Family Learning Center

Posts Tagged ‘Decent Chance’

Seven45 Studios talks Power Gig details, we go hands-on with its six string guitar peripheral

We’ll just come right out and say it: Guitar Hero and Rock Band should watch their back, ’cause there’s a better-than-decent chance that Power Gig will be all the rage this holiday season. Seven45 Studios is a heretofore unheard of upstart with roots in First Act, and unlike the vast majority of game developers, these guys actually have a direct hand in the production of the software and hardware associated with this package. They’ll be designing the Power Gig video game series (Rise of the SixString is only the first installment) as well as the guitars, drums and microphones in-house, and given the First Act roots, you know you’ll be getting instruments of higher quality than what’s on the market today. Oh, and yes, we didn’t misspeak when we pluralized “guitars” and mentioned those other two devices.

We had a sit down with the team today at GDC, and besides coming away impressed with the alpha build of the game and the prototype axes we saw, we also learned quite a bit more about their plans than what was revealed in this morning’s press release. Just to be exceptionally clear, Seven45 Studios will not only sell their upcoming title as a standalone product, but it will sell a “band bundle” that includes the game, a guitar (plus a strap, picks and an extra set of strings), a drum set and a microphone, the latter two of which are still very early in production and weren’t available for us to test. The beat matching setup that gamers have grown used to in Rock Band and Guitar Hero is still there, but most everything else is new; a “chording” addition will allow users to strum actual power chords that match the chords used in the song, giving newbies the ability to actually learn songs as they play the game. In other words, if users strum the same chords required to succeed in the game but through an amp, they’ll be playing the actual song. Speaking of which, the bundled guitar (along with extra guitars that are still being sorted in terms of size, material and color) doubles as a legitimate six string by simply depressing the dampening pad beneath the neck, and while it won’t match the crisp tone emitted from your Les Paul Custom, the prototype we heard here in San Francisco sounded just fine for a beginner’s instrument. We also learned that existing Rock Band and Guitar Hero guitars will work with the Power Gig titles, and Seven45’s guitars will work with existing music band games — not bad!

More after the break…

Continue reading Seven45 Studios talks Power Gig details, we go hands-on with its six string guitar peripheral

Seven45 Studios talks Power Gig details, we go hands-on with its six string guitar peripheral originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 09 Mar 2010 17:04:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |   | Email this | Comments
Read the whole story…

WD’s ‘Advanced Format’ Caviar Green HDD gets benchmarked, minor benefits found
Western Digital has yet to actively market its “advanced format” hard drives — in fact, there’s a decent chance you’ve no idea what we’re talking about if you weren’t tuned in on December 11th. In short, it’s a technology that alters a hard drive’s sector size from 512 bytes (the standard for the past three decades) to 4096K, which enables the ECC data to be stored in a more efficient manner. Just recently, WD began to ship Advanced Format Caviar Green hard drives, and the benchmarking gurus over at Hot Hardware strapped one in to see exactly how much of the hype was warranted. For starters, they debunked the thought that Advanced Format drives offered more usable space; Windows reported 931GB of free space on both AF and non-AF 1TB drives. They also go on to explain how to make AF drives play nice with Windows XP, and on the testing front, they found that an aligned AF Caviar Green drive could (mostly) hang with the higher end (and more expensive) Caviar Black. Pop that source link for the full skinny, particularly if you’re a WinXP user looking to snag a new drive.

WD’s ‘Advanced Format’ Caviar Green HDD gets benchmarked, minor benefits found originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 27 Feb 2010 02:01:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |  Hot Hardware  | Email this | Comments
Read the whole story…

How would you change Google’s Nexus One?

It hasn’t quite been out (in public hands, anyway) for two months, but Google’s Nexus One has managed to grab the world’s attention and focus it squarely on Android. Specs wise, it’s not the superphone that many had expected, but it’s certainly delightful in its own right. For those who have sprung for one, we’re bubbling over in anticipation to hear how you’d change it. Would you have snuck an overclocked processor in there? Would you have ditched the trackball for a sensor pad? Do you wish it were available on more carriers? Is the call quality up to snuff? Look — there’s a better-than-decent chance that you threw down some serious bills on this, so don’t hold back. The Nexus Two just won’t be the same without your pair of pennies.

How would you change Google’s Nexus One? originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 26 Feb 2010 22:29:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |   | Email this | Comments
Read the whole story…

OfficeMedium: Intranet for the Small Business User

We write a lot about the battles for the enterprise, the merits of Sharepoint and Google’s pitches into the corporate world.

But it’s always good to watch the new players who use existing open-source software to build something pretty quickly that people can use. OfficeMedium is a service that is a fit for the small business user with just enough social features to give it a decent chance of winning over companies looking to establish a community platform for their users.

Sponsor

OfficeMedium is a web-based, intranet and collaboration software. It’s developed on the Drupal platform so you know it has every possible module available to it for adding on if needed.

Overall, OfficeMedium is a clean, easy to use intranet software. In the new world of the enterprise, every employee will create their own media. OfficeMedium provides an environment to fit with this emerging trend but with enough hooks to satisfy the needs of a business where keeping people in the loop is often mission critical.

This front page has a clean UI with clear demarcation for recent content added or updated; comments; a calendar; a “shoutbox,” for quick messages and a basic activity stream.

.

The profiles we looked at have just a few fields for web sites but included a blog, personal and miscellaneous sites that the user may include. We’d add several more fields to this section to reflect the real media presence of the user.

The blog environment has built in notifications that may be sent to users. Comments can be turned on, off or set to read-only.

Overall, the social features are pretty decent but could use some improvement. For instance it’s difficult to find tags that are associated with the user or the company. A nice, robust cloud tag would be excellent to have front and center on every page. The navigation down the right column clearly identifies what the system can do but we wonder if this could be consolidated in some manner to provide a richer activity stream.

We’d also like to see rich media integration. Services like OfficeMedium can be fertile places for training and sharing marketing materials that may include videos. To have a place for them on the service would be quite handy.

But on a basic level – OfficeMedium works. Perhaps what we suggest is beyond what the small business user is looking for in an intranet. But overall, they do a good job of covering the basics. Here’s a summary of what they offer:

• Task and Event Management
• Personal and Group Calendars
• File Sharing, Storage, and Organization
• Contact Management
• Archiving

Further, the service provides the ability to integrate external parties with controls so the outside user can only see what is intended for them. That’s a big plus as more often than before, users work pretty closely online with outside parties.

OfficeMedium is $8 per user per month and $1 ore gigabyte. The first 512 megabytes are free.

Discuss

Read the whole story…

Snow Leopard ‘Guest Account’ bug deleting user files, terrorizing children?

Think your Snow Leopard woes are finally over? Don’t go logging into that Guest account, then. A flurry of reports have surfaced around the web explaining that even an accidental login to one’s Guest account within Snow Leopard could lead to mass deletion of all user files on the primary account, and when we say “mass deletion,” we mean “mass deletion.” The problem goes something like this: if one clicks on the Guest account after upgrading their machine to OS X 10.6, and everything hangs, there’s at least a decent chance that all of your data will be evaporated whenever you surf back over to the main profile. Apple has yet to address the issue (at least publicly), but we’d probably recommend disabling Guest accounts on your rig(s) until all of this gets sorted. You know, unless you actually enjoy watching your data vanish.

[Via Digg]

Filed under: Software

Snow Leopard ‘Guest Account’ bug deleting user files, terrorizing children? originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 12 Oct 2009 11:05:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments
Read the whole story…

Palm Pre rumored to be dropping to $150 on September 8th

We’ve already seen the Palm Pre dip below its $199 list price during a few limited, occasionally inadvertent sales, but it looks like it could soon be dropping well under the $200 mark for a slightly longer period of time — at least if a purportedly legit leaked document is to be believed. According to PreCentral, the doc comes from someone working at a Sprint “indirect partner retail dealer,” and quite clearly indicates that “indirect partners” will be able to sell the Pre for $149.99 (after a mail-in rebate) between September 8th and October 31st, 2009. Presumably, Sprint itself would also be offering the Pre for the same price during that time and, if the HTC Hero’s $179.99 price tag on Sprint is any indication, there seems to be at least a decent chance that the price drop could eventually become a permanent one. Either way, we won’t have to wait too long to see how this one pans out.

Filed under: Cellphones

Palm Pre rumored to be dropping to $150 on September 8th originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 07 Sep 2009 18:42:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments
Read the whole story…