Watch it here

Link found at Google video.

I love these two photos. Our mate John has been nicely owned.

Here are a few examples;

• Chuck Norris does not eat. Food understands that the only safe haven from Chuck Norris’ fists is inside his own body.

• The show Survivor had the original premise of putting people on an island with Chuck Norris. There were no survivors, and nobody is brave enough to go to the island to retrieve the footage.

• It takes 14 puppeteers to make Chuck Norris smile, but only 2 to make him destroy an orphanage.

Hilarious!!

• Every time Chuck Norris smiles, someone dies. Unless he smiles while he’s roundhouse kicking someone in the face. Then two people die.

Found on Google Video – UFO by Steve DePena
Send in the AirForce!!

The Tactapad which is something completely new and possibly quite hard to use. Looks intriguing though.

And then there is the Optimus which looks pretty standard until you realise that every key has a small LCD screen. In theory you can switch between a standard QWERTY keyboard to a Cyrillic Layout to a program specific layout in which the keys would take on the image of the symbols/buttons on the menus.

Link to Songbirdbirdnest.com
John Borland, Special to ZDNet

December 23, 2005

If digital-music veteran Rob Lord wanted to court controversy with his new open-source start-up, he probably couldn’t have done much better than to compare Apple Computer’s iTunes software to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer Web browser.

Lord’s new five-person company, the ambitiously named Pioneers of the Inevitable, is building a piece of digital-music software called “Songbird,” based on much of the same underlying open-source technology as the Firefox Web browser.

With their first technical preview expected early next year, the programmers want to create music-playing software that will work naturally with the growing number of music sites and services on the Web, instead of being focused on songs on a computer’s hard drive. That’s where iTunes, which plugs only into Apple’s own music store, falls short, Lord argues.

Apple’s iTunes is “like Internet Explorer, if Internet Explorer could only browse Microsoft.com,” Lord said. “We love Apple, and appreciate and thank them for setting the bar in terms of user experience. But it’s inevitable that the market architecture changes as it matures.”

An Apple representative declined to comment.

It is undeniable that music software and services are moving increasingly off the hard drive and onto the Web. But if Songbird is to be the “Firefox of MP3″ when it’s done, it has a long way to go.

Indeed, analysts question whether a world awash in music-playing software from Apple, Microsoft, RealNetworks, Yahoo, Sony and others really needs another digital jukebox.

Among those giants, Microsoft’s Media Player accounts for 45 percent of all PC music playing, Apple’s iTunes captures 17 percent, and the rest fall off sharply from there, according to U.S. statistics from the NPD Group.

But even with those odds, Lord has enough of a pedigree to make the industry stop and take notice. A co-founder of the Internet Underground Music Archive, an online music site predating the MP3 boom, as well as one of the first employees at Winamp creator Nullsoft, he was most recently a product manager for the launch of Yahoo’s music software and subscription service, after his last start-up, Mediacode, was purchased by the portal.

Songbird could have a built-in audience of open-source fans to give it a good start. And don’t forget, just a few years ago, who would have counted on the success of the Firefox browser? Since its first full-version release a year ago, the Mozilla Foundation’s Firefox has defied skeptics and managed to grab close to 8 percent or 9 percent of the browser market, although estimates vary.

And programmers working with the Mozilla Foundation say the Songbird project has their attention.

“We’re excited to see an ecosystem of companies building technology around Mozilla,” said Scott MacGregor, technical lead for the Thunderbird project, an open-source e-mail reader. “It’s a healthy sign for Mozilla and open source in general.”

Under the microscope

Even before the software has been released, Songbird has stirred up a hornet’s nest of online critics and boosters on outside blogs and even on the company’s own Web site.

Screenshots posted on the company’s Web site show a software application clearly modeled closely after iTunes’ browsing style. The parallels drew instant ridicule from Apple loyalists, who pointed out that Apple had in fact patented software with three “panes” for browsing through a media collection.

Until the software is released even in a preview stage, it’s hard to tell whether that will indeed be a problem. But Lord says that’s missing the point.

iTunes does have a good basic interface for browsing a music collection, but Songbird isn’t tied to any one look, he said. It’s built on technology that allows developers to change the look of the application with the same simple tools they use to write a Web page, and so will be extremely malleable.

That said, the five Pioneers of the Inevitable are a practical bunch, and will change their basic interface if it looks like there is any legal risk, he added.Songbird’s underlying programming technology is called XML User Interface Language, or XUL. Along with letting people create their own look for the software, this will allow music services or developers to write their own plug-ins, letting them add features or tap directly into their own digital-download stores.

That might mean that a listener could create a playlist that draws from his or her own hard drive, a Web-based subscription service like RealNetworks’ Rhapsody, and an online music storage locker such as MP3Tunes, for example. The open-source foundation will let the software be easily ported to PC, Macintosh and Linux-based computers.

Lord cautioned that little of this has actually been built yet. The version that will be released early next year will largely be a demonstration of how a media player can be built on top of the Mozilla technology. Most of the advanced features people now expect from modern music software will be added over the course of further development, he said.

“What we’ve built is a user preview,” Lord said. “This is meant to inspire and show the road map–and a glimpse of where we are on that road map.”

How does this all make money? It’s not yet clear. The company’s business model is a work in progress too, Lord said.

One possibility is selling the technology to companies that want to create their own music store, but don’t want to build their own software to do it. One analyst pointed to Procter & Gamble’s recent release of a music service as an example.

“I can imagine Songbird as a Web interface for a brand like that,” said GartnerG2 analyst Mike McGuire. “There would be interesting value there.”

A Firefox for music?: ZDNet Australia: News: Communications

Linked from Google Video. I love this. Short but sweet.

By Mark Ward
Technology Correspondent, BBC News website

A deadly virtual plague has broken out in the online game World of Warcraft.

Although limited to only a few of the game’s servers the numbers of characters that have fallen victim is thought to be in the thousands.Originally it was thought that the deadly digital disease was the result of a programming bug in a location only recently added to the Warcraft game.However, it now appears that players kicked off the plague and then kept it spreading after the first outbreak.Since its launch in November 2004, World of Warcraft (Wow) has become the most widely played massively multiplayer online (MMO) game in the world.Its creator, Blizzard, claims that now more than four million people are regular players.

Last rites

Wow is an online game that gives players the chance to adventure in the fantasy world of Azeroth that is populated by the usual mixture of humans, elves, orcs and other fantastic beasts.As players explore the world, the characters they control become more powerful as they complete quests, kill monsters and find magical items and artefacts that boost abilities.To give these powerful characters more of a challenge, Blizzard regularly introduces new places to explore in the online world.In the last week, it added the Zul’Gurub dungeon which gave players a chance to confront and kill the fearsome Hakkar – the god of Blood.In his death throes Hakkar hits foes with a “corrupted blood” infection that can instantly kill weaker characters.The infection was only supposed to affect those in the immediate vicinity of Hakkar’s corpse but some players found a way to transfer it to other areas of the game by infecting an in-game virtual pet with it.This pet was then unleashed in the orc capital city of Ogrimmar and proved hugely effective as the Corrupted Blood plague spread from player to player.Although computer controlled characters did not contract the plague, they are said to have acted as “carriers” and infected player-controlled characters they encountered.

Body count

The first server, or “realm” as Blizzard calls them, affected by the plague was Archimonde; but it is known to have spread to at least two others.The spread of the disease could have been limited by the fact that Hakkar is difficult to kill, so some realms may not yet have got round to killing him and unleashing his parting shot.The digital disease instantly killed lower level characters and did not take much longer to kill even powerful characters.Many online discussion sites were buzzing with reports from the disaster zones with some describing seeing “hundreds” of bodies lying in the virtual streets of the online towns and cities.”The debate amongst players now is if it really was intentional although due to the effects of the problem it seems unlikely,” Paul Younger, an editor on the unofficial worldofwar.net site, told the BBC News website.”It’s giving players something to talk about and could possibly be considered the first proper ‘world event’”, he said.Luckily the death of a character in World of Warcraft is not final so all those killed were soon resurrected.Blizzard tried to control the plague by staging rolling re-starts of all the servers supporting the Warcraft realms and applying quick fixes.However, there are reports that this has not solved all the problems and that isolated pockets of plague are breaking out again.The “Corrupted Blood” plague is not the first virtual disease to break out in game worlds. In May 2000 many players of The Sims were outraged when their game characters died because of an infection contracted from a dirty virtual guinea pig.

BBC NEWS | Technology | Deadly plague hits Warcraft world

Commentary by Lore Sjöberg

Well, 2010 was quite a year. Sony’s attempt to hang onto its thin lead in the gaming market by only selling the PlayStation 4 to six carefully chosen celebrities seemed like it might backfire, but the hype has never been hotter. Children’s crayon drawings of the PS4 are going for over $400 on eBay, and Paris Hilton is reported to have held the new console briefly at arm’s length before throwing it in a closet. Better yet, Sony is expecting to ship over 38 units to the general public next week, and gaming fans are already lining up outside their local Thunderdome waiting for a chance to fight for them.

Meanwhile, Nintendo has once again drawn controversy by announcing that its upcoming console, the Nintendo Apocalypse, will lack any sort of game controller whatsoever. Instead, you will direct the onscreen action by grabbing a household pet by the front legs and “making it do a little dance.” Gamers reacted with shock and disbelief, but Nintendo faithful pointed out that this will still be better than a gamepad for first-person shooters.

On the handheld front, Sony and Nintendo continue their fight for the minds and backpacks of the nation’s gamers by releasing ever-larger portable consoles. The Nintendo XL features six screens, a folding seat and a selection of overpriced candy bars, while the PlayStation Still Ostensibly Portable can now play all known forms of media, including 2-ton cuneiform tablets. The cuneiform tablet version of Ghostbusters is reportedly flying off the shelves, or possibly collapsing them.

As for the current generation of video games, the big news was the long-awaited release of Grand Theft Auto: West Bloodbath. Gamers were appalled by the violence, specifically the wussiness of it. “Wait,” they said. “I’m still limited to shooting, beating or running over hookers? Kill Death Die Hurt Maim let me chop off their fingers one by one while they begged for mercy, their cheap eyeliner merging with their tears and darkening the pools of blood at their feet. Are you sure Mario isn’t in this wimpfest?”

Speaking of Mario, Nintendo and LucasArts are still locked in competition to bring their aging iconic characters to every genre ever invented. The year 2010 saw the release of Darth Maul’s Star Wars Tennis, Mario MMORPG, Clone Trooper Golf, Mario’s Dating Sim, Jar-Jar’s Dating Sim and Mario Storms the Beach at Normandy. Plus, handheld versions of all those.

2010 was also the year that the world got tired of Katamari Damacy. Katamari 6: Now You Can Roll Up a Total of 1,024 Types of Sushi came out, along with the usual glut of Katamari clones, including Roll Things Up, Let’s Roll, Mario Rolls Stuff Up in a Big Ball and Star Wars: Adhesive Death Star. A spokesman for the gaming press made this announcement: “Dear game developers: We are so sorry. When we praised Katamari Damacy for bringing a zephyr of originality into the moribund miasma of sequels and me-too clones, we didn’t know what we were unleashing. Never again will we praise a quirky, low-cost game full of whimsy and joy. Please stop. We beg of you.” In related news, Tommy Lee Jones has been tapped to play the King of All Cosmos in the movie.

The mainstream gaming public finally started to go online in droves this year, motivated by increasing ease of use, fatter broadband pipes and more sophisticated online experiences, but mostly by the Xbox’s revolutionary Verified Gender technology. By guaranteeing that the hot, busty elf chick next to you is biologically female — if not actually hot, busty or an elf — Microsoft attracted millions of horny consumers looking for awkward, semi-anonymous online avatar sex. Microsoft is looking to expand this previously untapped market further by introducing cybersex ranking ladders.

Perhaps the biggest newsmaker of 2010 was the announcement by a number of major online gaming sites that they were going to abandon the pretense of reviewing video games. Instead, they explained, they will now simply assign a numerical ranking to the press release and go back to playing World of Warcraft. “This will allow the consumer to receive our objective, well-reasoned review of the game weeks ahead of time, making their purchasing decisions easier. Plus, the game companies have promised to keep sending us free stuff either way.”

Wired News: