Just realised Azureus has broken 400,000 users of the new distributed database feature! Roll on half a million.
Monthly Archive for May, 2005Page 2 of 3
Great article over at MSNBC about the future of human evolution, kind of the opposite of what I was talking about last month. I think the Unihuman concept is only going to happen when the entire world becomes globalised, so that won’t happen anytime in the next few centuries, more like a few thousand years.
The excellent Mars trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson goes into what happend to the children born on Mars is great detail. With a third of Earth’s gravity they became much taller and thinner making them incredibly weak in higher g environments. After a few generations the ones that try to return to Earth simply cannot take it and must remain on Mars. So basically any planet we settle will wind up with a whole different species of human living there. Got your ticket booked for the Mars colony ship yet? 
Bill Gates, "The day Sony launches [the new PlayStation], and they walk right into Halo 3."
Anyone who didn’t think this would be a war can chew on that quote. It’s great to see them taking the bull by the horns as I have mentioned before.
I was 8 when I saw my first Star Trek movie at the cinema, it was the sixth movie, not great in hindsight but I loved it at the time and have grown up on Star Trek ever since. I just finished watching the final episode of Enterprise and what will probably be the last new Star Trek content produced for a number of years.
And I miss it already. It’s ironic that the best writing, acting and overall engaging storylines took place in the show’s final season. Maybe they were feeling the heat of cancellation or maybe they felt they had nothing to lose, but this year has easily been the best for Trek since Deep Space 9 at it’s peak, if only they had started the series this way it may have survived beyond four years. At least it went out pleasing the fans (see picture) and with it’s head held high.
I look forward to what the future might bring (rumoured movie trilogy anyone?) but for now they can safely hand the baton on to the awesome Battlestar Galactica to carry us through this trekless period. Live long and prosper.
Dave is really pissed after the Adam Curry interview for Wired, I guess everything in the media over the last few months has started to get to him. Their main point of contention is who wrote the first ipodder. Sure, Dave did write the first program to download enclosures from RSS feeds but Adam was the first to link that to iTunes and the iPod. It depends on what your definition of an ipodder or podcatching client is really, either way something is going down at Gnomedex.
The best site for TV torrents BTEfnet has been down for several days now after a completely unfair attack from the MPAA. The site is now asking for donations but this is the beginning of the end for this once great community. Their problem? They hit a critical mass that flagged them up on the MPAA watch list like so many other great sites and P2P services in the past. The difference here is that BTEfnet were dealing in TV shows making it even more shocking they were targeted as the MPAA are now willing to stick up for more than just movies.
When these people come in and shutdown these sites more just seem to crop up in rebellion and for the mainstream of Bit Torrent users it’s just a matter of waiting before they can get their TV shows again. In the mean time ’seasoned’ users can fall back on the more tried and trusted methods that help us out in these times of crisis.
By now everyone knows the details of the Xbox 360 and it is as the leaks expected. The console looks great and won’t offend the vast numbers of people that the orginal xbox did, on launch last time many potential buyers simply couldn’t get over the size and shape of the console and the controller - both of which have been fixed this time.
On the subject of the controller it’s wireless as standard, can charge up by usb and has a cool X button that takes you to the main xbox dasboard no matter what the console is currently doing. I also like the LEDs they have put in there to show which part of the screen your playing on in split screen games, nice touch.
The marketing bods as MS have been working overtime on this one as they didn’t release all the details last night, instead the backwards compatibility, release, price and the halo/perfect dark issue will be probablly be left till E3 thus doubling their exposure.
With a solid games line up at E3 they could really come out strong but with the Revolution and PS3 still yet to be shown I will reserve judgement till then.
One question I want to put on the record before next week. Will Sony inovate with PS3? That’s what I want to see next week.
UPDATE: If your in europe and were going to watch the MTV special tonight don’t bother as this video is far more informative and much better produced.
It’s the big Xbox 360 announcement tonight on MTV but lets face it, the cat is mostly out of the bag now. Why not do this live? Pictures and specs have been leaking over the net all week which have taken a lot of the punch out of tonight’s event. Also why no webcast? We don’t all have MTV and as this is paid time MS can do whatever they like with the show. The whole launch was put on to just trump PS3 but they are going to lose a whole lot of momentum going into E3 next week which they need for the gaming journos to put a positive spin on. Let the media frenzy begin!
I got my new DVD burner yesterday and so far its been very fast and produced very good quality recordings. One of the reasons I got it was to fix my Xbox, unfortunately in trying to do so last night I did the worst thing you can do and accidentally flashed a Microsoft bios thus restoring it to it’s original state and locking me out completely. So now I have to do either a hardware or software mod to get it back. Not going to go hardware - it just takes way too long. Instead I’ll pick up a copy of Splinter Cell off ebay and using a hacked memory stick do the soft mod to get it back to a usable state.
I really messed my xbox up big time.
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