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- Daily Crunch: Rescue Robot Edition
- National Geographic reprints every issue to an external drive
- Tekken 3 on the HTC HD2
- jWIN licenses Polaroid name, prepares to market
- The Borderland’s Mad Moxxi Underdome Riot trailer
- Yet another new e-book reader – this one looks vaguely familiar
- Video: OnLive demonstrated at Columbia University
- Video: Project Natal playing Half-Life 2
- TenYears: Biggest Losers in Tech
- Once again, good design eludes iPhone gaming controller creators
- Cydle media player coming to America
- Neil Patrick Harris fans/freaks: This computer is for you
- Remember when Team Fortress 2 didn’t look like Team Fortress 2?
- TenYears: Unexpected Success Stories
- More screenshots of Perfect Dark for Xbox Live.
- Star Wars-inspired sneakers from Adidas actually look totally awesome
- Modern Warfare 2 Mythbusters: Episode 2
- Prepare yourself for more and more full body scanners at airports, America
- For men on trains: Japanese company sells anti-groping gloves
- Google announces press gathering on January 5th – Hello, Nexus One.
| Daily Crunch: Rescue Robot Edition Posted: 30 Dec 2009 12:00 AM PST | |||
| National Geographic reprints every issue to an external drive Posted: 29 Dec 2009 09:02 PM PST
What you get is a digital version of every issue, including the articles, pictures, maps, advertisements, everything that’s made NatGeo great over the years. It comes on a 160GB external hard drive, of which only 60GB is actually pre-loaded. Of course, you could probably pick up a 160GB drive for only $80, but it wouldn’t have all the NatGeo content. The package also comes with a DVD offering tips on better photography, a behind the scenes look at how National Geographic is produced and interviews with some of the photographers about their most famous pictures. It’ll set you back $199.95, but I think it’s totally worth it. Honestly, I’ll probably be ordering a copy for my personal library. [via Download Squad]
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| Posted: 29 Dec 2009 08:00 PM PST  So there's actually two things to tell you about here; for one thing, you can play Tekken 3 on your HTC HD2 phone. That's cool and all, but the big story is the emulator used to play it. The emulator, named FPSECE, not only supports the Playstation 1, but the touchscreen as well.
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| jWIN licenses Polaroid name, prepares to market Posted: 29 Dec 2009 07:30 PM PST
jWIN, producer of inexpensive electronics, just announced that they have entered into a licensing agreement with Polaroid, the film and camera titan that’s fallen onto tough times lately. Obviously, this all comes down to what’s in a name, and jWIN is hoping to leverage the Polaroid brand into the new digital world that Polaroid couldn’t find their own way in. From the press release:
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| The Borderland’s Mad Moxxi Underdome Riot trailer Posted: 29 Dec 2009 06:56 PM PST Sit back and enjoy a trailer that shows a bit of gameplay of Borderland’s next DLC expansion, Mad Moxxi Underdome Riot. [via Joystiq]
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| Yet another new e-book reader – this one looks vaguely familiar Posted: 29 Dec 2009 06:25 PM PST
Insdream states that 6-inch DSTN panel is better then the E Ink display that Amazon uses, however refresh rate is really not all that important when you are talking about e-book readers. Insdream’s reader is also missing a wireless connection and support from the Amazon.com website, however it does have a text to speech in Mandarin Chinese, something that the Kindle does lack. The Insdream supports TXT, HTML, PDF, EPUB, PDB, and several other popular e-book formats. Battery life is expected to be around two weeks of regular reading. I wouldn’t expect to ever see this anywhere other then China, considering the potential for lawsuits, and we have no idea what it’d cost anyway. [via SlashGear]
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| Video: OnLive demonstrated at Columbia University Posted: 29 Dec 2009 05:39 PM PST
This video deals with some of the technical issues that have been brought up. I haven’t watched the whole thing (skipped around to get the interesting bits) but he does address some of the compression and packet loss issues they have to deal with. I remember being told it’s about 4-5Mb/s for 720p/60FPS, which actually seems a bit low for streaming video, but with a specialized codec and stream they seem to have made it work, even with tricky bits like crisscrossing lines and slow gradients. They have a routing technique that they claim reduces latency as well, but can they really guarantee <20ms pings for everyone using the service? Seems optimistic, but overall pretty convincing. Here is the "business model" slide:
I notice they leave out a very significant number. They say they’re leasing servers, but I assume that’s for crunching video data and streaming it. They need a whole other set of devices to actually run the games. You want to run a game at 1280×720 and 60FPS? That’s a serious investment in hardware. Even with sophisticated planning algorithms for determining peak times and load sharing, you’re going to need thousands and thousands of machines to keep your service running. If I’m wrong and they’ve really avoided this, then I’ll eat my words gladly. Let’s just ballpark some hardware here:
The GPU will have to be at least mid-range, same with the CPU, or it won’t be able to run the newer games. Extra cooling will probably be done on a large scale, but is too squirrely a number to factor in here. Assuming there’s no case and they’re using onboard audio, then they’re looking at a bare minimum of $700 if they buy smart, probably more like $500 if they buy in bulk. Let’s call it $500. He talks about running things on CPU only, and virtualizing things across servers, but really, when you’re advertising playing the latest games on release, like Assassin’s Creed 2 and Modern Warfare 2, people aren’t going to choose Tetris. The bulk of games people will want to play are going to use real hardware. You can’t sell a product for one purpose and spec it for another. If each machine costs $500 and they have to serve 100,000 users, let’s say they need to have a third of those available at any time. That’s $500 x 33,000 = $16.5 million. I don’t see that figuring into their calculations anywhere. And I doubt Intel, AMD, or NVIDIA is likely to pony up that much hardware on credit. Depending on how much they charge for month, it might take users a year to “pay off” the hardware that enables their account. And don’t forget, OnLive will have to upgrade regularly, like us poor PC gamers. I’m still skeptical of the whole service, or at least its scalability, but the fact that it’s publicly displayed and discussed makes it far more real than, say, the Phantom. I assume they’ll be at CES, and maybe we can put some of these concerns to the man himself. [via Gamertag Radio and Joystiq]
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| Video: Project Natal playing Half-Life 2 Posted: 29 Dec 2009 04:20 PM PST It’s not clear what level of approval this leaked video has from Microsoft, but my guess would be that there is plenty of testing like this going to to determine the feasibility of FPS games on Natal. If anything, it looks more awkward than playing with dual analog sticks, but given the right game design, it could work well. Something where precise movement is less important than intuitive interaction (the Penumbra series comes to mind) might just make this fly.
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| TenYears: Biggest Losers in Tech Posted: 29 Dec 2009 03:35 PM PST
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National Geographic Magazine has been one of the most important publications ever printed. From the insightful articles to the brilliant photography, NatGeo has been the benchmark that other magazines compare themselves to. Now, you can own a copy of every single issue without having to build a new addition to your house to store it.
So you’ve got a company without an all-that-recognizable name, and you really want to ramp it up. What do you do? Well, if you’re jWIN you buy some street cred by striking up a deal with Polaroid, making your products have a connection with a legacy of creativity and innovation that you had nothing to do with.
Looks like 2010 is turning out to be the year of the e-book reader. I’m not sure at what point these are going to stop being news, but here we go again. Insdream is launching the SX601 which seems to borrow some significant design ideas from 
 Motorola Around the time of the iPhone being announced, the RAZR was the hottest handset on the market. It was thin as hell, looked futuristic, and did absolutely nothing different from any other phone. In fact, Motorola hadn’t made a phone that did anything different in years. And as things like Blackberrys and semi-smart phones began gaining traction on the mid-range-handset market, Moto continued to put out “improved” versions of the RAZR, or body modifications like the KRZR or whatever. Never mind that the phone was garbage fundamentally, let’s just keep pushing it! No long term plans necessary! They’ve salvaged themselves somewhat with the Droid, but that can’t last long; the Android market is too mercurial. Moto threw away an enormous lead and brand name, and barring a miracle, I don’t see any way they can get it back. |
 RIAA/MPAA What can I say here? These stodgy and litigious institutions continue to dig their grave to this day. A renaissance in media distribution was unfolding before their eyes, and instead of taking the bull by the horns, they sued the audience. Can you think of a worse way to handle the last decade of technological and cultural changes? I can’t. At every turn these Associations (and their counterparts throughout the world) have made the exact wrong choices. Suing children, fabricating numbers, instituting ridiculous DRM schemes — it’s been a decade-long disaster, and when the major labels all fall over dead, I’ll dance on their graves. |
 AOL Let me just say: I appreciate what AOL did. It put a lot of people online. It put them into a weird pseudo-internet, sure, but it broke the ice for millions and familiarized them with the web, e-mail, and A/S/L. Unfortunately, there wasn’t really a lot of room for AOL in the new order of things — AOL or the other big services like it. AOL’s role in the world today is much different than what it was, but instead of becoming a powerful brand in itself (like Yahoo!), it has receded into the background. And the fact is that’s because it represents all that was going to go wrong with the internet: it represents the corporate-controlled, content-locked, closely-monitored internet that the big guys would just love to foist on us. |
Our take
Doug: Internet Explorer, both the mobile and desktop versions. At the height of its reign in the middle of the decade, it had over 95% market share. Now that number’s hovering around 65% thanks to Safari, Firefox, Google Chrome and, to a certain extent, Opera (especially on mobile devices). I haven’t personally used Internet Explorer for any significant amount of time in the past three years despite using it for everything in the early part of the decade. It’s mind boggling that Microsoft sat on its hands and watched other browsers eat its lunch for so long.
Matt: As much as Toshiba lost in its investment into HD DVD, the consumer lost even more because of the silly format war. All we ever wanted was an easy way to watch high definition content on our HDTVs. Instead we got the HD DVD vs Blu-ray format war that did nothing but confuse the general public and infuriate early adopters. Although the format war definitely caused more people to look take a serious look at digital downloads, which is somewhat of a win for everyone.
Nicholas: I’d nominate myself as biggest tech loser of the past decade, but that would sorta violate the spirit of this here category. That aside, I might go so far as to say Sirius XM just based on what the two companies (back when they were two companies) were supposed to be: revolutionary radio~! It very much has lost its appeal, as has radio in general thanks to things like the iTunes Store, Spotify, Pandora, and the less-than-legal sources of acquiring music. Talk radio—Hannity, Limbaugh, Opie and Anthony, Ron and Fez, Howard Stern (I guess, not really a fan) and the like—is obviously a different story;XM channel 202 is the only reason I still bother to subscribe. If O&A and R&F were ever to leave so would I. So yeah, the whole idea of commercial, music radio, specifically Sirius XM and how it/they tried to be different but really aren’t, would be a pretty big loser.
Dave: Print media has really taken it in the shorts in the last 10 years. Once considered the first, best, and only way to get your information, people have come to realize that traditional print media is a lumbering dinosaur, trying to keep pace with a fast changing world that they are always 12 hours behind. I do feel sympathy for the old guard, but unless they can learn to evolve quickly, print media will be going out with the baby boomers – because they are the only ones who actually buy newspapers any more.
John: Dead tree books. I just bought a Stephen King book – Under the Dome – for the Kindle. My buddy showed me the actual book. It was a 1000 pages long and so horribly thick that it looked overly daunting. When guys like me, guys who like to read, just don’t want to carry around a ream of paper onto the plane, the publishing industry needs to worry. Maybe they’ll get a boost from Mr. Sparky Pants but as Seth Godin writes:
Amazon and the Kindle have killed the bookstore. Why? Because people who buy 100 or 300 books a year are gone forever. The typical American buys just one book a year for pleasure. Those people are meaningless to a bookstore. It’s the heavy users that matter, and now officially, as 2009 ends, they have abandoned the bookstore. It’s over.
I agree and I think books – in electronic form – still have a long and lucrative life ahead of them.
Once again, good design eludes iPhone gaming controller creators
Posted: 29 Dec 2009 03:00 PM PST
What's so hard about this, guys? I mean, obviously you can't make a controller that works with all the games out there, but if you make a good, cheap, basic one, plenty of developers will add a control option that accommodates it. Instead, we get garbage like the Game Grip and this plastic Batarang-looking thing.
Cydle media player coming to America
Posted: 29 Dec 2009 02:45 PM PST
Cydle is launching their new in-car multimedia system at CES this January. Previously only available in South Korea, the Cydle P29 is a portable multimedia player with HD radio and subscription-free Mobile DTV.
Cydle is known for their media devices in South Korea, but are relatively unknown here in the U.S. The P29 will sport a 2.9-inch touchscreen interface, and runs on an ARM9 CPU. Reportedly available in 4GB or 8GB, expect to start seeing them this coming spring with an MSRP of $199.
[via Electronista]
Neil Patrick Harris fans/freaks: This computer is for you
Posted: 29 Dec 2009 01:00 PM PST
Poke fun at this vintage computer sale all you want, but it’s actually not that bad of a deal for the right person. Think about it. What you’re getting for only $60 is a near-mint IBM PS/2 Model 60. Hook this puppy up and record your life just like the original blogger: Doogie Howser, M.D.
Big pic after the jump.
[kijiji via reddit]
Remember when Team Fortress 2 didn’t look like Team Fortress 2?
Posted: 29 Dec 2009 01:00 PM PST
A few of you may already know that Team Fortress 2 didn’t always look like Toy Story más violence, but for the unawares: it did. So, proof! A certain Curits Lassam, friend to all, found an old PC Gamer preview from the year two-thousand that described the game in its old, Counter-Strike-like art style. Yuck.
It’s safe to say I wouldn’t have spent nearly as much time sniping those red dogs if the game looked realistic. There’s a certain charm to mayhem and carnage when it looks like Buzz Lightyear.
TenYears: Unexpected Success Stories
Posted: 29 Dec 2009 12:30 PM PST
It’s almost January 1st, 2010 and we’ve been mulling over our favorites of 2009 – and the previous decade. Here we present another installment in our “Of the Decade” lists.
Winner: Apple iPod and the iTunes Store
No matter how you feel about Apple products, there's no denying that the original iPod – released in October 2001 – made a huge impact on the digital music world.
Before the iPod, MP3 players were clunky, had atrocious interfaces, and awful battery life. Geeks like us had the early models from Archos and Diamond but you'd never see a common luddite carrying one around. Then came this stark white, minimalist music player with – GASP! – a wheel? And a program called iTunes that made it easy to transfer music?
Add to that 10-hour battery life, capacities of 5GB or 10GB, and an interface that was easy enough for regular people to use, and you've got the beginning of the end for CDs.
Then consider the iTunes Store, which hit the scene in 2003. A digital music store that ONLY worked with the iPod and charged people 99 cents per DRM-encrypted song. Guess what? People bought into it because it was easy, quick, and well organized. Fast forward to the end of the century and iTunes makes up "70% of worldwide online digital music sales" and is currently the largest music retailer in the world.
Runners Up
Microsoft's Console Gaming Initiative
Console gaming really took off in the 80's with Nintendo and Sega – two Japanese companies. Then a third Japanese company, Sony, entered the fray and upped the ante with the PlayStation. Sega eventually died off, its last gasp being the Saturn console, discontinued in 1999. So which Japanese company would come along to fill the void left by Sega?
Microsoft? Whaaaa?
The first Xbox console weighed 700 pounds, ran hot and loud, and featured a controller the size of a Buick. But it was basically a computer beefed up to play video games – Pentium III CPU, NVIDIA graphics, and a hard drive (which hadn't been done before). The games looked gorgeous and were, perhaps more importantly, fun. Microsoft, a company known for making operating systems, came out swinging and secured its spot in the gaming community.
Blogging
Blogging is not a tangible product, no. But the fact that most of us here at CrunchGear make a full living from a concept that started out as little more than online diaries written by crazy people is, in and of itself, crazy. And while blogging didn't start in this decade, it sure took off in this decade.
We don't need to get into the whole mainstream journalism versus blogging debate, except to say that the line between mainstream journalism and blogging keeps getting blurrier all the time.
Simpler Devices
You'd think that in an advanced society like ours, as technology gets faster, more powerful, and more complicated that we, in turn, would adapt to being able to use more complicated interfaces and features. Instead, we've seen a return to simplicity. The iPhone has one main button, Flip camcorders plug right into your computer, and netbooks offer little more than casual web browsing and word processing.
And while you can find more fully featured devices than the Flip, the iPhone, and netbooks for far less money, casual consumers snatch these things up in droves if not for the very fact that they're actually easy to use.
The simplicity movement started off slowly in the beginning of the decade, but it's sure ramping up to full speed nowadays. In the future, expect a nice blend of both features and simplicity with less of a tradeoff between the two.
Our Take
Devin: The Wii. With that name? I still can’t believe how many consoles Nintendo has sold. It’s not that there aren’t good games, but I just never thought it would pick up the way it has. Good for them, though.
Greg: Me as a blogger. Does that count? No? Alright. I’ll go with the Halo series. It gets announced at Macworld of all places, then gets bought by friggin’ Microsoft. Mind you, this is all happening in 2000, when the only games Microsoft was known for were Solitaire and Flight Simulator.
Matt: Anyone remember the Moto RAZR? Of course you do because sometime within the last 10 years, every single person on Earth owned one. I still have the one I paid $500 for somewhere in a junk drawer. But I doubt anyone ever saw the still-ultra thin clamshell becoming just so popular. I have $10 that says that you know five people that are still using one.
Nicholas: I’m going to be lazy and say I largely agree with this list. I think I voted for Microsoft barging its way into the video game console business having little to no previous presence (the Dreamcast did feature Windows CE as an option for developers). Though I guess it’s not all that surprising when you consider that Microsoft merely broke out the chequebook and bought its way into our living rooms. I don’t know if I’d say the iTunes Store was a surprise. By the time it debuted, we were basically just waiting for someone, anyone to launch a music download store. That Apple, creator of the iPod, which was already something of a success by the time the store launched, was the first to create a store isn’t all too surprising. You might even say it was expected! Biggest surprise of all-time, though, was Hulk Hogan joining the nWo in 1996.
Dave: I’m going to say netbooks. Who knew that a underpowered computer with a tiny screen and a crappy keyboard would turn into such a commodity item. It really goes against the industry standard of “more power” and Moore’s Law, and came out of left field. I don’t know how long the netbook craze will last, but for now Acer and MSI seem to be riding high.
More screenshots of Perfect Dark for Xbox Live.
Posted: 29 Dec 2009 12:00 PM PST
The Xbox Live Arcade port of Perfect Dark still carries that frustratingly (well…) vague “winter 2010″ release date, but we’re beginning to see more and more screenshots trickle out from wherever these things trickle out from. Who knows. Anyhow, there’s a series of new screenshots on some dude’s Photobucket that may interest you.
No, they don’t look as impressive as the last batch of screenshots. I don’t know what’s up.
Multi-player seems to be limited to 8-man, with four per Xbox.
Too bad Perfect Dark wasn’t as good as Goldeneye, but at least now it’ll run at more than 15 frames per second!
Also, impromptu poll: should the word “screenshot” be two words or one, (”screenshot” vs. “screen shot”), or should it even be hyphenated (”screen-shot”)?
via Reddit, the last bastion of reasonably fun and intelligent Internet discussion
Star Wars-inspired sneakers from Adidas actually look totally awesome
Posted: 29 Dec 2009 11:19 AM PST
Try to remember the last time you bought shoes based on a movie or TV show. Judge Dredd boots? No. The Road raggedy bag-shoes? No… You were probably a kid and had a pair with Taz on them. I doubt you’d wear them now, and until today I thought any tie-in shoes or “inspired by” collections were worthless as fashion items. Apparently I was wrong, because Adidas is putting out some Star Wars kicks that are completely brilliant. As of this week you can actually order ‘em, too.
The X-Wings and Vaders shown above are my favorites, but there are a whole bunch more at the official site. Caution: lengthy (but kind of awesome) Flash intro. You can also start pre-ordering them at the official store — not everything is available yet, though, and those Vaders cost $150.
[via Fast Company and Fubiz]
Modern Warfare 2 Mythbusters: Episode 2
Posted: 29 Dec 2009 11:00 AM PST
This episode is actually a lot more informative than the first one. Watch and learn, friends. Unless, of course, you’re still boycotting MW2.
Prepare yourself for more and more full body scanners at airports, America
Posted: 29 Dec 2009 10:30 AM PST
There’s more fallout from that botched Christmas Day terror plot, and it’s something regular readers will be familiar with. It looks like the man who tried to blow up that airplane had explosives stitched into his underpants. The result? A push for more widespread use of those full body scanners we’ve been talking about for some time now.
Right now, full body scanners are only available in a few airports around the U.S. (Your standard issue metal detector wouldn’t have found the device in the man’s pants, as it obviously didn’t.) You’d need a fancier detector of some sort, such as a millimeter-wave scanner. Those things aren’t inexpensive, so the debate will be: how much can we afford to spend. Or, cleverly, how much can we afford not to spend?
But before we get into that, I point you in the direction of this illustration of the dangers you face every time you board an airplane.That’s right: there’s a one-in-10.4 million chance that you’ll be involved in any sort of airplane-related terrorist attack.
“We were very lucky this time but we may not be so lucky next time, which is why our defenses must be strengthened,” said Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut. Fair enough, but “might” would be the operative word. But again, if you look at the odds, there’s very little the average person should be concerned about.
Long story short: if you’re not already comfortable with the idea of full body scanner, too bad.
For men on trains: Japanese company sells anti-groping gloves
Posted: 29 Dec 2009 10:24 AM PST
Groping women in trains (or anywhere, really) isn’t only happening in Japan, but this country with its big cities with trains that are full of people (=easy bait for gropers) everyday has a particularly big problem with molesters. It’s a crime, and it’s reported around 2,000 times yearly to police stations in Tokyo alone, prompting a big Japanese railway operator to think about installing security cameras within trains in order to catch gropers just recently.
And now a Japanese company called Mindbank [JP] has developed a solution for those people who fear to get wrongly accused of touching women in trains with their hands: Anti-groping gloves.
I’m not sure if this is a half joke/half serious product (like many of those silly Thanko USB gadgets), but Mindbank is actually selling the things (patent pending!). And accusing the wrong passengers on a train does happen, too.
The way it works is that you get plastic plates that you have to stick into the gloves before you can wear them, making it harder for men to pull off groping attacks. One glove and one plastic plate will set you back $18, meaning you’ll have to pay $36 for both hands to be absolutely sure. Inventor Shimoyama expects brisk demand especially from “fainthearted” train passengers.
Google announces press gathering on January 5th – Hello, Nexus One.
Posted: 29 Dec 2009 10:08 AM PST
There have been whispers around the rumor mill for roughly a week now that Google was planning on throwing a press shindig right before CES - and sure enough, the invites just went out.
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