GTA IV shocks gaming and Holloywood industry

Following the first week of the most highly anticipated game of the year Grand Theft Auto IV (GTA IV), the game has shocked the gaming and Hollywood industry with a record breaking $500 million in sales its first week of release!

GTA IV made a retail value of $310 million worldwide on launch day and the developers 'Rockstar' could'nt be anymore happier! The supply for the highly anticipated game was far from limited, but yet they are still struggling to make copies faster than its selling even after the launch.

Everyone knows about the GTA series, and for those who don't, please climb out of that hole and reunite with civilization because those unfortunate enough not to get themselves a copy had to resort to finding someone who did just to watch them playing it and keep themselves from going "GTA IV Cold Turkey" a serious condition that is being struggled to keep under control.

IGN also gave the game a perfect 10/10, a first for the company and was always seen by fans never to happen for any game. Personally I don't think it deserves a 10/10, people are so wrapped up in the fact that it's the next installment of the series to think about the things that matters, I would personally give it a 9/10 for this reason: The storyline in GTA's could be improved upon, I found myself "Driving to this guy", "Pickin' him up" or "Taking him out!" then "Driving back for another job", the game tends to be very repetitive.... but for some reason still surpasses any other game? I had to ask myself why, and I found the answer...........

It's because everyone secretly wants to be a crook, steal cars, take out rich guys and take all of their dirty money & be richer beyond your wildest dreams! :P

Seagate ships its 1 Billionth HDD

Seagate Technology recently reported that it is the first company to reach the sale of their 1 billionth hard drive.

The company says the one billion hard drives Seagate has delivered equates to approximately 79 million terabytes, able to store 158 billion hours of digital video or 1.2 trillion hours of music.

It's funny, because in 1979 when Seagate shipped their first hard drive (ST506 HDD), it was only capable of holding 5 megabytes! It weighed in at 5 lbs and cost $1500! Thankfully, because of the advances in hard drive technology, we can now buy a 250 gigabyte hard drive for around £50 :D!

Seagate says that although it took 29 years to reach the billion milestone, the company will ship its next billion in less than 5 years.

The Internet on the verge of Extinction!?

Could it be? The thing that has changed everyones lives so dramatically about to become 'obsolete'? The answer....Yes.

By now your probably having cold sweats, followed by a panic attack and then start crying at the thought of the Internet becoming extinct, well there's no need, because it is being replaced by something much much more brilliant and is ready to change everyones lives once again like the Internet before it, and their calling it..... The GRID.

By they I mean the scientists who pioneered the Internet in 1989, it is the latest spin-off from Cern, the particle physics centre that created the web. The GRID has been said to completely "revolutionise society" by David Britton, professor of physics at Glasgow University and a leading figure in The GRID project.

Heres where things start to get interesting!

• The GRID is going to have speeds 10,000 times faster than a typical broadband connection!
• Have enough power to transmit Holographic images!
• Allow instant online gaming with hundreds of thousands of players (No more LAG!!)
• Offer High-Definition (HD) telephony for the price of a local call!
• Etc.... etc..... etc..... the possibilities are endless with these type of speeds and power!

Professor Tony Doyle, technical director of the grid project, said: “We need so much processing power, there would even be an issue about getting enough electricity to run the computers if they were all at Cern. The only answer was a new network powerful enough to send the data instantly to research centres in other countries.”

That network, in effect a parallel internet, is now built, using fibre optic cables that run from Cern to 11 centres in the United States, Canada, the Far East, Europe and around the world.

The GRID will also have an impact on the future of medicine. The GRID has already been used to find a cure for 'Malaria', the mosquito-borne disease that kills approximately 1,000,000 people worldwide each year! The researchers used The GRID to research about 140 million different compounds - a task that would have taken a standard internet connected PC 420 years to complete!


So... we've ALL made the reference to someone else "What would we do without the Internet, eh?", well you better start practising "What would we do without The GRID, eh?", because in years to come when you mention anything to do with the Internet, and the response is "What's the Internet?", that's when you know your officialy and OLD-TIMER!! :P

Attention all programmers!

This weeks post is on the growing popular demand for Visual Basic.NET programmers/developers in the Computing Industry. According to a friend of mine working for IBM in the U.S., there is a major demand for professional Visual Basic.NET programmers, he said that jobs are being offered with a starting salary of $70,000 (£35,000 approx.)!

I did a bit of looking into this on ITJobsWatch, being the reliable source for computing jobs that they are, I was able to research if there was such a demand here in the UK and Ireland for Visual Basic.NET programmers as there was in the US of A. It appears so!! Infact, I failed to find a Visual Basic.NET programming job with a starting salary lower than £32,500!

At this point, like most people interested in programming, I logged straight onto Amazon.co.uk and bought myself a book titled "Object Orientated Programming with Visual Basic.NET", but I did'nt buy the book just to begin to learn the new language, I also did a bit of research into what the difference is between VB.NET and other programming languages.

For those of you looking to be programmers, or for the programmers who are oblivious to it, VB.NET has features that no other programming languages at the moment currently support the major one be Multiple Inheritence! Any serious programmer at one stage or another has came across the problem of having to inheret - create object - inheret - create object - inheret ....and so forth.

Now that VB.NET supports multiple inheritence, we no longer have the tedious problem of having to create objects to inheret from them. This feature will allow software to become much more efficient and allow programmers to apply their Object Orientated methodology much easier to their programs.


So ....moral of the story is, anyone interested in programming, start learning VB.NET!

Ambient Intelligence.... Coming Soon!

Have you ever witnessed the 1980's concept of future technology? The silver jump suits and home automation machines? Well ...one of them is in the making and is planned to be brought into effect in around 2020 (not silver jump suits)!!!

Ambient Intelligence is starting to become a reality looking at the work that Philips Electronics have been currently working upon. Rather than Home-Automation, Philips are looking at how ambient intelligence can improve entertainment within the household.

The 2 projects which seem most exciting at the moment are Ambilight and AmBX (see all of Philips current projects here)



Ambilight - This ambient technology will immerse you into a whole new T.V. experience.

Using colours and tones, Philips have been able to create a new way in which we experience our television viewing experience. It is the idea of switching between different colours to intensivy the mood of the moment on the screen.

AmBX - This technology is going to be favoured by games worldwide! This is a mix of the previous Ambilight technology and a lot more extra features. These extra features include responsive fans and scents! Philips have already created a scripting language that can be applied to computer games to initiate the ambient experience during gameplay. Imagine playing 'Call of Duty' and standing beneathe a helicoptor when amBX starts the fans to blow at a certain speed, the Ambilight changes colour to intensify the dropoff of your backup from the helicoptor, and during all of this, the scent of the woods is being created and omitted throughout the room by combining a number of primary scents! This is the AmBX gaming experience! Here's a short demonstration video of what AmBX is capable of to keep all the gamers satisfied until this technology goes public ;), enjoy....

New 16GB iPhone & 32GB iPod Touch Released!

We all know that when the online Apple Store goes down, a legion of Mac fans hold their breath. Finally, they can exhale. The store's back up – and now features a spanking new 16GB iPhone and 32GB Touch. Woo-hoo! The new iPhone will costs £329 – £60 more than the standard 8GB model. The 32GB Touch also weighs in at £329, which again is a £60 premium over the previous top-end 16GB version.

With all Mac fans, when it comes to iPods, money is never an issue and they seem to pull it out from somewhere, why? Simple, because when Apple says that their new iPod has more memory, for Mac fans, bigger is never enough!

Plus, I have just realised something from the iphone and touch, its starting to look like these new pieces of technology history are going to be the next stage in Apple's revolutionary simplicity design, could this be the end of the 'Click Wheel'!

You can check out the New 16GB iPhone & 32GB iPod Touch here:

http://store.apple.com/Apple/WebObjects/ukstore

Free iPod Adverts, Legit?

I can safely say...Yep! Everyone has seen them, the banner at the side of your screen going beserk telling you to "squash 6 spiders with your foot" to win a free ipod! Well, I finally took it upon myself to find out once and for all if this was legit when I saw a similar advert telling me to 'Click Here for a FREE Xbox 360'.
Reading a little more about it, I discovered that you are able to receive these free gifts because of affiliate marketing. Basically, its the method of a company increasing its customer count by rewarding current customers to attract more customers to the company (that was a mouthfull).
Listening to the continuous remarks of 'it's a scam!', 'your wasting your time!' or 'do you really think their going to give it to you for free!?'. I continued on my quest to find out if it was legitamite, which now I can say, resulted in me receiving a FREE XBOX 360! During the time of rubbing it in everyone who laughed faces, I took a picture of it as proof before using it. Since then I have received many other tech gadgets for free, click the link to see a picture of each:

• Xbox 360 Premium
• 60 GB Playstation 3
• 2 x Xbox 360 Elites
• Nintendo DS Lite
• £646 Cheque
• £572 Bank Transfer
• £600 Bank Transfer (no pic)
• 8GB Apple iPhone .....Coming Soon!

Whilst others are forking out hundreds of £££'s for the latest tech gadgets, I am fuelling my passion for them completely FREE ;)!

If interested ....contact el.tempzo@gmail.com