1/2 - Kahuna notes: We had a kick back day yesterday. First of, the #18 Michigan State football team (9-4) lost the Capital One Bowl to #15 Georgia (10-3). State was leading at half-time 6-3 but had squandered 3 scoring opportunities with shitting play calling on the part of the offensive coordinator. In the second half, MSU's totally predictable offensive play calling put the George defense in command. MSU's players did well, but their offensive coaching staff failed them miserably. Thankfully, MSU's performance did not embarrass, something that can't be said for #8 Penn State (11-2) who gave up 38 points to #5 USC in a 38-24 loss. Next up, hockey's 'Winter Classic' held at Wrigley Field pitting the Red Wings (25-7-5) against the Black Hawks (20-8-7). The Wings pulled away with a win in the last few minutes 6-4. Kahunette cooked up a turkey for dinner. Herbal joined us, but BluesEyes was under the weather due to some exuberant partying on New Year's Eve - so BigBear and BlueEyes didn't make it. MarkyMark and PennyLane dropped in to join us for dinner. We had a fine time. Onward...
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Gaming Scene News:.
Left for Dead review -  4/5  Oooh !
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Star Trek Online preview.
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Q&A - Video gaming addiction.
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Gaming 2009.  Here's a set of lists to help you take a look at what's coming on the gaming scene in 2009.
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2008: The Year in Lists...  1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9  10  11  12  13  14  15  16  17  18  19  20  21  22   Blue's News puts together some nice lists - Best Games of 2008, etc.
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EverQuest 2's The Shadow Odyssey review -  4/5  Oooh !
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Space War Commander demo.  (54.4mb)
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Hardware Scene News:.
Intel Core i7 vs Core 2 Quad review -  A draw  Oooh !
Kahuna notes: This review is interesting because it takes a look at the gaming performance of the Core i7 and Core 2 Quads. The conclusion: "Our opinion is that, in this moment, it’s not worth it [to make a transition to Core i7]". They suggest that money would be better spent on a graphics card upgrade. In building my new rig, I came to the same conclusion - starting from scratch with Core i7 is very expensive for barely a smidgen of advantage in performance.
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Microsoft posts official fix for failed Zunes.  Microsoft, a company well know for release buggy software and low quality hardware has done it again. This time the meatheads made a idiotic mistake that bricked every 30GB Zune on the planet. Talk about horrendous PR - on a global scale yet. These guys are soooo bad; you just can't make this stuff up. Anyway, the Redmond retards have issued fix. MS posted instructions on its support site Zune.net/support on how to thaw your Zune from its deep freeze and get it working again.
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Microsoft meatheads blame Zune outage on leap year.  As we reported yesterday, every 30GB Zune on the planet failed on the last day of 2008. According to a message left by Microsoft's Matt Akers on the Zune support forum, "there is a bug in the internal clock driver causing the 30GB device to improperly handle the last day of a leap year." A Y2K9 bug?  What morons - this critical error should've been anticipated, but it's obviously just business as usual for the scum at MS: roll the shit out and let the public beware.
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Graphics price cuts lead to greater sales.  As a result of the latest price cuts, Nvidia's GeForce GTX 260 and ATI's Radeon HD 4870 can both be found for prices starting as low as $200. Now that's a deal.
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Nvidia picks the wrong 3D glasses technology.  Here's an interesting article for those keeping track of 3D gaming technology. I'm one of those. Heck, I've still got my 3D Revelators, although I can't use them due to my switch to LCD monitors a few years back. Anyway, the Inquirer guys have a nice techy article up on the subject. Check it.
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Rumor: Larger iPod Touch coming.  TechCrunch is reporting that three independent sources have mentioned to them a large form factor version of the iPod Touch, with either a 7in or 9in screen, is to be released fall of 2009. The device is expected to have access to the iTunes App Store. We'll see.
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Patriot 128GB Warp SSD review -  89%  Oooh !
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Tech Scene & Miscellaneous News:.
Windows 7 beta 1 performance vs Vista, XP.  The boys over at ZDNet have a nice study posted on Windows version performance with 23 test - a mix of 'real world' test like: boot up, shut down, files transters, network file transfers, compression with built in Zip, extraction with built in Zip, open MS Office docs, open PDF, and burning. Very nice selection. Tested on both an AMD Quad Core rig and an Intel Dual Core rig, the results for both rigs were: #1 Win7 beta 1 (build 7000) 32bit, #2 Vista SP1 32bit, #3 WinXP SP3 32bit. Man, that's impressive for a beta, especially a beta 1 (beta builds are usually more geared towards stability than performance). Maybe the scum in Redmond are finally on to something.
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Mac web share nears 10% in December.  In spite of fears of a late-year plunge, Apple has again beat its own market share record in December and now has a record 9.6% of web traffic as Microsoft's own influence continues to fall.
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Chinese court jails 11 in Microsoft piracy ring.  A court in the southern Chinese town of Shenzhen convicted 11 people on Wednesday of violating national copyright laws and participating in a sophisticated counterfeiting ring that for years manufactured and distributed pirated Microsoft software throughout the world. These guys are getting between one-and-a-half to six-and-a-half years in prison.
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IE lost share to Firefox, Safari and Chrome in December.  Microsoft's browser woes continue as its piece of shit IE7 continues to loose user due to horrible security problems and bugs. According to a Net Applications study, Web surfers have deserted IE in favor of Safari, Firefox and Chrome. As a matter of fact, MS/IE's market share dropped below 70% for the first time in eight years.
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