Scrabulous returns as Wordscraper. Netflix working with LG only for downloads? NASA looking for water on Mars. The Greek computer stories I am now convinced is a BS PR stunt. Yahoo exec makes Yuil search engine to show up Cuil. EDS to be part of HP. Microsoft redoes the search engine yet again. IE beta up for grabs. Madden out on Aug. 11, the game that is. Make a computer from spare parts for no money. China limiting web access during Olympics. Why?
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In this day and age, you are more likely to communicate with people over a message board, social network site, or blog then you are via phone or even in person. Ever since the dawn of the internet, trolls and online pests have been rampant, and it seems like people have less of a problem with getting down and dirty in an email or a blog comment then they would if you were on the phone or in person.
Cali Lewis from [ Geek Brief ] recently talked about this song by Geoff Smith and showed it on her video podcast and it deals with the idea that when people forget the manners that they would normally display in real life and post mean, and sometimes even cruel statements online, that there is a real person out there in the interwebs that feels the sting of what you say. Maybe that is something to consider before you hit that submit button. In the meantime, enjoy the song. It is pretty cool. Afterward, leave a comment and let me know what you think. Are you more likely to be hurtful online then you would be in real life?
On August 15th, Lucasfilm will unleash the seventh big screen Star Wars movie, this time in cartoon form. Star Wars is quite possibly the most well-known and loved Science Fiction franchise of all time. Just about any 30-something has a story about the first time they saw Star Wars in the theater, and can recount the confusion of seeing Episode 5 scroll across the screen when Empire Strikes Back played for the first time, and the absolute thrill every teenager got when they first saw Leia in her Jabba’s Palace outfit.
Then came the spring of 1999. After years of anticipation, and having waited in line for ten hours for tickets we got to see the back story for the three most beloved sci fi movies in history, and they sucked! I refuse to go into a rant about the prequels, but I think the first movie should have been edited down to this :
This was the only good part of the first movie.
Now, three years after the Revenge of the Sith, which I will admit had redeeming qualities to it, we are again forced to wonder if another attempt by George Lucas is worth our 11 dollars.
I have heard positive and negative things about this movie. One huge positive is the artwork. This will be a cartoon, but the images that have been leaked online are crazy and certainly have more of an anime flair to them. Here are a few :
Obi Wan looking awesome with his saber. Oh yeah, come and get some.
I am not sure if this is just a concept peice or an actual scene from the movie, but WOW. The artist that did this is amazing.
Here is [ Asajj Ventress ]. I am a fan of this character, and actually enjoyed her role in the Clone Wars TV series. I liked that she considered herself a Sith, even though she was “untrained”. I really hope her role stays strong in this film, and again the artwork is phenomenal.
Ok, so I am pretty sure we can all agree that one thing Skywalker Ranch excels at is creating amazing visuals, but plots seem to be an issue these days, and unfortunately, I think this will be the case in the upcoming movie. Here is the “official” plot synopsis.
The Clone Wars takes place between Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones and Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith. The eponymous Clone Wars rage between the Confederacy of Independent Systems and the Galactic Republic. When Jabba the Hutt’s son, Rotta the Hutt, is taken by a group of renegades, Anakin Skywalker and Obi-Wan Kenobi depart in search of answers: where is the Hutt’s son, and who is controlling this mysterious renegade group? Yoda sends Ahsoka Tano along as Anakin’s apprentice. Count Dooku will unleash his minions, including Asajj Ventress and General Grievous, to cause havoc for the Republic and to make a three way war between the Galactic Republic, the Confederacy of Independent Systems and the Hutt’s.
OK. First of all, Rotta the Hutt… really?!? Rotta the Hutt? Does anyone else out there remember Lumpy? Chewbacca’s kid from the infamous Star Wars Christmas Special. Haven’t we learned our lesson about creating random family members for the Star Wars universe? I am also trying to imagine a distraught Jabba wondering where he son his and thumbing through family photos to give to Anakin to help find little Rotta. Oh, and seriously does any one else really want to think about two Hutts mating and creating a child in the first place? Ugh.
Next, since when does Anakin get an apprentice? He is not a master and still an apprentice himself in the third movie. Granted, I am sure they will address this in the movie, but why add this into an established character history.
The final issue that I have with this movie is the lack of Ewen McGregor and Hayden Christensen. As much as I hate Hayden Christensen’s portrayal of Anakin, we all must face the fact that he is Anakin now, so how are you just going to get two different actors to play the MAIN characters. If this were a straight to DVD, or TV movie, I would not care as much, but this is a feature film, get the original actors or don’t do the freaking movie.
This movie is meant to be the precursor to a TV series, which will no doubt see a change in the voices of all the characters, which for a TV series, I am not too concerned about that, but ultimately I just think that this movie should have been a prime time special on the channel that will be airing the TV series and that’s all. Aside from the visual elements, I just don’t see anything about this movie being worthy of big screen play, or 11 dollars of my hard earned money.
In the end, I wish I could love Star Wars as much as I did in the Spring of 1999, before seeing episode I. The anticipation of that movie, the idea of new Star Wars content and the thought that a whole new generation of Star Wars fans being created just doesn’t exist with this movie. It seems an after-thought and in my opinion will be the final insult to what I considered to be a defining story in my childhood.
So let me know what you think, will you see the movie? Are you looking forward to it like you did the originals? Leave a comment.
UK hacker to finally be extradited to USA. A waste of the taxpayers money. Scrabulous lives on the Web. Dell going back into the music player business. 2100 year old Greek computer being revisited. Lake of petroleum on Saturn’s moon. Intel cheap computer a hit in Portugal. Microsoft’s Vista trick getting analyzed by everyone. Then there’s Midori, the Microsoft cloud. 64-bit Windows is not mainstream. T. Boone Pickens sells Yahoo stock, rips company.
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Facebook ditches Scrabulous. Adobe releases 64-bit Photoshop Lightroom 2. Microsoft shows off new spherical display device. Get your own jetpack for $100,000. Dell bringing out mini-desktop, perhaps a smart phone and Wal-Mart laptops. 70-percent of Government laptops are stupidly unencrypted. DS piracy rampant in Japan. India going to develop a $10 Laptop. Will Android merge with Symbian. China to clone Blu-ray with new standard.
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It has been 18 days since the release of the long hailed, hyped, and over marketed iPhone 3G. Has it lived up to the hype?
I have heard it said that “if you don’t have a love hate relationship with Apple, then you are just a fanboy.” This is a very true statement. I am an apple believer. I see Steve Jobs as a visionary who, barring health problems, will be pivotal in taking consumer electronics into the future. However, I also know enough to avoid the fanboy filled lines for newly released apple products. Why? Because straight out of the gate, Apple generally FAILS. They get it right fairly quick after the release, but the initial release is not usually a pleasant experience.
So, was it different for the iPhone? NO. We all remember the abysmmal launch that saw outages both in the at&t activation servers, and also the iTunes activation process. Lines that should have taken an hour took most of the day because the purchase time wasn’t a swift 5 minute process, like the previous iPhone, but an excruciating 30 minutes to an hour. Even after all that time spent, many were walking out with unactivated iPhones.
After nearly 3 weeks, if you want an iPhone you still get to stand in line.
What about the lucky ones who got their phones and were able to activate them? A friend of mine is on his fifth iPhone 3G and is convinced that the black iPhones are cursed and has switched to the white iPhone. I am sure there is no difference, but he has had battery problems, overheating problems, antenna problems, and apparently one of the iPhone’s got ghetto and cut him…
What about the app store? This, I believe, has been the saving grace for the iPhone. The app store is awesome. Providing needed functions and add-ons to a phone that, unfortunately, should have had them in the first place. Personally, I have downloaded about 30 different apps, and all of them are pretty cool. Even apps that serve no purpose at all just have a flair of awesome that is hard to escape. The best example of that is the iPhone saber app. It literally does nothing except show you a light saber and let you swing your phone around to make the light saber cracking noises, and yet it is so much fun. Another fun time killing app is the iPint. Using the accleramator on the iPhone you slide a brew down to the waiting hands of your customer avoiding all the obstacles on the bar. As a reward the phone pours you a pint you can “drink” and it looks pretty realistic.
Other apps do provide much need productivity and functionality to the phone. For instance, the WordPress blogging app is a fantastic tool to allow bloggers to report on events, or edit mistakes on the go. Another great app would be the Speed Dial app. Yep, I know you have speed dial on your phone already. This app though creates a block of nine square images of your friends that you can touch to dial, it just looks cool, and it is easily my most used app on the phone.
Also heavily used is Pandora. Pandora is an internet radio application, you create your account and plug in a few of your favorite artists and songs and it creates custom radio stations that you can listen too on the go. The selections can sometimes be a little out there, for example it paired up Journey on my RUSH station, but overall it makes pretty selections.
Lastly I will talk about the “remote” app. This one allows you to control your iTunes from anywhere on your network with your iPhone. While that is a great feature, this app really shines if you are also an Apple TV owner. I love my Apple TV, but one major issue I have with it is that the remote that comes with SUCKS.
It looks cool, but it can be a pain in the rear to use. Enter Remote on the iPhone. Now instead of having to navigate back and forth with the menu button, I can go directly the movie, or song, or picture that I want on the screen. Plus it drives my wife crazy when she has the small remote and “thinks” she is control of the TV. Muwahahahah . sorry .
As an first gen iPhone user, I am extremely happy with the App Store, and it has satiated my desire for an upgrade for the time being, so while an iPhone 3G is in my future, I am content to avoid the lines and the fully expected initial Apple FAIL for now.
So, in the end, no, the iPhone is not living up to the hype. It will, in the end, but as with all things Apple there is a painful early adopter process. In the coming weeks with the release of MagicPad giving us copy/paste ability and continuing upgrade of at&t’s 3G network, the iPhone will be the dominant phone on the market, but if you are currently in a contract with another provider, don’t break it for this phone.
New search engine flops with too much PR and no oomph. FCC cannot police Comcast but they can shake fist at the company. Apple MobileMe having issues. Company has yet to patch DNS hole as other get attacked by DNS poisoning. China has 560 million mobile phone users. Wow. Microsoft all over the news mostly about the bad Vista analysis. Microsoft throws in with Apache embraces PHP. Bad nVidia chips in Dell laptops?
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Scrabble sues Scrabulous. Why not buy them? Facebook opening the architecture for others to take advantage of its system. Google activates KNOL, its Wikipedia clone. The Northern Lights are actually explosions. Intel gets serious about SOC – systems on a chip – AGAIN. Sony modernizes its e-book reader. Alien formats now work. Yahoo announced a rollout of Zimbra e-mail consolidation software. Spammer walks out of jail and is now an escaped convict.
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I wonder what to do with the sound effects. Will Microsoft change the interface on the Xbox360? Child Online Protection Act has been over-turned. New law needed. Looks like Google may buy Digg for$200 million. CherryPal announces terminal calls it something else. Wiis selling like hotcakes down under. Spam King gets nearly 4 years in jail. GigaOm buying other blogs. Microsoft going to go after Apple with advertising. Finally! The DNS flaw is out in the wild. Look for exploits coming your way.
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Apple looking better and better but margin cuts may hurt the stock price. I like the way Apple does updates for the Mac. TiVO and Amazon doing a deal where you can watch live TV and then buy a product that you see on the show out-of-the blue. People do not watch entertainment just to buy something. General Motors wants electric stations to be set up all over the country by the utilities companies. Esquire Magazine is going to use e-Ink for fancy 75th anniversary edition. Should be fascinating. iPhone selling for $1000 on eBAY. IBM selling off Lenovo shares. AMD is on the road to recovery. The ASUS eeePC become hot in the EU.
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