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27Mar/100

Microsoft Student Insider Training Day 2: The first day at Microsoft Part 3

Welcome back to my series of posts from my Microsoft Student Insider Training trip to the Microsoft campus in Redmond.  This is part 3 of 3 from Day 2, so lets pick up right where we left off!  Read about Day 1, Day 2 part 1, and Day 2 part 2 if you haven't already.

By the time I finished up with my meeting with Josh, it was about dark and time to head back to building 99 to regroup with the rest of the Student Insider crew to head to Joey's in Seattle for dinner.  As much as I would love to say that I enjoyed  dinner, that would be a complete lie.  Rant time!  After a nice little drive to the restaurant, we are quickly seated in the extremely poorly lit bar area where it was so dark I could barely read the menu.  As soon as we got our drinks and were about to have our order taken, somebody mentioned that they weren't 21 which is apparently a problem in Washington.  For whatever insane reason, apparently there is a law in Washington that states that if you are under 21, you can't even sit in the bar area, even if you aren't drinking or anything.  This makes no sense to me considering its not like you can't order alcohol in the rest of the restaurant anyway.  Whatever.  So once everybody realized the fact that we were breaking the law, we were moved to the main dining section of the restaurant that seemed to be a lot louder and only slightly better lit.  The longer we were there, the louder it got as the place started to fill up.  I am guessing it is an acoustics thing because it quickly got so loud that I couldn't hear the people on the other side of the table from me.  Since I couldn't hear anybody, I pointed myself towards the bar where they had the X Games on.  Originally, I had plans to go to the Winter X Games this year until the awesome opportunity to go to Microsoft came up  so I was happy that I at least got to watch the X Games, even if I had to watch it from halfway across the restaurant with no audio.  The service at the restaurant was by far, the slowest restaurant experience I have ever had.  With dinner and desert and everything, we were there for close to 3 hours.  We would have been there longer so that people could finish their deserts had we not been trying to rush to the Space Needle before it closed, only to have had it just close before we got there.  I also would like to state how horrible the waiter was.  In the near 3 hours that we were there, I was never offered to have my drink refilled, I was never asked how my food was and he never asked if there was anything else that I needed.  I was even more irritated when apparently he managed to ask everybody but me if they wanted desert.  If I was his boss, I would have fired him on the spot.  When we eventually got our very overpriced food ($30 for a tiny steak with mashed potatoes stuffed in an something that looked like an eggroll), my steak was undercooked for my liking, something I definitely regretted the following morning if you know what I mean.  When we realized what time it was and when the Space Needle closes, we made a mad dash for the van and I can honestly say I have never been happier to get out of a restaurant in all of my life.

After a quick drive over to the Space Needle, we ran up to the doors only to find them locked.  After repeated attempts to convince the employees inside to let us in and take us up, we gave up, took a few pictures and headed back to the hotel for the night.  Having been to the Needle the last time I was up at Microsoft for a job interview, I wasn't terribly disappointed by not getting to go up although I would have like to have seen what it was like at night as last time I was there in the day and it was partly cloudy.  Once we returned returned to the hotel, myself and a couple of the other Student Insiders decided to hang out in one of the rooms and talk until around 2 A.M.  At that point. We went back to our rooms and I spent about an hour before bed trying to catch up on all of the news that I had missed that day.  You never realize just how many items you get on your Google Reader until you don't check it for a day.  Around 3 A.M. I went to bed to wake up a couple of hours later since we headed off to Microsoft again at 8 A.M. the next morning.

Stay tuned to find out about my awesome 2nd day at Microsoft including my appearance on Xbox Live's 1 vs 100 Live!

26Mar/100

Microsoft Student Insider Training Day 2: The first day at Microsoft Part 2

Welcome back to my series of posts from my Microsoft Student Insider Training trip to the Microsoft campus in Redmond.  This is part 2 of 3 from Day 2, so lets pick up right where we left off!  Read about Day 1 and Day 2 part 1 if you haven't already.

After the legal discussion, we broke for lunch back at the Commons.  This time, I got to explore the commons and all the various different food stations it has to offer, from seafood to pizza, if you want it, they probably have it.  The variety of food you can get there really is amazing.  What really amazed me is that it is not just food, but there are cell phone stores from a couple of carriers, a bank and even a bike shop in the Commons area so Microsoft employees can get their bike worked on or make changes to their wireless carrier while they are at lunch.  During each of our visits to the commons, we had various Microsoft employees come and eat with us and talk to us about everything from the products that they work on to the health benefits that Microsoft offers their employees.  Unfortunately I don't recall the names of everybody we met with over lunch but it was great talking with them and learning about what they do and what Microsoft does for its employees and how much they love the company for it.

After lunch, we split up and got to meet with people from various teams throughout Microsoft for most of the afternoon.  First, I got to meet with Mark Hopkins and Luis Cabrera-Cordon who work on the Microsoft Surface team.  We got to spend close to a half an hour playing with Surface (something I have done on a couple of other occasions but only to a small extent) and learning about how it works, Microsoft's vision for the product, what powers it, how they test it and how crazy expensive it is($12,500 for just the unit, $15000 for a developer unit according to wikipedia which is a little higher than I believe we were told but in the same ballpark).   It is amazing what the Surface tables can do.  It uses 5 IR cameras to detect whatever is touching the table and uses special tags, kind of like a bar code to bring up information about something.  This was demonstrated to us with business cards where the card was placed on the Surface and the persons information was read from the tag and brought up on the table.  We were shown all kinds of really cool things and I have a video of most of it which I will try to get posted soon so you guys can see just how cool the device is.  After we finished learning about and playing with the Surface, I headed to yet another building (pretty much everything was in a different building.  It is amazing just how many buildings that Microsoft has) to meet Dan Fernandez (blog) and Brian Keller (blog) from Channel 9.  They had planned for me to be on This Week in Channel 9 but unfortunately that wasn't communicated to whoever planned our schedule and because I had to be at the Scott Hanselman (blog) presentation, I never got to take advantage of that opportunity.  I did get to check out the Channel 9 studios however and the equipment in there is amazing.  From some awesome lighting to all of the recording equipment, it was everything I could do to keep from drooling and trying to sneak out with some equipment to spice up the Global Geek News Podcast.  Someday I hope to make it back so that I can be on one of the Channel 9 shows but who knows when that day will come.

Like I mentioned, my next stop was a meeting with Scott Hanselman in yet another building where I met back up with the other insiders.  At the time, I didn't realize how big of a deal it was to meet Scott.  Apparently in the developers/Microsoft employee circles, he is a bit of an all star in the company and even has a great podcast.  Apparently he works in another state and rarely makes it to the Microsoft main campus so the fact that we could steal an hour of his time is a big deal or so I am told.  The meeting with Scott was a lot of fun as he is a barrel of laughs.  He spent the hour talking to us about parallel computing and showing us just how efficient it is.  He showed us some code that blew my mind (I haven't done any parallel programming in all of my years as a programmer).  He showed us code for doing parallel queries to a SQL database and demonstrated just how much faster it is when you take advantage of the multiple cores on today's processors.  I was quite impressed to say the least.   Speaking of numbers, after our meeting with Scott, I got to go visit with Josh Carroll.

Josh Carroll works on the Telemetry team.  Never heard of the Telemetry team?  Neither had I, but I quickly found out just how important the team was at for various products at Microsoft.  The telemetry team is responsible for the automatically collected data such as crash information and details sent through the feedback tool and such and relays the data back to the teams in charge of the various products so that they can fix bugs and see how users are trying to use the software for future improvements.  The information that they interpret and pass on to the product teams played a large part in how great Windows 7 is.  For a little more on the team and how the information they gathered was used to shape the final release of Windows 7, I highly recommend checking out this article at Ars Technica.  Anyway, the meeting with Josh went great and it gave me some great insight into what happens when users send those crash reports to Microsoft when something goes wrong.  I have always been one to submit my crash reports whenever I have them but never realized that they were really being used much until now.  Thanks to this meeting, whenever somebody asks if they should submit crash reports, I always make sure to tell them to do it because it can make a big difference in future patches and releases.

I will cut off part 2 of day 2 right here.  Stay tuned for the final part of Day 2, our night activities, which should be up within the next 24 hours and then we will be on to the most exciting day, Day 3 which includes my appearance on 1 vs 100 Live!

25Mar/100

Microsoft Student Insider Training Day 2: The first day at Microsoft Part 1

Greetings Readers!

First, I apologize to the folks at Microsoft as well as my readers about not getting these posts up sooner.  I had planned on this going up a day or two after the first post about the travel day that I posted like 3 weeks ago.   Anyway, now that MIX 2010 is over, I can get back to my series of posts about my trip to Microsoft.  Due to posts turning out to be much longer than I expected, I am breaking them up by more than just days.  In the case of Day 2, the first day at Microsoft, it will be broken up into 3 posts so that it is not some huge mass of text that will take you a while to read.  Day 3 will be the same way.  Anyway, lets talk about my first day at Microsoft!

Although this wasn't my first trip to Microsoft as I have flown up to the campus in the past for job interviews and got a very quick run through of a couple of buildings in the past when I was visiting some family that works at Microsoft, this was the first time that I got a real feel for life and the atmosphere at Microsoft.

The morning of our first day at Microsoft, we were shuttled from our amazing hotel, the Mariot Hotel in the Redmond Town Center to the Microsoft campus where I gathered with the other Student Insiders and the wonderful ladies that are in charge of the Student Insider program shortly before heading to an area called the Commons for breakfast.  For cafeteria food, the food was really good.  There were all of the normal breakfast foods available from fruits to eggs to sausage and of course bacon.  Although I found the commons area to be impressive, it wasn't until later that I realized just how huge it was and how much it had to offer.  Anyway, after eating a great breakfast, we headed back to Building 99 where we first gathered where things really got going.  We started out with an introduction to our training which was interesting although I can't say I paid as close of attention as I should have because the power inverter on my netbook, the only computer I brought with me died as soon as I plugged it into one of the outlets at the table.  The introduction was interesting, I just wish I wasn't so preoccupied that I could have gotten more out of it.  Normally I wouldn't have been in such a panic except that the netbook was the only computer I brought on the trip and everything I had with me, from my phone to my iPod Touch and Zune was USB powered and without a computer to power at least my phone, I would be kind of screwed.  Luckily, I was brought a spare power brick around lunch time which really saved my butt.

After our introduction, we got to meet with Microsoft's great blogger from Australia, Frank Arrigo.  The discussion we got to have we him was extremely valuable.  From how we might improve our blogs and podcasts to how best to foster a community around our sites, it was an great discussion and I wish it didn't have to end as quickly as it did.  After that fascinating discussion, we were informed about our responsibilities as bloggers, specifically what we need to do and keep in mind when it things like FTC guidelines for blogging and disclosing things that we receive and  stuff like that.  Having kept a very close eye on this topic ever since the FTC said that bloggers will have to disclose products that they are given and such, there was nothing here that I didn't already know.

Speaking of which, as soon as I get a chance, I am going to create a disclosure page so that I am completely transparent and you guys can know exactly what I have received or whatever in exchange for blog posts or mentions on the podcast or whatever.  I will make sure to have this page up shortly after MIX (I hope).  Since this seems like a decent cut-off point for this part of day one, that is it for part 1 of Day 2.  Stay tuned and part 2 will be up sometime within the next 24 hours.

7Jan/100

Microsoft’s CES Keynote was a major snooze

Greetings Readers!

As I am sure many of you are aware, last night was Microsoft's CES 2010 keynote and if you watched it, you know that the most exciting thing that came out of the keynote was the power failure that delayed it close to 30 minutes (We live blogged it here).  As I stated last night, I would give my thoughts, both good and bad right here (Disclosure: I am a Microsoft Student Insider), so here we go.

I was rather surprised at the lack of announcements coming out of the keynote compared to years past.  For those hoping for a big announcement regarding the rumored new features behind Ford's Sync, you are out of luck.  Those are apparently being saved until Ford's keynote.  Hoping for a major announcement about the Zune HD?  Nope, nothing here either.  Windows 8?  Wishful thinking.  A portable version of the Xbox?  This will remain every gamers fantasy.  What was announced?  Ballmer really didn't announce much.  He gave some lines about Windows 7 being the fastest selling OS of all time and some analyst speculation that PC sales will increase considerably this year but I don't really call those announcements.  Steve announced that the HTC HD 2 running Windows Mobile will be coming to T-mobile but I am not sure anybody cares since we are talking Windows Mobile after all and T-mobile doesn't help either.  Steve said they would talk more about the future of Windows Mobile at the World Mobile Congress in Barcelona next month.  Ballmer did show off some prototype "Slate PCs" that will hopefully combat anything Apple announces later this month.  The one he really demonstrated was an HP prototype that was running Windows 7 and the Kindle PC software to demonstrate how good of an e-book reader it could be and it looked to be about the same size as the Kindle 2.  Sounds nice and I will definitely buy one, but if you are going to try to compete with Apple, you need to show something that will come out a little sooner rather than some prototype.  Wait, you really wanted to know what was announced?  Ok.

As far as REAL announcements go, there are a couple fairly minor announcements.  Bing is now going to be the default home page and search engine for all HP computers.  Excited yet?  They also demonstrated what a Cable Card and a pc in your tv could do and said that with it, you can record 4 HD channels simultaneously which was probably the most impressive thing from they keynote.  They talked a bit about Media Room and some partnership with AT&T's U-verse that I still don't understand and finally they had a couple interesting Xbox announcements.  Besides all of the interesting number like units sold and games sold, Robby Bach announced that Project Natal will ship as an attachment to existing Xbox 360 systems in time for Christmas 2010.  No price although I would expect that around E3.  There was also no demo which was kind of disappointing.  They also teased a new Halo game only to have it turn out to be a trailer for Halo Reach which was announced back at E3.  I was rather disappointed but the audience seemed to love it since they could see the trailer and everybody watching the stream could not.  The big Xbox 360 announcement was Game Room.

What is Game Room?  Game Room seems to be a virtual space similar to the PS3's Home where you can run around a giant arcade as your avatar and buy and play old arcade games that look like the arcade units you would spend tons of quarters on in years gone by.  Over 1000 games are planned for the next year that will be released in weekly batches that you will have to purchase.  The coolest part is that this will be not only for the Xbox 360 but for PCs too!  How much are these games going to cost you ask?  If you want to play an arcade game on both platforms, you will be paying 400 Microsoft points aka $5.  To get it on one platform, it is 240 points or $3.  If you really want the old school experience, you can pay 40 points or $.50 and get two quarters worth of playing time on the old machines.  The games can be played with other people, in 1080p and there are cross-platform leaderboards and achievements.  This is coming in the Spring update to Xbox Live.  Personally, I am really looking forward to this because lately I have had the urge to start buying old arcade machines and turning my basement into a small arcade but now I will be able to do it virtually instead of having to completely redo the basement.  This was the only real announcement with any cool factor to it other than the HD recording.  If you would like to see the demo that the people watching the live stream couldn't watch, you can check it out here.

That was pretty much about it.  It was a very boring keynote and ended kind of out of nowhere.  It certainly doesn't make me super excited about Microsoft this year but hopefully that will change.  What did you think about the Microsoft CES 2010 keynote?  Good?  Bad?  Boring?  Exciting?  Let us know!

20Nov/090

PDC 2009 Day 1: Three Screens and a Cloud

Greetings readers! This is the first of a several posts and a number of videos  from my experience at Microsoft's PDC for 2009.  Disclosure:  I am a Microsoft Student Insider (Find out a little bit more about this in one of my previous posts). Day 1 of PDC started off great despite the fact that a few minutes after arriving that I had forgot my camera back at the hotel (so no pictures from day one).  Registration was as simple as handing them my ID and they gave me my badge.  I found out the hard way that being there for Microsoft, I don't get any of the goodies like the Acer bag and whatever came in it.  The big disappointment as far as free goodies came on Day 2 which I will talk about in the next post.  Anyway, shortly after getting my badge, I followed the signs through the huge maze that is the Los Angeles Convention Center.  For those that haven't been here, this is quite the huge, impressive structure and when you are going from hall to hall, you will be doing a fair bit of walking. I managed to find they hall for the keynote and jumped into the line that was weaving its way down the long halls.  Despite the long line, once the doors were open everybody flooded in and took a seat rather quickly.  After a short wait, Ray Ozzy, the top architect at Microsoft since the stepping down of Bill Gates, came on stage and presented us with the idea of "Three Screens and a Cloud."  The keynote focused on having the same experience on a computer, mobile device and tv and using Microsoft's cloud OS, Azure, to do that.  Since last year's Azure announcement was in fairly cloudy terms, I never really got excited about it but after seeing what it can do and how it can scale, I think if all goes as planned, it is going to be amazing.  The major announcement in terms of Azure is that it goes into service at the first of the year and billing begins in February and that you only pay for what you use.  If you have a company with a large web presence, this is definitely something to look into, especially if you have traffic spikes and want to be able to scale up to those spikes but not have all of the server overhead when you don't need all of the power.

After the keynote, I spent the rest of they day going to sessions, eating, and having fun with the vendors that were there.  Although this was the case all three days, some of the sessions were interesting while others were so far above my head that I thought they were speaking in another language.   Although there were some sessions throughout the event focused on aspects of Windows 7, compared to other topics like Azure, there was very little talk about Windows 7 which I found kind of disappointing since it just came out a few weeks ago.  I also was disappointed but little to no mention of the next version of Windows.  Apparently Microsoft sees the future as everybody having their head in the clouds.

For the sake of keeping these posts short and to the point, I will talk more about some of the sessions I attended and what I learned in a separate post from my daily summaries.   I will post the happenings from day 2 at PDC in the next post to likely come out tonight or tomorrow and day 3 shortly after that.  I also have a number of photos and videos to upload when I get home too.  It might take a few days to get everything up as my school quarter started yesterday and now that this trip is coming to an end (I am sitting in LAX as I write this), I need to focus on making sure i don't fall behind in that.  I also have a number of other things to talk about as well as soon as I get a chance including the new Chrome OS.  Stay tuned!

17Nov/090

Microsoft’s PDC 2009 Coverage

Greetings Readers!

In the last post, I alluded to the fact that Microsoft has sent me to PDC 2009 (Professional Developers Conference) in LA since I am now a Student Insider and as part of that, I am going to be writing numerous blog posts throughout the week about the stuff that is being announced and talked about here.  I have also been equipped with a Flip Ultra HD camcorder to take video of what I see.  Since I got the Flip this afternoon, I will have to wait until tonight to charge it up and try it out but I should be able to shoot some video the next two days and I will likely have to wait until I return home on Friday to begin uploading them as internet speeds around here seem to vary somewhere between dial-up speeds during the keynote and around 1.5mbps at other times.

I am mainly focusing on Windows 7 stuff and various developer technologies that interest me and alter how I do my pet programming projects.  If there is anything specifically that you would like me to report on, let me know in the comments.  Feel free to check out the schedule at the PDC 2009 site and point me towards the sessions you would be most interested in me reporting on.  Also, once I get the video working, I will be doing interviews as well, so expect some cool stuff from that.  There are also a number of the Microsoft Surface tables here so I will get some videos of those too.

I am getting ready to go into another session so I will blog more tonight about what I saw today and just what I think about everything that is being shown off.  Stay tuned!

13Nov/090

I am now a Microsoft Student Insider, changes are coming

Greetings Readers!

I have some absolutely amazing news to share with all of you.  As of today, I am officially a Microsoft Student Insider.  What is that you ask?  Essentially, it is an unpaid job to blog about various topics that they would like me to blog about.  There is one student insider to talk about a specific topic.  In my case, I am the chosen one to speak about all things Windows 7.  Normally, I wouldn't take an unpaid position, but the perks of the job are good enough that I don't mind it.

While I will be writing a minimum of 15 blog posts for Microsoft over the next year, I am also being sent, all expenses paid, to whatever conferences they want to send me to cover.  While I don't yet know a schedule of everywhere I am going to be sent, I do know that I am being sent to cover PDC in LA all of next week.  It seems a bit fast considering I just got the job today, but I don't think I can complain too much about a free trip to LA and entrance into an expensive conference and I am getting some awesome stuff too.  As part of being a Student Insider, to help me cover the event and others like it, I am being given a Flip HD camcorder, an ASUS eee pc netbook, a Microsoft shirt and some various other things to help with cab fair and such.  I am also told that I will have access to talk to higher up people within Microsoft like various product managers and stuff, possibly even some board members either next week or at other times.

I will tell the story of how I got the position in either another post or on the next episode of the podcast which is at a time to be determined since I will be en route to LA at our normal recording time, but I do want to address what this means for the blog.

Although I have wanted a sponsor for some time for the show or the blog or whatever, mainly to help pay for my hosting fees, domain fees and such, at the same time, I have always dreaded the idea.  I have build the podcast and this blog on a goal of being 100% honest, 100% of the time with no BS.  I have always dreaded the idea of the sponsor because I don't like the feeling that I can't say what I want to say about a topic because I don't want to worry about offending them.  The last thing I want to do is open up my mouth and scare way people who want to throw money at me.  When I found out more about this position, I hesitated for a bit because of this, but I have decided that despite what I am being given or where I am being sent, I will do everything I can not to allow it to influence my opinions so that I appear to be nothing but a mouthpiece for a company.  I will gladly blog about the topics that they request I blog about, but in the end, I will express how I really feel.  I will do my absolute best not to censor myself.  I will allow Microsoft or anybody else to present their case to me and I will forward it on to my audience, but in the end, my opinion is my own.

If all goes the way I hope, the type of content on here and the podcast will not change, there will just be more Windows 7 related stuff and when it is something that Microsoft wants me to talk about, I will make that very clear so that you can factor that into your judgment of my writing when you read my posts.

I primarily see this as an opening door that I have been trying to work my way into for the past 2 years.  As many know, I have been trying to get a job at Microsoft for nearly 2 years and I see this as my way in and I will do whatever I can to achieve my dream while keeping my integrity in regards to Global Geek News but I suppose we will see how it plays out.  Anyway, there may or may not be a podcast next week.  Since I will likely be in flight when the show is recorded, it will definitely not be released on Tuesday like normal.  There is a small chance of recording on Wednesday but at this point, I am not holding my breath.  It is most likely the case that we will end up skipping a weeks show but I don't yet know.  I will keep you all informed.

More to come!

Don't forget to follow Global Geek News on Twitter and listen to the podcast!

23Jun/090

Reminder: Windows 7 Beta to begin bi-hourly shutdowns next week

Greetings Readers!

This is your friendly reminder that if you are still running the Windows 7 beta, you need up upgrade to the RC.  Starting Monday, July 1st, the Windows 7 beta will begin shutting down every 2 hours as a way to alert you that it will expire soon and you should get all of you important data off before it does.  The beta expires on August 1st, so if you don't upgrade by then, you could be in real trouble.

Windows 7 RC users won't have to worry about this until March 1st 2010 and expiration on June 1st 2010.  That should give you plenty of time to get the retail version which ships in late October.  If you aren't on the RC yet, I recommend it as it has several great features that the beta doesn't.  I am running Windows 7 on all of my machines now and I don't think I could be happier.

Check out the latest Global Geek News Podcast!

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-Jeremy "pcnerd37" Bray

10Jun/091

E3, the best Electronics Entertainment Expo in years, mostly

Greetings Readers!

As promised, I am here to share my thoughts on this year's E3.  I'm not going to address every game that was talked about, but more of my thoughts from the main press events, so here we go.

Lets start off with Microsoft.  This event was mind blowing!  I found myself sitting in my chair several hours after the event still saying "holy crap!"  The past couple of years have been a rather big disappointment from all of the major companies but this even alone makes up for all of it.  Before I address Project Natal, which was the main "holy crap!" moment from the event, lets talk games and Xbox functionality.  There were a ton of great titles that were announced at this years Microsoft press event, including Forza Motorsport 3, Halo Reach, Left 4 Dead 2, Crackdown 2, Metal Gear Solid Rising and even a Beatles version of Rock Band.  These were great announcements as many of the major titles including Halo Reach, Left 4 Dead 2 and Metal Gear Solid Rising were completely unexpected.  In terms of games, it looks to be a very bright year for the Xbox 360.  They also announced some great new additions to Xbox Live including Last.fm, Facebook and even Twitter integration.  This will do wonders for making the 360 become apart of your social network life.  They also announced better quality video streaming which is awesome too.  Finally, the biggest announcement was Project Natal.  This is Microsoft's one-up on the Wii motion controller.  When this is released, you will be able to interact with your 360 and games with no controller at all, just by moving your body.  If that wasn't cool enough, it can react to voice commands.  I cant say enough about this, so head here to check out the demo of it.

Nintendo was the second person to present at this years E3 and it made for a great opportunity to take a nap.  After the stellar event from Microsoft, Nintendo could have put just about anybody to sleep.  The major problem with Nintendo's press event was that it was largely old news and not the announcements that people were hoping for.  They spent a fair bit of time talking about the Wii Motion Plus which they announced and showed at length last year but doesn't come out until this week.  Nothing spectacular was shown with this, just another demo of Wii Sports Resort which was also announced last year.  The Wii Fit was also talked about at length and they announced a new expansion for the Wii Fit with some new exercises and stuff for those that still use the Wii Fit, all 2 of you.  Other than those disappointments, this year was the year of Mario.  A number of new Mario titles were announced including a new Super Mario Bros which allows up to 4 people to play at once and Mario Galaxy 2.  Other than Mario which didn't seem to overly excite many people, the only other major announcement was a new Metroid game.  While it looks interesting, I am not a Metroid fan so I can't say it had my jumping up and down and it didn't seem to get that big of reaction from the crowd.  There was no news about a Zelda game or anything that people were expecting other than after the event, one of the Nintendo people said one was in the works.  Generally, it was a complete snooze although a 4 player Mario does look interesting.

Finally, the last to present was Sony.  Unlike Nintendo, this one was pretty exciting too although just slightly below the Microsoft event.  They demo'd a bunch of major new games that nearly all look amazing including Assassins Creed 2, Metal Gear Solid Peace Walker and even my personal favorite, God of War 3.  There were a ton of great looking games announced but they took a back seat to the two major announcements, the PSP Go which I have already blogged about here and here, as well as their own version of motion control that looks like the Wiimote's uglier, more powerful cousin.  While it kicks the butt of the Wii motion control, its not quite as impressive as Project Natal.  Overall, they put on a great event.

Between Microsoft and Sony, this was an amazing year at E3 which Nintendo gave everybody a great nap opportunity.  This certainly looks to be an exciting time for gamers over the next year and I can't wait to play the many games that are coming out.  What did you think of everything that happened at E3 this year?

Check out the latest Global Geek News Podcast!

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-Jeremy “pcnerd37″ Bray

4Jun/090

Russia launches anit-trust probe against Microsoft because it hates Vista

Greetings Readers!

Russia's state anti-monopoly service has decided to launch an antitrust probe of Microsoft because it hates Vista.  Apparently Russia is complaining that Microsoft is cutting back on its shipments of Windows XP even though there is still demand for it.  It seems Russia would rather use an old, far more insecure operating system than use Vista.  They claim it is because there is still a demand for it which doesn't make a whole lot of sense because Microsoft certainly isn't the only company to have ever killed or in this case slowed down shipping a product that still had a demand for it.  I have come up with two theories as to why this is happening. First, they really hate Vista.  Despite the fact that it has been giving me trouble as of late, Vista isn't bad enough that it would warrant this kind of response.  My second theory is that the botnet and virus writers have infiltrated the Russian anti-monopoly office and are doing everything they can to keep people on an insecure operating system they can more easily exploit.  Personally, I favor the second option.

The hearing is set for July 24th so hopefully more will be revealed then.  What is your theory?

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-Jeremy "pcnerd37" Bray