betise

on wikipedia, there are links to youtube videos and forum posts, etc., describing how this technology works. The basic idea is that if you have magnets rotated at ninety degrees to one another, then for some reason, if you swing one magnet past the other, if it's moving at the right speed and the fields are set up right (right distances), instead of the magnets attacting and getting stuck together, the moving magnet gets kicked away by the stationary one, with more force than was used to push it there in the first place. Voila, free energy.

search for steorn on youtube and you can see videos where people have built "ktoys" and "ctoys" which are basically little demo units of the phenomenon.

The start-stop thing is the idea that this thing "kicks" to generate the excess energy, so you have to either just store that straight into a battery and reset the thing or find some way to get a few of these going in parallell so they seem to continue on forever.

It's all very interesting and doesn't violate the law of physics, it takes advantage of previously unknown flux in magnetic fields. It's like saying windmills violate the law of physics because they generate free power. They don't, they take advantage of flux in the atmosphere.

Hard to imagine, but there was once a world without wings. And once a world without Orbos.

OSX was cheetah cause it was so much faster than the beta. And we went from there.

FFXII has pretty next-gen ish graphics throughout. They did a lot of model subbing in/out... sometimes you'd see a guy in a city would be sort of static and then as you got closer he'd sort of "fade in" to be a full poly model.

I wouldn't be surprised if the in-game visuals were close to what we're seeing. Just because it's next gen doesn't mean they all of a sudden abandon everything they've learned about squeezing performance out of an engine.

A lot of the live cut scenes in FFXII looked better than the pre-renders in FF7. A generational jump can make a huge difference when you have the best coders in the world.

Also, gears of war looks that good in real time. it can be done.

That said, it took about 15 minutes for the "wow" of the graphics to wear off in FFXII. These poor guys are fighting an uphill battle... we passed the "good enough" mark a few years ago. Any improvement now is just, at best, gravy. At worst, annoying.

portable games aren't just for commutes. My wife is just not the sort of person who wants to dominate the big screen for hours on end playing bleary eyed gaming. But she will throw the TV on and curl up in the corner of the couch with the DS. I think it just accomodates different people's mindsets and interests a lot more than Gears of Excessive Gratuitious Neverending Violence ever could...

I like the idea of Apple and Nintedo coming together but let’s see if we can mak it make sense.
#1) FrontRow channel on Wii
Apple is using the opposite tactic with iTV than it did with ipod.. ITMS was orginally a way to tie people to their ipods (and it still is, considering no other mp3 player can use its songs...)
But iTV is just a thing to get people to buy more movies. The movies themselves are the main point.. and can be played back on a greater variety of devices. It benefis Apple to get their ITMS movies onto people’s TVs any way they can. Apple won’t sell 3 million iTVs nearly as fast as Nintedo sold 3m Wiis. Personally this is a solution I’d look forward to. I already have an ipod and imac, I don’t want another $250 box just to move content from one room to another.
Also, just because Wii games only run in 480p, there’s no reason it can’t play a movie at 720p through component cables.
#2) Wii kit for imac/macbook
A USB sensor bar, a standard wii bluetooth remote, and a software DVD. $79.
Since Apple already has a great PowerPC emulator with Rosetta, Wii games (which basically run on a 700mhz g4 and ATI graphics) could easily be emulated. Even easier on iPPC based macs. Even down to maybe ibook g4, considering the Wii’s vram needs are so slim.
The benefit for Apple? Increased iMac and macbook sales appeal. ( think nike+ipod )
For Nintendo? Huge potential install base for greater software and accesory sales. They could probably make more money on the kit than they do on a Wii box. And would probably find they get a lot of cross sales ( like wii owners who want to play games on vacation, so also buy the kit for macbook )
Now THAT would be a nice way for Apple and Nintendo to work together

unless this guy had the press showing that IGN and CNET had, he's bound to give a bad review. Waiting four hours in line just to play a video game, no game can live up to that. IGN and C|NET probably had the right credentials so they could skip the line (while I was standing at the exit peering in, I saw a lot of people with green badges walking right in. the badge the joystiq guys showed in their pass wouldn't let them skip the line...)