AIBO Euthanized

As part of large scale restructuring in a bid to swing around the company's financial struggles, Sony has announced that they have discontinued new product research into entertainment robots. AIBO, the popular robot dog that retails for around $1700 and it's lesser known humanoid cousin, the QRIO, will no longer be produced.



The AIBO is probably the single most recognized consumer robot on the market, and it's a real pity to see it go. The little guy seemed to be an indicator that all sorts of other consumer robot pets and helpers might be just around the corner, but perhaps that's not true.

Of course I nvy anyone that has an AIBO or two stashed away, I could imagine the eBay price on an AIBO will skyrocket within the next few months..

See no ****, hear no ****, speak no ****?

The web was abuzz last week with discussions about Google's decision to release a localized version of it's search service in China. The service itself is not the big news, but rather the fact that it will be censored to remove certain entries that the Chinese government deems inappropriate. This move seems to clash directly with Google's don't be evil mantra, as well as with their supposed mission of organizing the world's information and making it easily available to everyone.

Speaking in defense of this move on the Official Google Blog Andrew McLaughlin, Google's senior policy counsel said that this decision was made as they (Google) felt it was better to provide the Chinese population with a limited service, than with no service at all. While I understand their point of view, as well as the need for a business like Google to do what it needs to get into a market as important as China, I find it really worrying that even this angelic company is willing to sacrifice their supposed scruples for a piece of the pie in this country, especially considering the results of recent similar activity by other companies/products in the same space, Microsoft's MSN, and Yahoo. While China is undoubtedly well on it's way to being the single most important economic force on earth, allowing it to dictate the way business is conducted, to the detriment of free speech is extremely irresponsible. If China is allowed to establish such standards, what is stopping other governments for using them as an example and employing similar tactics? I am not typically one to throw around phrases like 'The Greedy Corporations', but in this case I think such labels are appropriate, and moves like this by such entities could quite conceivably spell doom for the information freedom that has developed over the last few decades thanks to the internet.

PC Gaming sucks

Don't get me wrong, I'm no fanboi or anything. I have had my fair share of fun with PC gaming especially playing RTSs (which is the one genre I have yet to see properly implemented on a console), but fun can only cost so much in time, effort and money before it stops being fun. Let me explain: Last week one of the guys at work downloaded 3DMark 06 which, for the uninformed, is the latest version of benchmarking company Futuremark's 'gamers benchmark'. It is the de-facto standard in PC stats bragging, basically the tool of choice in the hardware pissing contest that PC gamers are so fond of. It runs a series of tests on your machine that place the same kind of strain on it as a current-technology game would, determining how well your various PC components live up to the task and providing you with a single, all-encompassing '3DMark score'. This single score is used on forums, at LANs and in any other gamer meeting place you can think of to illustrate how much more powerful one person's machine is than everyone else's. It's the digital age version of bicep-flexing or arm-wresteling.



Anyway, I ran this benchmark on both my home machine (a Mecer notebook with a P4 2.8GHz processor, 1Gb of system RAM and a Radeon 9700 Mobility with 128 Mb of onboard RAM) as well as on my work PC (a 3.2GHz machine with 1Gb RAM and a GeForce 7800 GT with 256Mb RAM). These machines earned scores of 347 and 3411 respectively. Now these scores alone mean very little to me, what does matter is that my notebook (which is not that underpowered) gets 0-1 fps on each of the tests and my work PC gets between 8 and 20 fps. The level of hardware needed to run this benchmark properly is apparently a system with a dual-core CPU, two high end graphics cards and a (yet to be released) physics processing card. All that adds up to about a R15000 machine (at least). How many people can really afford to spend that on a gaming machine.. especially considering that it will be outdated within 8-10 months (my work PC would have been a top end rig 8 months ago)!? It really is rediculous.

Thanks, but at that kind of cost, I would much rather 'invest' in one of the new consoles coming out, enjoy games at the same quality level (or higher) as current-generation PCs, and know that for the next five or so years I will be able to play games as they were intended to be played, on exactly the same hardware that the developers tested them on. No setting down detail levels just to be able to run the game at a steady framerate on my year old machine, no worrying about whether a machine will even run on my rig, just pop in te disk and play!

Less is More..

Now this is what an IM client should be like! Not some nasty, clunky, supersized eexample of bad design, but small, clean and functional! This is what Miranda can be with a bit of TLC and tweaking. This really is the most awesome IM client. Tabbed windows, ability to remove everything superfluous (with a plugin or two), transparency support, and easily transportable. I love it!

One of the most useful plugins I have found is one called Metacontact, it actually groups together aliases from different protocols into a single contact, so you can transparently use MSN, GTalk, whatever, to contact them. This is great when you're having trouble with one of the protocols. Lovely!