We try to find the interesting news and developments to report to people, but sometimes the industry just doesn’t help us much. Sometimes, it all just seems “ho-hum. Like now! I’ve just returned from a few days at the lake relaxing, and eagerly I scan the news channels for interesting items to report to the people here. It’s really hard to get excited though, isn’t it?
Before I went away a few days ago there were mutterings about ATi’s X1600 series cards being serious competitors to the much lauded NVidia 6600GT ‘cheapie’. Now we find that NVidia have responded by announcing yet another variety of their 6800 series – the 6800GS – to counter the challenge. Ho-hum. We knew that was going to happen, didn’t we? Stands to reason, and the amount of ‘letter variations’ of display cards to be announced recently does little except annoy the hell out of people actually trying to fit some performance into their budget!
We find that ATi have announced a driver revision which ‘boosts’ OpenGL performance. An ATi card has finally ‘beat’ an Nvidia card at Doom3 benchmarks! Ho-hum! It’s new graphics card time again, and just like the last time that happened we all know that driver revisions are going to ‘magically’ boost all sorts of performance issues, benchmark figures are going to bounce around all over the place for a while, and then it’ll all go quiet because someone or other has revealed that the ‘tweaks’ were really only fiddlings that ‘sorta cheated a bit’.
With Xbox360 availability drawing ever closer we find that a new advertising campaign is enjoying its 5 minutes of glory. Hex168 is the buzzword, and are we meant to tremble in fear at the thought of it being ‘viral marketting’? Ho-hum!
Intel has jumped up and down a bit to state that it’s not, in fact, pulling out of the integrated chipset market as many people have claimed. Ho-hum. The reports I’ve read only ever said that it won’t be making a low-end chipset that is Vista-ready (which i915 is not) and that there’s a market gap that others will need to fill.
Another nation, India this time, has joined those who’ve criticized Google Earth for providing high definition images from various spots around the globe, on the basis that doing so provides tools for terrorists. Ho-hum! Let’s conveniently forget that all those images are rather dated, and are available publicly elsewhere anyway!
Microsoft has announced an upgrade to Media Center Edition. Ho-hum! We talked about that in detail last week!
Outspoken critic of violent videogames Jack Thompson has had another kerfuffle, we hear! This time he’s been been ‘distanced ‘ by the head of NIMF (who just happened to CC: the request to the heads of the retail chains who sponsor NIMF, and who are defendents in lawsuits which Jolly Jack is defending! Jack’s also ‘dared’ to criticize the folk at ‘Penny Arcade’! How dare he criticize people who make money from selling “I hate Jack Thompson t-shirts? Ho-hum!
Steve Jobs has had another moment in the spotlight too. He’s been promoting cheap availability of mainstream video content for his new Video iPod and angered the entertainment industry yet again. Mainstream TV shows the day after they’re aired for bargain basement costs, and specially created content we hear from Steve, and then he’s puzzled about why the entertainment industry gets a little annoyed! I reckon you’re going to have a ‘hard sell’ on all that, Steve, especially outside the US where broadcasts can attract really large fees for the rights to air them rather later than the day after they air in the US. There’s going to be Networks all over the world screaming ‘blue murder’ about that one! Ho-hum!
There you are, readers. Brought up to date a bit and I hope you were more enthused about it all than I was. Maybe I should have stayed a bit longer and had another feed of fresh fish!