As some of you know I run the Oblivion Portal a fan site dedicated to the game Oblivon, which is part of the Elder Scrolls series of role playing games developed by Bethesda Softworks. Well to start the story I think it's wise to go back to their previous game Morrowind. When you first started the game you found a ring in a barrel. This ring belonged to Fargoth, one of the first people you run into when you begin....
Well it had to happen eventually. The Office of Fair Trading have passed Apple's iTunes service on to the European Commission on grounds it's ripping off it's UK customers. "We're campaigning for free movement of goods and services in Europe and we'll take on any company, or group of companies, that seek to carve up the market to their benefit." To buy music through iTunes in the UK costs 20% more then in France or Germany....
Recently NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory detected solid (well as solid as anything gets in this arena) evidence that one of the most distant quasar lies 12.7 billion light years away. The anti-Big Bang crowd have gone into overdrive over this, claiming that the Big Bang theory is "obviously wrong" as how could something like a quasar form so quickly after the Big Bang, which is estimated to of happened 13.7 billion years ago....
Viktor Yushchenko, the opposition leader in the Ukraine has shown his total hypocrisy, throughout his campaign he was constantly singing the tune of "democracy", he lost the election - 46.61% of the vote, compared with 49.46% for Viktor Yanukovych. Now he speaks of rebellion, turning his back on democracy completely because the people refused to support him. All the talk of electoral fraud is based on the exit-polls (which were financed and organized from the US), which did show a victory for Yushchenko, of course this is completely irrelevant and unofficial....
Buzzing around in the news today is a story about a Californian based pornographer suing Google. "They're showing pictures from my magazine and my website for free, so there's no reason for anyone to buy my products." This is the basis for the legal action, it also demonstrates what a total idiot this guy must be. Let's clear up a few things about how a search engine, such as Google, MSN or Yahoo actually work....
I hate the iPod, everyone who knows me well knows I hate the iPod, not everyone knows my reasoning, it follows. Longevity problems, dare I mention the battery issues that have plagued the iPod, batteries in a device with this kind of price should not fail or lose a significant amount of charge for years - months and weeks is simply not acceptable, what’s more if (or when) the battery fails this actually requires Apple to sort it because the batteries aren’t removable, a critical flaw in the design....
Just got my hands on a Nebula DigiTV PCI card yesterday... Pretty good! For those who don't know it has a digital tuner allowing it to access all unencrypted channels broadcasted digitally in the UK (aka Freeview) as well as an analogue input for video from an external source, although the quality is quite poor and the newer software seems bent on trying to encode it to MPEG in real time creating a delay of several seconds, rather then just push it through onto the screen, the older pre-July software didn't do this so it's a little odd....
I was reading through some posts on a newsgroup I won't mention where it was (it was a completely OT conversation) anyway this was posted by "Lisa1174" in response to some criticism of the Bush regime by a Canadian. "Perhaps we are concerned about America FIRST and Iraq and the rest of you LAST!!!!! And, for your info, YES, Iraq is a safer place! Ask the citizens of Iraq. Ask the US Military....
Be advised this entry does contain Halo spoilers. You have been warned. I've lately been playing through Halo, again, and paid particular attention to 343 Guilty Spark, that annoying blue floating thing that dragged you through the Library, or more accurately known as the some what quirky caretaker, or "Monitor" in his words, of "installation 04" aka Halo. I'm sure so many players, myself included, simply dismissed Spark as being a completely insane AI that had lost it, the fact he seems bent on protocol, seems to think he knows us for some reason, always calls himself a genius and giggles like I don't know what would give most people the impression that he is totally nuts and should be ignored....
Over on the BBC News website they have up an article talking about the new Portable Media Centers (they actually fail to mention their names). It's based upon some of Jupiter Research's findings on consumers demand for portable players that can handle video. It reads "the analysis of the portable media player market found only 13% of Europeans want to watch video while out and about" "By contrast, almost a third are interested in listening to music on a portable player such as an iPod....