Friday, May 20, 2005

Quickie Episode III Review -- 11:17 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

I think . . . I may have a new favorite Star Wars movie.

The Master comments: It's weird. It was an excellent movie. I've never heard a packed theater let out as quietly as that one did. Guess this one really grabbed some people.

A.T. Hun comments: There was applause afterwards in my theater, but everyone was much quieter leaving than they were going in. I knew an awful lot about the movie beforehand (I promised myself I wouldn't read spoilers, but I couldn't resist), but the way it was all carried out still floored me. I told my wife that I felt like my @$$ had been kicked. If this is indeed the last Star Wars movie, Lucas certainly went out with a flourish.

Console Wars Winner -- 11:02 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

After reading all available information on the new gaming consoles coming out from Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo, I can officially declare a winner without fear of contradiction. The winner is . . . IBM. IBM is making the processors that power all three boxes. The Xbox 360 and Revolution use versions of IBM's PPC chips. The PS3 uses the Cell processor, co-developed and produced by IBM. Nary an Intel or AMD in sight.

Xbox 360 Games on PowerMacs -- 10:49 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Anandtech noticed that the playable Xbox 360 games available at E3 didn't seem to be all that impressive for a next-gen console. They found out why. The games were in fact running on Apple PowerMac G5s. The irony is more than a little bit delicious that MS products were being promoted using Apple hardware. I can't wait to see what happens if/when Steve Jobs picks this up and runs with it.

Please note, I'm not really bashing MS here. The actual console isn't going to be out until the end of the year. Both MS and Sony had more smoke-and-mirrors rather than actual hardware running actual games. Nevertheless, the future looks very interesting to say the least.

Thursday, May 19, 2005

Microsoft Dreams of Death -- 11:23 am CST, Update by The Master

That's right: Ballmer is dreaming of Google's death in five year's time.

Nice job on that monopoly control, you think?

J.t.Qbe comments: If Monkeyboy says so, it must be true. Guess I'll stop using Google and Gmail now and switch to Microsoft's search whatever and Hotmail. And then shoot myself.

A.T. Hun comments: DEVELOPERS!!!1!!1!

Bleh -- 9:03 am CST, Update by The Master

Had one of those fun programming moments yesterday while coding a data dumper in Delphi. I was dumping a string to a flat file, and discovered that my code was dumping chunks of the heap into my file instead of the string I intended. Luckily, it didn't just blue-screen the machine, but bad pointer derefs don't always let you off that easy.

Now that I mention Delphi, there is a new release of Free Pascal available. This freeware version of Pascal is even somewhat compatible with Delphi, but can be used on x86, PowerPC, ARM and SPARC platforms. Good stuff.

Past Two Days' News

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