It’s like Hi-Fi but, er, divorced? Missed this one a few days ago - Creative have announced their new sound card chip which will be a fair bit more powerful than the Audigy thanks to some clever design and 51 million transistors. It can "Crystalize" compressed 16-bit audio into clear 24-bit audio and simulate over 100 speakers on a 5.1 setup, or do very convincing 5.1 on headphones. Reportedly. No word on actual cards yet, and hopefully the drivers are better than they’ve previously been from Creative.

So it’ll just be Computer, Documents and so on. About damn time, they always sounded silly to me, not that I ever bothered renaming them.

The "My" prefix was apparently an attempt to create a personal
connection between people and their computers at a time when the idea
of using a computer might have been forbidding.

Um, okay…

And so it’s revealed - ATi’s multi card rendering solution. Six months later than nVidia’s SLI but it looks far less of a kludge, particularly as it works on any game right away. Multiply and Conquer indeed.

I’ve been saving up a couple of fun comparison articles. First up is Opera vs Firefox - having switched from the former to the latter you can probably guess my pick, but Opera is still a quality browser. X vs XP is a detailed and fair looking comparison of Apple and Windows - again having used both I’d say they could learn a lot from each other, though Windows nudges it for me each time purely because of gaming. And finally, Forza vs GT4, this time as a video. Personally, GT4 is artistically a better game despite the inferior hardware, but Forza is just far more accessible thanks to the clever driving aids and zero driving test nonsense. Certainly a very impressive first effort and it’s nudging GT4 on MetaCritic too.

Pixel Kill has unusually been more of a geek blog than a games blog today, I guess games news is slow right now. Pointless but interesting fact here - words for storage space bigger than a terabyte. So when do we get Brontobyte hard drives? (via digg)

I’m not sure the Google Web Accelerator is a good thing. Lowtax certainly doesn’t think it is. What’s interesting though is that it may be more than it seems, namely a tool to assist Google web indexing efforts significantly. How cunning, think I’ll stay away from it until privacy and security concerns are dealt with. And no, I wasn’t one of the people who got paranoid about Gmail, I use that daily.

Update: Well, it seems Google has removed it for now due to reaching "maximum capacity users", in others words "Oh crap, couple of issues here, best fix ‘em ".

Vaguely disturbing, very amusing. You’ll see. (via the splendid Waxy.org)

This is so very  pointless. So why do I want one so much? (via Gizmondo)

That’s Multi Video Processing, and so far it sounds like much less of a kludge than nVidia SLi. In short, with MVP you can apparently mix and match cards (unlike with SLi), it all opperates over PCIe instead of needing a bridge chip and it sounds like it’ll work out of the box with any game (SLi needs a different driver profile to be made for each game). Of course, mixing and matching cards of different generations sounds like a pipe dream and this is all early info but we’ll see.

This is brilliant, or at least there’s the potential for brilliance. Imagine being notified that an old friend you haven’t seen for years is just down the road, or that someone else with your taste for obscure Japanese Bonsai forms is just a few feet away. mates from the Uni of Michigan is the first step towards making this reality. Of course, way too few people have a PDA with GPS for this to be as cool as it could be, but there are still possibilities, particularly with mobile phones. (via we make money not art)

Enough game linkage, time for a bit of a rant that’s been brewing for a while - do Microsoft even know what the hell they’re doing with their own OS anymore? In the time since Windows XP Apple have released multiple significant updates to OS X adding all kinds of neat features. Tiger, the latest, adds find as you type for all files on the system (a system called Spotlight) and plenty besides. Mac users get this, and plenty more, now. Windows will offer something similar, but Longhorn is well over a year away.

Then there’s Avalon which… er, accelerates the windows desktop and lets you do some 3D stuff. That’s really about as clear as it looks to me right now, and yet again Apple is already fully using modern graphics cards with Quartz Extreme.

None of this is lost on the ever-vocal Steve Jobs who’s laying into Microsoft for copying Apple. Well, nothing new there, can you say Trash C… sorry, Recycle Bin. Except unlike the horrid OS 9, having finally spent some time with it I can say OS X is lovely. Now all it needs is decent games support, but then it sounds like they’re finally taking that seriously now too.

I’m sure much of this perception is because the Longhorn PR machine hasn’t even started to spin up, but no matter how hard you look for early details it currently doesn’t seem to have much fuel at all.

So why, you might ask, have I not switched? Well, as it happens the Mac Mini actually looks more and more tempting by the day. At this point it’s simply a matter of cash (and the price on the Mini renders that a minor issue) rather than inclination.

Very clever stuff here - bits on hard drives currently lay magnetic pole to magnetic pole. This silly but brilliant Flash sequence from Hitachi shows how they’re turning the bits so they stand up. The platters have to be thicker but they can fit a LOT more data.

The funny thing is, it turns out Toshiba and Seagate have similar technology in the works. Interesting how technology developments like this can occasionally turn up at the same time from different sources. Or maybe it’s just corporate spying.