Spoilers bring out the worst in people, whether it be kids rushing about the playground with the results of last nights Royal Rumble that you were looking forward to watch when you got home or people speaking too loud on the train about the episode of Lost they downloaded the previous evening. Heavy Rain is released at the end of the week on PS3 and already spoilers are popping up on the net about the identity of ‘The Origami Killer’, ruining the game for many players. Here are some tips to avoid spoilers for this game and others in the future.
Here at the ES office we spend hours slaving away over steaming Vic20 keyboards and ZXSpectrum consoles, so we were excited to learn of a new tool that may make our lives easier. Those of you on the bleeding edge of technology may have heard of a small, family run ‘web-site’ called Google. Apparently this search engine promises to find out shit for you when you can’t be bothered to read a book.
Yesterday the whole bloody thing stopped working for a bit see, and revealed the terrible dependence the world has on this thing- no gmail, no analytics, not even the ill-fated one with the catalogue pages. Thousands of emails went unsent, and a whole bunch of students couldn’t use scholar to cheat on their dissertations.
Happily, ES receives its news from a network of jungle drums.
When not googling our own names/local strip clubs/illegal dog fight pictures, ES occasionally use the series of intertubes to find out real actual stuff (how much is that jetpack/what is my ex-wife doing), but it gets pretty frustrating when you have multiple info factors involved. Luckily in the near future we will no longer have to ask Jeeves (why is Google better than you?) those more esoteric questions, thanks to the terrifyingly named Wolfram Alpha search system.
No formula questions, no rrules for asking, just mathematical algorythms and a complexity factor that mean just about any question can be answered!
Wolfram himself suggests: How many protons are present in a lasagna for six people?
I suggest: How many grenades to take out every child in that schoolhouse?
Which means we finally have access to a system that will tell us if Commander Riker is on board the enterprise or not, and could well bring Google down.
Even though most of us have iPhones and Blckberrys and whatnots these days, there’s always a time when you get stuck without a terminal, and end up revisiting the 1990s (or various parts of the US), and holing up in an ‘Internet Cafe’ as I believe they were known. Well, this socially awkward sitch is a thing of the past thanks to the boffins at MIT, whose latest newfangled gizmo combines a webcam, projector and mobile phone into a piece of jewellery.
In a scarily-accurate fortelling of shriekyware, the device piggybacks onto any web-enabled phones in the vicinity, and gives you a heads-up projected display on any surface you care to name!The whole thing comes with lots of quirky add-ons (hold your hands up in a frame shape and click your finger-it takes a picture) and webcam connectivity even turns you into a web-searchable live site, broadcasting through search engines, so remember to take it off before you shower.
OH HOLY SHIT. For anyone who spends as much time online as I do, That’s a lot, by the way. A FUCKING lot, this kinda made me taste purple. Weezer’s Pork And Beans – remixed and improved and run through the WTF machine. The original was good, this is spectacular. The entire internet compressed into a video. Fuck yeah. Count the netterweb superstars. And weirdly, I don’t hate the song.
