Console Wars

We have 3 consoles out there waiting to be played and new comers emerging everyday trying to decide which one to buy... Microsoft and Sony have both given us price drops to entice new buyers while Nintendo has stuck with its price point. Looking at overall value the Xbox remains at the top of the list. With an impressive list of top titles, a large gaming community, Netflix content, and the Xbox arcade Microsoft has the best bang for the buck on the market. They are not without fault though. Xbox live is a scam at best, where you pay to play over the internet service you already pay for with games hosted on other consoles. So the fee is all profit with no benefit to the consumer... It would be different if Microsoft hosted its games on their own servers, but that is not that case. Scam or not Xbox offers a great product and great game play value. Wii comes second barely edging out PS3 due mostly to its online content as well, with its arcade featured games, reverse comparability with Gamecube, and it's not so gimmicky motion sensor tech Wii has a great deal to offer. Especially with it's new motion plus addition. Negatives with the wii are graphics power and price of additional accessories. PS3 it's expensive.. we all know that, it comes with a bluray player and supports 1080p games, and has an impressive 4 core one of a kind processor. What they don't tell you is that this proccessors makes it hard to make games for this system and leads publishers to optimize their games for the much more user friendly Xbox and then port it over to PS3. Yes the exclusive titles for PS are great they look great and mostly play great too. It will be interesting to see how their new motion tech will pan out. If you need a bluray player and like are hooked on their exclusives than this is the system for you. Make sure that your favorite exclusives are still PS only still as some major titles have been put off by the PS3's lack of success and its above mentioned development issues.

Good Luck
Buy happy
and Play hard

Microsoft adds ads to Xbox...?

Microsoft has responded to concerns over a recent announcement it would be bringing Silverlight adverts to its Live service, saying the adverts won't interfere with the gaming experience for users.

Xbox Live's Larry Hryb posted on his Major Nelson blog about the move, reassuring gamers that Microsoft intends to enhance the service with its adverts, not interfere with it. . "I’ve seen quite a bit of discussion today about how we're bringing Silverlight ads to LIVE in the future," he said.

"I need to let you know that you don’t need to worry about a huge influx of ads across the dashboard. One of our core principles is to enhance, not interfere with the gaming experience, and we work directly with our partners to only deliver experiences that are relevant to the Live community."

Microsoft recently spoke about its plans to bring interactive ad campaigns that are compatible with a range of its services, included Live, via Silverlight - software that produces similar results to Adobe Flash. It said that this technology would create the same appearance on the games console as ads viewed on a web browser.

However, Hyrb stresses these ads will become an organic part of the dashboard, comparing them to some of the NXE slots produced in the past.

"No one on the team wants to turn the dashboard into something that looks like Shibuya Crossing," he writes in his post. "That's just not good for anyone."

11 awesome applications you've never heard of

http://www.techspot.com/news/35307-1...-heard-of.html

The average PC user has a dozen or so applications which they completely swear by – and rightfully so. What gets the job done is what matters the most. There is, however, a treasure-trove of pint-sized utilities and fully blown applications just waiting to be discovered. We’ve scoured the Web to provide a list of 11 useful programs which you’ve probably never heard of.

All of the programs in this article are either absolutely free of charge or have a free alternative, so don’t hesitate to give them a shot and see what you’ve been missing out on. We hope that by the end of this list, you’ll have discovered at least one application that fills a void you didn't even know existed.

[techspot]Dell accidentally sells 19-inch monitors for $15 in Taiwan

Taiwan consumer regulators have ordered Dell to honor a pricing slip-up on their website that offered 19-inch LCD monitors for only NT$500 (around $15). The pricing mistake was posted late Thursday, and while it has been fixed since, news of the supposed bargain spread quickly via email, blogs and sites like Twitter. In the eight hours before Dell corrected the listing to the intended price of NT$4,800 ($148), 26,000 people had placed orders for nearly 140,000 displays.

Dell apologized and promised to offer “reasonable discounts” to those who ordered the incorrectly-priced monitors. Naturally, people were not happy. Taiwan’s Consumer Protection Commission said it has received 471 complaints about the mix-up and ordered Dell to complete orders for customers who had only ordered one monitor. Those who had ordered more than one should receive discounts on the second and further units.

According to the agency’s statement, if Dell doesn’t follow the directive, they will consider it a violation of Taiwan’s fair trade laws and seek legal recourse.

Competition

Competition is back in the world of computer hardware. For the past year or so we had a clear front runner in both GPU and CPU applications, Nvidia and Intel respectively. Now with AMD acquireing ATI they have begun to fight back. ATI has equal if not better graphics cards for many applications and AMD CPUs are cheaper and reaching closer and closer to the raw computing power of Intel CPUs. I love it. That's what makes building and buying computers fun, seeing two companies push eachother to innovate. Ever since my first 3dfx voodoo I have loved the hardware race. Its something that isn't only fun to watch but creates growth and forces faster inovations leading us to more awesome tech. We have lost this type of competition in 3d art programs. Auto Desk has a strange hold on these programs, releasing incremental updated version of 3d studio max and Maya to milk them for all they can. There needs to be a change made, there needs to be some new programs created to test them and take away this monopoly to create a better and more inovative environment, with hopes to keep a speedy growth of this technology.