October 2005 - Posts

Bill Gates gets streamed... in VIVIDAS format... WHAT THE?

Well its about time, Bill Gates recently gave a talk at Engage 2005 in the UK about how High Definition is going to change the face of marketting, the organising company behind it decided to adopt the Vividas format to stream some of the talks, including one by the man himself Mr. Bill Gates.

Bill Gates Viv'd

There are some interesting parts where he talks about "the future". he starts off by reminising about the "dream" he had about getting everyone in the world have a PC and making it easier to use, when he was 19, and assure's us that they are on their way of making that a reality. But some of hte more interesting "predictions" come later on about phones, newspapers and tablet Pcs, which can not only show news but come in the form of a $400 student "all in one bookcase" for school and many other cool parts...

definately worth a watch, but its long so spare about 20-30mins...
posted Friday, October 28, 2005 6:11 AM by wsoftware with 0 Comments Rated Excellent [5 out of 5].

Visual Studio 2005 and Sql Server 2005 RTMs, Subscribers start your enginess... err downloads!

THATS RIGHT! as of 2 hours ago MS have released VS.NET 2005 (aka Whidbey) and SqlServer 2005 (aka Yukon) to MSDN Subscribers... Grab it if you have a subby...

Yayyy! its finally yer!
If not grab the .NET Framework 2.0 RTM:

File Name: dotnetfx.exe
Version: 2.0
Date Published: 10/27/2005
Language: English
Download Size: 22960 KB
Estimated Download Time: 55 min @ 56K

Well I guess its time for a reformat, clean install... but dang, Uni exams dont finish till the 18th November:( Bummer!
posted Thursday, October 27, 2005 1:08 AM by wsoftware with 1 Comments

Omega v5.10a drivers released, tuned for Q4+F.E.A.R

*Finally* the moment everyone's been waiting for (ATI Crowd that is), Omega has released the v5.10a tweaked drivers and they're awesome! These have some special tweaks for Quake 4 and most likely F.E.A.R as well.

Go on and download it.

While on the topic of ATI, i've been using the Arctic VGA Silencer ATI 5, Rev 2 on my X850XTPE card for the past 4-5 months and its done wonders to the cooling and noise level compared to the stock cooler. Previously I'd be hitting 60C+ playing UT2004 or FarCry and the noise level was insane, but after replacing the cooler I've managed to keep it below 30C on idle and around 40-49C Max on load and its whisper quite... best $32 i've spent thus far:D
posted Wednesday, October 26, 2005 1:02 AM by wsoftware with 0 Comments

Sorry, its no Space sex for you until we get to Mars young man...

A trip to good old Mars will take approximately 30 months = thats 2 and half years, and NASA has just given some grim news to the perspective crew of this epic journey... "Sorry mate, no sex in space with the lass..."

Would you survive?
"But he says sex may also benefit missions by creating 'a sense of stability or normalisation'. Ellison agrees, saying sex or masturbation could help alleviate boredom and anxiety on the long, lonely journeys through space."
HA! maybe Playboy can sponsor the trip;-) But seriously, it must mean they A) NASA would have tried this, B) they'd had a bunch of highly respectable scientists (i'm thinking of a different word... starts with N ands with a D and has an ER somewhere in the middle) analyse this to great extent before coming to this conclusion...

Read the Scientific background... On a more serious note, it'll be so cool to be able to have people going to Mars (although not Total Recall style) 2 Years is a bit of an over kill (actually 5 years in total) but the fact that we're considering going that far is astounding!

posted Saturday, October 22, 2005 1:02 PM by wsoftware with 0 Comments

Flock to see Flock... (The sexier way to browse!)

Finally got access to Flock, the innovative new browser based on Firefox to try out, first impresions... WOW! looks nice, sexy feel too it even though its another mutation of grand old Mozilla...

Behind the eye candy that is Flock, its got some very funky features, the classiest is the integration with del.icio.us where you can share your bookmarks with others and some RSS Tools...

time will tell if good old firefox will be forked if Flock takes over... then we'll get FunkyMonkey to take over Flock, which will inturn be taken over by FatPipe in many moons to come.. ok that was just me talking crap...




Dont just sit there, go on and download your copy silly! (NOTE:: its very preview'ish at the moment)... and HotHTML 3 wont register this as a browser (maybe in FixPack 5)
posted Friday, October 21, 2005 11:16 AM by wsoftware with 1 Comments Rated Excellent [5 out of 5].

A Career in the British SIS? (Mi6)

Not exactly IT related (or is it?) but cool never the less...

The Mi6 has finally got a website yesterday, not only that but with some fairly good info on their history, and how you can possibly apply to be apart of the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS)...

Heres some classy links:

History:
http://www.mi6.gov.uk/output/Page5.html

Intro to careers:
http://www.mi6.gov.uk/output/Page18.html

Applying:
http://www.mi6.gov.uk/output/Page22.html

Now if only I was in Britan... dammit!
posted Monday, October 17, 2005 12:41 AM by wsoftware with 1 Comments

COOL Trailers: Serenity / IBM Ad

We'll I think I'll start a new part that has some of the more interesting trailers that stream in Vividas format every so often (maybe once a month)... so to get things started...

Serenity
We've got the first 9minutes of the movie in VIV (Vividas) format to view right here. Take a look, the TV Trailers made the look look like *** but after watching this I'm so going to watch it this weekend;-)

IBM
 What is Big Blue doing these days I hear you ask? Consulting ofcourse! This video's pretty well done, quite comical too.

Make sure when you run the player that  no Windows Media Player instance is in the background (or anyother movie  software -PDVD etc), if you notice a slow down thats probably that in the background...
posted Friday, October 14, 2005 5:12 AM by wsoftware with 2 Comments Rated Excellent [5 out of 5].

ATI Catalyst v5.10 (Crossfire Support) and DC Support in a few months!

ATI have released Catalyst v5.10... Go on and get a copy, I'm still waiting on Omega or NGO to release their versions. NGO has the 256Mb optimisations, Omega has the OverDrive options intact, performance differences are fairly equal so its hard to choose...

Read On to learn about ATI working on drivers to add some extra grunt to those with Dual Core CPUs (so it doesnt stay Idle while you frag away ass kicking in ) but its still 2-3 months away...

posted Thursday, October 13, 2005 9:34 AM by wsoftware with 0 Comments

Halo Movie to be directed by Peeeeeter Jackson... thank god its not Uwe Boll!

Well it looks like *sigh of relief* Uwe "ewwwwwww" Boll will NOT BE DIRECTING THE HALO MOVIE (can I make it anymore obvious?). Peter Jackson (LoR) will be the executive producer which will mean the movie will atleast be in the hands of "professionals"... now the debate about directors...

Some good ones that come to mind:
  • Ridley or Tony Scott
  • Peter Jackson
  • James Cameron
  • Paul Verhoven (Total Recall)
Then theres the role of Master Chief... I'll leave that for the imagination... (Tom 'Jumpy Jumpy' Cruise? Vin 'Tank' Diesel? Arnold 'Governer' S?)

And to conclude, some duely deserving Boll bashing:
Read the entire story about the Halo space here.

posted Sunday, October 09, 2005 3:43 AM by wsoftware with 0 Comments Rated Excellent [5 out of 5].

COOLTOOL: Good-bye DvdDecrypter and heeeelllloooooo ImgBurn

Havent had a COOLTOOL post in ages, so here it is!

LightningUK had to shutdown DVDDecrypter because of legal issues, but now he's back with ImgBurn... awesome utility that will surely pickup popularity quickly:D
Burn Baby Burn!
ImgBurn carries on from where DVD Decrypter left off! (Well, for the burning part anyway!)

ImgBurn can write most types of CD / DVD images and it supports all the latest writers (including booktype / bitsetting on many of the major ones - i.e. BenQ, LiteOn, NEC, Plextor, Sony). You can even use ImgBurn to erase / format your rewritable media!

ImgBurn will try its very best to burn your DVD-Video double layer images using the layer break you've specified in the IFO files, but it can also calculate the best place for you, to save you the trouble.

Advanced functionality can be found in context menus that appear when you right click on various bits of the user interface. Can you find them all??!!
GO on, Download It, Embrace it and thank LightningUK with a donation!
posted Thursday, October 06, 2005 2:27 AM by wsoftware with 0 Comments

PCWorld's 100 Best Products of 2005

Hard to believe that 2005 is nearly over (atleast in uni terms!) but PCWorld have come out with their top 100 products of 2005.

Not to spoil the suprises (hits and misses) some funky stuff in that list, the beloved 2405FPWcomes in at 4th which is nice!
posted Tuesday, October 04, 2005 1:37 AM by wsoftware with 0 Comments

Open source VB6 code (Great Collection!)

From the guy that brough you SiteSkinner Professional and ComDoc, Edwin's now released all his work as open-source on his E.V.I.C.T.(Edwin Vermeer Information Communication Technology) site.

Among the huge amount of reusable VB6 code there, heres a list...
Take a look as you'll find *something* there you can make use of!
posted Sunday, October 02, 2005 2:47 AM by wsoftware with 0 Comments

WOW! 54" quad HD LCD from CMO...

Nearly fainted when Edwin told me they've come up with a 56" HD LCD TV, with get this, QUAD HD - 4x(1920x1080) = 3840x2160 - display...

The new panel consists of over 24.8 million units of transistors, with a data transmission speed of over 1.4 gigabytes per second. To achieve this breakthrough result, the CMO research and development team overcame a number of significant technical challenges, including the development of special new driver methods and scanning procedures and solving massive heat generation problems caused by the alignment of so many transistors.
Read the Full Press Release from CMO
posted Sunday, October 02, 2005 2:42 AM by wsoftware with 2 Comments