The International Automotive Festival has crowned the Alfa Brera the sexiest sled alive, few can claim the legitimacy of this one. Car Design News, a website produced by and for the automobile designers of the world, has polled its own audience of designers and design students to discover which car auto artists themselves believe to be the best designed.
The Aston Martin V8 Vantage appears to be the design most revered by designers. Admittedly this car looks even better in person as it does in pictures. Second place went to the four-door Mercedes Benz CLS and third to another Aston, the DB9. The Alfa Brera managed to capture the hearts of designers to the tune of an eighth placed finish.
Intel has announced the final chapter of its NetBurst architecture with the successor to the Pentium XE 955. Bit-tech runs the Pentium Extreme Edition 965 through it's battery of benchmarks - read on to see the first benchmark with an Intel beating an Athlon in ages.
In multi-threaded video encoding scenarios, the Pentium Extreme Edition 965 trades blows with the Athlon 64 FX-60, but the FX-60 remains the faster of the two on aggregate. In single threaded tests, it performs similarly to the Prescott based Pentium 4 Extreme Edition 3.73GHz. It's no slough, in that respect, but it's not as fast as AMD's single or dual core processors that have a much higher instruction per clock count.
Gaming is a mixed bag at the moment, because almost all of the current shipping games are single threaded, thus showing no tangible benefit to having a dual core processor. However, they don't really show any massive drawbacks either. Quake 4 is one of the first games to show performance benefits for dual core processors. Intel's Pentium Extreme Edition 965 came out on top of the pile in our high-detail test at 1280x1024 - this came as a bit of a surprise to us.
Xvid Encoding:AutoGK 2.20; 15 minutes of Dr Who, convert to 175MB MPEG, 2 passes, 720x416;
Michael Dell, head honcho at the PC maker, said that: "Alienware's products are an excellent complement to Dell's own line of high-performance computers designed for gaming, enthusiast and media content customers. In addition to offering high-quality, high-performance products, Alienware has tremendous brand appeal with consumers and creative business professionals."
In related news, Dell has started selling its Renegade XPS 600 system, its QuadSLI behemoth that leaves buyers with little change from $10,000. The system sports a custom paint job by Mike Lavelle, and has more bells and whistles than you can shake a very large stick at.
Enfucell's or Power Paper's flexible batteries has the usual thin n' flexible selling angle, but while still in development, are apparently anticipated to be particularly cheap and environmentally friendly due to a more off-the-shelf material and manufacturing process of metals in a paper and laminate sandwich. Sure, it may not produce a huge amount of juice, but when you're talking about very low-energy applications like e-ink, cheap, flexible batteries could power the digital newspapers of tomorrow before being thrown away with the day's rubbish.
Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzle Collection is a bundle of 24 open source, cross-platform puzzle games. Many of them will look familiar, like Solo (Sudoku), Mines (Minesweeper), and Guess (Mastermind), others perhaps not, but if you like puzzles you're guaranteed to find something addicing in the collection. Each of the games have multiple difficulty levels, save and load functions, multi-level undo and redo, and a few more features, and each one is available for Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, and Palm OS. As if that weren't impressive enough, every puzzle is a download of less than 100kb.
Japanese manufacturer Asurada's RAYERD-X (pronounced, apparently -- no "Engrish" jokes please -- Layered-X) has the crazy contortionist moves that would make even the most flexible gymnast wince in pain. Asurada entered the quadrupedal automaton in the Ninth Robo-One competition in Tokyo, where it wowed the crowds with such moves as the crab crawl, humanoid pose-down, and the most difficult position of all, the Iron Cross (well, kind of). Unfortunately for the design team, RAYERD-X, for all 28 of its servos and innumerable configurations, only captured 24th place at what must have been an extremely heated competition, although it did manage to take home the pretty important-sounding "Sunrise Special Prize."
Another post on GDC culture, this time on the garb of conference attendees. This is the stuff that isn't necessarily clear when you're reading accounts of interviews & key-notes, but this will gives a more complete picture of the event. We'll do this percentage-breakdown style.
(Pictured above, a dude hired by Microsoft to bartend sports the company-supplied shirt, and a competitor's hat.)
12% art students who are clearly trying too hard to be different. Green or rainbow-colored hair, noserings, plug earrings, torn fishnet stockings, that sort of thing. Shown above.
5% hardcore business attire. Full suits. Chumps. Or first-timers. Or Leland Yee.
.01% Nintendo power glove wearers. There's always exactly one of these guys. The other 10 who brought their power gloves do not wear them when they see the first guy wearing his. It's an unspoken rule that there. can. be. only. one. It gets ugly if someone breaks that rule.
20% Jeans and T-shirt. The GDC uniform for the rank-and-file. Seen here.
10% Jeans, T-shirt or hoodie, blazer on top. The GDC uniform for execs. It's how J Allard's image consultants dress him. We don't think J was at GDC, but those who subscribe to his wardrobe style certainly were.
8% Tracksuit jacket (ideally with European football team insignia), vintage t-shirt. See Neil Young, head of EA LA studio (pictured here) for example. Orange was the new black. Then it was pink. Is orange the new new black, then?
14% Khakis, woven leather belt, button-up shirt. For denizens of corporate cubicle farms. These people actually liked the GDC food, but occasionally hinted that San Jose is nice and all but they'd sure be glad to get back to the family in Chicago or Seattle.
9% hairy dudes. Long ponytails. Lambchop sideburns. Full beards. Foot-long goat-tees. Any combination thereof. The older ones tend to be involved in the making or running of MOOs, MUDs and antiquated (but loved) MMOGs.
17% booth babes. Yup, they do exist at GDC. Compared to their E3 counterparts, they tend to wear more clothing. Like their E3 counterparts, they're generally uninformed about products in the booths they front. This group is distinct from the actual real industry women who were present in ever-greater numbers at this year's GDC.
How do we know the ladies pictured at right were hired for their looks? Real employees of a company would sue if asked to show up at a tradeshow in a tiny little skirt (or a muscle-T). Professionals (male or female) just don't do that, even if they could somehow pull it off after sitting on their asses in a cubicle farm for years. Professional employees tend to wear logo-embroidered polo or button-down shirts and conservative bottoms.
(Numbers do not total 100%, because some people play multiple roles and because we're a games blog, not a math blog.)
Fashion Week Daily covers the latest wacky idea from Kate Spade, a "special" canvas bag with the word 'it' handpainted by Hugo Guinness on the corner. The very basic tote will be sold in a limited edition of 150 for $250 each.
Acme Studios has created an updated version of those clunky pens that let you switch to different inks. The slim 4fp pen was designed to be the thinnest multifunction pen around. It's enviably slim shape hides a black ballpoint, orange highlighter, lead pencil and a PDA stylus. It comes in eight designs and sells for $78.
Laguna Waterworks specializes in waterfalls, fountains and the hypnotic colored walls of water shown here. They come in different colors and can be custom sized. The water walls are low maintenance and require only occaisional refilling. The bubble panels sell for $1,199 for a panel that is 27" x 14" x 81" tall.
Whether you like it or not, Devi Kroell's Classic Eagle Hobo is an eagle handbag made of calf leather and the eagle is made of python. Shown here in purple, it is also available in olive/dark brown and blue/dark brown and in a larger size (24" x 16"). Bag dimensions: 16" x 11". Price: $1890.
The "Jetmousine" created by Dan Harris, in Bend, Oregon, who turns old private jets into luxury limos. He is currently at work on his first project which has a bright red exterior and a plasma TV, high-definition TVs, an 8,000 watt sound system and plenty of leather upholstery. The first one costs around $1 million, has been sold to Exotic Coach, a limo company in Chicago, and is street-legal. It uses a 1974 Lear jet fuselage with chrome wheels and a 400-horsepower 8100 cc Vortec engine from a Chevy truck.
id Software has posted their Software Development Kit for Quake 4! Casual gamers won't get much use out of the SDK, but Quake-addicted programmers will be stuck in front of their computers writing code from now until Quake 5 hits beta. Got C skills and an artistic flare that involves heavy weaponry? Here's your link.
Sightspeed: Video chat community for Windows and Mac
Sightspeed looks and feels different from just about any other video chat application, the interface is unlike your typical text I.M. application, like Skype or iChat.
Instead SightSpeed is sort of a "video desktop"--it has a wide rectangular window instead of the typical buddy list interface you may be accustomed to if you use Skype. At first, I couldn't understand why the Sightspeed designers chose this tack, but now it makes sense. Sightspeed is probably the friendliest video chat program around. Sound and video quality are on par with iChat. Some other unique features include video mail and pan-tilt-zoom controls, so you can actually control the camera of your chat partner.
Sightspeed runs on Windows and Mac, so iChat users who've been frustrated by the lack of Windows compatibility for video calls will definitely want to check it out.
eJamming with your musician friends around the world
The Home Recording and Instruments blog has highlights of a new software download for Mac and Windows that allows you to conduct musical jam sessions with your buddies on the Internet--in real time! This piece of software lets you use MIDI instruments--guitars, keyboards, and woodwinds--to collaborate on musical compositions from miles and miles away. Pretty cool stuff, especially if your guitarist lives in Florida and your drummer lives in Tokyo.
This video's absent any meaningful sound (except the hum of the Xbox 360 next to the television screen), so it'll take a little 'splainin. What it is, is a NES emulator running at "almost full speed" on the Xbox 360.
How it works is by firing up a web browser-based Java emulator on a Windows Media Center PC and then streaming the content displayed in that web browser window via Microsoft's Media Center Extender software to the Xbox 360. It's not the 360 emulating the old games, it's the Media Center PC. The Xbox 360 simply displays whatever's going on in the browser back on the PC. Basically, any program that can be run in a browser on a Windows PC can be run on an Xbox 360 through this method.
Here's the current status: Forum users report varying degrees of success getting the application to work. There appears to be three issues.
1. The speed of the Windows Media Center PC is important, as running finicky, slow emulators at full speed requires faster PCs. 2. The connection between the Xbox 360 and the PC needs to be fast. Some users with suboptimal home networks report lag issues. Remember, this is basically remote control of a PC via an Xbox 360. Network speed is very important. 3. Sound isn't working yet, but Xexter and other programmers are surely hard at work on that issue.
For more information: the best thread on this at the moment can be found over at the Xbox-scene forums, here.
It's legal for now, maybe. An Xbox-scene forum member Daddy021 writes, "The Library of Congress has recently granted copyright exemptions in the Digital Millenium Act to obsolete games. The exemption applies to games that require the original hardware as a condition of access, and if the game is 'no longer manufactured or reasonably available in the commercial marketplace.'" In other words, until the Nintendo Revolution is released, there is no reasonably available means in the commercial marketplace for playing these games. Therefore this may be legal, for now. Read more..!
LEGO Mindstorms NXT kit available for pre-order April 1st
Rabid LEGO Mindstorms fans finally have a date to circle on their calendars for hitting the company's website and breaking out their credit cards -- April 1st has been announced as the start of pre-orders for the highly-anticipated new NXT robotics set. NXT bots use non-traditional stud-less LEGOs, Bluetooth-enabled 32-bit controllers, and three precision servo motors for a much more powerful and flexible tool set than previous offerings. Despite their steep price compared to regular packages, buyers are limited to five of the $250 sets during the initial pre-order.
Aaron Broesky put together this Katamari-inspired Lego stop animation. Well done, Aaron! But what's with the senseless spaceman-on-frog violence? Rampant ranidaphobia means it's not easy to be green.
Samsung has been producing these players from the beginning and they were the first to hit the $100 mark. The DVD-HD860 may not have a lot of bells and whistles but it does scale the DVD up to 720p or 1080i via HDMI. It is small and cheap, but doesn't comes with a HDMI cable. So big box shoppers note: it maybe cheaper to buy the big brother, DVD-HD960, as it comes with both a HDMI and a DVI cable then it is to buy a HDMI cable in large retail stores. Plus, you will get a better DVD player.
It looks like these new Sony E-series flash players will come in 512MB (NW-E002), 1GB (E003), and 2GB capacities (E005) for up to 1,400 Kronor (about $180 US).
Programmable Container lets you customize your cola
The idea of customizable soda flavor options with an almost infinite combination of fragrances, flavors, and colors is understandably exciting. Massachusetts-based IPIFINI (the bold is part of the branding) has exceeded our wildest dreams with their Programmable Liquid Container, which contains small, flavor additive-filled (or paint-filled, for the home improvement set) "buttons" around the periphery of the plastic container. Consumers press the appropriate buttons to create different flavors from a common base, such as cherry vanilla cola or raspberry tangerine lemonade, or get even wilder with aroma and food coloring options. IPIFINI claims to already be licensing the technology around various industries, so don't be surprised to see sodas and coffees (and probably some alcopops too) in the near future that let you choose your level of buzz.
Imation has been releasing gimmicky flash memory products lately such as its "Furry Flash" drives, flash wristband, and its latest must-have product, a series of colorful flash drives on carabiner clips. They're not the first carabiner-equipped flash drives, they're certainly not the first to come in multiple hues, and they're definitely not the first designed to be "built to last" (and they don't look particularly rugged).
After months of back-and-forth, which included protests led by musician Ryuichi Sakamoto, Japan's Trade Ministry has backed down on a new law that would have limited the resale of certain used electronic gear. The government had already relaxed some of the restrictions, which go into effect on April 1, declaring that resellers of musical instruments and some other products could be exempted from the most onerous of the new rules. Now, the rules have been completely laxed for sellers of used products. Officially dealers won't actually be selling you anything. They'll just be "renting" it. So, buying all the old video games, vintage synthesizers and tube amps from that dude in Akihabara will require you to sign a rental agreement.
do we know the ladies pictured at right were hired
-Lytir1
