Information Overload: can be it a good thing?

A post was made recently to slashdot saying that for some poeple information overload is what makes them “tick”.  I have to say that I disagree.  Yes I deal with information overload on a daily basis, just look at the WebCandy portion of the blog.  But does that mean that I need it to “tick” no.  Furthermore I also disconnect from the digital world from time to time in order to reset myself, and connect with nature as opposed to connecting to a server.
It is funny all this technology surronding us was made to make our lives easier, and at least with the internet it has done the exact opposite.  From checking you gmail account, to upadating your myspace page, and the making it your IP video conference with you grandmother in Spain.  This technological wonders are not simple to use, and even more difficult to administer.  For my money Information Overload is just another annoiance that we all must deal with, but given the chance I think most of us would rather have less information, and more imagination.  After all ignorance is bliss.

Non Carbon based energy sources

As anyone who has watched the news lately for 5 minutes knows there is a huge push for newer cleaner sources of energy in this country.  People such as Al Gore and T. Boone Pickens are among the many with plans to implement these technologies, and the idea of spewing less carbon in the atmosphere is a good one to me.  However living in Alaska an area the ranges from Rain forest to Arctic conditions there are many questions I have.  Such as what happens when the first blade of a wind turbine is exposed to -40 temperature becomes brittle and shatters due to the stress of the wind blowing on it.  Also how well will hybrid cars start at extremely cold temperatures that are common in Alaska.  Also what about the hydrogen, when does it solidify.  I know from experience that propane becomes a liquid at -40 below.  These are all questions that I probably will not receive answers to until I am forced to adopt this new technology, and further more find the solutions to theses problems, instead of scientists thinking forward about these problems.  All that I know for sure at this point is internal combustion has been proven to work in arctic climates.  Not to say that these new technologies won’t work up here, but as far as I know not much research is going on concerning this technology in northern climates.

Grand Theft Auto IV

It never ceases to amaze me how quickly groups will attack that which pisses them off. Most of these groups don’t even give the offending material a chance. As such I give you Grand theft auto IV. The latest installment in this ever popular game series. And just like all the previous releases the usual groups are up in arms. “its too violent… I don’t like the language used in the game” and other real life things in the game are their chief arguments. Listen, even though you in your sugar coated life may not see these things they do in fact happen. Therefore if a game company such as Rockstar games wants to put them into a game I feel they can. Also what ever happened to creativity, things like this have been put into books for decades.
Now there are those who would say that this game is not for minors, and I agree. That is why the game is rated MA (Mature Only). Now granted there are minors who will be playing this game, you can’t stop that. Just as sure as there will be minors sneaking into the next R rated action film. However it is as if these groups believe that Rockstar is directly advertising to teenagers. I must disagree with this. Yes the advertisements of the game will get teens excited, however they will also get many adults excited as well. Humans are violent by nature, history proves this. So when a human “adult” or a human “teen” sees said violence there bodies will react to the stimulant. There is no why around this fact, except for humans to evolve past violence, and I don’t see that happening any time soon.
So I guess my point is this. Yes Rockstar may have pushed the violence and language a little bit in the game, but at it’s core the experiences in GTA:IV are very similar to the ones a person would experience in a real life inner city.

TOO MUCH! Yes that is right I said it. There is to much tech floating around the world today. Man, five years ago I thought I would never say this, but as I see it there is in fact too much tech. When you can plug devices into a USB slot and power a small robot with it, it is time to step back and reassess. When you can have a “war” between media formats (Blu-ray and HD-DVD), and when you can plug just about anything into your iPod and let the device “shack, rattle and roll” there is something wrong. Now I realize with the speed of evolution that technology is at the market may be artificially inflated. With old and new tech on the shelves at the same time, but come on. There has to be some order in this chaos. Plus I believe that part of this new tech craze is simply a ploy to get consumers to go out and buy the hottest accessory this week.

Alright already, enough with the Blu-ray hype.  My god it seems like everything under the sun now has to have a blu-ray player.  I really hate hype.  This seems very similar to when cell shading first came out for the gaming community.  Every game production house was lining up to use the technology, and in the end the results were mixed at best.  Listen even though the High Def standard has now been set most people will still continue to watch their old Standard Def DVD’s.  Therefore there is no real reason to flood the market with Blu-ray capatible devices yet.  Plus most people are not willing to pay the current going rates for this tech.

BLU-RAY vs HD DVD?

According to industry insiders the High Def DVD war is over, and Toshiba has officially dropped production. now first of all let me tell you the my money was always going for Blu-ray especially after I bought a Playstation 3. Not to say that I thought Blu-ray was going to win the war. For a while I was thinking HD-DVD would win. (WARNING: Semi-adult content to follow) Especially after I heard industry reports that the Pornography industry was going HD-DVD as opposed to Blu-ray. I believed this was going to push HD because if you look at the VCR and Beta Max war the reason that VCR won was in no small part because the Adult film industry was an early adopter of the standard.

However if you look further into the reports about HD content it is believed that in the future the convenience of video downloads will overtake movies that are placed on media to be purchased at a “brick and mortar” store. So will Blu-ray really be as big as sony wants it to be. I don’t believe so. Americans like quantity and convenience, over quality and options.

This week the Game Development Conference took place and as such there were many announcements concerning games. Three games announced this week that really caught my eye were Lego Universe Star Wars: The Force Unleashed and a Hello Kitty MMO (blah!!!). It is rather funny that many years ago the saying “Don’t install games on you computer, they have viruses”. Perhaps a few games that people did install did in fact have viruses however they were probably form less than legitimate manufactures of games. However I believe that that gaming in general will continue to grow. Especially with the current state of affairs. Everyone is fairly depressed with their lives and the economy. I think that games today will become much like movies in the thirties. a way for people to escape the heartache of their daily “grind”.

Also specifically on Star Wars: the Force Unleashed. There will be features to keep the content fresh and rich. One feature as called Euphoria this feature will come into play when you repeat a part of the game, it will make it a little different every time. Making you still think about what you are doing, instead of running here, flipping this switch, hitting this guy three times, and then hitting him with special weapon 3 etc. They have also increased the realism in the game using their digital molecular matter feature. When you destroy an object in the game it will look more like it would if it were real. Instead of breaking into random sized bits alone. It will splinter, shatter, and bend just like a real object would.

There has been a lot of buzz about a new game form Will Wright (Wikipedia) the creator of the Sim City the Sims and many other simulation games. This is rather interesting considering most gamers hip to the game have been waiting for years for it’s release. Well in a story from the CNET crave blog ‘Spore’ to ship September 7 yes thats right. Now why I am making this my “This Week in Tech” post, well it is because this game in many ways is revolutionary. Here is the premise you start out in the game navigating the Primordial Ooze (not the Ooze made popular by Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2) From there you try to survive and allow your creature to evolve. After you are successful in this venture you are allowed to create a more complex creature, and the evolution begins again, and if you get enough experience in the game you are even eventually allowed to explore outer space, and interact with other worlds that were created in a similar fashion. The social networking aspects of this feature are mind tingling. The idea that you can play god is nothing new, the Black and White series already tried this and was fairly successful. But now to be allowed to do something very similar to “intelligent design” is fascinating.

PREVIOUS POSTS ABOUT SPORE FROM THE CNET CRAVE:

Hands-on with ‘Spore’
EA propagates new ‘Spore’ images
Seeing ‘Spore’ on the Mac for the first time
Electronic Arts will bring ‘Spore’ to the Mac this year

It is time that I finally put some technology news on this site. So I am going to try and due a weekly technology of the week wrap-up. And this week it is all about the ever changing world of multi-core processors. This week there was a story about a possible mother-board that would support 2x Intel quad core processors. (Read the story here) Giving a total of 8 cores at the users disposal. further in the story was information that Intel may be working on an 8 core processor. It was speculated that the 8 core processor would be compatible with the dual processor mother-board meaning 16 cores at the users disposal. Now that may seem like overkill now, and yes even the latest generation of “horsepower” sucking games really wont take advantage of 16 cores. However you can bet that if this hardware hits the market it won’t be but a couple of weeks until game developers take full advantage of it.

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