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Posts Tagged ‘Yesteryear’

MSI Wind12 U230 unboxed and benchmarked, trounces netbooks of yesteryear

It’s no Pine Trail when it comes to power consumption, but AMD’s Congo platform is no slouch, either. TestFreaks recently received the Congo-powered MSI Wind12-U230 for review, and discovered that its dual-core Athlon X2 L335 CPU and speedy Seagate drive made neat work of last year’s Atom netbooks, including the formerly formidable HP Mini 311. After shooting the requisite unboxing video and posing the slender machine for a few close-ups, TestFreaks praised the large, comfortable keyboard and touchpad, while scoffing at only four hours of net browsing as the entirety of its battery life. You’ll find pics, a host of benchmarks and even CPU-Z screens at the source link; now, we just want to see how the netbook handles a contemporary competitor.

MSI Wind12 U230 unboxed and benchmarked, trounces netbooks of yesteryear originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 20 Mar 2010 15:13:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Neo SNES / SFC Myth Flash cart brings emulation magic to your aged console
Oh, sure — the Wii’s Virtual Console may put you in direct contact with some of the best titles from yesteryear, but for the purists in attendance, it just feels like cheating. If you’ve been hanging onto that Super Nintendo (or Super Famicom, as it were) and you’ve recently been dealing with the emulation itch, Neoflash just might have the remedy. The Neo SNES / SFC Myth cart is pretty much the most magical cart you could ever slap into your classic console, offering up ROM support for “99.5 percent” of SNES games. Better still, titles can be offloaded from your PC and onto the cart via USB, making the entire transfer process a cinch. Of course, the $169 price tag will likely offend all but the most dedicated of retro gamers, but hey, at least you’ll be staying true to those “roots” you value so highly.

Neo SNES / SFC Myth Flash cart brings emulation magic to your aged console originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 08 Mar 2010 17:28:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Feature: The format wars: of lasers and (creative) destruction

I have this love/hate relationship with format wars.

No, it’s not reality television versus talk shows, or Top 40 radio against “the best of the ’80s — and more!” The wars I’m thinking about pit technologies against one another, usually in a battle to the death of one or more of the contestants. It’s One format to rule them all every time, and the streets are littered with the remains of the losers.

These wars are loathsome because we consumers have to pick a side or else lose out on something awesome, and then the ones who picked wrong have to pay up again for the winning technology. But format wars also keep the carousel of progress spinning and fan the flames of innovation. Join me for a brief look back at the format wars of yesteryear, and a look a head at what will replace them.

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From the Maker of TweetPsych: Dr. TweetDreams Will See You Now

Social media scientist Dan Zarrella, the creator of pop psych Twitter app TweetPsych has put together a new tool for analyzing tweets about dreams.

Dr. TweetDreams pulls together elements new and old, including symbolic meanings from a 100-year-old dream dictionary and any and all tweets containing the phrase “had a dream.” “I finally got to use all my cool natural language code,” Zarrella told us last night. “I’m using a part-of-speech tagger, a wordstemmer, and Princeton’s WordNet to generate a list of related wordstems which are then matched against a dream dictionary.”

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“This one was actually my girlfriend’s idea,” said Zarrella. “I’m not one for dream analysis, really. But it seemed like a fun thing to build, and I know there are lots of people on Twitter who’ll like it… Also, eventually, I’ll be able to match people who’ve had similar dreams.”

Some of the analyses we tried out were pretty clear-cut:

Other tweets produced hilarious, convoluted, or just plain strange results. One of the particularly interesting things about taking definitions from a 100-year-old dream dictionary is the charmingly antiquated social mores; woe to the married woman who dreams of hugging a man other than her husband! And check out the wonderful fortune in store for this lucky young lady:

Ah, how we long for the golden days of yesteryear, when marriage was a woman’s best occupation! There were also a few misfires in terms of vocabulary; for example, a hundred years ago, a plane was a carpenter’s tool, not a mode of transportation. Nevertheless, we found these idiosyncrasies charming.

Users can take a look at one of the most recent dream-related tweets or check out various analyses on Twitter.

Discuss

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Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition out on iPhone

Filed under: Gaming, Odds and ends, iPhone, App Store, iPod touch

That was fast — LucasArts has released the Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition out to the iPhone, and it’s available on the App Store right now for the low price of $7.99. I say low because even though that’s higher than many games for the platform, this one is not only one of the best-loved games of yesteryear, but it has also had its graphics completely redone, voiceover added for every scene and character, and a completely remastered musical score as well. Plus, if you get nostalgic for the old version, you can seamlessly switch between the new and old at any time while you play the game. Pretty darn cool.

Plus, the price can also be considered low because this exact same game released just about a week ago on the Xbox Live Arcade for $10. So not only do you now get to play it in a portable version, you get to play it for $2 less. Hopefully this is the first of many LucasArts classics that we’ll see on the iPhone. Just keep an eye out as you play for any really evil-looking doorstops — we hear they’re quite fearsome.

TUAWSecret of Monkey Island: Special Edition out on iPhone originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 23 Jul 2009 20:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Flickr Find: Apple homepage, 1983

Filed under: Humor, Cult of Mac, Apple, Apple History

Of course, we didn’t have Flash, or web designers, or shiny browsers with big graphics, or the actual connections to load those graphics back in 1983 when Apple introduced the Lisa. But what if we did? That’s the premise of this slick little photoshop by Dave Lawrence, imagining Apple’s current homepage advertising their products of yesteryear.

It’s good for a chuckle — if the blistering 1mb of RAM doesn’t get you, the iPhone preorder or the “BASIC” on the menubar probably will. But wait; what’s all of this about Apple Retail Locations? We’ve never heard of an “Apple Store,” and actually won’t until Steve takes a bunch of investors to the first location in 2001. We know all about Apple Authorized Resellers, though. Maybe that’s what you meant?

TUAWFlickr Find: Apple homepage, 1983 originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Tue, 21 Jul 2009 07:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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