Archive for August, 2007
Posted by: in Celebrity news
 Splash News Online; National Photo Group
Hayden might be the youngest hero on screen, but her world-saving attitude clearly extends far behing her TV role. Stepping out for coffee on two recent occasions in L.A. the actress showed her support to Invisible Children, a non-profit charity that brings education and awareness to children in war torn countries. Hayden, who just recently celebrated her 18th birthday, has two T-shirts that benefit the children’s charity. Click here for her cream gun camera Invisible Children shirt, $20, and for the indigo peace dove top, $20, click here.
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Daewoo has just unveiled the DPC-8099PD-I portable DVD/iPod player that comes with an LCD display that is an inch larger than the industry average of 7″. Not only do you get to enjoy your current collection of DVDs, VCDs, and audio CDs, you can also dock an iPod as well. Additional features include a USB port and card reader that is more than willing to accomodate any USB thumb drives or SD/MMC memory cards. Supported formats include MP3, JPEG, and DivX. As at press time, there has been no word with regard to price and availability.
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Filed under: New Releases, PlayStation Network, Hands-on
Warhawk hit the PlayStation Store yesterday and the positive reviews have been pouring in. Our review is coming as well, but in the meantime we wanted to post our early thoughts on Incognito’s impressive shooter. Even after our relatively short play time (~five hours), we feel confident saying that this is one of the most addictive online experiences you can have on the PS3 — or any console for that matter.
It’s worth pointing out though, that as good as Warhawk is so far, our experience was initially tainted just by the difficulty of just downloading the game. True, we did download it right after it was released but it took nine tries for Sony to actually add money to our PlayStation Store wallet. During this time, we ran into multiple PS Store errors and timeouts, saw images fail to load and generally experienced weirdness while trying to navigate the store. It was incredibly frustrating but after about an hour of trying, we finally were able to purchase Warhawk and queue up the 800 MB download.
Once Warhawk finished downloading and installing though, we fired up the game and messed around with the slick and intuitive menu system. This is where you tweak your controls, customize your character, set up clans, and find games. While there are a ton of options here, the layout is pretty straight forward and within no time we had a funky looking purple skinned avatar and had jumped into one of SCEA’s official ranked servers.
The action in Warhawk is instantaneous — there is almost no downtime whatsoever. As soon as you appear on the map, it is on. Within seconds you’ll be engaged in firefights with other ground troops or you’ll be hurtling down the road in a jeep packed with soldiers, all looking for somebody to open fire on. If neither of those sound fun at the moment, you can hope into a Warhawk for some aerial combat or jump into one of the defense cannons, looking to shoot down any pesky enemy planes in the sky. The amount of instantly accessible gameplay options is incredibly satisfying and help keep the pacing of the game fast and furious.
Part of what makes the gameplay so great is the fantastic job that Incognito has done at balancing all the different aspects of combat. So far it doesn’t appear that any one vehicle or weapon is so overpowering as to break the game. Ground troops can shoot down Warhawks with rocket launchers, Warhawks can blast tanks and strafe bases, jeeps can run over ground troops and shoot at Warhawks with their mounted machine guns, and on and on. You aren’t invincible in anything but you are deadly in everything.
We will be back with a full review soon, but in the meantime we’re gonna go back and play more Warhawk. There is really nothing like this on the PlayStation 3 right now and is a breath of fresh air for game-starved PS3 fans. Though our opinions might change as we get more time with the title, right now we’re prepared to call this one of the PlayStation 3’s first true ‘must-have’ games.
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Posted by: in Hollywood news
Filed under: Action & Adventure, Drama, Universal, Theatrical Reviews
If it had a smaller budget and its theatrical prints were marred with scratches and debris, Illegal Tender might pass for the first half of a skuzzy, exploitative drive-in double feature. As it currently stands, however, Franc. Reyes’ follow-up to Empire will have to make do delivering silly, shallow B-movie nonsense to fancy-schmancy multiplexes. A Hispanic crime saga unable to fully compensate for its amateurish performances, awkward dialogue, and hypocrisy regarding a criminal lifestyle that’s supposedly condemned even as it’s lustily glorified, Reyes’ film is far more sizzle than substance. Nightclub grinding, champagne sipping, and guns cocking - these are a few of the director’s favorite things, all of which receive the lion’s share of attention throughout his tale of a family trying to fight back against a gangster who won’t let them live in peace. Still, nothing in this goofy pic receives more TLC than star Wanda De Jesus, a brawny yet sexy badass Latina mama cast from a shoot-now, ask-questions-never Foxy Brown mold. Listen closely enough while she’s commanding the screen, and you can almost hear Blaxploitation-loving Quentin Tarantino panting.
Decked out in tight shirts that reveal an equal amount of cleavage and bicep muscle, De Jesus plays Millie DeLeon, a Connecticut mother of 21-year-old collegian Wilson Jr. (Rick Gonzalez) and young Randy (Antonio Ortiz) whose drug dealer husband - as shown in a lengthy prologue set in 1986 Brooklyn - died at the hands of his duplicitous cohorts on the night Wilson Jr. was born. And by cohorts, I mean two voluptuous hitwomen in low-cut tops, mini skirts, and high heels — a laughable pair who don’t look remotely comfortable wielding firearms yet nonetheless work at the behest of kingpin Javier Cordero (Gary Perez). That Illegal Tender thinks it extremely clever to cross-cut between Wilson Sr.’s (Manny Perez) murder and Wilson Jr.’s birth - One life exits, another life enters! Whoa! - is emblematic of the film, which can’t go five minutes without having a character articulate some obvious fact or simplistic theme. Grace is not the film’s strong suit.
Continue reading Review: Illegal Tender
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Filed under: Cellphones, Portable Audio, Portable Video
Oh come on, what the hell is that? A Nokia branded iPhone? It was presented during Nokia’s GoPlay event this morning as a glimpse into the future of Nokia interface design. Oh, and it’s due out next year. When pressed during the Q&A about the striking similarity to the little Cupertino device, Anssi Vanjoki — Nokia’s Executive VP & General Manager of Multimedia — said, “If there is something good in the world then we copy with pride.” Well, ok then. See what we mean after the break.
[Thanks, James B]
Continue reading Nokia’s iPhone — no, seriously
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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!
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Filed under: Analyst reports, Rants and raves, Competitive strategy, Google (GOOG), Apple Inc (AAPL), Short stories, Indices, Entrepreneurs, Media World, S and P 500, DJIA
Last week Barron’s [subscription required] socked it to Mr. Booyah!, James Cramer, with a cover story highlighting his overall mediocre stock-picks performance and the associated antics on his highly rated (for cable) CNBC Mad Money show.
There have been many follow up stories reflecting on the Barron’s article and I thought I had to add my voice, not to jump on to the bandwagon, but to share my own take. Differing tracking sites weighed in on how successful Cramer has been (or not) in his stock picking. As I read Barron’s own take and the many twisted tales portrayed by CNBC and TheStreet.com, I thought about my own tracking. You see, I have actually been tracking Cramer’s nine picks for the year and sharing it with our readers each month. This month I posted Chasing Value 2007 picks : Google (GOOG) runs up, Cramer runs down, indices worse and Cramer did in fact beat the indices through the end of July.
Here is an excerpt:
Jim Cramer’s average return on his nine picks was 5.63% after seven months dropping this month because of his optimism about the over all markets and weighting his portfolio accordingly. Adding the dividend portion (.66% x .58) of 0.38% brings Cramer’s gain to +6.01%. Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL) continued to shine with the release the iPhone on June 29. There does not seem to be much that Apple can do wrong this year. Given new product and software launches and the continuation of current products and programs there is every reason to believe 2007 should be another one for the record books.
The Indices all gave something back in July, with the DJIA, NASDAQ and S&P shrinking they still pegged gains on average of +4.2.%. Adding its portion of the dividend yield (1.8% x .58) of 1.04% brings it up to a total gain of +5.31% which if matched in the second half of 2007 would be a decent but probably disappointing year. The over all market seems to be losing out this year to the stock pickers.
As you can see Cramer did eke out a better return than the Indices, however as Barron’s points out and I definitely support, this does not include fees and other costs. I will be posting again next week the results through August. The review includes my annual picks and a comparison to just owning Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG).
Many years ago, when James Cramer was not so overwhelmed with his celebrity status he had time to respond to emails, I corresponded with him for a while. Back then he made some great calls, the best being his call to get out of telecom before anyone else was shouting it was doomed. He was right. He has made many good calls over the years and he has much wisdom to share. But if you follow his advice, advice by the thousands, on his Mad Money show, I’m afraid you will be a loser.
I have written about Cramer often. Earlier in the year I posted Cramer pumps Tech, then hates it days later and The Cramer “Show” can cost you big! and these two stories indicate why I think following Cramer’s show is a losing proposition. It is entertaining to some, but to me it has become unwatchable. I liked his radio show a couple years back. Cramer has been on my email list and receives my stories, although he has not commented lately.
In closing, I would like to add that I think Cramer could beat the indices if that was his sole focus. However, that is not his sole focus. He is unfocused and therefore following his picks is not a good idea. Besides, if you make thousands of picks each year, do you not resemble the indices, except with more costs if you actually trade on the calls? There are better places to learn about investing.
To verify my track record, including bad calls, read Chasing Value and Serious Money.
Sheldon Liber is the CEO of a small private investment company and the principal for design and research at an architecture & planning firm.
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Tasers and pepper spray are good for warding off an attacker a few short paces away, but what if you’d prefer to keep assailants at more than an arm’s reach? Well, that’s where the new (and surpsingly fashionable-looking) Avurt IM 5 Launcher comes in.
The weapon launches paint-ball like capsules of pepper spray that explode on impact and cling to your would-be attacker, burning his or her eyes, nose and throat. Unfolding the handle arms the device and activates the built-in laser sight. Point and pull the trigger and you will stop the assailant in his tracks. The magazine holds five rounds and can fire as fast as you can pull the trigger. The launcher comes in four colors, so you can carry a different one everyday to coordinate with your outfit.
The new non-lethal personal defense device is currently available for pre-order from the Avurt website for $299.99.
From Daily Tech
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Filed under: Gaming, Portable Audio, Portable Video
You can never have too many name-brand duping, cheap looking, Chinese sweatshop produced PMPs laying around, can you? I mean sure, we’ve seen little guys that boost the Gameboy Micro before, such as this number from way back in 2006, but this new entry does it with so much flair and unabashed disregard for copyright law we just had to mention it. The BMP-900 — as this device is mechanically called — does all kinds of exciting PMP activities, like playback of MP3, WMA, WAV, and PCM audio, MPEG4 and AVI video, JPEG, GIF and BMP picture viewing, plus e-book and TXT reading. Additionally — and this may come as a surprise to some — the red devil does some video game emulation, including Famicom, Gameboy, and Gameboy Color. Right now the player seems to only be available in China, or wholesale in lots of 100-199 pieces… so, go nuts.
[Via PMP Today]
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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!
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 I’ve been watching the CouchDB database project since it has started. It’s the pet project of programmer Damien Katz. I was excited to read an update today announcing that it will be accessible via a RESTful JSON API and the query language for CouchDB will be JavaScript. How cool is that?!
CouchDB is not a relational database but rather a distributed document database. Instead of inserting a row of column values into a table, you save a document, with any number of named fields and values (now represented as JSON objects) into the database where it exists in a kind of addressable pool. Documents can be created, retrieved, updated and deleted without having to worry about schema-design as there is none.
If you do require a little structure you can create views. A view is a dynamic structure that acts like a search query, providing a virtual table of documents matching the query. The query, previously expressed in a proprietary language, is now a JavaScript function which is used to determine which documents to include in the view. Because the views are completely virtual you can have as many as you like and you can add or remove them at any time without touching any of your data. Views are indexed and regularly updated to keep tabs with the state of the documents in the database.
CouchDB has some other impressive attributes; it’s fully ACID compliant, has a security model built in, bi-directional incremental replication and conflict resolution.
But what is it good for? Well the documentation is quick to point out this is not a replacement for relational databases but it is well suited to document style applications like blogs, document management, bug tracking, forums and so on. The CouchDB wiki says:
With very little database work, it is possible to build a distributed document management application with granular security and full revision histories.
CouchDB is still only in Alpha, but there are already demos available and client libraries written in PHP, Ruby and others. You can also download the source code under the GPL license.
I think CouchDB will be one to watch!
This article provided by sitepoint.com.
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Filed under: News
 Bob is a martial arts genius. When he was a bit younger, he had a handsome face and a toned body that complimented this fighting intelligence perfectly. You could say, in Tekken 6, he would have blended right in with many of the other male fighters. But Bob ran into a problem — he couldn’t beat any opponents “larger” than he. So, he decided to take a few years off the fighting circuit and “train” himself to become larger than any opponent. Thus, Bob went on the “all donut all the time” diet and grew rotund enough to take out anyone.
Tekken 6 is getting a pretty colorful cast of characters, no? This new scan talks about Bob, the newest revealed character, as well as mentioning that a media showing in mid-September will have the latest build of the game playable in Japan. Or something. We can’t read Japanese too well. Either way, we’re glad to see the cast of one of the biggest fighting game continue to grow.
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