Author: Duncan Geere
Nintendo releases 'Pro' Wii controller
Nintendo’s got a new controller for the Wii, in addition to the Wii Remote/Nunchuk combo and the ‘classic’ controller, used to play retro console games. It’s called the “Pro”.
It rejects some of the differences between the classic controller and most other gamepads, adding back in the ‘legs’ and moving the wire back to the top of the device. The shoulder buttons are also made more accessible, and the whole thing’s put on some weight, too.
Unfortunately, there’s “no plans” for a European release, let alone any pricing. I wouldn’t chuck away your classic controllers just yet.
(via Eurogamer)
The Revolution Will Be Streaming
This is my 1,000th post on Tech Digest. My first was about Robopong, and I have no idea what my last will be about, but this one’s about the economics of free music, which is a subject that I’ve touched on many times while writing here. It’s about how a free download turned me into a massive fan of a band.
Yesterday, personalized streaming radio site Last.fm announced on Twitter, that its free downloads page was back. It’s a page, which can be found here, that lists a bunch of tracks that bands have decided to give away, for promotional purposes. According to the old thinking prevalent among record companies, a download = a lost sale. In this case, a download led me to a whole lot more than that.
The download in question is a song called, wonderfully, “The Revolution Will Be Streaming“, a nod to Gil Scott-Heron’s 1971 classic “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised“. It’s by an American post-rock band that I hadn’t previously heard of called Saxon Shore.
My eye was caught by the title, and I downloaded it on the off-chance I’d like it. I did like it, a lot, and after a few listens, I headed over to Amazon. The band’s got a few tracks available on the download store, but the album featuring “The Revolution Will Be Streaming”, “The Exquisite Death of Saxon Shore” wasn’t. So I bought the CD instead. On import.
Because the album has to be sent over from the states, I’m looking at a couple of weeks before I can listen to the damn thing. So I checked Spotify. The band isn’t there, sadly. I realized that when it does arrive, all I’m going to do is rip it to high-bitrate MP3 and put in on my Zune, so my next step was to head right over to the Pirate Bay and see if I could find it.
Turns out that the site doesn’t (at the time of searching, anyway). Luckily I’ve got other sources, so I grabbed it from another tracker and this morning on the bus on the way into the office, a bizarre and unexpected diversion around the back roads of King’s Cross was made all the more lovely by Saxon Shore’s wonderful album.
The band doesn’t seem to be touring at the moment, but when they show up in London, I’ll definitely be there and I’m fully intending to drag down as many of my post-rock-friendly friends as I can. I might well buy a t-shirt, and when I’ve fully digested this album, if I’m still loving it then there’s a good chance I’ll buy some of the older ones.
Now, I’m not pretending that there’s millions of people doing what I did above. Nor am I pretending that this would work just as well if every band in the world started giving away tracks. But if Saxon Shore hadn’t given away that song, then they wouldn’t have gained me as a fan. That’s why free music works, why music blogs are the best way to find new bands, and why free music isn’t the devaluing of art that some claim it is.
I welcome your comments and thoughts on the above, but before you do, go listen to the track in question. You can stream it from Last.fm here. The revolution will indeed be streaming, it would appear.
Amazon makes a terabyte of public data available on its servers
Amazon’s got quite a bit of spare server capacity. In its goal to become the world’s top online retailer, it bought so many servers that it’s now also running a cloud computing business on the side that’s actually rather cheap.
Last night, Amazon announced on its Amazon Web Services blog that it would be making a terabyte of public data available to its cloud computing users, for them to do whatever they like with.
The data includes stats from the US bureau of transportation , an *entire* dump of Wikipedia, the DBPedia knowledgebase (which includes info on 2.6 million people, places, films, albums and companies) and all publicly available DNA sequences, including the entire human genome.
There’s also a bunch of other stuff, and it’s all being made available at lightning-fast speed in machine-readable databases to Amazon’s cloud computing customers. It’ll take a while for the internet to really get to grips with this stuff and use it, but anything that’s about freeing up data and information is wholly supported around here. Three cheers for Amazon.
What would you do with the data? Work out why your trains are always late? Work out how many degrees of link separation a random Wikipedia article has to another? Use the human genome to create a clone army and take over the world? Share your ideas in the comments, and make me your second-in-command as world leader.
Amazon Blog (via ReadWriteWeb)
Guardian finally launches mobile website
I read newspapers on the bus in the morning. Not on paper – that’s expensive, wasteful and a bit of a hassle – but on my humble Nokia N95. I start with mobile Techmeme, then hit up Google News for the big stories, then over to the New York Times, because their mobile site is one of the best there is.
If I was forced to pick up a paper copy of the newspaper, it’d probably be the Guardian. Their website’s second only to the BBC for me, when it comes to online, too. That’s why it’d be nice to get the paper’s editorial perspective on my phone. And now I can!
Well, that’s a bit of an overstatement, actually. I could if I was on Three. Guardian News & Media has launched an initial version of its mobile site on the Planet 3 portal. Following a period of exclusivity with 3, and then another period of exclusivity with Vodafone, the general public will finally get access later this year.
It won’t be a moment too soon. Although phones are starting to get better at displaying the full internet, it doesn’t take much to slim down your page load times and shrink the photos, and many people won’t have full-internet capable phones for a few years.
What’s your experiences with mainstream media on mobile devices? Share them in the comments.
VIDEO: Circulafloor – intelligent floor for virtual reality use
Circulafloor is a set of four tiles that can intelligently position themselves so that you never fall off, but remain in one place. It’s an interesting idea, and not one that hasn’t come up before, though this one seems to have a long way to go before it’s ready for production.
Looks like you’ve got to walk really rather slowly for starters, and I wouldn’t trust it if I saw the thing first. You never know, though, if this ends up a little more practical, with more tiles, it could be a winner.
(via Dvice)
Microsoft shows off in-development video version of Photosynth
We’ve already been awed by Microsoft’s Photosynth technology but now, rather impressively, the company has managed to extend the functionality to video. It’s not available to the public yet, but in the video above you can see Microsoft demonstrating the functionality to Techcrunch.
It uses services like Qik, which stream live video from mobile devices, to switch together multiple video streams of the same thing into one big picture. The obvious example is something like a festival or concert, where hundreds of people might be eagerly filming the same thing.
Given how long it took for Microsoft to release Photosynth, though, it might be a wee while before you and I are allowed onto the service ourselves. In the meantime, we’ll have to stick with the still-life version, available here.
Quake Live is now open to all
Ever play much Quake 3? Lots of people did, and now you can enjoy that same twitchy deathmatch experience in your browser. Quake Live is now open for business to everyone, after an extensive closed beta. Oh, and did I mention it’s totally free?
Just point your browser to the Quake Live website, sit in a queue for a bit, install the plugin, restart your browser, sit in the queue for a bit longer, and then you’re in. The game ranks you by completing a 10-minute training match, and then you’re ready to go.
Technically, it’s less impressive than it seems. It basically just uses your browser as an interface for a program that runs on your PC. That said, though, the ranking and matchmaking system is sophisticated, pitting me mostly against people that weren’t a million miles better than me.
Developers ID Software make money from it from ads on the walls of the arenas, as well as advertising on the socreboards at the end of the matches, and in the border of the browser window.
You’ll find that the site’s rather busy right now, as it’s only just become available, but if you perservere, then the actual ingame experience is pretty good, even on an aging PC with a rubbish internet connection.
What’s your experience been of Quake Live, so far? Let us know in the comments.
Quake Live
Medion unveils cheap, high-spec, gaming PC – the "Erazer".
Medion, known for rebadging expensive PCs and selling them cheap, has just sent us word of its new gaming PC – the Erazer. It’s a reassuringly high-specced machine considering the price, with perhaps only its graphics card letting it down. Let’s have a look in more detail.
The machine is centred around the fantastic Intel Core i7 920 processer, which runs at 2.66GHz with 8MB of cache. That’s paired up with a respectable 9600GT graphics card with 512MB of graphics memory and DirectX10 compatibility. There’s a 1TB hard drive, a whopping 6GB of RAM, a full 10 (10!) USB ports and your average Wi-Fi, optical media drive, memory card reader and a few bits of bundled software.
All that’s available right now for the low low price of £899, though that doesn’t include mouse, keyboard, monitor or mousemat. And we all know how important a mousemat is. I’d have been happier if Medion had swapped out the i7 for a slightly lower-spec, but just as capable, Q6600 processor and upgraded the graphics card instead, to an 8800GTX, perhaps.
UK Justice Secretary Jack Straw gets hacked
The UK government’s Justice Secretary, The Right Honorable Jack Straw MP, has been hacked by Nigerian fraudsters, who sent out hundreds of emails to his constituents and government figures asking for cash because he’d lost his wallet on charity work in Africa.
Straw says that everything’s okay because it was only his constituency office that was hacked, not his official government address. I’m sure that’ll make his constituents feel better, who’ve apparently been calling the office asking about the email. Only one replied, and his or her Hotmail account has since been suspended by Microsoft.
(via BBC)
Nokia asks 1,000 staff to take voluntary redundancies
Work for Nokia, and fancy a bit of a change of scenery? Well, now is a good time, because the company is inviting its employees to quit with a “voluntary resignation package”. Nokia says that it’s attempting to avoid the need for ‘involuntary redundancies’. Nicely put.
Nokia staff have between March 1 and May 31 to apply for the scheme, or until 1,000 employees have applied. The company is also encouraging employees to take time off rather than exchanging holiday for cash, and granting short-term unpaid leave to anyone who wants to take it.
(via Barrons)
