Archive for March, 2008

The boss of Crytek simply announced that Crysis 2 (the sequel to Crysis) would not be ready before 2010. The wait will be long.

This is a special gift to all readers from Ireland: You are continuously the country where visitors spend more time on this web site (more than 4 minute per visit) from all countries contributing more than 20 visits per month.

Special for St Patrick’s Day: If you stare at the image, the clover leaves will start moving.

Most people did not really notice this bit of information: The United States of America reached a point where 1,6 million Americans are in jail. This is nearly one percent of the 230-million population.

I am starting to believe that this is (maybe not only) a way to manage a significant part of unemployment. When a society has 1% of its people behind bars, this is becoming not only a marginal management of violence but a strategy to economic management of population. One of the first advantages there is that it has a visible impact on unemployment (jailed people do not look for a job).

Has jail become a nation-wide population control system?

Source : Neatorama.

US Rednecks did build a powerful spider mech just “because they could”.

Don’t let your kids wander around this one!

2008 will be the year of the triple core CPU. AMD started to ship the Phenom chips in various configurations.

As said before, this is a great way for AMD to differentiate itself, but the prices are not expected to go down immediately. Either because AMD does not want to shoot itself in the foot or because the quantities will not be huge for a few more weeks.

Let’s wait for the next price war between Intel and AMD, remembering that most games do not take advantage of more than 2 cores.

Nothing is for sure, but Wired has an article about this issue: paying a monthly fee to have fully legal access to unlimited music download on P2P. Wired seems to believe that it would be a piracy levy on ISPs, but I think it would be a real license paid on a monthly basis.

If you have a nVidia graphics card on your PC, you can get a free download of recent games from Steam / Valve.

For a limited time, if you qualify (you only need your PC to hold a nVidia graphics card), you can donwload a free copy of the following games from Steam just by creating an account or having an account on Steam.

• Portal: First Slice (11 levels of this new innovative game from Valve)
• Half-Life 2: Deathmatch (networked FPS)
• Half-Life 2: Lost Coast (FPS technology demonstrator)
• Peggle Extreme (a relatively simple game inspired by old brick games)

Look! It’s a free offer for only half of the PC owners in the world.

Long ago, I had already published the old Copyright FAQ (”10 Big Myths about copyright explained” * by Brad Templeton), but here is a good post from PlagiarismToday: “10 Basics About Copyright Everyone Needs to Know“.

When straight lines are no longer straight.

Fabrice is a friend currently living in Japan. I already had presented some of his photos. Here is one more that I find particularly nice:

Fabrice Hénon web site.
In order to have a wider view of his photo work.

The bane (correction: “one of the banes”) of the new opus of the Microsoft Office saga (MS-Office 2007) is that the Redmond developpers once again changed the file formats. I’m sure that this is for the best. But if you went the MS-Office 2007 path and not your colleagues or friends, they no longer can read your files.

Solution (partial because you still need to do something): Crunch all documents through a software to make them readable. This is basically the offer from Docx2RTF, Windows utility that you can download freely.

Some of the graphics cards are available in different memory sizes (like the successful nVidia 8800 GT or 8800 GTS): 256MB, 512MB, 1GB. But how much RAM do you really need?

Thanks to The Tech Report, you will know: “How much graphics memory do you really need?“.

Summarized:

• 1GB: is worthless, the CPU of the bard will be short before the memory is full
• 512MB: This is the right figure
• 256MB: Not enough if you want to push the definition up

Of course, you know about the impossible triangle (very classical optical illusion).

Do you know how to draw it? It is complicated indeed and most people will do some ugly sketch instead of a nice optical illusion. However, this is quite simple. It is all a matter of starting it right thanks to the help of: “How to Draw an Impossible Triangle“.

Here is a software tool that will allow you to explore the fonts installed on your Windows computer: FontEXPRO.

If you are interested in GNU/Linux and want some useful e-reading, you should jump to this list of free ebooks related to Linux from LinuxHaxor.net.

All lovers of role playing knew -at least- the name of Gary Gygax, co-author of Dungeons & Dragons, the game that opened the path for all RPG (Role Playnig Games). This man who influenced the imaginations of countless players and inspired many other creators, just died at 69.

No curing spell is going to bring him back.

Source: NY Times (thanks to Xtian).