For those that want to get caught up, we’ve covered Call of Duty 5 before, it’s the World War II shooter developed by Treyarch (not Infinity Ward, who did Call of Duty 2 and 4) that is bringing a full development cycle (Treyarch only had 8 months to do Call of Duty 3) to the table and my personal favorite, 4-player co-op. Enjoy:

Thanks VE3D!

Staying on-top of the Rock Band 2 vs Guitar Hero: World Tour craze is hard business. First we find out that Guitar Hero: World Tour will have all sorts of sexy Guitar enhancements, wireless drums and song-creation features!

Then we get a peek at the Guitar Hero: World Tour artist and song list… looking hot, but then another bit of news comes over the wall in the form of Rock Band 2’s faux-wood guitar that looks pretty nice, but doesn’t have the touch-sensitive pad like the Guitar Hero: World Tour guitar.

Then we get a peak at the Rock Band 2 artist and song list, although many readers notice duplications between the Rock Band 2 list and the Rock Band DLC content already available, hmmm, maybe not too exciting?

And as we are saying to ourselves “Who cares, Guitar Hero: World Tour wins because of it’s wireless drums”, we get a lap-bomb that Rock Band 2 will have wireless drums too.

Our take is that the real difference between the two franchises will come down to how important the following items are:

1. Existing DLC that may keep you tied to an existing franchise.
2. Depending on how the music-creation tool works in Guitar Hero: World Tour, that could mean infinitely more songs for you to play with that set.
3. Are the differences between the instruments compelling enough to make a decision? For example, the touch-sensitive Guitar Hero guitar or the cymbals on the drum set?
4. Do you prefer the feel of either game better than the other?

There are some serious question marks around the music-creation tool in our minds at this point. While it could be the stand-out feature that makes Guitar Hero: World Tour the hands-down winner, there are royalty problems that make it unlikely you’ll be able to share the music you create based on existing popular songs.

There is also the issue that most people only like these games because it lets them play music they recognize and feel like a rock star.

I am not that interested in playing some guy’s personal rock song if I can jam out to the classics while the crowd screams and I think back to my childhood when I dressed in head bands and giant legwarmers.

Thanks VE3D!

While most folks rejoiced, I think there were a fair number of us that sighed and thought: Goddamnit, here’s the beginning of the Java fragmentation.

Or if that not, were at least sufficiently annoyed at two such large significant and completely parallel efforts. Well I suppose Linux did this for 20 years and look at the incredible market-share that has given it for a billion-times the man-hours of development that has gone into Linux distro-dev across the board compared to Windows or Mac.

Today we get the news that Sun is right around the corner with releasing their own completely free Java implementation (after Open Sourcing or replacing encumbered code). Now that is actually good news, but I have to imagine that RedHat’s announcement pushed that schedule up.

I know there are folks reading this that think “The more the merrier” and more folks that figure “How can open sourcing all this code be bad?”, when it was the GCJ or the Apache Harmony project, I didn’t really care. Neither of those projects had significant distribution capabilities and most folks would need to use them by choice if they wanted… neither were likely going to get significant footholds, especially in business deployments. But this time, it’s freaking RedHat… you know, the company that sells server solutions to companies.

RedHat isn’t going to abandon this IcedTea project anytime soon, not after all the money they pumped into it… so that means going forward, Fedora and RHEL are going to ship, out of the box, with an almost/mostly/kinda/sorta/ok/maybe-not 1-off version of Java that is just good enough and just compatible enough and, oh yea, covered in RedHat’s support contract with it’s customers that people will begin deploying to it. I’m guessing at least one other significant distro will pick it up and ship it as well.

NOTE: I’m happy IcedTea passed the TCK, but still expect a significant amount of differences between the platforms in hard-to-debug places that you only notice when your app starts behaving differently after a week of runtime… you know, those bugs that make you want to kill yourself.

To clarify, it’s not that I’m anti-Open Source or anti-RedHat or anti-Sun, I’m just insanely frustrated at the wasted resources and duplicated efforts to copy each other instead of actually providing solutions to developers… to make our lives easier.

I basically tried to find a reason to post the picture above, and this story was exactly that reason.

Not a half-bad idea that is for the UK folks out there. RoadTour has partnered up with Harden (restaurant reviews) to give real-time (and accurate) real-time GPS-based navigation to good dining around your current location.

You out and about in London and hungry for some Fish and Chips? Pop open the “foodie-Nav” and type in what you want, viola… you are eating at a place that doesn’t serve garbage! (unless that is what you looked up)

I’m happy to start seeing these applications of Nav and additional services. Wouldn’t mind something like this in the US from Garmin that augmented the search results with information from Trip Adviser or the like; so when you were out and about in the country side you could type in the “The Thing” for example and find out that it’s 12miles away, but that it’s a complete waste of time and skip it.

Full announcement after the jump…

Full Announcement:

RoadTour twins with leading guide Harden’s to give on-the-move dining advice.

Wouldn’t it be nice if your Sat Nav could give you decent tips on the best places to eat? Well now it can.

Thanks to a collaboration announced today, users of ‘Harden’s for RoadTour’ can now access trusted reviews of over 3000 UK restaurants, pubs, hotels and cafés, at all price levels, directly from their Sat Nav.

The new product sets a new standard for UK Sat Nav restaurant-guides (which are too often like sticking a pin into Yellow Pages – giving too much choice, with too little information).

The reviews (which include ratings for food, service and ambience) are taken from Harden’s uniquely wide-ranging survey-driven content, which draws on the input of over 8,000 people across the UK (who together contribute 80,000+ independent reviews) every year. Which is how Harden’s famously ‘tells it how it is’.

And it couldn’t be simpler to start: simply load Harden’s for RoadTour onto an existing mobile or Sat Nav.

“So many people have Sat Navs but can find it hard to access quality information; Harden’s excellent guide completes the transition of these devices into true travel companions” said RoadTour’s Daniel Taylor.

Harden’s co-publisher Peter Harden comments: “We’re delighted to be twinning with RoadTour to bring our content, in such a user-friendly format, to travellers while they’re out on the road.”

Information on RoadTour: RoadTour creates audio-visual add-ons for GPS devices, which people can access on the move to enhance their travels. These add-ons are available at www.roadtour.co.uk.

Information on Harden’s: Established in 1991, Harden’s is the UK’s leading, and longest-established, publisher of restaurant reviews based on consumer surveys. These reviews are published in guidebook format, and through www.hardens.com.

Harden’s for RoadTour, £9.95 one-off charge, can be downloaded from www.roadtour.co.uk.

For more information or interviews please contact: press@roadtour.co.uk – 07912 149681.

Click to read about the Perfect Petfeeder

This is awesome news over on the YouTube Blog sent in by Ted Regulski. It looks like Sony has partnered with YouTube/Google to include game-video upload capabilities into the PS3 that any game title can take advantage of.

The APIs enhancements will be available to all PS3 developers to take advantage of and will seamlessly upload the game videos directly to YouTube, allowing people some of the fancy video-sharing controls seen built into Halo 3, but hopefully across more titles in the future to come.

Here’s the blurb:

We are happy to announce that PLAYSTATION®3 (PS3^TM) has integrated the YouTube APIs to allow game developers to create games that enable direct upload of in-game video captures to YouTube. This YouTube upload functionality can be incorporated not only into new PS3 game titles, but also existing PS3 titles that have the ability to receive network updates. Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. has added YouTube functionality to Mainichi Issho, a popular game with PS3 users in Japan. Gamers will now be able to upload their in-game video captures to YouTube. We’re excited at the opportunity this presents and look forward to more and more games to be enhanced with YouTube.

Besides the improved look we also rolled out optimizations across the site design itself so it should load much faster for most folks.

Another thing we tried to do was minimize the number of ads on the page and integrate them more seamlessly into the site so for folks that don’t like ads they weren’t distracting, but given ads pay for us to keep the lights on, we didn’t want to do away with them completely

So we hope you like the new site, layout and features. We appreciate all your participation over the years and hope the new design will make that even easier.

Have a Great Memorial Day Weekend!

Well it’s 2008 and we are all still here. If you want to post with what your New Year’s resolution was I’d be thankful.

Mine is to “live in the now”… which means more than it sounds like. Check out “The Power of Now” for an excellent book that discusses living “in the now”.

Merry Christmas you Beautiful People!

I hope today is a blast for everyone. If you have family in town, have a good time together. If you get exactly the gift you wanted for Christmas, be sure to smother the person (or persons) that got it for you with praise.

Have a great holiday!

• Reviews
• Guides

The Reviews section of the site is focused on the different product reviews (games, movies, consoles, toaster ovens, whatever we want!) we do. The Guides section is focused more on long-winded guides that teach you how to do something; like setting up podcasting on Mac or learning your way around Ubuntu.

Let us know what you think of the content by replying in the comments… we’ll be sure to bring you more of what you want!

Also we are aware of the rendering issues with IE, have no idea why they are occurring (site looks fine in Firefox, Opera, Safari, Konqueror, etc.) but we’ll look into that soon as well.

Update #1: Picture are back, WOOT!

Update #2: IE rendering problems fixed, WOOT-CAKES!

I got fed up with GoDaddy for a few reasons:

• The management interface is terrible and a mish-mash of controls. They *just* rolled out a new UI though, it seemed alright.
• They put universal “flood” restrictions on all sites hosted on their shared hosting so if an IP address makes too many connections in a set amount of time, it doesn’t just throttle them, it blocks them for up to 10 minutes. Not too much of a problem right? How about if you are trying to download backups of your site… jesus that was frustrating. Took me 4 hours to finish, I would get 10 files, then get banned and have to retry in 5-10mins and continue. I finally helped to work around the problem by throttling my FTP client at 5 KB/sec, you didn’t read that wrong, I’m talking dial-up speed, just to get the site to stop banning me.
• Performance is completely hit-or-miss depending on the time of day you hit the site.

Then you take a look at Media Temple, who I would consider to be the SmugMug of the hosting industry, and here is your control panel:

And here is me with 1 scheduled backup and then manually making a new backup of the site after I was done configuring everything:

Everything is AJAX-enabled, all custom code and totally refined. There are little touches all over the place that make you go “Oh nice!”. Like when I was registering, and I filled out the “Referrer” information, it automatically pops up a help box only while you are editing the fields to let you know what they are asking for. So if you never edit the fields, all that help stays hidden.

Then you have your 1-Click Applications and Backup Management that is all part of the deal and it’s a dream come true. I got Wordpress back up and running along with weekly scheduled backups in like 30 seconds.

Some more nice touches added to the site:

• Performance is much improved
• Increased disk space and bandwidth
• New “Subscribe to comments” feature for posts that you are interested in, you will get emailed when new comments arrive.
• Easily upgradable server by adding more “grids” AFACT
• Newest stable releases of software supported and installed (PHP, Perl, MySQL, PostgreSQL, etc.)
• root-like access/control over your Grid without SSH login and all from a nice Web UI that finally isn’t retarded.
• Excellent Help/FAQ system that supports ratings on the answers to help give strong indications of how valuable those articles are
• 24/7 1-800 support where you can talk to a human being

I hope you all enjoy it, and thanks for the continued support!

Update #1: Ok this is getting too cool now. I just turned SSH access on, on my account, and the GS server even run Subversion. This is like a VPS but 1/2 the price… I love it.

Well there is one more trip to make at News Years then we will be safely home. I’m going to nail the windows and doors shut and decompress for a while. I sure hope everyone else’s holidays are enjoyable, mine sure were.

We are both getting excited… very very excited.