Archive for January, 2008

Wow, Speed Racer? Really?

Published by gaijin on January 26, 2008 in Movies, Pop Culture and Really now why?. 3 Comments

Okay, everyone. If any of you have seen anime you know of the OLD show Speed Racer; and if you remember any thing about it it is the KING of campy. So you can imagine how I felt when I saw they are making a movie. A live action movie … yeah, my brain stopped for a second too. I’m not sure what to make of it. but I think you should have a look at the preview for yourself. If anything it will make you chuckle a little. Warning, still looks pretty campy. Oh yeah John Goodman is in it.

YouTube: Speed Racer Trailer

- Gaijin -

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Portal: A Day in the Life of a Turret

Published by Neko on January 25, 2008 in Games, Really now why? and Video. 2 Comments

This has probably already been around the net 15 ways through the course itself, but hell, it is worth posting. NSFW.

YouTube: Portal: A Day in the Life of a Turret Thanks Digg

Gordon Freeman calls ‘Coast to Coast AM’ radio show

Published by Neko on January 24, 2008 in Games, Really now why? and Video. 1 Comment

I think the allure to this audio clip is that the host of ‘Coast to Coast AM’ probably doesn’t know what Half-Life is… (Thanks Digg and YouTube)

You Tube: Gordon Freeman Calls Coast to Coast AM

Why the Red Ring of Death happens in XBOX 360s

Published by Neko on January 23, 2008 in Games. 0 Comments

This story falls firmly in the realm of if it is on the interwebs, it isn’t necessarily true. The article is a blog post written by supposedly a non-professional for newspaper readers. The source is un-named which isn’t necessarily bad, just riskier to trust.

That being said, the guy makes some very good points that all make sense and seem to mirror reality.

This past week I met and interviewed an individual who has worked on the Xbox 360 project for many years and they had some things that they wanted to get out into the public.

also

It’s around 30%, and all will probably fail early. This quarter they are expecting 1 M failures, most of those Xenons. Some of those are repeat failures. Life expectancy is all over the map because the design has very little margin for most of the important parameters. That means it’s not a fault tolerant design. So a good unit may last a couple of years, while a bad unit can fail in hours.

Warning, this is a highly technical story. Anway, it may be one of the two leaders in the game console market, and it certainly has the games to back it, but Microsoft was dangerously close to messing it all up because they wanted to beat Sony. /rant

Seattle Post-Intelligencer (US): Inside Source Reveal the Truth About Xbox 360 “Red Ring of Death” Failures

A limit on how much gold you can have in WoW — and who I think found this out

Published by Neko on January 22, 2008 in Games. 0 Comments

I’m not a hard-core WoW player. In fact, there are pieces of macaroni that play harder than I do. I’m lucky if I see 100 gold ever in a character’s life span — which totals to about 1 month if I add all the play time up and assume that 20% of that time is me staring at the screen drooling.

Back on point: So money (the digital kind) still has significant worth. I can’t imagine how people get 500, 1000, 5000 gold because I just can’t do it. No attention span, no ability to sit on a game that long (not that there is anything wrong with that.)

As an aside, I learned about a unique kind of Chinese slave labor (of sorts). The CBC reported a while back about Chinese gold farmers. Poor people in China work for companies where they work very long hours harvesting gold for brokers who resell it to people in the “real” world. [More info at end of this post.]

Back on point again:  Someone had to figure out that WoW has a maximum limit for the amount of gold. If you do computer programming, which I used to do a lot and now don’t do quite so much, you know that computers save numbers in finite spaces in memory. Phone numbers in the US are 7-10 numbers long and they are because that is about the extent in which we can reliably remember numbers. (Hell, I know people who can’t remember their 4-digit suffix when everyone in town has the same prefix!)  Anyway, computers work the same way, except it is a hard limit. Humans can learn to save more. Computer, if you try to make them remember more in a space for a phone number go DUH! HAT ON FOOT and that is that. You just lose the numbers

Considering that, it is no surprise that WoW can have a maximum number of copper. In this case, 2^31 (two to the thirty-first power, or 2,147,483,648 copper; this equals just over 21,474 gold). 100 Copper = 1 silver, 1000 silver = 1 gold.

Boing Boing via Slashdot: World of Warcraft limits your wealth to 2^31 copper

CBC Radio show ‘Search Engine’ (Canada): Gold Farming for more information on Gold farming in China

Sparter.com for offers of World of Warcraft gold in US$*

*The author of this article and members of this site do not condone activities which are illegal or break the Terms of Service for World of Warcraft. Links are provided for informational purposes only.