Understand a few things before you QQ (listen up, it's important). You are looking at a newbie mission - in a Solrain newbie shuttle. This is the equivalent of "Go out and collect me 10 boar tusks young one; gain a level while you're at it. Congratulations, you're two!"

The flight mode is using "dampeners". That's a jargon way of saying flight-assist mode is turned on. This allows new players to spend their first few missions learning the game instead of learning how to fly. Once you disable dampeners you enter into a Newtonian physics based flight sim in Space.

The video on this screen is awful, it's grainy, but it's something to look at while we wait for the game to get out of Alpha (yes, that's right, alpha testing). Watch some of the videos that aren't shot on hi-8 looking at a flat screen monitor for a better sense of the graphical experience.

Finally - if you don't like the UI, the whole thing is Flash based. This means that dev-minded gamers will be able to tap into an API, download the original .fla files, and totally re-write the look and feel of the controls. The dev team has openly admitted that a few guys in a vacuum are no match for the innovation found in a game community. Their goal is to give us - the gamers - a structure to work with in order to create a better game experience.

This doesn't even go into the new public quest system... where gamers can even get really cool quests designed and enter them into the universe.

All in all, this is a group with a lot of experience trying to deliver us a true MMO experience right down to interface and universe design. Personally, I'm really looking forward to it.

Yessss.... the eyesss... they "will blend"

But... will it blend?

Look, you're totally missing the point here.

I'm an IT guy. Provided my phone is in my pocket, my laptop always has an internet connection. It's great. Unfortunately it's not exactly grandma-friendly having to figure out which of 3 INIT strings an 2 dialup codes to use after determining the right port and launching the phone connector in windows. A lot of people pay me a decent bit of money so that they don't have to think about the details.

The significance here is on a market level, not a technology level. It's grandma-friendly torrenting; and that has to scare the crap out of the studios.

But will it blend?

That's "code name: Sam" to you!

Geez, testy. I'm actually a Microsoft fan for lots of reasons that don't belong in this thread.

Thank you for correcting my mis-understanding. I haven't read a white paper on the cell chip in several years. My point had more to do with MS strategy to make Sony over-extend (brilliant) than with the finer technical details of the chip. If I wanted to be a bastard I'd say something about technical vs executive job skills here but I'm also feeling charitable.

My apologies for getting the technical details of the cell chip a little off.

Effort to outsell? Yeah, that's the business world. Honestly though - let's look at how the game played out so far. Microsoft sucker-punched Sony and they took the bait hard. Let's review.

1. MS wanted to take out at least a 20% market share on their next generation box, the 360.
2. So they leveraged their PC hardware contacts and built the best system they could manufacture based on current technology.
3. Sony, never one to be outdone on a hardware platform, went and built something so advanced it couldn't even be reliably manufactured for the first two years. This meant they were selling $2000 hardware for $600 and being crapped on by consumers for price-gouging. Not an enviable position to be in.

The result? Nintendo pulled a ninja miracle by betting on the wii and XBox 360 has ridden high for 18 months now as the top-end enthusiast system; problems be damned.

Now MS is cruising on easy-upgrades and yeah, PS3 still has the better hardware. No one is going to pretend an octacore system doesn't just destroy the 360's performance. Then again, if we're talking 2010, then we're talking about 38nm octacore. Intel has been showing them off already at trade shows and they scream.

So MS is doing what it's good at - sustaining technology upgrades - while developing the next generation systems for 2010. The whole competition will come down to who can get the best price to performance ratio: Intel or IBM.

It should be fun to watch.

A lot of people figure the convertable thing is just a rendering mistake. It's not. There is a far better gallery - including pictures of the real thing (plus hot spy-girlfriend blond) over here: http://www.autoblog.com/2008/02/14/geneva-08-preview-rinspeed-squba-concept-for-the-spy-who-lov/

The best part is that I felt my $20 was well spent to get rid of the effing nag that iTunes threw at me every time I plugged in my iPod.

At first I was irritated. I ranted, I raved, I even tried to download ( http://www.theboysdownunder.com/wmpod/ ) to manage my iTouch from WMP only to be served up a jucy fist full of 404.

Then by the 25th time or so I gave in. I'm sorry, I now embody everything that is wrong with an iPod user.

Just don't think for a minute I'm going to forget the experience, Apple.