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Archive for the ‘General’ Category
The market place is teeming with vibrancy and life to a point where you actually feel you’re in 11th century Jerusalem. However being an assassin in such troubled times means only one thing, you’re in the city on business. Your target, a town preacher with a hidden agenda.
You wait, watching from the roof tops as he makes his way to a secluded spot after spewing his half-baked propaganda. As soon as he’s alone, you descend from the sky, his back facing you as you hurl a few punches at him, beating him into submission. No one said this would be non-violent, or so god damned involving.
While he puts up a feeble resistance to your super-human combat skills, the trees sway, creating shadows that dance across the stone buildings in the mid-day sun, you can almost feel the breeze. The city crier concedes and vital information changes hands. You draw your sword to reschedule his appointment with god.
All seems well, until, from absolutely nowhere, a burly man decked in 11th century couture decides to amble down this lonely spot and manages to miraculously walk in between your blade and the victim. And come out unscathed. David Copperfield’s ancestor perhaps?
It’s amazing how an anomaly can reduce an experience like this to the rank of a mere video game with flaws et al.
This really is good news or bad news, depending on which way you choose to look at it. It’s a pragmatic statement, so I’m not going into why I think so, because frankly, no one gives a flying hoot about what I think.
But BioWare have announced today that Mass Effect will grace all modern PC’s in May 2008. The EA slaves announced that the award-winning space epic Mass Effect™ published by EA and will sport some redesigning for the PC.
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Okay, Barney says, before you slash the author of the article for posting it and spreading the panic.. (3 diggs so far.. panic?), just read it carefully. The article doesnt say that the world is going to end. Thats a whole different issue, which Barney will upload during the weekend. For the time being just chill your beers while the ice lasts…. glurp…..
Greenland’s ice sheet melted nearly 19 billion tons more than the previous high mark, and the volume of Arctic sea ice at summer’s end was half what it was just four years earlier, according to new NASA satellite data obtained by The Associated Press.
“The Arctic is screaming,” said Mark Serreze, senior scientist at the government’s snow and ice data center in Boulder, Colo.
Just last year, two top scientists surprised their colleagues by projecting that the Arctic sea ice was melting so rapidly that it could disappear entirely by the summer of 2040.
This week, after reviewing his own new data, NASA climate scientist Jay Zwally said: “At this rate, the Arctic Ocean could be nearly ice-free at the end of summer by 2012, much faster than previous predictions.”
So scientists in recent days have been asking themselves: Was the record melt seen all over the Arctic in 2007 a blip amid relentless and steady warming? Or has everything speeded up to a new climate cycle that goes beyond the worst-case scenarios presented by computer models?
“The Arctic is often cited as the canary in the coal mine for climate warming,” said Zwally, who as a teenager hauled coal. “Now as a sign of climate warming, the canary has died. It is time to start getting out of the coal mines.”
It is the burning of coal, oil and other fossil fuels that produces carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that are responsible for man-made global warming. For the past several days, government diplomats have been debating in Bali, Indonesia, the outlines of a new climate treaty calling for tougher limits on these gases.
What happens in the Arctic has implications for the rest of the world. Faster melting there means eventual sea level rise and more immediate changes in winter weather because of less sea ice.
In the United States, a weakened Arctic blast moving south to collide with moist air from the Gulf of Mexico can mean less rain and snow in some areas, including the drought-stricken Southeast, said Michael MacCracken, a former federal climate scientist who now heads the nonprofit Climate Institute. Some regions, like Colorado, would likely get extra rain or snow.
More than 18 scientists said they were surprised by the level of ice melt this year. “I don’t pay much attention to one year … but this year the change is so big, particularly in the Arctic sea ice, that you’ve got to stop and say, ‘What is going on here?’ You can’t look away from what’s happening here,” said Waleed Abdalati, NASA’s chief of cyrospheric sciences. “This is going to be a watershed year.”
2007 shattered records for Arctic melt in the following ways:
552 billion tons of ice melted this summer from the Greenland ice sheet, according to preliminary satellite data to be released today by NASA. That’s 15 percent more than the annual average summer melt, beating 2005’s record.
A record amount of surface ice was lost over Greenland this year, 12 percent more than the previous worst year, 2005, according to data the University of Colorado released Monday. That’s nearly quadruple the amount that melted just 15 years ago. It’s an amount of water that could cover Washington, D.C., a half-mile deep, researchers said.
The surface area of summer sea ice floating in the Arctic Ocean this summer was nearly 23 percent below the previous record. The dwindling sea ice already has affected wildlife, with 6,000 walruses coming ashore in northwest Alaska in October for the first time in recorded history. Another first: the Northwest Passage was open to navigation.
Still to be released is NASA data showing the remaining Arctic sea ice to be unusually thin, another record. That makes it more likely to melt in future summers. Combining the shrinking area covered by sea ice with the new thinness of the remaining ice, scientists calculate that the overall volume of ice is half of 2004’s total.
Alaska’s frozen permafrost is warming, but not quite thawing yet. But temperature measurements 66 feet deep in the frozen soil rose nearly four-tenths of a degree from 2006 to 2007, according to measurements from the University of Alaska. While that may not sound like much, “it’s very significant,” said University of Alaska professor Vladimir Romanovsky.
Greenland, in particular, is a significant bellwether. Most of its surface is covered by ice. If it completely melted - something key scientists think would likely take centuries, not decades - it could add more than 22 feet to the world’s sea level.
However, for nearly the past 30 years, the data pattern of its ice sheet melt has zigzagged. A bad year, like 2005, would be followed by a couple of lesser years.
According to that pattern, 2007 shouldn’t have been a major melt year, but it was, said Konrad Steffen, of the University of Colorado, which gathered the latest data. “I’m quite concerned,” he said. “Now I look at 2008. Will it be even warmer than the past year?”
Other new data, from a NASA satellite, measures ice volume. NASA geophysicist Scott Luthcke, reviewing it and other Greenland numbers, concluded: “We are quite likely entering a new regime.”
Melting of sea ice and Greenland’s ice sheets also alarms scientists because they become part of a troubling spiral.
White sea ice reflects about 80 percent of the sun’s heat off Earth, NASA’s Zwally said. When there is no sea ice, about 90 percent of the heat goes into the ocean which then warms up everything else. Warmer oceans then lead to more melting.
“That feedback is the key to why the models predict that the Arctic warming is going to be faster,” Zwally said. “It’s getting even worse than the models predicted.”
More on this topic can be found here:
Thats what our friends at 1UP are saying. After being the recipient of some multi-platform games which were, umm, let’s just say, not on par with the other versions, it feels great to finally hear some good news. Here is what Shane Bettenhausen had to say while comparing the demos on the Xbox 360 and the PS3:
Capcom brought the game in, we got to play it, both the PLAYSTATION 3 and Xbox 360 versions. First thing I noticed, the PLAYSTATION 3 version is better.
Bryan Intihar chimes in on the situation,
It’s funny. You can tell, this game is built for the PlayStation 3, but moved over to the Xbox 360. As of right now, I think the PlayStation 3 version is better. I saw like screen tearing in the Xbox 360 version. Even like, when you were playing it, it felt better on the PlayStation 3.
Bettenhausen comes back with,
With the triggers on the DUALSHOCK 3/SIXAXIS, it’s easier to pull of the moves on the PlayStation 3 versus, the Xbox 360 controller.
Well, we can take this with a pinch of salt since its just a preview.
Now all we have to do is sit back and watch while the Interwebs explode with frenzied chants of “Teh internet is teh biazed!” …or whatever it takes to start a whole new battle in the console wars. Either way, I love my PS3.
Interesting piece of information I stumbled across today. An article on the BBC’s website reports that according to a recent study (read experiment); a few chimps were pitted up against students from the Kyoto University in Japan to test memory tasks. The tests involved remembering random numbers on the screen and then recalling which boxes these numbers were in.
Guess what - the humans lost! Yeah - THE HUMANS LOST!
Interesting because if you start to think about it, here are just some of the 9 major things that could go horribly wrong with life as we know it:
- Counter Strike will no longer be played by 14 year old delinquents.
- You’ll probably get pwn3d in every online deathmatch by a Chimp.
- Donkey Kong now gets to run around and bone princess Peach.
- Ape Escape and Ape Academy will cease to exist and the franchise will die - breaking the hearts of millions of little girls.
- Monkey Island would be called “Guybrush Threepwood’s Adventures”. Ugh!
- You will no longer be able to use terms like “spanking the monkey” or “freezing the balls of a brass monkey”.
- The Foo Fighters would lose a great song.
- Bananas would no longer be used as replacement dildo’s.
- theANGRYpixel staff would become the smartest primates on the planet and we would eventually rule the world.
Got any ideas of what else could go horribly wrong (or right)? Well, write a comment and buy favour with us now… don’t say we didn’t warn you!
Chuck. Ex-Stanford. 20-something. Doesn’t have a girlfriend. Supervisor of the “Nerd Herd” at a Buy More by day. Gears of War pwner by night. Sounds familiar? Dive right in.
Oh, also a US national security “asset”.
Hard to believe it’s been a week since we posted the Jade Raymond article. What was posted as a simple opinion on my part somehow ballooned out of control and became a huge “news story” on N4G and Digg, which it so wasn’t. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned from all this “attention” is that people who are nice are still nice and the jerks are still… well, jerks! We know, considering we had to blacklist a dozen IPs and delete a truckload of comments simply because they were downright disgusting.
Going through the comments, there’s so much I want to address, but I fear if I start getting into it, all the other stuff I’m working on will just get put on the back burner. While it looks like we’ve got a dozen people linking to the site, all of them, wonderfully, coming together to try and address retarded sexist “gamers” everywhere, others still believe gaming still hasn’t come out of the Dark Ages when women were just supposed to be barefoot, pregnant and in the kitchen, cooking breakfast. Honestly, if I start playing a game, I don’t give a rat’s ass as to who made it - it just has to play right. And if I am playing online, I don’t care what sex you are - you just have to play right! Gender should never matter in an industry where you rarely ever see the people behind the scenes or on the other end of the internet connection.