The Smidgen

The computer gaming industry is certainly no stranger to rumor and one of the most recent, and juicy, involves speculation on the PSP2.  Keep in mind, none of this information has been mentioned or confirmed by Sony.  It’s a rumor, remember?

Anyway, Acclaim developer, David Perry, started this whole thing off with a message he made on his Facebook and Twitter accounts that Kotaku picked up and repeated, and now I will do the same.  His quote,

“I hear Sony FINALLY has the PSP 2. And thank goodness, they’ve removed the stupid battery-sucking UMD disc drive. I’m excited!,”

has people running ragged questioning what Sony will do.  Will they go with an all flash based system, presumably Memory-Stick Pro Duo (Quad Singulo Disco Ipso Facto …), and direct download and if so, how will they support backward compatibility?  Or will this “new” PSP be another revision giving us the PSP-4000 (since we’re on the PSP-3000 now)?

Well you know what, when I see a rumor saying that Sony will can the UMD all I can say is, “no sh*t, it’s way over due.”  Other speculation is that Sony will announce the PSP2 officially at this years E3 in June and if they are planning to release one any time soon, that would be the time to mention it.  Hopefully in June we can lay to rest yet another failed proprietary Sony format (no one is weeping for you MiniDisc).

The Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals laid the smackdown on Arnold Schwarzenegger’s law restricting the sales and rental of violent video games to minors.  By unanimous vote, the three-judge panel ruled that the law was too restrictive and violates free speech guarantees, upholding the same ruling by the lower courts of California. Bo Andersen, president and chief executive of the Entertainment Merchants Association and Michael Gallagher, president and CEO of the Entertainment Software Association, urged the state to abandon any further appeals of the case, however, state senator Leland Yee, the author of the legislation, said he will urge California Attorney General Jerry Brown to appeal the court’s ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court.  Everyone seems to have a lot of urges around here that I’m not sure I want to be a part of.

The law intended to create a new “18″ label for violent video games but the court thought it’s wording on just what constituted a “violent” game was too vague.  All that is nice but what I really want to know is do people actually think it makes that much difference if the kid is 17 or 18?  “AO” rated titles, rated by the ESRB, are basically 18 and up titles and as such if your brand new shooter game earns an “AO” tag you can pretty much kiss your sales goodbye.  On the other hand if you tweak it just enough that an “immature” 17 year old could handle it well then sales a plenty.  Whatever.  All that really means is that some mom somewhere is scared of the phrase “adults only” but isn’t quite smart enough to realize that 17 and up games probably shouldn’t go to her 12 year old either.  Someday they will find a new scapegoat to uselessly throw money at so parents can continue to avoid the responsibility of parenting and I just hope they don’t pick something else I love.

I leave you with the words of Michael Gallagher, “This is a clear signal that in California and across the country, the reckless pursuit of anti-video game legislation like this is an exercise in wasting taxpayer money, government time and state resources.”

Well, it’s Monday and that means the start of a new work week and I couldn’t be angrier.  Let’s get rolling.

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What the hell happened to television episodes?  Recently I’ve been watching a lot of old school Trek and it has forced me to realize the shift that has taken place in the world of television.  Up until a few years ago television shows have followed along with this definition of and episode: an incident, scene, etc., within a narrative, usually fully developed and either integrated within the main story or digressing from it.  Yet now, the world of the television drama is more like a “mini” series that actually lasts 5 seasons long, spanning more than 100 segments.

If you enjoy watching 24, Lost, Heroes, Battlestar and the rest like them then just pray you have a DVR or the network masters will gain one more slave.  Miss an “episode”?  Forget it, you won’t know what the hell is going on and now you’ll have to wait until the DVD comes out.  Of course when that happens they’ll already be on season 34 so you have no hope for ever catching up with the current plot line.  You can forget casual conversation at work too, because they’ll all be talking about what happened this week.  So what can you do?

Honestly I don’t know, I’ve personally stopped watching TV but it’s not really a protest so much as laziness.  I have a DVR and even then when I realized I had 4 “episodes” of Heroes recorded and a new one was airing that evening, I just gave up.  I liked the show but I really didn’t feel like watching 5 hours of it just to keep up with the Jones’.

The thing of it is, this “mini” series format has actually seemed to increase the quality of TV dramas by giving them cohesion and forcing the writers to keep the overriding plot in mind.  For example, when watching season 2 of Star Trek (this is the original series were talking about, remember) there is an episode where an alien race from another galaxy took human form to commandeer the Enterprise.  Spock points out that the odds of an alien race developing and evolving to be exactly like humans was a near impossibility and they realize these people don’t quite know how to be “human” after all.  Of course, the very next episode they find a planet that not only developed humans, but America, Russia, the Cold War and the Constitution.  Yes, this is Star Trek, it was pioneering, it was low budget, it’s campy and it was the first of it’s kind so there are plenty of excuses for this oversight, but the series formula of today’s TV dramas actually forces writers to think from “episode” to “episode” giving us smarter TV and far fewer of these incongruities.

So why can’t there be a middle ground?  Why can’t we create a new Star Trek series that continues it’s episodic journey through the galaxy but plan it out?  Write a series from start to end (plots only, I don’t expect every episode and all dialogue here) and pitch it that way, go Babylon 5 on it and plan for the end but let me miss an episode here and there without feeling hopelessly lost.

Ok, I’m better now.

Scientists at UMass Amherst and UC Berkeley have developed a new way to align nanoscale block copolymers using commercially available sapphire crystals.  Got that?  No?  Well let me see if I can break it down a bit.

Block copolymers, which are two or more chemically dissimilar polymer chains linked together, have this habit of organizing themselves into an equidistant pattern when spread out on a thin film, a pattern that computers, and especially data storage get all hot and bothered for.  The problem is, things get sloppy when the area of copolymers gets larger, making it impractical.

The sapphires come in to play because when heated to 1300 to 1500 degrees Celsius for 24 hours they reorganize their surfaces to a highly ordered pattern of sawtooth ridges and guess what, the copolymers love it.  These ridges give the copolymers a guide to follow allowing for larger areas of extremely small (I said nanoscale remember) and extremely organized patterns.

Great, now we know that but what does it all mean?  It means that with features as small as 3 nanometers you can store 10 terabits of data per square inch.  So something about the size of a quarter can hold about 125 gigabytes of data.  Now go cram that in your camera.

I have added a social bookmarking link to each post like any good blog, not that this one really qualifies as such, but yeah I did it anyway.

It’s just so pretty.  The up-and-coming Palm Pre, the first phone from Palm to feature their new webOS operating system, has become the object of my obsession.

It’s more than just the looks, however, this new phone has a lot going for it.  With a big, multi-touch screen, a full web browser with page zooming, accelerometers for spacial awareness, and a slide out full qwerty keyboard the Pre is a serious contender to take on the iPhone.  The best thing of all, for me at least, is that it’s not an iPhone.  I give credit where credit is due and there is no arguing that the iPhone is amazing and has really stimulated the smart phone market, the Pre being a prime example, I just can’t bring my self to give Apple money.

But enough of all of that, lets get into some details here.

Feature Summary

I’ve already given a sample of what the Pre has to offer but in addition to that Palm has included a proximity sensor and ambient light detector to round out the spacial awareness set.  Though possibly not available at launch, Adobe has announced that Flash will appear on the webOS platform and it’s developers are working closely with Palm to deliver the best experience possible.  Other features include GPS, WiFi (using 802.11g), stereo Bluetooth, a 3.0 megapixel camera with LED flash and a host of standard phone options. continue reading…

Logitech may have gone completely insane.  Announced for a release in May is the G19 keyboard, an upgrade to the popular G15, the first keyboard to contain an LCD screen on it.  For the most part it has a lot of the same features as the G15, the macro keys and all of that, with the addition of the fully customizable backlight color available on the G13 gamepad and G9 mouse.  There is also a windows button disable switch meaning if you’re in a full screen game you can turn off the windows button so as to avoid accidentally pressing it and minimizing your screen.

Oh and one more thing … it has a friggen 320X240 pixel, color LCD screen.  Yeah, you read that right, the LCD has been upgraded to the size of a cell phone screen and, with the included app, can play youtube video on it … on the friggen keyboard!  Check this review out for the full details if you’re interested but be forewarned, all that coolness will cost you a double-benny … which is a term I just made up for $200.

Someone once said, “You can’t judge a book by it’s cover”.  I don’t know who the hell it was but lets say Abraham Lincoln, he gets credit for all kinds of crap he never said so why not, right?  Anyway, while we might not be able to pass sentence on said book based solely on it’s cover, we certainly can, and will, evaluate it quickly.  So what book am I talking about?  People, of course, this is a vent and I don’t think there’s another topic I vent more about.

So in this life lesson I’ll share with you some knowledge about business professionals in the workplace.  The nicer they dress, the ruder they are while waiting in line.  Could be these people are as successful as they portray, and maybe they truly are as busy as they want you to believe they are but I don’t really care, if your ass is in the back of a 20 person line when a new line opens up, your clothing is not a free pass to the front of that line.  Now get back there and like it!

Ok, I’m better now.

I honestly can’t tell you how many times I’ve started and restarted a blog so that I may share with you as much of the useless information I find as possible.  It’s probably like 3 but I just don’t feel like counting.  Well here we go again anyway with a shiny new host, a user submitted new domain, a gleaming new theme and we’re off.  Hope this works!