As if the video game was not blasphemy enough, there is apparently now also a video game novelization of Dante’s Inferno, which is little more than the eponymous literary classic defaced with images from the video game.
(via Penny Arcade)
As many of my friends know, I am a big fan of the Shuttle line of XPC barebone systems. Barebone systems are, for those unfamiliar with the term, partial computers that usually consist of a motherboard and power supply mounted in a custom chassis. Shuttle is one of the leading manufacturers of small form-factor (SFF) barebone systems.
My first experience with a Shuttle was at one of my first jobs, where XPCs were used both as servers but also as testbeds. I was so impressed with them that I bought a Shuttle SN95G5 and fitted it with an AMD Athlon64 3700+ and a Radeon x1600 to use as my LAN gaming machine back in college. Even today, that system (since upgraded to an overclocked Athlon64 4200+) is solid as a rock even if it finds itself bested by some of the latest games.
In the past year, I have been looking to build a new SFF system to replace my trusty SN95G5 — affectionately named Shizuru — but I haven’t been impressed with Shuttle’s lineup. Its AMD offerings (which, with the Phenom II, represented a good balance between price and performance) were anemic and its Intel systems essentially limited me to a choice of either an expensive LGA-1366 Core i7 processor or a soon-to-be obsolete Core 2 part.
Until now.
from gizmodo
Yesterday, the International Herald Tribune ran an article on the iSlate, the rumored Apple tablet, that essentially says that the iSlate will be a game-changer. Although the author acknowledges in the first few paragraphs that what little we know about it comes from various blogs, she writes the rest of the article with such authoritative certainty about the iSlate and its capabilities.
“Like many new digital devices, it will combine several products in one,” she states. “Critically it will also act as an electronic reader, like Amazon’s Kindle and Sony’s Reader.” She asserts that the iSlate will revolutionize e-media — just as the iPod revolutionized digital media — and that it will come with “a fun, simple system with which we can download e-content.”
All of this is certainly plausible, but herein lies the problem: we don’t actually know anything about the Apple tablet. Most of the information available about the tablet, including its presumptive name, comes from blogs and rumor mills. Some of the hearsay has been given credence because their sources have been correct (or lucky) in the past. Other pieces of gossip have gotten a life of their own simply because they struck a chord and captured the imagination. Slowly, these spread across the blogosphere, gaining legitimacy with each reblog or retweet until they coalesced into conventional wisdom. As such, what began as rumors and hype in the far-flung corners of the Internet have now infected even the titans of traditional journalism.
