The prize for the COD tournament was a signed Infinity Ward poster.  (whoopie)…

I understand this was Desctructoid’s first event.  Overall as a party goes it was pretty good.   There was a good group of folks playing Rock Band, a game I still don’t ‘get’.  Clearly sucking and looking stupid at Karaoke isn’t enough. At least with Rock Band you get to share the shame with 3 other people playing guitar and drums.   Some of the ‘bands’ were OK, at least they can push the buttons, but the singing, well, I should probably just stop here.

There was another station set up for people to play smash brothers.   Which to me was about as lame as it gets.  If I had shelled out $50 for that game I’d have to hurt someone.

There was a pre-release showing of a Ninja game.   Imagine the sword fighting of the Lord of the Rings PS3 games or Prince of Persia, mixed with the run around task based game Assassins Creed, only not as good and you’ve got this game.   I’ll certainly pass on that release.

The COD tourney was somewhat of a joke.  Very unorganized, and I’m sorry to say, you need sound to play that game.  That wasn’t possible hooked up to the big screens above the bar.

This review may sound negative and perhaps it is.  But the party was a blast and I’m sure it will only be better next time. 

Wh00t!

Why would you want this? What’s wrong with the 6 Axis?

Two reasons.

1. Six Axis controllers are $50, they seem to last about 3-4 months if you use them hard as I do. The analog sticks go to hell, become less responsive and it becomes almost impossible to use the L3-R3 buttons underneath them.
2. Some games really benefit from turbo, think Call of Duty, where your single shot weapons are now full auto’s.

The instructions for this thing were weak as most cheap over seas electronics are. But it is straight forward enough. The feel of the control is somewhat crappy. It’s a low end unit. The turbo functions work as advertised, but the analog sticks are crap. It often gets confused if you’re trying to move and run (using the left analog stick but also pushing it down to activate the L3 button, while looking around (using the right analog stick). You might do a 180, you might end up looking at the sky. Results are unpredictable.

It feels like the analog sticks are accelerated and non-linear. This blows when you need to make small critical adjustments (like sniping).

It has a switch with 3 settings for the analog stick movement, but none are good, medium is jacked up, fast is too fast, and slow is too slow. Even working with in game adjustments I couldn’t find a setting that was even close the the accuracy and quality of the Six-Axis.

Game controls are certainly subjective. The ergos are OK, it’s the mechanics of this thing that are jacked up.

It also burns a USB port because you have to use their dongle. Since the PS3 has built in bluetooth why hasn’t anyone reverse engineered how to make replacement controller that just uses that? Why do I need another dongle?

It also eats batteries. It burned through fully charged AA’s in 9 hours not the 400 hours indicated in the manual.

So if you are looking at this, you might want to pass.

PLAYSTATION(R)Network

-----------------------------------------------------------

Dear Customer

We have recently discovered the possibility of unauthorized access to
personal information on the PLAYSTATION(R)Store through PCs, a content
download service of the PLAYSTATION(R)Network.

Protection of personal data is Sony Computer Entertainment's highest
priority. Please be assured that we have taken immediate measures to
rectify this issue and system security has been restored.

Although very unlikely, it is possible that your password to sign in to
the PLAYSTATION(R)Network may have been changed through unauthorized
access, making it possible to view users’ personal information and/or
use the Wallet for the PLAYSTATION(R)Store. PLAYSTATION(R)Network accounts
do not display entire credit card numbers, so any unauthorized access to
your PLAYSTATION(R)Network account is very unlikely to compromise your
credit card number.

We have investigated the extent of any unauthorized access and possible
alteration of passwords that could have occurred before corrective
measures were taken, and are sending out emails directly to those
customers who may have been affected by this incident.

Much to my dismay, the love affair I’ve had with X1, my all-out favorite for desktop search, has come to an end.

Why? It’s certainly not because I’ve found something better, no.

It’s because it’s simply stopped working. Others have given up on it a long time ago, but it has stayed and remained my favorite.

Nothing else give you the speed and flexibility. Results as you type, etc.

Crashes with the products have become more prevalent, though usually work-around able, they were becoming more than I could stand. I checked for an update, and there was a ‘minor’ release. I tried to upgrade to that. Tried simple upgrade, and full-reinstalls. It works, it indexes my files, and my Mozilla email but for some reason it won’t touch my Outlook anymore. The prior version had stopped updating per the schedule, but I could still manually update the index from time to time, which I had done.

But now, nadda, nothing, zilch. No Outlook/Exchange indexing to be had. Spending more than an hour screwing with it negates all benefit, so it’s now gone.

I’m now on the hunt for the best tool for my needs. No, Windows desktop search isn’t it. While it works, it’s slow and clunky.

I’ve just re-installed Google Desktop. It’s claming it will take another 10 hours of idle time to finish the initial index. We’ll see how that goes.

My biggest need is searching emails. I get too damn many. When it’s time to fill out an expense report I want to be able to search for $49.95 to find the email receipt for that software I purchased a month ago. I want to be able to easily pull up all emails from *@domain.com fast and easy. X1 used to give me that.

Outlook search folders work fine if you’re in no hurry but I usually am.

If you have tip for a good email indexing product, post it in the comments.

$300 buys you, a slim Mac Mini. You provide your own cables to hook it to your TV.

That TV must be a wide-screen tv (HiDef). You then download content via another real computer somewhere via iTunes, then push that to the AppleTV.

(OK so that part should be easy).

It requires HiDef, but you don’t get to watch anything in high-def, as what iTunes delivers isn’t. Yeah, that makes sense. I get it, it looks good sitting in your entertainment center, has pretty menus and all but the actual video looks like crap.

Where do I sign up?

Oh what a POS this is.

Of course I didn’t read any reviews, and it’s a damn good thing I didn’t drop $60 for this. Instead I only burned $8 by renting it.

Games for kids on the PS3 are few and far between and I had somewhat been looking forward to this games release. I’ve never been a big Sonic fan, but sans anything else how bad could it be?

It’s so bad Sony and Sega should pay me for even screwing with it. Hell, on one of the game sites it only ranked a 4.2 and that’s is extremely generous.

This game is a half baked, half assed, very rushed game.

Ugh, there’s not much else to say. Don’t waste your time or money on this. Sony should be embarrassed that this is even on the market.

The Sonic page on gamespot

I’ve been hearing advertisements on the radio for “Presto“, email without email, thing. The email printer for those who want to get email but that have computer phobia or something.

It’s just like WebTV only without the Web or TV part. IT’s basically this HP printer that you buy for $149.00 and plug it into your phone line.

People (your normal computer and email savvy family members) send you email and it prints it there for you.

No you can’t reply to them, you just get to read the email. All of this for a mere $9.95 per month. It’s like a one-way color fax machine! Why didn’t I think of this?

I’m sorry, computers just aren’t that hard. If my mother-in-law can do it anyone can and there are plenty of FREE email services out there.

Would the guy who funded this please email me? I want some of your money and I’m sure I can give you a much better return than this dumb idea.

CNN Money said; “Wouldn’t it be great if you could send email to your parents and not have to teach them how to use a computer?” Ah, no. No, no and hell no. If they can’t comprehend a basic computer with simple web access and web mail then no, I don’t want to have a one-way email conversation with my parents. It would only encourage them to pick up the phone and call me. Who wants that?

So David Pogue, the un-official Mac/Apple homer (aka iPogue) spent some quality time with the iPhone and wrote about it again here.

Now that the Keynote hype, and the ‘Demo-Ware’ magic has worn off, Pogue points out a few things:

Yes, typing is difficult (bleh)

Web Speed wasn’t great. Originally I had *thought* they were doing the web stuff in the prezo on-net, but being that it was wireless, then I’m really not all that impressed with the speed. If it was that _slow_ over wifi, then it’s going to completely suck on Edge.

Granted, this is a pre-release with demo/debug software so let’s hope it’s not that slow. I once hoped that Outlook 2007 would be faster once out of beta too. Boy was I wrong.

Other questions that everyone is asking were answered in a follow-up comment by Pogue:

ANSWERS TO ALL YOUR QUESTIONS:

Guys, if it hasn’t been said, then the answer is no.

Can it run Mac OS X programs? No.
Can it open Word/Excel docs? No. (Yes to PDF, though.)
Can it be used with anything but Cingular? No.
Does it run Palm apps? No.
Does it connect to iChat? No.
Does it have games? No.
Is it ambidextrous? No.
Does it have GPS, voice recognition, 3G? No.
Flash or Java? No.
Music over Bluetooth? No.
Can you change the battery? No.

Etc.

It is STILL the coolest piece of electronics to come along in years.

DP — Posted by david Pogue

So, no you can’t add stuff to it. (That’s bad, though everyone in the handheld community is expecting an SDK to be announced at WWDC). It would not surprise me in the least though if Apple kept the iPhone as a closed platform just like the iPod. Since there wasn’t a mention at the Keynote, we’ll assume for now that it is closed.

No Word or Excel viewing compatibility? That’s a big WTF? Even if some bastardized version of Doc’s To-Go was included, that would help.

Cingular blows we all know this and it’s a recurring theme. I understand the need to support GSM though.

Of course it won’t run Palm apps. Duh.

Ambidextrous? If you can’t use it with one hand, being ambidextrous is moot.

If it supports Safari, why not Flash? Java?

Ugh. It’s still an amazing device, but then again, so was the Newton.

The reason is that Treo’s and Blackberry’s suck.  But people buy them because the alternatives suck worse.  Text input on a Treo is painful at best, but it’s the best option that anyone has come up with so far.

A Treo, when you come right down to it is a heavy ugly kludgy compromise of a machine.  But it beats the hell out of everything else because it’s the best compromise between a phone and a handheld computer anyone has yet come up with.

Enter Apple and the iPhone.  Right off the bat it looks better than a Treo and a Blackberry and a Q.  Right off the bat it has more memory and media capabilities.  If it works half as well as it looks, it’s going to kick ass.
Winners

Storage: 4gb of Data is not much in mp3 and PSP world, but it’s huge in smartphone world.  The Treo 700p comes with 128MB for example.
Price:  $499 is killing people who are not familiar with what things cost in smartphone world.  Treo users shrug and say, whatever.

Don’t know yet

Screen:  Bigger and sharper than anything we’ve seen so far.  How will it handle smudging and scratching?  Did Apple learn from the Nano gen1?

Usability:  Text input from the screen has the potential of being better than teeny-tiny buttons, but it’s wait-and-see for now.

Enterprise Access:  They say it works with Exchange, but if it’s imap that’s probably not good enough to counter Blackberry and Treo/goodlink, but that’s a wait and see too.
Losers

Network:  Exclusive deal with Cingular?  Boo!  Cingular coverage blows and EDGE is not better than EVDO for Data access.  The deal should not have been exclusive and Apple should have a multi-carrier phone.  Palm did it.

If any of the carriers were dragging their feet, just release it with all the capability and let popular pressure force the carriers hands.  But too late now for that.
Around the Web:

Engadget takes a look at the Apple stock vs. RIM (Blackberry) and Palm (Treo).  Wow.  More pics.
Bizzy wants more business support.

Spacetropic has ilust.

I think Lou Minatti nails it:

Apple will gain a huge chunk of the market. Surely not 80%, but they will become a dominant player. Nokia, Samsung, Motorola, Blackberry, all of them will struggle to come up with something competitive. They’ll probably throw some clunky feature-packed designs together in a hurry, much like Microsoft did with the Zune. No one will want them.

Apple’s announcement yesterday was pretty amazing and wasn’t all that unexpected.

On the surface, the iPhone is a pretty awesome device and I can’t wait to get my hands on one.

My initial reaction though was more of a “Ewe, for as awesome as it is, they missed a couple boats”.

Cingular/ATT: While this carrier might be awesome in San Fran, it downright blows around here. Everyone who’s left Verizon for Cingular is back. Edge isn’t all that, in fact it’s downright slow in a lot of cases.

No Removable Media or Battery: This to me as a big disappointment, It also appears that the battery isn’t user replaceable, which prevents users from carrying more than one, and/or replacing batteries as they go bad.

Keyboard? : Apple certainly has done something amazing with their new multi-touch technology. While they certainly bashed mini-keyboards, I have yet to see a faux keyboard that really worked. There is no replacement for tactile feel, and knowing you ‘pushed’ a button. While I agree with them that a number of devices with keyboards simply blow, the Treo’s keyboard is pretty good once you learn to use it. I expect its learning curve is or will be less than that of the faux keyboard simply from a feedback perspective. I would gladly give up some thickness for a horizontal slide-out keypad/keyboard.

Web Surfing? : Was it just me or did the experience in the keynote seem slow? Granted it was using a ‘real’ web browser. But if you used Opera-Mini I thought the rendering and navigation around the Times website was kind of slow.

Enterprise Apps and Compatibility: O.K. This one really got me. Perhaps 3rd parties will step up to the plate. They listed ‘Exchange’ under iMap. That’s just great. That is not Enterprise level “over the air” syncing. I certainly hope they are not expecting iTunes to integrate with Exchange and Active Directory. No Syncing with iCal and Address Book is not enterprise level integration. FACT: Most “Smart Phone Users”, are using their smart phones with enterprise level software, be it Good[tm], Exchange Push, or BlackBerry software.

Outside of all of that, I really like what I saw. It’s not overly priced given the features.

My final and biggest concern is; “One handed use”. Of all the smart phones that Apple bashed upon, one thing they do and do well, is allow you to operate them with one hand. Palm/Treo is very good at this. Granted, they have made absolute ZERO progress in the last 3 years improving the Treo other than adding new carrier support. The Palm interface, and Blazer are awesome.

My biggest fear is that this device ‘requires’ you to use two hands in most cases. That will render it fairly cumbersome to use. Phones are single handed devices, so are iPods. I hope that isn’t its Achilles heel.

The parallels between this launch and the leap in technology remind me a lot of Palm’s “Palm VII” launch. Where is that device today? Certainly the networks are greatly improved and I applaud Apple for giving us a full browser on a phone. (It should however be Firefox and not Safari).

Steve claimed they were creating 3 new devices, or making extreme gains in 3 categories. The reality is that this is a very special iPod. A wide screen, touch based iPod with a pretty nice phone built in. A new Internet communicator? SMS isn’t what I’d call earth shattering, gadgets are nice, too but, from current experience with Cingular and Edge, this part may very well be disappointing.

Bottom line though? I can’t wait to get my hands on one.

We lucked into a PS3 (at retail) around Dec 1, but we didn’t open it until Xmas. I put it on eBay at an outrageous price just to see what would happen, but apparently we missed the wave.

I was only willing to sell it if I got enough cash to cover both a PS3 and Wii at retail after the holidays but that didn’t happen. Things being what they are with the holidays, it stayed wrapped until Xmas.

I had a brief experience with a PS3 a couple weeks ago at a buddy’s house. We only played Madden for a little bit, and not being familiar with the controls it was a tad difficult. So now after 3 days with my own PS3 here are my first impressions.

The model we have is the 20gig model.

What it’s missing over the 60gb:

• - 40gb of hard drive space. (Not that big a deal thus far, and I’m sure we can upgrade this later.
• - Card reader ports, it doesn’t have the built in ports for memory cards. Even the 60gb doesn’t give you a PS2 memory card reader which is about the only card I can see putting in this. I have a 17 into one card reader and will use that via USB if need be.
• - Built in Wifi. Now, I already have an external wifi game adapter that we used with the PS2, but I can see this as being something I wish I had. I’m sure there will be a way to use a USB wifi stick at some point so that won’t be so bad.

Setup was easy. Plug it in Using HDMI the resolution is amazing.

Games played so far (2): Call of Duty and Madden 07.

I picked up these games and a second controller the night before Xmas as none of the games I had ordered were going to make the big day.

Game play:

Madden:

It’s a little rough around the edges, more so because once PS2 controls get burned into your head, switching them up is a bad idea. EA, you are dumb.

Game play is pretty good though once you make the transition. Being a launch game, expectations are somewhat high. There are far too many visual artifacts to please me. The review ratings for this game put it around a 7 and that’s fair. It’s still a keeper, and I look forward to Madden 08

Call of Duty:

Pretty much the same applies. Quite a number of visual artifacts at times and I’ve had the sound freak out on me twice. Luckily it reset at the next level. This game is still very well done. Reviews for this also come in around a 7 and that too is accurate.

Using the PS3 for other things:

Web browsing is a joke, the same joke it is on the PSP. It’s also not a funny joke.

Blue Ray, uh so far watching Talladega nights, I’m not seeing much different than a good DVD player puts out.

We did watch Cars using the PS3, and while not a Blue Ray disc, it was as good or better than our progressive scan DVD player. I was much impressed.

Playing PS2 games:

Ratchet and Clank Deadlocked plays well, even over the net in multi-player mode. The new R2 Trigger button hurts ya a bit but it’s not something you can’t learn to deal with.

We’ve played a number of other PS2 games and so far they all seem to work.

I think the biggest win for this is the PS3 OS and interface, which is modeled after the PSP OS/interface.

Creating users is huge, and the lack of a need for memory cards is a big win.

The wireless controllers are the bomb as well. Though the motion sensing part, well, I’m not too sold on that yet. There are a number of places in Call of Duty that use it. You wiggle the controller to fight off up close attacks, and you rotate it to set the fuse in bombs. Driving jeeps and tanks is horrible with the motion sensor. It’s a damn good thing those levels where you’re driving just simply aren’t that hard.

I don’t know what all the bitching is about. Maybe if I’d have paid > $1000 I wouldn’t be happy. But I am very pleased with the PS3 so far and look forward to the 2nd release games.

Go get a PS3.

[Background]

First things first… I am a reformed Apple bigot. Yes once upon a time, there was a time when I’d rather die than be forced to use Windows. Think Different, think back oh, around the System 7 days.

I used a Mac whenever I could use a Mac and I was absolutely sure I was far more productive on the Mac than any Microsoft based operating system.

Back in the day I was lucky enough to work for a company that used Mac’s as much as Windows based boxes. We were a Premier Apple developer and did a number of high profile projects for Apple Enterprise. Back when Apple had a group dedicated to Enterprise. This was around the time they were desperately working on Copland, and before Steve’s 2nd stint as the man in charge.

Out of nowhere Apple killed the Enterprise team and decided it wouldn’t try to continue to play in that sandbox. (Remember this was pre OS X, pre X Serve’s and that the goodness that they would bring). As a company our hands were forced. At the time we got nearly 80% of or business from the Apple Enterprise group and we needed a backup plan since that was drying up.

Enter our immersion in the world of Bill.

Instead of new Macs we bought Wintel boxes, first Windows98 with an NT 4 domain to support the organization. Of course that brought good things like Exchange. We were also a Microsoft Partner, but only because we had to be.

It took a while but the conversion was made.

Throughout the whole Windows 95 run we all made fun of how much Microsoft was trying to copy Apple. That all of this ‘new’ stuff wasn’t so new, we’d all seen it before.

Cutting to the chase, over the years Windows got better. Windows 98 wasn’t all that but Windows 2000 didn’t suck that bad, in fact compared to Win98, it was pretty awesome. Matched with a Microsoft NT back end, collaboration was huge. We still had Macs, especially in the art department. Supporting them grew troublesome but we still kept them around.

From an everyday business application perspective, the native versions of Office have always been better.

For the longest time I still kept using a Mac when ever I could. In fact doing Palm programming required it. I continued to use Mac OS software and Metrowerks to do Palm programming as well as what ever business related or oriented products that I could find. Certainly there were good apps out there, even as we crossed over into OS X.

Reality started to sink in though. Most business-oriented tools were simply better on the dark side. From Office to QuickBooks, if you were using the Mac flavor of things you were getting hosed. For the longest Artsy fartsy tools remained better on the Mac but that eventually changed too, or at least Windows based tools were just as good as the Mac counter parts.

The last Apple computers that I paid money for were the Cube, and around the same time a PowerBook Titanium G4.

It didn’t take long at all for these pieces of hardware to get behind the curve. OSX, emulated software running on top took its toll. It didn’t take long for me or my wife to get frustrated with the lack of applications available for home schooling.

Yes I bought into the Mac, it’s safer myth too. For the longest time I left the family’s computer as an Mac OS based computer because they couldn’t dork it up as easily.

Unfortunately, both Apple and Microsoft screwed the pooch when IE for the Mac became a joke. Safari, well, it just plain sucked and we had far too many important websites that were incompatible.

A couple of years ago we made the switch at home back to, or over to the dark side. WindowsXP is very manageable. Limited privilege accounts are key. We’ve never been infected with a virus. We’ve never had to reinstall the home machine(s), other than when I have purposefully dorked them up or significantly upgraded.

[Fast Forward to Today]

Apple has embraced Intel. Parallels and/or Boot Camp let you boot this fancy hardware into Windows or simply use Windows.

Folks at work are hell bent on getting Intel based Macs instead of a new Dell or true ‘made for Windows’ piece of hardware.

So in an effort to understand the attraction, I’m now working from a MacBook Pro.

I need to see what the fuss is all about.

Come back later for more.