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New user? Sunday, November 19, 2000
Agilent sells Healthcare Solutions Group
PR (a couple days old but news to me): Philips to acquire Agilent Technologies' Healthcare Solutions Group for $1.7 billion... wow.
Agilent will focus on the communications and life sciences markets.
Saturday, November 18, 2000
3D Projection Without the Glasses
3D Projection Without the Glasses -- WHOA!!
"The effect was not unlike the famous special effect in Star Wars where R2D2 projects a holographic display. But unlike R2D2's grainy video, the images at Comdex were often as vivid and concrete as real objects.
And unlike most other 3D displays, Dimensional Media's does not require special glasses or any kind of headgear.
"It's magic," said Anna Zharkova, an event manager from Russia, who was running around the booth like a headless chicken. "I cannot believe it. It's just magic.""
Daily pictures
My Palm is still charging, 3 hours to go. (this is agonizing)
Now that I finally have a digital camera (okay, a lame one but it's better than nothing!) I think I'll bring back the daily pictures.
For those of you who are new to this site, I used to have a new picture on this site each day, but it became difficult to keep up with so I stopped after a couple of months.
Palm IIIc
Today I bought a Palm IIIc organizer and a Kodak PalmPix camera.
So, what should I do with it?? If you have a Palm, I'd like to know what software I should install on it, what sites Palm users visit, etc.
Newbie Alert!
Simpson uses his fists to send Yashin a message
LOL!
Simpson uses his fists to send Yashin a message -- "A lot of the guys don't agree with what he did and I was hoping to get a standing ovation from the fans. The fans deserve to see him get his butt kicked around a little bit. I thought they'd enjoy that."
Yeah, good ole' Canadian boy kickin some ass. :-)
Friday, November 17, 2000
Bush, Cheney's Texas votes challenged
Bush, Cheney's Texas votes challenged
Why haven't I seen anything about this on CNN or anywhere else? It sounds like pretty big news to me...
PS2: not yet
I returned the PS2 I rented last night.
My verdict on the platform, thus far:
- The platform itself rocks! I'm extremely impressed with the graphics capabilities of the system.
- The sound didn't impress me at all... nothing jumped out at me as being extraordinary. That said, I don't actually care much about the sound. It was good enough, as good as any other viable console.
- I hope the games I rented aren't a sign of things to come for this console. What I found, overall, was that the games were high on glitz and low on substance.
Examples:
- NHL 2001...
As I mentioned before, it sets a new standard in what you should expect from a sports game, graphically and cinematically. However, the cinematics became predictable and annoying quite quickly. It made me wanting more and thinking what they could have done.
The gameplay was great, if you played another person. Playing against the computer was a total nightmare, the balance is totally screwed. I won't dig into that rant right now, suffice it to say the game balance in NHL 2001 on the PSX is 10x better in comparison.
NHL '97 was much better on the PC and Genesis(?) NHL '97 was on the PSX. I couldn't give the same margin of victory to NHL 2001 on the PSX over NHL 2001 on the PS2.
- SSX...
This game totally rocks, I understand why it's getting huge accolades. I almost decided to buy a PS2 just for this game, but I think I'd tire of it quickly enough and it'd be cheaper to just rent the console a couple more times to get to that point.
- Tekken Tag Tournament
Apparently quite faithful to the arcade version in playability, and the graphics and scenery are much better according to a friend of mine who played TTT with me.
However, I thought this game was a MINOR incremental improvement over previous versions, and was a disappointment for a premier PS2 title.
I yearn for Battle Arena Toshinden for the PS2 which I feel is a much more fun game to play.
...
The bottom line:
I'm not getting a PS2... yet. Maybe next spring or summer. I'm not waiting for the arrival of the GameCube, or Xbox (shudder), but for more games to validate this platform.
OmniGraffle == GlyphiX?
I downloaded OmniGraffle this morning from Omni Group.
It appears to be an enhanced OS X version of my favourite diagramming tool, GlyphiX.
Many of the unique features of GlyphiX appear in OmniGraffle. However, GlyphiX is apparently very similar to an old NeXTStep/OpenStep application called "Diagram", so OmniGraffle might actually be an OS X version of Diagram. Hard to tell, but either way, I'm a happy boy.
Now, if I could do WebObjects development on Mac OS X, I could move over to OS X completely! (Frontier is on its way too)
There's already a great number of excellent apps available for Mac OS X, which is a testament to Apple's skill in making an OS that's easy to develop for.
BTW, a very cool feature in OmniGraffle is the ability to make force-directed graphs. Wow.
Update: Wes likes OmniGraffle too. So does Steve, but he hasn't mentioned it on his site yet. ;-)
Mac OS X for Intel
Mac OS X Developer Documentation: i386 Addressing Modes and Assembler Instructions
(veeeerrrryyyy eeeeenteresting!)
