One of the most major problems in the software market is that of piracy, and for the most part this has been dealt with quite badly. Over time, more and more copy protection systems have been put to work to stop unpaid software usage, whilst at the same time creating even more hoops for legitimate customers to jump through in order to use the software they’ve actually bought…

Cue this screenshot (click to see it properly) from USB Overdrive X:

A couple of things. Firstly, hats off to the developer for realising that using even more DRM would hurt the consumer.
Secondly, this is brilliant. Guilt-tripping would-be pirates and yet still allowing the use of the software, hoping that the user would do the right thing in the end, and if I were reading this on software I would certainly think about it.
Thirdly, “Shame On Me” button: Epic…

[Via Digg]

Apple, a company known for making… Apple products… will not be attending MacWorld for 2010, a celebration of…. Apple products. Will this mean the death of MacWorld as others pull out because Apple won’t be there? The organisers are fine with continuing though…

Even worse - The man that they all want to see, Steve Jobs will not be there for the one coming up in January. What does this mean? And I don’t mean for MacWorld, I mean for Apple itself. Having the (excuse the street vernacular) “Big Dog in the House” (sorry) made MacWorld feel like a mighty important event each year and that Apple’s hype-machine was doing it’s job properly.

Now, the world will have to put up with Phil Schiller instead…

[Via Engadget]

MacMall have decided to drop their prices on… well… Macs… for Black Friday. If you wanted to get a mac, I’d suggest trying to get one now rather than later. There’s a rather nice chart of prices over at MacRumors showing off a nice smattering of offers and where the best place to get them would be, and most of them point to the aforementioned MacMall. All of the offers end at Friday night midnight P.T.

Come on, you can get a 17″ 2.5GHz MB Pro for $250 less, surely that’s worth a look.

[Via MacRumors]

I am an avid viewer of many of Revision3’s shows, including Systm, Tekzilla and of course Diggnation. Watching two guys drinking random amounts of alcohol whilst on a couch reading the top stories of the week from Digg makes me happy on many a cold evening here Chateaux Mamba.
However, lately I’ve begun to notice that most of the other shows on Rev3 are far better produced than “The ‘Nation”, using things like scripts, sets, more than 3 crew members for recording, planning things in advance, that sort of thing. I just felt that the show was starting to lose it’s edge for out-and-out greatness.

Until this week…

Those brains at BitGravity have somehow managed to squeeze 5 different video feeds through the internet to my browser, and have somehow managed to give me the ability to choose where I want to watch: Standard front view, close-ups of Kevin and Alex’s faces, a rear view of the host’s heads to allow us to see the crew, and another of the crew for good measure.

This is cool, though I doubt that this will be a regular thing, and I have no idea how this would work as a downloadable show (in this case they have done a Director’s Cut for those that don’t want the multiview goodness), let alone whether my poor iPod would be able to take the strain of all that extra video that’s playing but isn’t watched.

More important news, Kevin has new glasses!!!! OMGWTFBBQ!!!!!11!

[Diggnation Remix and the Director's Cut]

The powers that be at Oblong Industries (fantastic name, by the way) have come up with a brilliant computer interface based on what you saw Tom Cruise use in Minority Report. It’s a bunch of screens on walls, a table that acts like a screen as well, and some gloves that can be used for selecting, moving, resizing, positioning and editing media on the screens. According to the blurb, one of the founders of the company was an advisor on the film, so at least we know why there is such a heavy resemblance.

g-speak overview 1828121108 from john underkoffler on Vimeo.

Despite the fact that it’s very cool and all that jazz, I just can’t see any real commercial reason for doing things this way. It’s hugely impractical for the home, and my head just begins to hurt at what kind of normal applications this could be used for.

Strangely, I think that the home made Wiimote version would be more useful. And cheaper. And wouldn’t take up an entire room…

[via Engadget]

As many of you that read one of the other blogs will know, I have owned my 3 Skypephone for a good few months now. I loved the idea of being able to use Skype on a mobile phone without resorting to some cobbled together solution involving extra equipment nor a computer. I blathered about it being a smart and useable handset that turned out to be suprisingly cheap over at Blatantly Random, but now that I have lived with it for a few months, the honeymoon period is over.

In a nutshell, it’s a normal candybar mobile phone. It’s cheap, it’s functional for calls, texts and mms, and it has hefty Skype integration, allowing you to call people from your phonebook on either their mobile, housephone or their Skype client if it’s accepting calls. The important part is that 3 UK offer this Skype functionality for no extra charge, so long as you are either on a contract or on a prepay solution. It does the jobs as described, but it does have it’s faults….

The most obvious problem is cosmetic. Rubbery latex covers most of the handset which, despite being a bit odd in terms of coating, is lovely to touch. Sadly, the coating for the removable back cover has mostly peeled off. Weirdly it is just this back cover that has the problem, since the rest of the phone seems to look ok.

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Nvidia’s Nvision 08 has now ended, and obviously there were many technical and graphical things on display at the event that many people in the computing world would care about. Graphics card and CUDA related stuff mostly. [Here endeth the "technical" part of the post...]

Among the other events were a live Diggnation, a lanparty and Adam and Jamie from Mythbusters. As in those guys that throws a dummy into a burning vehicle full of explosives to see if the moon landings really happened (Or at least I would guess, I haven’t seen that episode yet so I can only speculate on what experiments they would end up doing to prove or disprove that).

The Myth-Duo had decided to show the difference between a CPU and a GPU using a medium known for expertly demonstrating such technical changes: paintballs.

Video after the jump…

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As a member of “society” (you can loosely call it that), sometimes you feel the need to help others. Sadly, that usually comes at the price of doing something vaguely boring, disgusting or degrading in order to help (for example sponge baths, as in you washing someone with a sponge and water, not you getting bathed).

Folding@Home is one way of “helping”, but really it isn’t if you only run it on your home machine and maybe your PS3. You need to use multiple machines, or if you are adventurous, a server farm. That is one large step in the right direction, but you can always go one further…

Overclock.net forumgoer “nitteo” has decided to go down the road of graphical prowess. Using a large number of graphics cards, a few motherboards and one control station, nitteo is capable of over 260,000 points of work in 24 hours. That is a lot, when many people have trouble getting into just 4 figures.

Although it’s great for the fight against things like Cancer, the real question is: Will it run Rage?

[Via Bit-Tech]

Apologies to you all, but sadly E3 is on, and that means that all hands are on deck at Gametactics.com and E3coverage.com until the flood of news ends. Normal service should return next week.

Have you won the lottery recently, hit your mid-life crisis or generally have a ton of cash doing nothing? Well, why not blow a chunk of change at Alienware. Yes, I got bored and looked at the UK site to see what kind of potential damage I could do.

Well, how about £10,323.15? (That’s $20,591.48) On a single PC….

Of course, how could a sane person spend so much money on one PC!? Well, by adding lots of stuff that you don’t need or really want for the expense value alone. Like a watch, mug, all possible game controllers, and MS Office Professional 2007. In German. It could have been potentially worse, but I decided not to include things that wouldn’t fit in, such as if there are too many drives or cards in the back.

To see what I could have “Bought” had I the finances and the nature to blow so much cash, come on through to the other side… Continue Reading »