2012-12-21-268

5 Highly Anticipated Games to look out for in 2011

Starting at number one we have Mass Effect 3.
Being one of the most hyped game franchises in western RPG history and with good reason too, Mass Effect 1 and 2 were international video game blockbusters with Mass Effect 2's week one sales topping 2 million in it's opening week alone. With the recent trailer at the Spike Video Game Awards hinting at the next game's 'save planet earth' setting, many gamers are skeptical, but willing to wait and see.
Developer: BioWare
Publisher: Electronic Arts
Platform: Xbox 360, PS3, PC
Release Date: Q4 2011

2012-12-21-236

35% Android device owners buy things with their phones

Owners of Android phones are making purchases with their cell phonesmore and more frequently, according to NPD.

From large transactions, to so-called "micro-transactions", Android applications are being used more often to buy things online and in stores. According to research firm NPD, March statistics said that 35% of Android users were using mobile payment applications, up 8% from last month.

Applications are being introduced into the Android store all the time to let smartphones purchase more and more things.

"Consumers are doing everything from basic utility (bill pay, moving money, and account management) to using the phone itself to pay for goods and services of limited value (micro-transactions), including buying a cup of coffee or movie tickets." says research director for NPD Connected Intelligence, Linda Barrabee.

Popular payment applications now include the PayPal app, Starbucks, and Fandango movies. Also popular are payment accepting applications, such as Square and Pay Anywhere. Android is certainly not alone in its variety of mobile payment apps, as iOS has quite a similar list itself.

But the entire mobile wallet scheme is not complete. Unlike with credit cards, one does not simply walk into a store and expect their phone to be accepted. The convenience of the technology is enough to convince people to use it where its available, but the market is slow to fully adopt it yet.

"Ultimately,” says Barrabee,” the success of mobile payment and wallet initiatives rests on changing entrenched consumer behaviors, and shifting the reliance on, and use of, physical wallets and all of its contents to a mobile (digital) version. In order to do this, and facilitate on-the-go consumer transactions and commerce, wireless carriers, credit card companies, and e-commerce companies need to make sure the process is convenient, simple, and secure for consumers."

Source: CNET

“original gangstas” really ought to suck, but —

Hey, what the hell, you know?

In the late 90s and around the turn of the millennium, blaxploitation cinema started to earn a long-overdue critical reappraisal, due in large part to the success of films like Jackie Brown and the “updated” (and lame) Shaft — suddenly the opinion-dictators out there, who had written off the entire genre as racist, contemptible crap realized a lot of those old flicks were pretty damn good. And after being wrong for about twenty years, said self-appointed trendsetters were finally right about this terrific, much-maligned genre. And since a lot of the folks who starred in those great old 70s action yarns were looking for work, it was only a matter of time, I suppose, before a “greatest hits” reunion came to pass.

Enter director Larry Cohen, the ultimate B-movie survivor (he helmed blaxploitationers like Black Caesar and Hell Up in Harlem in addition to tons of awesome B-grade horrors), who in the year 1996? reassembled all the blaxploitation heavy hitters (well, okay, almost all), sprinkled in a few more awesome cult stars, got ahold of a semi-decent script that gave ‘em all something to do, and the result its Original Gangstas.

Just look at this cast, people — Fred Williamson. Pam Grier. Jim Brown. Ron O’Neal. Richard Roundtree. Paul Winfield. Isabel Sanford. Robert Forster. Wings Hauser. Charles Napier. Paul Winfield. There’s just no way any flick with that cast, and Cohen behind the camera, is going to suck too badly.

Is Original Gangstas predictable? Dear God yes. Fred “The Hammer” plays an ex-football player who comes home to Gary, Indiana when his father is brutally attacked in the shop he owns by members of a street gang known as The Rebels, and from the minute his private plane (probably rented for all of ten minutes by the production crew) touches down, you know everything’s gonna work out okay. Any supposed “twists and turns” the plot takes along the way cam be seen from a mile off — at least.

But so what? You’re not in this for anything new. You’re here for the comforts of the familiar, to see the old pros show the young punks how it’s done.

For the most part, the fight scenes are well-enough staged, and you believe the likes of Williamson, Brown, Grier, and Roundtree can still kick a little ass — and that they’ll feel it in the morning. The aura of invincibility around all of them has been brought down a couple notches, and they’re portrayed not as super-heroes, but as people who can hold their own in a fight despite their advanced years. Yeah, it might be a totally unrealistic premise, but at least it’s presented —- uhhhhmmm — semi-realistically.

It’s essentially the soul music generation vs. the hip-hop generation here, and there’s never any doubt about who’s gonna come out on top in the end. Contemporary elements like drive-by shootings, automatic weapons, ultraviolent gangbangers, and a “gangsta rap” soundtrack all combine to produce an atmosphere where it’s pretty clear the old-timers are, sure, a little out of their element, but they work hard and know how to adjust on the fly. They’re survivors, after all, and they’ll make it out of this scrape okay.

Sure, it gets a little preachy in spots — what’s happening to our neighborhoods?, what’s happening to our youth?, why are the cops so incompetent?, what’s happened to economic opportunities in the black community?, yadda yadda yadda etc. etc. etc.

So what? There was an element of preachiness in all the 70s blaxploitation flicks, usually about these exact same subjects. Give Original Gangstas a break — it’s pretty clear from the outset that the only “original” thing in the movie is the first word in the title.

It’s all here — the gangland slaying of their son rekindles an old romance between Brown and Grier, hard-working flatfoot detective Forster tries but can’t get anywhere, Napier as the Mayor and Hauser as his assistant don’t actually give a shit, Williamson’s gotta get the old gang back together (he and Brown and Roundtree and O’Neal actually founded The Rebels), and the little kid who everybody loves gets killed. Again, don’t expect anything new under the soggy Gary skies here, just enjoy the ride.

And if you can do that, then goddamnit, Original Gangstas is a? lot of fun. Way more than any flick with a geriatric cast going after one last crack at glory should be. Cohen moves things along at a steady little pace and with consummate professionalism, and not one of the stars seems to be mailing it in, even though all of them could. I won’t recommend it without reservation, but if you know exactly what you’re getting into here — and it’s never any secret — then there’s no reason you can’t just kick back and dig it for what it is — one last shot at the big-time for a bunch of actors who certainly deserve it.

Original Gangstas is available as a bare-bones DVD release from MGM, and it’s also playing all month on Impact Action-on-Demand, in HD, on most major cable systems. It’s well worth a look, and even if one viewing will probably do it for you, it’ll be one enjoyable viewing.

The advertising tagline for Original Gangstas is “It’s Time for Some Respect.” The film itself earns just that.

2012-12-21-74

[Rumour] Apple buys all Radeon HD 4800 cards?

A shortage in 55nm products, both ATI and Nvidia has been speculatedabout ever since the release of ATI's HD 5800 series. From the Nvidiaside of things, this is rumoured to be a discontinuationof the GTX 200 series.

Bright Side of News andMydrivers.com now report similar rumours - Apple has snapped up twomonths' worth of HD 4800 stock, particularly the HD 4850. These HD 4850swill find their way into BTO (Build-to-Order) Macs.

A quickcheck around e-tail reveals that HD 4800 series actually has betteravailability than HD 5800 series. The HD 5850 is hard to come by -everytime it shows up for sale, it is sold out within a matter of hours.HD 5870 is availability is improving. HD 5700 series availability issketchy - with no signs of the HD 5750 512 MB. It is clear AMD isstruggling to keep up with demand, and we hope these availability issuesare fixed to complement an otherwise successful Evergreen launch.

Reference: Bright Side of News, Mydrivers

2012-12-21-502

Adobe previews Flash player for OS X, throws in support for hardware acceleration

For a long time, Adobe has claimed in its defence against Steve Jobs' attacks on Flash that Apple has refused to open up the API that was needed to allow the low-level access the plugin needs to allow hardware acceleration, thus forcing Flash to revert to using CPU cycles, which, quite, naturally, results in some less-than-stellar results.

And now, it seems that Adobe might actually be proven correct in this round, espcially with the latest 10.6.3 update for OS X Snow Leopard.

According to what we have learnt, the 10.6.3 update contains a certain Video Decode Acceleration framework, which, according to Apple, provides “low-level access to the H.264 decoding capabilities of compatible GPUs such as the NVIDIA GeForce 9400M, GeForce 320M or GeForce GT 330M”, and is “intended for use by advanced developers who specifically need hardware accelerated decode of video frames”.

Which, in other words, is exactly what Adobe needed to get hardware acceleration working for Flash on OS X. And follow up on that they did: barely a week after the release of the framework, Adobe has announced a preview release of their 'Gala' Flash player, which claims to be able to take advantage of hardware acceleration.

And while we don't have a Mac with us, we were fortunate enough to find out that Engadget had managed to perform a quick bench-test of both the older Flash 10 and 'Gala; Flash on a Mac, and the results speak for themselves:

While the Core i7 Macbook Pro showed the greatest improvement in CPU loads when running Gala, the same cannot be said for its Core i5 variant, which, for some reason, actually recorded higher CPU loads on Gala when compared to Flash 10. However, it should be noted that Gala is still pre-release software, and there will certainly be many more bugs to work out before the quality of Flash for OS X can come close to that of its Windows counterpart.

Still, it does not change the fact that Adobe has managed to prove their point that all they needed was the API to work with to make significant performance improvements to the plugin. And remember, Steve Jobs called Flash a buggy piece of software which hogged CPU cycles. Is Flash still buggy, even after having access to OS X's low-level API? Probably. But hogging CPU cycles? From the looks of the Gala prerelease, extremely unlikely.

*Gala is available for for download at Adobe Labs here. As it is still pre-release software, the usual caution applies: back up your data in case something goes wrong.

Source: Engadget

the bw review “before watchmen comedian” #4

Well, after last time around, things really couldn’t get much worse, could they?

If you’ll recall — and even if you don’t — the third issue of Brian Azzarello and J.G. Jones’?Before Watchmen : Comedian is a book I had literally nothing good to say about whatsoever. Not only did it mark, in my mind, the low point (at least to date) of the entire BW enterprise, it was , no exaggeration, one of the very worst comics I have ever read in my life, period. ?It’s pretty rough to imagine that the next ?issue would lower the bar even further, and while I’ve learned never to underestimate the ability of a good many of these titles to be even more pointlessly lame than I imagined going in, I’m relieved — even?pleased — to report that this book ?has, at least for the time being, pleasantly interrupted this particular series’ post-debut issue downward spiral.

Following Eddie Blake’s rather public meltdown on the mean streets of Watts the last time we saw him, it seems that Uncle Sam has decided that the best place for their top psycho-for-hire is back in the jungles of Viet Nam, and while his first go-’round there in issue two was a rather listless and bog-standard affair, this time around scribe Brian Azzarello has taken the time to actually develop some supporting characters for the Comedian to interact with (particularly a couple of local kids that Blake is teaching to play cards, among other things) and has even gone to the extent of having his title character do something actually?interesting, which is always a plus in any comic.

And what is this interesting thing he has him do, you ask? Well, he has him drop acid. We don’t know how it’s all going to play out yet — only that it ends bad — but hey, between this and Hollis Mason getting high in the final issue of?Silk Spectre, at least the various BW books are providing equal time to the onerous and predictable anti-drug message presented in the first two issues of Len Wein and Jae Lee’s?Ozymandias.

The other notable thing about about what Azzarello’s done — finally! — with this fourth issue ?is that the story actually?builds on preceding events to show some sort of character trajectory for Eddie Blake going on. Even if it’s a rather simple tale of one guy’s gradual mental breakdown, and it arrives pretty late in the day (after the series’ halfway point), at least it’s there — which, again, is more than you can say for?Ozymandias, which is still stuck in basic “career-recap” mode.

To be sure,?Before Watchmen : Comedian #4 (variant covers this time around by Jones and Brian Stelfreeze, respectively, as shown — is that getting to be my most predictable line or what?) is still far from a great comic . In fact, it’s very barely what I would generously term as a good one.??J.G. Jones’ art still does absolutely nothing for me, and while I really can’t point to anything actively?bad?about it, for the most part it just strikes me as being — well, kind of?there, you know what I mean? As for Azzarello, he still has a tendency to mask out-and-out laziness as an “economy of words” or pseudo-”gritty” realism, and the fact of the matter is that biggest knock on this particular segment of his little six-parter is that not a whole lot actually happens in it. But hey, after that absolutely horrendous third issue, a story that’s ?competently enough executed for the most part, even if it’s still miles away from the work of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons on even their worst day, at least feels like a step in the right direction. Even if it’s just a baby step.