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Discovering Heroes

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Chris Till
on August 13, 2007
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Heroes

I just watched an episode of Heroes the whole way through for the first time. I have seen bits of episodes but never really felt like sitting down and really watching until now but I feel like I’m really into it now and am excited to watch the rest of season 1 and season 2 when we get it over here on sci-fi. The show is really entertaining with the antics of the two japanese guys and thought provoking with the cheerleader who can regenerate. In the episode I saw, she was murdered by a guy at school and after she comes back to life during her autopsy, she sneaks out and goes home. The guy is stunned when she shows up at school. She acts friendly to him and asks for a lift. She then procedes to drive the car into a wall to kill them both before she presumibly regenerates.

Anyway, I’m enjoying it and am thinking about picking up the season one box set.

Today’s Apple unveiling, and .Mac still sucks

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Chris Till
on August 7, 2007
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I haven’t blogged about any apple stuff for a while now. I don’t think I’ve even posted about the iPhone since before it’s launch. To summerise my feelings on that, it’s cool but when it does come out here I probably won’t be buying one because firstly I have a phone that I never use so a contract is just burning money for me, I also have an iPod and I’m waiting for the new “iPhone without the phone” iPod in the works. Finally, despite how cool it is, there will be an even cooler one at macworld no doubt and even though I really want to have the net in my pocket everywhere, it’s not worth the money to me at this time.

So moving on to today. They announced the new shiny iMacs in aluminum and glass, iLife 08 and Web Gallery for dot mac. I have to say, even though I like the new iMac design I’m not sure they’ve done a lot to the actual specs on either version but who can argue with a price drop on the top model and a much nicer new look.

On the iLife side I just don’t care that much as I can already make podcasts or photos or videos and organanise that stuff ok. I don’t feel like any of this stuff really benefits me at all. There was also iWork 08 introduced but it didn’t have anything I would be interested in really. However, I did like pages being able to be used as a simple word processor rather than a layout tool if you want it to which is nice. The new addition to the lineup, Numbers is also cool because its an alternative to excel on the mac and because the bundle costs the same now as it did before.

Dot Mac was probably the most dissapointing thing of the day because I was expecting so much more than what they gave. I wanted them to say that they’ve partnered with google to provide the servers for the new, free dot mac service but no. Instead it was a online photo gallery which integrates into iphoto and iphone where you can send photos straight to the gallery from the phone and sync other friends photos straight to your iphone which is as close to MMS as you can get without it being that. So yeah it fills the void left by no MMS support but $100 just for that is pretty crap. Why is it not free? Why can’t Apple give a little like Google or anyone else for that matter do. My webspace costs less with far more ability to do stuff. $100 a year is too much considering my hosting is approximatly the same and I get unlimited email addresses and the ability to host unlimited domains, plus 300gb or space and unlimited transfer. 10gb doesn’t hold up much even with the stuff you can do between macs and stuff, not that I have more than one anyway.

Simply put, the iPhone integration should be free and so should .mac for every mac owner. I just don’t get why they didn’t lower the price to something reasonable or make it free. It’s not exactly going to hurt them financially.

In summary, nice new iMac design, iLife is ok but nothing to shout about and dot mac was a pretty big dissapointment, still Apples worst and most hated product and as far as I’m concerned, having an email @mac.com is just the fanboy’s badge of honour and nothing more. If this is all steve jobs was refuring to when he said to Walt Mossburg at D that .mac will be upgraded soon, I’m so dissapointed because my hopes, especially with all they’ve been doing with google recently were way up about a completely new .mac we haven’t seen.

Update: When you take a look at the .mac web gallery and other features including the nice webmail and Imap integration with mail and iphone it is a service that would be somewhat useful to me. I mean I won’t use the email really but the web gallery is nice especially with iphone intergration. The problem is, despite how cool that is, dot mac really doesn’t come close to being worth the cost. The price is $100 (£50) but despite that, it costs £69.99 in the UK which is so unreasonable its hard to describe without swearing. From my point of view, every feature in .mac can be found elseware for less. The only difference is that this way requires the person to know a little more but most people who buy dot mac I would imagine probably would have the skills needed.

For £60 you can buy the hosting plan I have which includes a domain name, 300gb as opposed to 20gb, unlimited bandwidth and email accounts, databases and other stuff plus countless other things. You don’t get the high quality .mac virus filtering and webmail interface or ease of setup but you do get a lot more space and features if you know what your doing. Then again I personally don’t even use the email I pay for and just stick with gmail because it’s just the best and easiest to use (and free). The space may not be as easy to access as the iDisk but regardless, it’s still a far better deal for the money. To cover the other things, you can create blogs easily with wordpress, podcasts might not be so easy but you can just insert mp3’s in blog posts. Groups are easy to take care of with PHPbb forums or any other type really. The final thing to find a replacement for is the web gallery which admittedly is pretty cool.

Now really all that service consists of is a flickr siideshow interface which lets you send MMS’s to friends and contribute to each others galleries. While these are features that flickr doesn’t offer, you can still email photos by using any phone (including iphone) and other people can view the photos on their iPhone even if they have to go to flickr in safari to do so. You don’t really even need a flickr pro account to do this but if you did want one, that combined with the hosting plan and included domain name still come to less than dot mac. If they had slashed the price to maybe $25 per year or something like that then I would think about subscribing, but even then I don’t have many uses for the service as of right now.

The late, post E3 gaming update

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on August 4, 2007
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Last time I posted back in may I was talking about Nintendo and how they are known for their lateness and unfortunatly they don’t seem to have their mind focused on changing any time soon. Now that E3 has come and gone and they’ve announced Mario Kart Wii for next year in Q1, I can’t help but think that by Q1 they really mean June or July 08.

I get dissappointed watching these great press conferences where they’re so happy to report that all the big games but mario kart are coming out this year and while this is the case for Metroid and Mario Galaxy (both of which are out a month or two earlier in the US), it is not true of Smash brothers, and for me personally, while Metroid and Galaxy are fantastic games, I just don’t care. I suck at first person shooters despite how cool they look and never have the patience to get through a platformer despite how great galaxy looks. So for me I’m really dissapointed becasuse the wii will offer me absolutely nothing until at least march next year which isn’t good considering how long that still is away.

Away from the wii, I have said before several times that I was not that interested in either the PS3 or the Xbox 360. I remember posting that I would be more interested in the Xbox than the PS3 mainly because of price and blu-ray as well as the fact that we currently don’t have access to an HD TV. Since may I’ve changed my mind and only recently bought a PS3 jointly. I think the main reason we went ahead and took the plunge with a PS3 was due to the price drop. If there had not been the new bundle introduced with motorstorm and resistance plus an extra sixaxis I probably wouldn’t have given the proposition much thought at all and almost certainly wouldn’t have one now.

The price drop was announced just before we went away for the week and when we were at a cyber cafe while away I saw the new deals and instanty suggested we put our money together to make less of a dent in our wallets. Also, incidently, while we were away we had an opportunity to play on an Xbox 360 and I have to say while the blade interface impressed me for a while, I found myself finding it very tiresome very quickly.

Blu-Ray was always going to be something that defined either the success or failure of the PS3 in the end and it’s still not clear at all which way blu-ray is going. I said that Xbox was a better deal because of the price and the fact that they don’t force you to take the plunge with a next gen dvd player unless you want to buy the addon. Well, my view has changed and I would now argue that the PS3 is a better deal because with the new bundles, you get blu-ray, the games and extra pad for the same approximate cost as the Xbox without the HD DVD addon. That price of around £400 also includes the Xbox live subscription because I don’t think many people buy a new console to not play online and also the overpriced (£60 f-ing pounds!) wi-fi adaptor because the cable isn’t long enough to stretch to the router in the dining room. I still can’t understand to this day why they didn’t put wi-fi in the original version. The fact that it is still not in even the elite version now is totally rediculous to me and I don’t get their thinking at all there.

As far as the games go, I like some of the Xbox exclusives like halo 3 obviously, but the problem for me is I almost want to see microsoft fail with Halo 3 now as a punishment for over hyping it to a stupid amount really. I mean it will be a great game no doubt but it’s not the god game microsoft thinks it is. It’s going to be a big system seller for them and a huge cash cow but hopefully enough people can resist to give sony (who have the far superior, mostly error-free hardware and pretty much the same games for the most part) some sort of chance to get back into the race in the next year or so, which I’m fairly confident they will. They’re really chasing second place after nintendo because it’s clear they will become the market leader by early next year. I think in the end the faulty Xbox will cost microsoft, certainly from making any profit from the thing, but also from winning the race in this generation. If Sony were able to sell over 100 million PS2’s and still going and were also able to keep going in the face of huge adversity from all the negative criticisms they’ve taken over the PS3 so far then they can surely give microsoft a run for their money. Sony aren’t going to want to surrender their first place in the industry to Nintendo and Microsoft and they’re going to be coming back strong.

I guess we’ll see how much damage Halo 3 does and how Sony retaliates soon enough. Meanwhile Nintendo will continue their way to the top with Smash Bros, mario kart in 08, and later this year Metroid, Galaxy and others will help them out, not to mention strikers which just came out in the US and looks to be a fun party game.

More on Nintendo for 2007

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Chris Till
on May 27, 2007
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Since the last post, it has become clearer that the three main games: mario galaxy, metroid prime and smash bros are coming out this year in the US. There hasn’t been any mention of a european release for either of these three games and considering we haven’t been given a date for pokemon diamond and pearl yet or super paper mario, both of which are out in the US, I don’t have much hope for these games being released this year.

One upside is that we do have mario strikers charged out a couple of months before the US but that’s going to be a small consolation for many gamers who are waiting for the big three titles for wii, not to mention zelda phantom hourglass for DS which has also been set for this year in the US.

I’m planning to pick up strikers soon and hopefully I can get my wii replaced so I can get online and play the game and download some old stuff and the web browser and maybe if we’re lucky we’ll be playing at least one of those big three games by the end of the year. I’m also hoping for pokemon battle revolution but even though that has been out in japan since launch, I still have my doubts. I guess we’ll see what happens.

Just touching on the other consoles briefly, I’m hoping for a very unlikely PS3 price decrease by the end of the year because I’d like to get the new NBA game and others because there’s just some games that don’t suit the wii remote and nunchuk and need better graphics to keep appealing to gamers. Plus it wouldn’t hurt to have a relatively cheap blu-ray player should blu-ray beat HD DVD which I would prefer at this point I think.

Will there be another Nintendo game drought?

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Chris Till
on May 9, 2007
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It’s definitely shaping up for 2007 to be a pretty dissapointing year in which Nintendo fail to deliver their games on time. No matter what any release date pages say, I have a feeling that I’ll be dissapointed in the same way I always seem to be with video game releases. The games you want always take the longest to come out and when they do, while it’s great to play them, its just a bit empty because of the long wait for it.

Mario party 8, metroid prime 3, mario galaxy etc all looked like they would be out in the first half of this year but now that’s out of the question. I think game.co.uk should change the release info on metroid and galaxy to be a little more realistic than Q1 2007. Nintendo have recently said that they are releasing pretty much all the games that we have been promiced in 2007. The problem is they don’t specify if that will be for Japan, the US or Europe and because of this, I’m taking it as meaning Japan only for all of them, some of them in the US and virtually none in Europe.

Recent examples of delays include pokemon diamond and pearl which are sheduled to come out sometime between june and july in this country I think, but it’s already out in the US as of April. I think worldwide releases should become the norm because really, how hard can it be to get the games out everywhere simultaniously?

Other prominent examples include Excite Truck which came out November 19th in the US and Feburary or March in the UK. The latest game I want to play but can’t is Super Paper Mario which is coming out sometime later this year I’m guessing, by which time i probably will have lost interest.

I think the problem is every time Nintendo bring out a console, it seems like there’s always a super smash bros and mario kart long in the distance and it’s pretty dissapointing when theres at least a year’s wait for it.

An update on sports coverage

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Chris Till
on May 9, 2007
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Well maybe I spoke too soon because I’ve found that UKTV are starting to broadcast UKTV Slam basketball live on standard tv as well as on their subscription site.

Apparently they have done a deal with the bbl too because there is an announcement on the bbl site hinting at more tv coverage next season. I guess we are starting to see basketball really take off again in this country which is nice to see. Away from what UKTV are offering, by far the best coverage is from five who seem to be pretty much the only ones who realise that there is a significant demand in the UK for live US sports coverage.

Sports coverage needs to change in this country

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Chris Till
on April 28, 2007
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One thing that I don’t like much is that we don’t have the best coverage of sports in this country. Well, at least not an extremely diverse and continuous selection of different sports. It seems like the only sport ever on consistently is football, and, while it’s a good sport and I like it sometimes, I’m more of a basketball fan and more recently I’ve been discovering baseball thanks to five’s late night coverage. Five really is the only way you can watch north american sports like NBA and MLB on a semi-consistent basis. The problem is that it’s only one or two games of the chosen sport per week. Now I can’t complain about the time the shows are on because time zones can’t be helped and they are american sports so why should they play games to suit the comparitively small NBA and MLB fanbase in the UK and other countries. Of course they shouldn’t and on that front it’s all fine.

But where are HD feeds of games on UK TV? And where are more live games each week. While one free game is nice and definitely worth celebrating, it’s no where near what the US has in terms of free access to sports. The sports monopoly in this country gobbling up seemingly the rights to every sport almost is Sky Sports. Sky Sports is an expensive package on-top of your standard package and to be honest isn’t worth paying for unless you really like football, which has been shown in that many people choose to unsubscribe to Sky Sports during the summer when there is no football on.

Now in the US, as far as I know, the main networks which show sports: ESPN, abc, NBC and TNT are all free channels. Plus local channels show games of the local team if they aren’t picked up on national TV. This is definitely something we need to get in this country because right now we have virtually nothing to shout about in terms of sports coverage, unless your talking about olympics coverage because the BBC has that down to a tee.

Finally, I just want to touch on the misery that is the BBL, our sorry excuse for a basketball league in this country. It’s really just extremely dissapointing to have a league that is really struggling in terms of TV audiences and really re-establishing itself from the glory days of several years back. It hasn’t had a team representing it in the ULEB cup this year and my local team hasn’t even been competing choosing instead to take a year out and come back next season. The worst part is the TV viewership and the astonishing fact that the league has signed an exclusive deal with a channel I’ve never heard of which can’t be a good idea. What makes it worse is that firstly they don’t carry this channel on anything other than sky which takes freeview, analogue and virgin customers out of the equasion and lowers their possible audience. I’m surprised no one else gave them an offer because I would imagine that at least one of the top four or five broadcasters would be interested in showing games from the league. Four not including sky sports because I don’t consider them to be one of the majors as they aren’t available on freeview or anything else without additional charges.

The second problem they have is that now they have signed an exclusive deal with the channel, they are stuck with that channel until that contract expires before they can go anywhere else, that is if anyone else is interested. The contract may be up at the end of this season or it may be longer. I hope it isn’t a long term deal and that a deal can be reached with the BBC or five soon.

In conclusion, I hope that sometime soon, we have a better array of sporting viewing as well as all other types of TV content, in HD where applicable and we have more free channels that show these programmes or at least provide high quality programming for as lower cost as possible, but until then I’ll be keeping tuned to five or recording things if I can’t be nocturnal.

When is something going to get done about old tech patents?

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Chris Till
on April 26, 2007
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Everyone knows what’s happening with the Verizon vs Vonage situation. Verizon are shamelessly using old patents that are extremely wide ranging and arguably obsolite at this point in time to cripple the competition.

This is so common and you never have to wait long for the next greedy company or individual to try to get some money or take out their rivals, depending on the situation.

I have heard so many of these cases so it’s hard to think of any to think of many, but the ones that come to the top of my head include the people who sued Microsoft, `Sony and nintendo over rumble and another company that makes remote controls that sued nintendo for the wii remote despite the company not making remotes for gaming. The only sued them over the motion sensing which is for a totally different purpose and is I’m sure not unique anyway.

Away from gaming I know Microsoft and Apple among other major manufacturers of computers and other tech products have been targetted almost constantly by patent squatters.

So in conclusion, the whole system has to be updated to make it all work fairer now that things have changed so much. Trademark law work well for the most part in that they force the trademark holding company to enforce it and take steps to protect it and stop others from using it, and also show that you are using it. An example would be where cisco were criticised for simply putting an iPhone sticker on their VOIP phones (which incidently could probably be banned if Verizon get their way). But the squabble they had with Apple is history now and the companies are working together on iPhone interoperability.

Back to the patents, I think if people are no longer allowed to sit on patents then this kind of thing won’t be able to continue happening, and companies with great products won’t have to worry about people coming along trying to rain on their parades.

The BBC iPlayer will support the Mac

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Chris Till
on April 19, 2007
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I was hoping that this would happen and I also filled out the survey BBC put up a little while ago so it’s great to see it happen. I have been bashing the BBC lately with the lack of programming that I really want to watch and the tv license which I’m not a huge fan of.

This is certainly making me reconsider my position on the BBC and the license fee in the future if on demand tv viewing will be available online.

Read the article here.

Mac Pro octo core and Final Cut Studio 2 thoughts

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Chris Till
on April 16, 2007
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The creative professionals now have everything they could need at this point. Not only have we finally seen the release of Adobe’s Creative Suite 3 for intel macs and the Mac Pro octo core, Apple have also released a brand new version of Final Cut Studio. The new version has a whole load of great stuff including a couple of really great things that caught my eye. The first being the ability to place a wide variety of formats on the timeline in final cut and being able to edit them together in real-time. Plus the ability to compress huge HD video files down to much smaller files is great too.

The fact that you’ll be able to get smaller HD files online and the ever increasing broadband speeds, this hopefully means that more HD content will be available online soon.

One note about the Mac Pro 8-core though is that they introduced it at an increased cost and kept the quad core versions available at the same price as before I think although I may be wrong. I was hoping that they would keep the one highest end quad model and then go all octo from there upwards in pricing while dropping the quad core’s price and introducing the octo at not too much of a premium above that but I don’t think that’s what they’ve done.

I’m just not sure if I believe that it really costs so much more to put 8 cores in there than 4 and also that the quad system hasn’t gone down in price since it was launched last year.

But then again for those professional video editors it’s a small price to pay for probably best and still the cheapest solution for high end video editing and other professional tasks.