Monday, May 30, 2005
Gah! Ringtone beats ColdPlay to No.1
What is the world coming to. The #1 tune in the UK music charts this week was inspired by a ringtone of a guy imitating the sound of a moped. Add in a music video with a crazy frog in it and, well, it has to be the most annoying, most "can't get it out of your head" song ever recorded.
You can get the annoying Crazy Frog video here
Perhaps more startling is that it pushed ColdPlay's Speed of Sound single in the #2 spot, outselling it 4 to 1. I'm sure ColdPlay are gutted, but its not the first time something like this has happened. Back in 1980 one of the topselling bands of the day Ultravox released their greatest single ever, "Vienna", but were kept out of the #1 spot by a joke song called "Shadap ya face" sung by Joe Dolce. And this was back when people actually *bought* singles.
The UK is a pretty cool place most of the time, but folks there sometimes do nutty things.
You can get the annoying Crazy Frog video here
Perhaps more startling is that it pushed ColdPlay's Speed of Sound single in the #2 spot, outselling it 4 to 1. I'm sure ColdPlay are gutted, but its not the first time something like this has happened. Back in 1980 one of the topselling bands of the day Ultravox released their greatest single ever, "Vienna", but were kept out of the #1 spot by a joke song called "Shadap ya face" sung by Joe Dolce. And this was back when people actually *bought* singles.
The UK is a pretty cool place most of the time, but folks there sometimes do nutty things.
Thursday, May 12, 2005
Poor Microsoft. First Longhorn descends into farce, and now they announce Xbox 360 on MTV in a special that totally sucked. The game graphics looked like old PS2 games with a couple of notable exceptions (Project Gotham 3 looked neat for the second it was on screen).
I thought all was lost until Toms Hardware confirmed the specs, and confirmed my earlier suspicion that the CPUs would have to be liquid cooled.
Still seems hard to believe they can sell it for $400 and not lose money... big-time. I just hope they get real before E3
I thought all was lost until Toms Hardware confirmed the specs, and confirmed my earlier suspicion that the CPUs would have to be liquid cooled.
Still seems hard to believe they can sell it for $400 and not lose money... big-time. I just hope they get real before E3
Xbox 360 preview tonite - set those TiVos!
Putting the lame hobbit accent aside, tonight Elijah Wood is showing off the new Xbox 360 on MTV at 9:30pm EST.
If the leaked specs are to be believe this thing will be insanely powerful... a 21.6GB/s frontside bus and 256GB/s memory bandwidth just seems too fast to be real.
Still, if the screenshots of Unreal Engine 3 running the new Xbox are anything to go by maybe it is real after all...
Going back to the specs, the CPUs are interesting too... They're PowerPC based much like those in the Apple PowerMac G5, but there are three cores each of which can only run two threads at a time... but they run at 3.2GHz (the PowerMac goes up to 2.7GHz right now). I'm curious to find out how this setup works in the real world. It takes me back to the days of RISC vs CISC, where RISC processors were a lot simpler than Intel's CISC x86 processors but also ran considerably faster. When your PC is sitting idle most of the time and ocassionally checking for email, I wonder if these processors would make sense in desktop computers too. If nothing else, the fact that Xbox 360 is supposed to be only $400 or so makes me think you could use that same CPU setup in a Mac Mini without affecting the cost much.
The other question I have is about cooling. The G5 runs pretty darn hot as do high end graphics cards. If this thing has to have a bunch of fans (the PowerMac G5 even needs liquid cooling), the 360 is going to be a noisy little beggar.
Ah, in a few hours all my questions will be answered. Either that or I'll be left even more confused than I am now.
If the leaked specs are to be believe this thing will be insanely powerful... a 21.6GB/s frontside bus and 256GB/s memory bandwidth just seems too fast to be real.
Still, if the screenshots of Unreal Engine 3 running the new Xbox are anything to go by maybe it is real after all...
Going back to the specs, the CPUs are interesting too... They're PowerPC based much like those in the Apple PowerMac G5, but there are three cores each of which can only run two threads at a time... but they run at 3.2GHz (the PowerMac goes up to 2.7GHz right now). I'm curious to find out how this setup works in the real world. It takes me back to the days of RISC vs CISC, where RISC processors were a lot simpler than Intel's CISC x86 processors but also ran considerably faster. When your PC is sitting idle most of the time and ocassionally checking for email, I wonder if these processors would make sense in desktop computers too. If nothing else, the fact that Xbox 360 is supposed to be only $400 or so makes me think you could use that same CPU setup in a Mac Mini without affecting the cost much.
The other question I have is about cooling. The G5 runs pretty darn hot as do high end graphics cards. If this thing has to have a bunch of fans (the PowerMac G5 even needs liquid cooling), the 360 is going to be a noisy little beggar.
Ah, in a few hours all my questions will be answered. Either that or I'll be left even more confused than I am now.
