The guys in my work are pretty excited about Halo 3, we have fan-boys from both camps: some have taken most of this week off to play it, others announced that it was rubbish before they'd played it.

Halo 2 is still played quite a lot online, despite being over 2 years old now. It was a pretty good multiplayer, and that gives it a lot more longetivity than single player only games.

One of the 'against' comments was that it looks just like Halo 2, with very slightly better textures. I'm not sure this is accurate, but it misses the point. They've made no attempt to change the basic multi player, it is the most successful ever on a console, after all. Instead they've added demo recording.

Demo recording has been around in PC gaming for years.

Recently in the Times was a section on research by Simon Baron-Cohen (yes, he's Borat's cousin) into prenatal testosterone levels and the male brain type.

The basic theory goes something like this: the human brain tends towards either empathy skills or mathematical/pattern recognition skills. Women tend to be more towards the former while men tend towards the latter. Due to this these tendencies are referred to as male and female brain types, even though either gender can have them.

I'm really impressed by this idea: seam carving image resizing. It's relatively simple, but the effect is really impressive. Basically the as the image is stretched or compressed a gradient check is used to remove or add a 'seam' of similar pixels from the image. This leaves the detail parts of the image relatively in proportion.
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This is something I relatively recently conflicted with a friend of mine about. He was much enamoured of a team in his company that always seemed to have the most new features each month.

I finally got to see their project and, well, it works. It just isn't what I'd call finished. Pages can take over 30 seconds to load.

I've been playing a new game Bioshock recently. It's been getting 10/10 reviews and having played it I have to say that it's brilliant.

It isn't perfect, but it's got a fantastic and sophisticated plot, amazing atmosphere and it's a pretty good first person shooter.

I stumbled across this interesting paper by Andrew Odlyzko today: Content is not king. It's really about 3G networks and internet to mobile devices, but the interesting bit is that the 'killer apps' are those that allow communication, rather than content.

The comparison with the web 2.0 bubble is interesting. Companies are throwing money intent on turning user content sites into wealth generating sites, but I don't think it's there.
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