Pool service, a 3d Skate game
• Piano, a simple piano where you can play your own tunes on
• Audio Surf: Tilt, ride your music – you choose a song that the game will turn into a roller coaster track for you to ride
• Checkers, I don’t think you’ll need a description for this one

Update: Engadget fired up PGR on their Zune HD, uploaded a video and had this to say about it.

That Tegra chip is no joke — the graphics in PGR: Ferrari Edition are easily on par with the PSP and quite possibly better, with intricate textures, high-quality reflections, and smooth framerates. The other games aren’t nearly as intense, but they’re just as smooth.

John McCain, presidential candidate and self professed technology curmudgeon, who admitted during his presidential campaign to having little or no knowledge or interest in modern technologies like email or the Internet, seems to suddenly be very interested in it’s ‘freedom‘.

His new bill, the ‘Internet Freedom Act’ sets out to stop the FCC from going forward with any sort of Net Neutrality regulations after the FCC has unanimously voted to go ahead with talks to formalize net neutrality guidelines.  In the bill the FCC “shall not propose, promulgate, or issue any regulations regarding the Internet or IP-enabled services.”  Now I have to echo Tony Bradley of PC World’s statement here and ask, isn’t that what the FCC is supposed to do?

Now McCain certainly knows nothing about the internet but he does know about removing regulations in the thought that the free market will police themselves, just like AT&T did when they blocked VoIP services or Comcast did when they throttled peer-to-peer networking on the down-low, both of which only retracted after threat of FCC net neutrality rules.  Go team “Honest and Fair”!

You know guys, if there is a legitimate reason to block net neutrality guidelines you have 120 days to gather your data and present your case in the debate the FCC has just voted to have.  No guidelines have actually been set yet so perhaps waving around legislation like a torch to scare off ‘the beast’ is a bit premature.  Remember, 120 days, and since you’re probably not good at math that’s about four months to prepare to defend the internet’s ‘freedom’.  Which I supposed would be the ‘god’ given freedom to rape and pillage, right?

It’s been a long, long time coming but if the rumors are true the next handheld system from Nintendo may get a significant performance boost thanks to the Tegra in the form of the tentatively named Nintendo TS (Tegra System?).  Yup, that’s right, the same multi-core ARM based chip that powers the new Zune HD could give Nintendo a portable system that is on par with the Wii in terms of processing power and graphics output.  Moreover, it could actually compete with the feature set of its closest rival, the PSP.

The news gets even better when you consider that the previous generations of DS hardware were based around 16 and then 32-bit ARM cores, making the leap to Tegra painless and, very likely, backwards compatible, which everyone apparently loves.

If true, this design win for the Tegra chip would mean a huge boost in revenue for Nvidia knowing that they power the new version of Nintendo’s 100 million selling DS system.

Conversely, this could be dire news for Microsoft if it ever plans on getting into the handheld market with their Zune hardware.  The Zune HD currently uses the same Tegra chip and therefore is currently sitting idly on the processing honchos to deliver a great gaming experience.  That is, of course, if MS can ever get off it’s backside and integrate the Xbox Live Arcade into the Zune and vice versa.  Delay too long and Nintendo will swoop in with a Tegra of it’s own and a long history of success in the handheld market to swing around like a 10 ton hammer.

The handheld market just got a whole lot more interesting for me.  Look for this rumored device to land sometime in late winter of 2010.

Big old rumor alert here so grab that chunk of salt you keep laying around for just such an occasion.  It seems that SquareEnix head, Yoichi Wada, is predicting that Nintendo will unleash a Wii HD with graphic capabilities similar to the current PS3 and Xbox 360 in 2011.

This of course would not be the first time for such a rumor but it is the first one I know of coming from the head of a major game development studio.

An HD Wii that supports HDMI and 1080p with actual current gen graphics would go a long way toward swinging my attention back to the big N.  Of course playing catchup in 2011 is all fine and dandy until the next Xbox releases in 2012 (another rumor, that one).

Yeah ... looks real comfortable alright ...

Oh Japan, how I love you and your crazy sh*t.  See that thing on the left there with the suit precariously balanced on it?  Yeah, that’s Honda’s answer to the Segway.  A self propelled, self balancing, 3.7mph traveling unicycle that moves in the direction you lean.  Tightrope not included.

The U3-X weighs in at just under 22lbs and though it’s just “a proposal” right now, it’s designed with the elderly as a first thought, world takeover a close second (like all of Japan’s robots).  The wheel is actually comprised of many tiny motor-controlled wheels that allow it to swerve around in any direction when you lean that way.

I’m not really sure how the less mobile and coordinated elderly (you know, the ones that need a device to move them around) would fair with something like this but hey, that’s not the point, the point is it’s cool and weird right?  Right!?  Want to see some more pictures (you know you do), check out the Daily Mail article.

As promised, it’s here, the new Radeon HD 5870 from AMD.  In case you forgot this card is basically double everything you had in the RV790 chips (Radeon HD 4890) running in the same power envelope with lower idle power consumption.  Not bad eh?  It’s built using TSMC’s 40nm process allowing those 2.15b transistors to keep the power levels down (188W load and a very low 27W idle).  The 5870 with 1GB is also priced slightly lower than previously reported at $379, however, NewEgg is already sold right out of them.

So how does it perform you ask (naturally)?  Well AnandTech (as well as several other sites) has an extensive and lengthy review if you want all the details, including a lot of specifications and hardware diagrams, but I’ll summarize the juicy performance parts here.

For Crysis: Warhead AMD’s new card comes in just under the GTX 295 in pretty much every test.  AMD’s goal was to beat the 295 and they are really close but not quite there with Crysis.  Of course this new card is about $100 cheaper than the cheapest 295 out there and up to and over $300 cheaper than others, so take that as you will.  For Far Cry 2 the 5870 in fact does beat the 295 by just a little bit, though oddly it loses to it’s other multi-GPU competitor, the 4870×2, go figure.  As for the single GPU match up the 5870 beats the GTX 285 by 40%.  World of Warcraft?  Well it’s notoriously CPU dependent but nevertheless the 5870 beats pretty much everything out there except for an SLI configuration of GTX 285’s.  The story is pretty much the same across the board with the 5870 and the GTX 295 swapping wins here and there by small margins and the 5870 beating any other single GPU solution out there.

So what do we have then?  Well as a single GPU solution the 5870 is by far the fastest around and considering the 285’s price points are currently in the $300 range it makes the 5870 a far better purchase due to it’s slightly future proof DirectX 11 hardware.  In the single cards space however (meaning one card but possibly more than one GPU), the 5870 and the GTX 295 are close with the 295 being slightly faster.  Again you must consider a $100 price premium for a ~10% performace gain.  In the multi-card space two 5870’s in CrossFire mode is once again the clear winner.

So what games will take advantage of the 5000 series DirectX 11 prowess?  First is EA’s Battleforge; out just in time for the release of the 5000 series (a day early in fact) it is the first game to have DX11 support, though limited.  S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat, went gold in Russia earlier in the week and should have an English version on the way.  While we don’t know the specifics of it’s DX11 content, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games are typically very tough of GPU’s so it should be an interesting test when released.  Dirt2 will be the first “full featured” DX11 title supporting tessellation, shadow filtering and other dx11 features and is due out December 11th for PC.  Aliens Vs Predator from Rebellion Games will be the most impressive DX11 game but it’s not due out till Q1 next year at the earliest.

So there you have it kiddies, AMD is first out of the gate with DX11 hardware and Nvidia is left to play catch-up for the first time since DirectX 9.0.  This could be a bad thing for Nvidia as game developers looking to incorporate DirectX 11 into their titles currently have only one choice of hardware, meaning the games will be tweaked to work with AMD’s DX11 implementations over Nvidia’s, something that happened in reverse with DX10.  The stage is set for the next battle royale, just waiting on Nvidia to show up to the party now.

Like the idea of running a gaming rig with multiple GPU’s a-crankin’ but don’t want to be tied down to one chipset or graphics card manufacturer?  Well Lucid’s gotcha covered.  Enter the Hydra 200 real time distributed processing engine.

When first announced over a year ago many people, myself included, expected nothing.  A chip that would distribute the graphics process to any GPU regardless of manufacturer and without proprietary cables and connectors, without performance sacrifices?  Ok, sure.  Well here we are about a year later and the Hydra 200 is about to make us eat our words.

The Hydra 200 chip is a small (18-23mm) chip that uses 6W of power and can be placed on a motherboard or expansion card to handle the distribution of the graphics processing requirements to the cards you have installed.  Since it’s a separate chip, it doesn’t care what card that might be.  AMD and Nvidia’s SLI concoctions require you to have a specific chipset and then use a special connector to get multiple cards to work in conjunction.  Both graphics card manufacturers then use software in the form of drivers to distribute the graphics workload among the GPU’s.  With Lucid’s chip the software is on the silicone and handles the processing before it gets to the cards so all the cards need to think about is pumping out the results of the work it gets.

I’m still not completely sold on it using “100%” of the performance of every card attached but it is intriguing.  The Hydra is Vista and Windows 7 compatible and supports DirectX’s 9c and 10.1 as well as being DirectX 11 ready.  MSI appears to be the first one out of the gate using a Hydra 200 chip on their “Big Bang” motherboards due out on October 29th.  Hopefully we’ll get some performance benchmarks soon after that.

The world of the mobile smart phone operating systems is about to get even more crowded as Intel has announced that Moblin v2.1 will support phones using their Atom processor.

Multiple applications running at the same time and the ability to flip through them was displayed on a MID, nothing really ground breaking there.  Intel’s new offering will be one more Linux based OS for smart phones with the only interesting fact about it (so far) being that it’s designed for the Atom.  This is the important part for Intel which seeks to compete more heavily against ARM in the MID and now in the phone sectors.

Expect this to pick up some steam as Intel will be throwing a lot of it’s bags of money toward dominating yet another chip market.

Can you see the eye?

A team of researchers at the University of Washington has successfully used therapeutic genes to allow colorblind, adult Squirrel Monkeys to distinguish between red and green again.  Something intriguing indeed to this colorblind man’s heart.

Though they aren’t testing the process on humans yet, it’s important to note that the monkeys were adults as it was previously thought only younger, more “plastic” brains would accept the new DNA instructions provided by the genes introduced to  the light-sensing cells at the back of the eye.

The monkeys used in this test were treated over two years ago and their improvement in color vision has remained stable since that time.  “Further research is required, however, before this comes to human clinical trials, and therapy in the clinics,” but if successful it could help about 7% of males and 1% of female who are born with colorblindness.

Personally the concept actually seems a little freaky to one day see things in a different light (spectrum) for the rest of my life, however, I’m very much ready for those tests!  NASA here I come!

Read the full article over at BBC News.