Lazy Friday Mega Post

Too many good things to post about today so I'm just going to list a few.

• Hungarian School Teacher Strips For Students (video, semi-NSFW)
• David Tennant Leaving Doctor Who 2010
• Samsung FTW With 40" 1080p OLED Prototype Screen
• Microsoft Makes Uber Cool "Surface v2.0" With More Surface (video)

*phew*

Blue Is The New Red

Kent Displays (I've never heard of them either) have apparently been making cool and funky displays for a few years now and selling them to manufacturers but today it was announced that they've got two hot new technologies ready to rock your gadget world.

The first one is "a simple monochrome electronic writing tablet that consists of a pressure sensitive display (think next-generation Post-it note)". I can't quite picture how this works and the photo just looks like a bent LCD screen...

BUT!

The cool one is the funky colour changing electronic "skin". Named eGo it requires no power at all to maintain any colour already rendered on the surface. This means you can "display" whatever colour you'd like and it stays that way without using any more power until you switch it again. It would be handy for things like watches and phones (like in the photo) if you're a little fashion conscious. Or maybe it can be applied to your fingernails so you can be just like the secretary from The Fifth Element. Can you think of any other uses for it.

Windows 7 Will Do Stuff

Sorry for the day-late post but here's where you can get all you need to know about the new version of Windows, Windows 7. To me it looks like a point release for Vista but then again, it's not out for another year so who knows what'll happen between now and then.

Some highlights:

The icon-only items in the taskbar, which is now very square looking, are highlighted with a dynamic colour based on the main colour in the icon.

The Sidebar is gone and gadgets are now dumped on the desktop.

Hovering over an item in the taskbar brings that application into focus by making the other windows transparent (kind of like switching to it without switching to it). You can also do this with the Desktop so you can see your gadgets without having to minimize everything.

Supports up to 256 CPUs but can run on a pissy little eePC's CPU plus new DirectX enhancements means 50% less memory usage for the UX.

Lots more Windows 7 info can be found over on Long Zheng's blog.

The Real Return of 50s Communist Paranoia Sci Fi

The new trailer for The Day The Earth Stood Still (DTESS) was released onto the tubes today (see below) and I must say, I'm more than a little excited about it. Keanu Reeves is back in his Neo-like broody mood getting his freaky alien shiz on as Klaatu, the freaky alien shiz guy in a human suit.

DTESS is a modern retelling of the classic 50s sci fi film with the same name about an alien visitor (that'd be Klaatu) and his giant chrome robot (no, not Bender). Judging by the new (lengthy) trailer the design of the robot is remarkably similar to the original and it has LASERS!

The remake is directed by Scott Derrickson, the man behind The Exorcism of Emily Rose, so expect some scary moments. It stars Keanu Reeves, Jennifer Connelly, Kathy Bates and John Cleese. Plus, for the sci fi nerds out there, Battlestar Galactica's Aaron "Chief" Douglas makes an appearance as Sgt Winter, not to be confused with Captain/Major Winters.

DTESS is due for release this December (12th in the US, 26th in Australia).

Live ID, Now With More Open-ness

Great news today from the Windows Live Dev site where they announced that pretty soon you'll be able to use your Windows Live ID (MSN Messenger, Hotmail, Xbox Live etc.) to authenticate with Open ID 2.0 sites.

"The Windows Live ID OpenID Provider (OP) enables anyone with a Windows Live ID account to set up an OpenID alias and to use that alias for identification at an increasing number of OpenID 2.0 relying party sites". JOY!

For those unsure of what Open ID is Wikipedia says, "OpenID is a shared identity service, which allows Internet users to log on to many different web sites using a single digital identity, single sign-on, eliminating the need for a different user name and password for each site."

I already have an Open ID set up with another provider but if the Windows Live community of users has easy access to such a wonderful technology things might start heating up. Aren't you sick of trying to remember usernames and passwords for heaps of sites?

Ninja Scroll Gets Real

I appears that Hollywood is getting tired of remaking Japanese horror movies and Spanish thrillers and has moved on to elsewhere for their source of "new" ideas. Coming to a theatre near you in the next few years are remakes of Anime classics Battle Angel Alita, Akira and Astro Boy and you can now add one more to the list.

Today Warner Brothers announced that they have acquired the rights to, and will be making a live action remake of, Ninja Scroll. IMDb's plot outline for the original reads, "A ninja-for-hire is forced into fighting an old nemesis who is bent on overthrowing the Japanese government. His nemesis is also the leader of a group of demons each with superhuman powers."

I'm not sure how Warner Bros. will tackle some of the scenes from the anime like the giant rock-man raping the poisoned ninja girl or the naked woman whose snake tattoos spring to life and writhe around her body or the endless limb slicing and body hacking. Either they make an R Rated film which the fanboys will poo poo and won't make much money or they make a PG film which the fanboys will poo poo but will make a lot of money... hmmm.

I'll keep my eyes on this one.

Australia to Become A Better Place

Great news everyone! Australia usually gets shafted when it comes to big new technologies that require brand new infrastructure due to the amount of whitespace between cities but today we got some great news.

Better Place, "a California-based, venture-backed company that aims to reduce global dependency on petroleum" has just announced that their next target for building a nation-wide electric car charging network is the good old Land Down Under. They say, "[w]e will build an electric vehicle network capable of supporting the switch of Australia’s 15 million gas cars to zero emission vehicles.", just in time for me with my Holden Volt!

I like Better Place's stance on why they chose Australia as their next area, "If Australia can do it, so can others.". I assume they're talking about the previously mentioned wide expanses rather than us being so stupid that anything we can do, others can do (better).

About Better Place, Wikipedia has this to say, "In January 2008, Better Place announced a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with Renault-Nissan to build the world's first Electric Recharge Grid Operator (ERGO) model for clean transportation in Israel. Under the agreement, Better Place will build the electric recharge grid, and Renault-Nissan will provide the electric vehicles. In 2009, Better Place expects to deploy hundreds of charging stations as the company moves toward wide-scale deployment in 2011.". I guess they'll be doing something similar here.

Yay Australia!

Quake In Your Browser Not Your Boots

It looks like some whacky folks have gone and ported ye olde Quake over to Microsoft's Silverlight. You can sit and watch the demo run but as soon as you try to load up a new game it just hangs. No audio yet either. Still, pretty cool.

Check it out on the Innoveware website: http://www.innoveware.com/ql/640/QuakeLight.html, or watch the video below.

Note, this isn't video playback it's the actual game engine running in Silverlight. You can read more about it here.

I Just Need A Litte Space

Once again, Scott Hanselman delivers the goods, this time in the form of an easy to read guide on how to free up potentially heaps of hard drive space under Windows Vista.

Some of the tips are obvious, like running Disk Cleanup regularly, but tips on clearing away Vista Service Pack 1 setup files and good ol' NTFS Compression are something that most people might not think of (or even know about).

I did a few of these things last night and recovered around 4GB of space on my Vista 64 machine at home (now with an all new R4850 video card!).

Check out the guide with handy images over at Scott's blog... be warned though, his final tip has the "Works on my machine" certification which means it might not on yours.

Watch Out, 'Cause We're the Spaceballs

Late one night in 1957 RAF controllers told US pilot Milton Torres to scramble his F-86D Sabre fighter to "lock on" and attack a "bogey" hovering above Norfolk, England. Seconds before the 26-year-old US Air Force lieutenant fired at the unknown flying object the size of an aircraft carrier, it vanished at an estimated 16,000km/h.

Sounds like a Hollywood remake of a 50s sci fi movie but it is actually from one of 19 files declassified by Britain's Ministry of Defence and released by the National Archives this week.

According to The Sun newspaper Torres said, "I was told I would be firing a complete salvo, all 24 rockets. I was pumped up - this was the sort of thing that happened before a war.".

He was approaching the UFO at almost 1125km/h and could see it on his radar before it suddenly disappeared from view. Torres, now 77, said: "I was smoking, as fast as I could go. This thing had a different propulsion system. It was not an airplane."

He said he was visited afterwards by a sinister security official and warned not to tell anyone. I wonder if they were wearing blue rubber gloves.

No Surprises In Top Aussie Film Survey

The Australian Film Institute (AFI) held an online poll to celebrate 50 years of the AFI Awards recently and found that the country's top five films of all time are, in no particular order, The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, The Castle, Muriel's Wedding, Lantana and Gallipoli.

No surprises there although I get the feeling that Baz Lurman's Australia, coming out in a month or so, is hoping to be on the top 5 list next time the AFI run an online survey. The AFI will announce which film was number one at the 50th AFI Awards on December 6.

Personally I'd have put Two Hands and Mad Max in there somewhere near the top, maybe boot out Muriel and Lantana. While we're on the subject, it's about time we had nice cleaned up releases of Two Hands and Gallipoli, my DVD of Two Hands is especially nasty.

Thanks for the tip news.com.au.

Finally, A Good Use For A Playstation 2

A couple of Canadians and a Kiwi thought it'd be a great idea to stash 3,400 ecstasy tablets in an old PS2 in order to trick the customs officers at Sydney Airport on their way in to the country.

Well, they seriously failed when customs spotted them at the airport and, instead of jumping them there, they tracked them all the way up to Surfers Paradise in Queensland, 850 kms away. Imagine thinking you'd gotten away with a scam like this after driving for 12 hours only to be busted when you made it to your destination.

If found guilty, they face a maximum penalty of $825,000 and/or life imprisonment. At least here in Australia we don't have the death penalty for possession of drugs (I'm looking at you Bali!).

Thanks for the news Kotaku.

Trekkies: Prepare For Battle

If anything is going to polarise Star Trek fans it's going to be J.J. "Lost" Abrams's remake of the original Star Trek. Well, it's not technically a remake but it has Spock and Kirk and Co. as it "Explores the early Starfleet careers of future Enterprise officers".

There'll be the Trekkies who can't stand anyone playing their favourite character(s) but the original actors (who are now 40 years older than then) and then there'll be the Trekkies who think Abrams has done the right thing in reviving the ancient sci fi series.

Personally I'm not a huge Star Trek fan but I've seen a few episodes of the original series, a lot of Next Gen and a few of the movies, that's as far as I go. Not sure if I'll be seeing this remix at the cinema but I must admit the cast is a little intriguing... Simon Pegg as Scotty!? Eric Bana as the big bad guy (of course he's an alien)!?

Anyway, there's a slew of new photos going around the internet at the moment showing scenes from what looks like the final product including a magazine cover that looks like it's for a less-than-hetero audience. First Showing is guestimating that these images are from a new trailer which will be showing before Quantum of Solace, the new Jimbo Bond movie, which is due in around a month's time.

Star Trek is due May 2009. More info and photos at First Showing.

Silverlight 2 Is Out, Go Get It!

Quick, before they release another version! Go get your fresh copy of the FULL RELEASE of Microsoft Silverlight 2. Yes, Microsoft has finally finished fluffing around with beta version after beta version and have cooked up this final release of their multimedia web delivery thing.

Please note, if you do any Silverlight development you'll need to install the final release of the Silverlight 2 Tools for Visual Studio 2008 SP1 before attempting to install Silverlight 2..

Stealing Is A Crime

If you know me you know my standpoint on the issue of DRM and digital distribution but in case you don't know me, Randall Munroe who does the genius XKCD web comic proves that a picture is worth a thousand words (although there are plenty of words in the picture). If you plan to follow XKCD make sure you check Randall's alt tags on his comics, they're like DVD bonus materials.

SHanselman Needs You

If you're a .Net developer then Scott Hanselman wants to hear your opinion. He's created a 1-question survey where you tick the boxes of the architectural features of .Net that you use.

Scott, a Microsoft Senior Program Manager, says "...one of the things I like to do is take your comments, questions and feedback directly to the right folks inside Microsoft.".

He then goes on to say, "They have all sorts of scientific methods, analysts, and smarties that give them information, usage details, etc. Sometimes, however, I like to throw the product planners the occasional totally RAW web survey, just to make sure that there's fewer layers between me and the bosses."

So go and give Scott a hand, it'll only take you 10 seconds... http://www.tinyurl.com/dotnetsurvey

Go! Give feedback!

Holden Volt: Hard to Say, Easy to Charge

Sorry to harp on about the Chevy Volt again but today Autoblog Green confirmed that the Chevy Volt will be coming to the land of Oz around 2012 under the sneaky name of the "Holden Volt". While the guts of the car will remain the same it has yet to be confirmed if it'll have a face lift or not. I guess in this current economic climate they'll try to keep the costs down meaning they'll just whack a giant Holden logo on the front.

One good thing about the Volt here in Australia is our 230-240 volt AC power will be able to charge the car's battery pack in half the time the poor 110-120 volt North Americans can.

Looks like I'll be trading my old Nissan in for a Holden come 2012.

V: The Rebooted Series

It was only a matter of time before another big show from the 80s was rebooted for this, the second coming of the 80s. The news today is that ABC has been working on a remake of the old 80s classic "V" (also known as "V: The Miniseries", "V: The Final Battle", "V: The Series", "V: The Energy Drink" and "V: The Drug from True Blood").

This time round the writing is being done by The 4400 co-creator/executive producer Scott Peters, so at least it's being written by someone who is familiar with aliens.

According to Variety, the original V served as an allegory for the Holocaust and Nazi Germany. Scott Peters said he won't being relying on Nazis for his remix but rather on what happens when the masses have blind faith in their leaders. Gee, I wonder who they might be talking about?

To quote Movieweb, "...even without the same storyline, the original V's bones will remain: As in the '80s version, the show will open with an enormous army of spaceships hovering over the world's major cities. The visitors say they've come to help Earth, but their motives are nefarious (in the original, they wanted to steal the world's water supply)." Oooooh... a mystery! I just hope they don't repeat the same shots that Roland Emmerich ripped off when he made ID4.

I wonder how this will effect Kenneth Johnson's plans to make a motion picture of V.

New XBox 360 Dash, November 19th!

News has hit the streets after the Microsoft press event at this year's Tokyo Game Show that the eagerly awaited "reboot" of the Xbox 360's dashboard (AKA "XBE") will be available for download on November 19th. No mention of it being geographically based or if it's just a big global release but I assume the Netflix integration will only apply to countries that already have it... i.e. not Australia.

Thanks for the heads up Engadget (and others).

So, will you make your "Avatar" look like you in real life or will you go all out to make something whacky to hide behind?

Carcade: Play As You Drive

Remember the good ol' days when you'd be driving along in the backseat of the family wagon on a hot day bored out of your brains. You'd have the window down and every now and again you'd stick your hand out into the oncoming wind just for something to do. My older brother took it one step further and would often "surf" a two-fingers hand-man on an icy-pole stick.

Well, some German students have taken this idea and made a video game out of it. Carcade is the name of it and using a webcam and laptop it scans the view out your car window. It then converts the view into a landscape for you to navigate your spaceship over as you pick up good stars and avoid bomb-stars.

Going by the video (below) it detects obstacles that are too big to fly over and gives you a portal of sorts so you don't come to a firey death. It even adjusts game play speed according to vehicle speed.

Check out the video to see what I'm rambling on about...

Volt Visits Down Under

Seeing as I didn't make it to the Australian International Motor Show (AIMS) in Sydney this year I have to settle for news coverage from CarAdvice.com.au, the only useful Australia-oriented motoring news site.

I was pleased to see amongst their thorough coverage of AIMS that the Chevy Volt has made the trip down to the Southern Hemisphere to give us a wave and a nod before heading back to the US. G'day Volt! *waves*

As mentioned previously we'll most likely be seeing the Volt in one way, shape or form here in the land of Oz by 2011 or thereabouts. It may be branded as a Holden, it may not even look like the Volt or GM might just give up and just move the steering column over to the right side and sell it on city corners.

Regardless of how it'll get here I still want one. More pics and plenty of coverage of the Volt (and AIMS in general) over at CarAdvice.com.au.

Tim's Crap of the Day

You're guaranteed that soon after something bad has happened jokes will start to crop up. I remember the jokes going around the school playground after the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster in 1986, something about an astronaut's eyes being blue...

Anyway, sometimes the joke goes to0 far and ends up biting you in the clacker-valve. An example of this is the recent Fringe Festival play based on the Beaconsfield Mine Collapse. It was originally titled "Beaconsfield: A Musical In A Flat Minor" but after the pun police arrived on the scene the playwright was forced to drop the "A Flat Minor" from the title. The pun police stated that it was due to the title being in bad taste however it was a good pun (is there such a thing?).

Well, I got this "news item" from Tim today regarding the current global financial climate...

Following the problems with Lehmann Bros and the sub-prime lending market in the USA, uncertainty has now hit Japan.

In the last 7 days Origami Bank has folded, Sumo Bank has gone belly up, and Bonsai Bank announced plans to cut some of its branches.

Yesterday, it was announced that Karaoke Bank is up for sale and will likely go for a song, while today shares in Kamikaze Bank were suspended after they nose-dived.

While Samurai Bank is soldiering on following sharp cutbacks, Ninja Bank is reported to have taken a hit, but they remain in the black.

Furthermore, 500 staff at Karate Bank got the chop, and analysts report that there is something fishy going on at Sushi Bank where it is feared that staff may get a raw deal. And, I understand that assets at Hara-Kiri Bank have been slashed repeatedly.

*sigh*

LittleBigPlanet Calculator Boggles the Mind

Remember the other day when I mentioned that the developers of LittleBigPlanet, this year's PS3 killer app, said that it wasn't a game but a platform for creating almost anything. Well one lucky gamer who got a hold of a beta key has taken that concept the extreme.

While maybe not as much fun as the Tetris remake, this fully functioning adding/subtracting machine (video below) consists of 610 magnetic switches, 500 wires and 430 pistons. It may not look like much but wait until the mad scientist behind this creation enters the editor and shows you the inner (or outer depending on how you look at it) workings.

Thanks for the tip Kotaku!

Should I Get Fallout 3 on PC or Xbox 360?

I'm past the point of deciding whether or not to buy Fallout 3, my problem now is what platform to get it on.

I have a decent gaming PC (it does Crysis on Medium/High without trouble) and an Xbox 360 both of which have their own pros and cons and no matter how much I ponder the question there's never an obvious winner.

Both setups are running 5.1 audio with the Xbox 360 attached to a cheap-ass plasma and the PC using a 4:3 ratio 21" CRT monitor.

PC
Pros

• Finer control with the mouse for aiming and shooting in first person view. That said the game can be played using a non-realtime combat system where this pretty much becomes irrelevant.
• Can play with less chance of the kids walking in during one of those amazing "Crash Mode" death sequences.
• PC edition is $10 cheaper than the Xbox 360 version.
  

Cons

• I only have a 4:3 21" monitor but I am sitting closer to it.
• Moving around in the game is done in the third person (like Oblivion) which sucks dogs balls on a PC.
• No Achievements. :(
  

Xbox 360
Pros

• XBox 360 Achievements! Yes, I'm an Achievement whore...
• Third person movement is much more natural and intuitive with the analog sticks on the controller.

Cons

• Targeting in first person view is far from accurate with a controller but as mentioned above, may not be necessary to play the game.
• Xbox 360 version is $10 more than the PC version.

So which version do you reckon I should get!?!?

For the nerds among us my PC setup is as follows:

Intel Quad Core 6600
4GB RAM
GeForce 8600 GT (needs replacing as it's slowing me down but should run Fallout 3 OK)
64bit Vista Home Premium

Citroën Stops Teasing and Finally Reveals GTbyCITROËN

Citroën, one of France's largest manufacturers, has been teasing us for weeks with shots of their mystery concept car. The photos that have been dribbling out have shown a white (it's the new black!), highly stylised vehicle mostly shrouded in a red sheet with the Gran Turismo branding on it.

Well, they finally revealed the whole car at the Paris Motor Show and we even know its name: GTbyCITROËN. Yes, the name looks like a typo but that really is it... all mashed up like that.

I'm not a big fan of Citroën's production car designs but this beast blew me away. What makes this concept car even more interesting is that it is already available to play in Gran Turismo 5: Prologue on the PS3. Loading up the game now will let you download a set of new vehicles including the GTbyCITROËN. Citroën says the car was "a partnership between Citroën and Polyphony." Polyphony of course being the people behind the hugely successful Gran Turismo game series on Playstation 2 and 3.

In the game the new GT concept is a hybrid EV powered by hydrogen fuel cells with 646 bhp (481 Kw) from the main engine plus an additional 136 bhp (101 Kw) from hydrogen-power. The 3,000-pound two-seater takes a virtual 3.6 seconds to get from 0 to 100 kmh so it's fast, but not THAT fast. Of course anyone can make up whatever they want in the game world so we'll just have to wait and see what the real deal can do.

Plenty of photos of the real thing and the virtual thing over at Autoblog.

What Are You Eating?

I thought it was a little passe to bash McDonalds but I just couldn't help but share this.

What you see here is a McDonalds burger (obviously) but what makes it interesting is that it is from 1996. The 12 year old burger looks the same today as it did back then. The white specs on the patty are crumbs from the bun.

Karen Hanrahan over at Best of Mother Earth keeps it as a prop for her talk about nutrition where she educates parents on what they should be feeding their kids, and going by this, she's not big on Maccas.

Have a read about this amazing burger from the past on Karen's blog. She has a comparison photo of this burger with a new one plus the high tech storage container she keeps it in.

Sony's 0.3mm Super-Thin OLED Screen

While the LCD manufacturers are having a wang-measuring contest with their slim displays Sony comes out with this OLED (Organic Light-Emitting Diode) prototype that just blows everyone away.

Because OLED doesn't require any backlight like LCD the screen can be as thin as, well, the screen!

The screen in this image is that paper-thin (literally!), slightly bent thing in the glass case. Of course what we can't see is the power source and other bits and pieces like a TV tuner but it's cool nonetheless.

OLED's biggest hold-back at the moment is the size, especially when plasmas and LCDs are past the 100" mark (that's 2.5 meters diagonally) but it's just a matter of time before things get bigger and less expensive. That said OLED gives amazing contrast as well as very little power consumption.

More screen bending photos over at Engadget.

SQL Server 2008 Full Text Search Weirdness

Sorry to the non-tech readers but I just had to post this one.

After hearing Greg Low's session at Tech.Ed on Full-Text Searches in SQL Server 2008 I thought I'd upgrade from 2005 to take advantages of the new features. The biggest difference between 2008 and 2005's FTS is that the indexing etc. is now done in the database instead of palming it off to the operating system (2005 used Windows Search for FTS).

So after a switch to SQL Server 2008 CTP on new hardware running Windows Server 2008 I found that one of my searches that ran well under 1 second in 2005 was taking over 10 seconds in 2008. As you may have guessed I was a little flabergasted.

Basically the query is searching for cars (models) that have the search string in their name or the search string is in the car's manufacturer name. Using "lambo" as a test it should return all the Lamborghinis in the database.

Original Inner Join Query

SELECT * FROM Model WITH (NOLOCK)

INNER JOIN Manufacturer WITH (NOLOCK) ON Model.ManufacturerId = Manufacturer.ManufacturerId

WHERE CONTAINS(Model.*, '"*lambo*"') OR CONTAINS(Manufacturer.*, '"*lambo*"')

ORDER BY Model.StartOfProduction DESC, Model.ModelName

Now before you get carried away with those "SELECT *"s in there, this is early days and I'm using LINQ to SQL.

Anyway, my first thought was that the FTS indexes were out of whack after coming across from 2005. I remembered Greg saying something about 2008 not rebuilding the indexes on import unless you explicitly told it to. I set the server to rebuild indexes on import and reimported the database. The query was down to a scorching 5 seconds or so. Still far from an improvement over the >1 seconds on 2005.

A few emails to and fro with Greg, an upgrade to the hardware (more RAM) and to SQL Server 2008 RTM and the very same query was now taking over 20 seconds! And it was in this darkest hour that I stepped back and looked at the problem from afar and realised I should just stop bashing my head against the wall.

What I needed from the query was a list of cars that either have a matching name or a matching manufacturer name. So instead of using an inner join with a Contains() I used Union which allows you to take the results from multiple queries and output them as one table.

New Union Query

SELECT ModelId ... (explicit list of columns)

FROM Model WITH (NOLOCK)

WHERE CONTAINS(Model.*, '"*lambo*"')

UNION

SELECT ModelId ... (explicit list of columns again)

FROM Model WITH (NOLOCK)

INNER JOIN Manufacturer WITH (NOLOCK) ON Model.ManufacturerId = Manufacturer.ManufacturerId

WHERE CONTAINS(Manufacturer.*, '"*lambo*"')

ORDER BY Model.StartOfProduction DESC, Model.ModelName

It's a little more complex than the original query but now it's back to running at under 1 second. *phew*

Big thanks to Greg for putting up with my nattering and for passing this on to the SQL Server product group to see if they can figure out what's going on with the inner join query.

THE END