Thoughts on The Arctic Cooling GCM

This isn?t really a review, and I can?t label it as such, if only because Arctic Cooling?s GCM isn?t really the type of device we usually cover. Still, when it landed in the office I just couldn?t help myself. It looked so cheap and nasty that the other guys in the office recoiled from it in melodramatic disgust. I had to write about it.

You?ve seen gizmos like the GCM before, probably. It wouldn?t be out of place on the prize rack of a fairground attraction, or in a machine at that really run-down arcade that your parents never let you go to. The packaging is emblazoned with bold claims that try to sell the GCM to you on a sheer value factor ? 80 games in 1? Wowee! ? all of which strengthens the impression that it?s going to be rubbish.

But, hey, at least it comes with its own Arctic Cooling batteries!

Of course, you can tell from the moment you turn it on and first hear those tiny, tinny speakers squeak into life that the 80 games it offers are going to be terrible; the lowest, cheapest emulations of the franchises and games that the creators feel they can get away with. You know that they?re going to be full of simplistic knock-offs at best, if they work at all.


Still, if you?re anything like me, you can?t help but hope a little. Maybe one of those games could actually be quite good, eh? Or maybe it?ll be just entertaining and cheap enough for it to be worth shoving the GCM into the bottom of your rucksack and keeping it for an absolute last resort ? those times when your DS, PSP, iPod Touch, Gameboy Color and mobile phone are all out of battery life. And your solar charger is broken. And you?ve not got a book. Then the GCM might sputter its way towards usefulness, maybe.

As soon as I picked up the GCM, however, all these ideas scuttled out of my head and it suddenly dawned on me what the others knew intuitively ? that there is no way the GCM could ever be good at anything, ever, for whatever reason. It?s too light and flimsy to even make a good paperweight, too bulky to fit into a pocket and too flimsy to feel satisfactory in your hands.

The GCM seems to sum up everything bad about mass production; vomited onto the market thoughtlessly and crudely because ? and I'm guessing this is the extent of any executive approval it might have received ? ?someone must want to buy this crap.?

And, seriously, it?s so badly made and designed that it makes broken glass look like a solid product. The sensitive Reset and Main Menu buttons are on the shoulders, right where your fingers normally rest. Even the screen rattles.


And the games? Sheesh. There are 80 of them, but they're all even worse than you might have feared ? mostly boring one-button affairs with no depth or excitement, in which bland Mii-like avatars drift floatily around boring backgrounds and respond to your button presses after a half-second delay. There are a few titles in the mix, such as the obligatory Breakout clone and Schmup, which work OK, but even they lack enough lustre or speed to encourage more than the first five-minute fiddle.

Most of the included games don?t even work, in fact. The GCM has got more bugs than an ant farm, and it crashes regularly too. One time I tried to boot up Jet Girl, one of the less obnoxious titles in the Racing Games category, but got nothing more than a 12 second loading screen followed by a burst of numbers running across the screen. A moment later the Fencing game loaded up instead. In French.

The GCM is really a joke, and its punchline must be the price. £40 for this pile of cheap, worthless trash? It?s one thing for the GCM to fulfil expectations by turning out to be a poorly built and cheaply produced pocket-toy full of games you wouldn?t play if you had to. It?s something altogether to charge such an outrageous RRP ? you could have a nice meal for two for the cost of this bloody thing!

As I predicted earlier, the GCM is indeed the type of product you?d expect to see in an oversized gumball machine outside a hairdresser in the bad part of town. No wonder this isn?t a proper review; there just isn?t a score low enough.

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5 iPad and iPhone apps to enhance the Oscars

With the 83rd annual Academy Awards quickly approaching, media junkies will be hurrying to see this year?s latest nominees, while catching up on the latest buzz and predictions.

Just in time for the Oscars, we?ve rounded up five apps designed to fill your insatiable hunger for Hollywood?s most important awards show.

Award?s Guide: The Oscars

Award?s Guide offers the Oscar nominees and winners from 1920 to 2011, allowing movie lovers to browse by both Oscar categories and years. By selecting any year, this app will list each category (best picture, best director) coupled with every nominee and winner. One of the coolest features of this app displays a list of previous nominations and wins. For example, by selecting Natalie Portman, a contender for best actress this year, Award?s Guide has included her past nomination for Closer in 2004. Nicely this app also includes a search feature however, it doesn?t sport any information about the films or nominees. Still, a handy app to have for reference while watching the show.

Live From the Red Carpet

E! Entertainment Television brings the red carpet to you through live streaming video, news, photos and videos that feature Oscar predictions, gossip and buzz. This app?s focus is on the hottest events happening in Hollywood but its Oscar 2011 section is completely dedicated to this year?s award show.

The user interface is pretty sleek and parades the Oscar-related content in horizontal boxes similar to popular news app Pulse. Overall there?s quite a bit of content available and it?s free for both the iPad and iPhone. We can?t speak to the quality of the live stream but if you fire the app up tomorrow the option should be live. There?s also a list of nominees but unfortunately it?s lacking direct links to movie information or IMDB.

Oscar?s Backstage Pass

FilmOscar?s Backstage Pass, developed by ABC, is a must-have app for anyone who?s serious about the Oscars. The app, available for both the iPhone and iPad will enable users to watch live backstage video streams. During the event, viewers will be able to switch back and forth between multiple cameras and they?ve even included a map of where the cameras are positioned. There are loads of cams to view, including a fashion cam on the red carpet, a backstage champagne cam, a winners walk cam, and a feed from the lobby bar. If you?re crazy about the Oscars, you can grab the app for .99. We?re hoping the footage quality will be as good as it sounds.

Vanity Fair Hollywood: Oscar?s Edition

Vanity Fair

Vanity Fair has been known to publish in-depth recaps of the Oscars in its magazine and, it has done an excellent job with it?s iOS Oscar edition as well.

This app is beautiful on the iPad and it?s super useful for previewing trailers of each nominee. Vanity Fair?s app divides screens by nomination categories (best picture, best director), offering a trailer for each nomination within the respective screens. Quick access to each film?s trailer/movie preview is very handy and is sure to make the Oscar?s more enjoyable, especially for passing around at Oscar parties. Users can additionally cast votes and share through Facebook which will later post your predictions to leaderboards. It?s available on both the iPhone and iPad and it?s free. Another must-have app for the Oscars.

The Oscars

OscarsThe Oscars, exclusively available on the iPhone, has a database full of this year?s nominees and past winners of the Academy Awards. It offers the latest news, photos, and a written synopsis of each film. Users can also make predictions or view user submitted predictions. Like Award?s Guide, there?s a way to discover the past winners by category or by decade and it offers results from the 1920?s up to today. The user interface isn?t that exciting and it doesn?t include trailers or much content as of yet. The Oscars was designed for the iPhone but it does work on the iPad, and it?s free.

Enjoy the show tomorrow, and feel free to post your Oscar predictions in the comments.

We should also note that Oscar?s Backstage Pass and Live From the Red Carpet are only available within the U.S. app store.

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Source: http://thenextweb.com/apps/2011/02/27/5-ipad-and-iphone-apps-to-enhance-the-oscars/

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On the Stump, Gingrich Puts Focus on Faith

If Mr. Gingrich moves forward with a presidential bid, as his advisers and friends say he is poised to do as soon as this week, he will start with a reputation as one of his party?s most creative thinkers and a record of leading Republicans back to power in the 1990s and confronting Democrats on spending.

But he will also have to grapple with aspects of his life and career that could give pause to elements of the Republican primary electorate, including a lack of a well-established association with religious conservatives and attendant questions about his two divorces.

So as he travels the country, he is striking two related notes: that the nation faces not just a fiscal crisis but also a loss of its moral foundation, and that his conversion to Catholicism two years ago is part of an evolution that has given him a deeper appreciation for the role of faith in public life.

On a recent winter night here, Mr. Gingrich, 67, stood on stage at a Catholic school with his wife, Callista, and introduced a film they produced about the role Pope John Paul II played in the fall of Communism in Poland. As Mr. Gingrich looked out over a crowd of 1,300 people, he warned that the United States had become too secular a society.

?To a surprising degree, we are in a situation similar to Poland?s in 1979,? he told the audience, which had gathered at a banquet for Ohio Right to Life, one of the nation?s oldest anti-abortion groups. ?In America, religious belief is being challenged by a cultural elite trying to create a secularized America, in which God is driven out of public life.?

To most audiences, Mr. Gingrich does not talk directly about converting to Catholicism, but his faith has become an important part of his dialogue with conservative voters.

In an interview, Mr. Gingrich said he knew that a campaign would bring new attention on the full scope of his personal and political background. Last week, in an appearance at the University of Pennsylvania, he grew testy when he received a question from a Democratic student activist about the details of his two divorces.

?There are things in my life I?m not proud of, and there are things in my life I?m very proud of,? Mr. Gingrich said in the interview when asked what effect his background would have on a candidacy. ?People have to decide who I am. Am I a person they want to trust to lead the country or not??

In Washington, Mr. Gingrich, one of his party?s best known and most polarizing figures, may still be remembered for a spectacular rise and fall: the Republican takeover of the House in 1994, the confrontation with President Bill Clinton that led to a government shutdown the next year, ethics battles and his resignation as speaker in 1998. He also acknowledged having an extramarital affair with Callista Bisek, then a House staff member, while leading impeachment proceedings against Mr. Clinton for lying about his own sexual transgressions.

But elsewhere, Mr. Gingrich?s reinvention has long been under way, amplified through regular appearances on the Fox News Channel, as he tries to build support among the voters who will choose the 2012 Republican nominee.

Rival Republicans marvel at his deep well of ideas, his innate intellect and his knowledge of government. They also point to the strategic approach taken by the Gingrich team in the 2010 elections, including holding training sessions for a new generation of elected officials. He has secured important endorsements, including one from the new majority leader of the Iowa House, who has been courted by all potential presidential candidates.

Mr. Gingrich said he believed that the 2012 election was comparable in historic scope to 1932, when Franklin D. Roosevelt defeated Herbert Hoover and ushered in the New Deal, and to 1860, when Abraham Lincoln prevailed over Stephen A. Douglas, setting the stage for the Civil War.

He urges Republicans to not settle for ?rejection conservatism,? which simply casts aside liberal arguments, instead of ?replacement conservatism,? which would fundamentally change institutions that he believes have outlived their effectiveness.

?That?s part of what the Republican Party has to come to grips with,? Mr. Gingrich said. ?Does it want to be a party prepared to replace the failed institutions and move to a very bold new approach? Or does it want to try to muddle through accepting the framework of the systems that are failing??

As always, Mr. Gingrich continues to mix the abstract and the more politically concrete.

The man who introduced the Contract with America in 1994, which still stands as a gold standard of political branding, now has a snappier jingle for today?s shorter attention span. The message is so concise that he pulls it from the breast pocket of his suit, no matter if he is delivering an intimate dinner speech or addressing a large audience, as he did recently at the Conservative Political Action Conference.

The note card reads: ?2 + 2 = 4.?

It is an elementary lesson on spending and debt, he said, that has eluded the Obama administration. He uses it to present his broader view that the next presidential election should be a major debate over the size and scope of government.

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Middle East Conflict and an Internet Tipping Point

First in Tunisia, then in Egypt, now in Libya: technologically savvy protestors are making extraordinary use of the Internet and digital media to support mass movements against autocratic governments.  The Twitter hashtag #jan25 and its corresponding date in history will mark a change in how those seeking to cling to power will look at networked digital technologies for the coming generation.

But before we get too excited about the future of global democracy, we should put the recent events in the Middle East and North Africa in their proper context.  One context is regional. The other is historical. 

The regional context is crucial. The way that activists, and relatively passive citizens, for that matter, use digital technologies in civic life is very different in different parts of the world.

In the United States, the way the Internet has driven sociopolitical change has been limited. Technology visionaries like Chris Hughes, the Facebook cofounder and a leader of then-Senator Obama's presidential campaign organizing efforts, use these tools to improve classic offline campaigning tactics, like door-knocking and get-out-the-vote.  Since the election, Hughes has turned his efforts to organizing groups to give more generously to philanthropy through a site called Jumo. This kind of sophisticated usage of the Internet in well-established democracies is effective, but not (yet) transformative. Perhaps our discourse is richer for the contributions of bloggers and others writing in what Yochai Benkler calls the "networked public sphere." But the kind of change that we see in long-standing (I hesitate to say "advanced") democracies is, so far, marginal.

On a different end of the spectrum, some of the world's strongest autocrats have managed to overcome Internet-supported protests in their streets. The response of Iran's government to the protests in 2009, despite quite effective use of the Internet to coordinate protests and to alert the world to atrocities on the ground in Tehran, was to crush the protests, punish the offending organizers, and get back to the business of running the state. The Internet may have helped organize the revolt, but it also might have given the Iranian state an effective way to track organizers down and prosecute them. The military junta in Burma in 2007 similarly survived the use of cell phones to organize and share pictures of monks marching in the streets.  Examples of the triumph of states over Internet-fueled protests are easy to come by.

The point is that the technology matters far less than the context of the politics, culture, and history of the place and people involved in using the technologies. In Tunisia and Egypt, it was crucial that a minimal number of people, commonly both young and elite, had high literacy rates, access to the technologies, and skill in using them. These states have very large youth populations and growing levels of sophistication, at least among the children of the wealthy, in their access to and use of digital technologies. One organizer of the Egyptian uprisings is now known to have been 30-year-old Google executive Wael Ghonim. He had created a Facebook page to commemorate 28-year-old Khaled Said, a businessman beaten by police the previous June. The sophistication of the activists and the corresponding lack of sophistication of the autocrats matters enormously.

The regional context matters in another way. It is plausible that the domino effect that we are witnessing in the Middle East and North Africa has something to do with the network as well. In some respects, common language and use of the same Internet-based tools is more important in a digitally mediated world than geopolitical boundaries are. The fact that the uprising in Tunisia prompted sympathetic protests in the region, and as far away as Turkey, may have something to do with the extent to which digital networks carried news of the uprisings very quickly, through social media and formal news outlets, in Arabic, English, French, and other languages. This is not to say that the governments in Libya and Bahrain will necessarily experience what the governments in Tunisia and Egypt have. It is instead to say that linguistic and regional affinities may be strengthened through digital networks, and may in turn lead to tinderbox-like conditions in certain regional settings. 

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Republicans Propose Budget Stopgap, Reducing Risk of a Federal Shutdown

Under the proposal, the law now keeping the government open would be extended two more weeks, until March 18, at the price of $4 billion in new spending cuts. In the interim, House and Senate leaders would try to negotiate a broader plan to finance the government at reduced levels through Sept. 30.

While the measure, which will be considered by the House and Senate next week, represents only a reprieve, it showed that both Republicans and Democrats were interested in easing the political tensions around the budget showdown.

As they adjust to the new power structure on Capitol Hill, both sides have said they hope to avoid an impasse that could shutter federal agencies. To make it harder for Democrats to object to the temporary plan, Republican architects of the proposal tried to make the cuts relatively painless.

They came up with the $4 billion by ending eight education, transportation and other programs that President Obama had previously sought to close down, a savings of almost $1.2 billion. They also reclaimed nearly $2.8 billion set aside for earmarks in the current budget; both the House and Senate have agreed to ban such pet projects.

?We hope the Senate is going to finally join us in these common-sense cuts to keep the government open and not continue to play chicken,? said Representative Eric Cantor, the Virginia Republican and majority leader.

Senate Democrats indicated they would be willing to go along with the proposal despite their insistence earlier this week that any temporary measure should be free of spending reductions. They had portrayed such a maneuver as a back-door way for House Republicans to begin enacting $61 billion in cuts that have met objections in the Senate.

?We are encouraged to hear that Republicans are abandoning their demands for extreme measures like cuts to border security, cancer research and food safety inspectors,? said Jon Summers, a spokesman for Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader.

If approved, the measure would buy time for more talks on the depth of spending cuts.

If the House and Senate do not reach a deal by March 18 under the latest proposal, they will once again face the prospect of closing federal agencies or be forced to enact another temporary extension.

Republicans said their willingness to fashion a measure that involved relatively uncontroversial cuts and was free of the more ideologically charged provisions included in the $61 billion plan showed that they were sincere when they said their main interest was reducing spending, not shutting down the government.

?This is to get the government moving forward but to cut spending in government,? said Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the No. 3 Republican. ?I don?t see how Democrats can?t take these basic steps toward reining in government while keeping our government operational.?

But Democrats said their efforts to raise the alarm about a possible shutdown due to Republican demands for deep cuts in a variety of federal agencies had paid off. They said Republicans instead chose to advance a temporary measure with the same kind of spending trims that Democrats had been advocating.

"They feared a government shutdown, and so they are adopting some of our suggestions on what to cut," said Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York, the No. 3 Democrat in the Senate.

The House is expected to approve the temporary measure on Tuesday, leaving a few days for the Senate to act and send a measure to President Obama before the current stopgap bill expires at midnight Friday. The time frame leaves little opportunity for the Senate to alter the measure and send it back to the House.

Senate Republicans said Democrats had few good options with the clock ticking and encouraged them to accept the bill and move on to the negotiations over the broader spending legislation as well as the budget for 2012.

?By supporting the House bill, our friends on the other side of the aisle will have the chance to ensure that the government remains operational while we work with them to identify additional ways to shrink Washington spending this year,? said Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader.

Striking a final deal will not be easy. Democrats contend that the $61 billion cut by the House in its marathon floor debate earlier this month reaches far too deeply into essential federal programs and strikes out at favored Obama administration initiatives like the new health care law. Senate Democrats have begun assembling their own package of cuts and expect to bring it forward next week as an alternative to the Republican plan.

At the same time, the new House speaker, John A. Boehner of Ohio, has little room for negotiation given the insistence by his rank and file, including 87 newly elected Republicans, on standing firm on the $61 billion in reduced spending that has already cleared the House.

But both sides agree that federal agencies face some level of significant spending cuts from the budgets they are currently operating under, a result that could cause some disruptions.

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Weekend Open Forum: Your first and current mouse

Parents Shouldn?t Text: a screen cap collection of awkward to WTF

Watching our baby boomer parents adapt to new technology is pretty funny. Sometimes its hilarious, but most of the time its awkward and just plain WTF. Some parents are better at using technology than others. Parents Shouldn?t Text is a site dedicated to the latter group. Launched at the beginning of this month, the site is the brainchild of Jillian Madison, who also created Damn You Autocorrect and the Pophangover Network.

It runs in a similar pack with When Parents Text and Crazy Things Parents Text.

I picked out a few of my favorites for you here:

Looks like Dads are worse than Moms at texting. I only wish they had a top rated  list one so I didn?t have to spend so much time perusing!

Got a good one? Submit it here. For updates, follow them on Twitter here.

ParentsShouldn?tText is a part of the Pophangover network, which includes Food Network Humor, Damn You Autocorrect, Worst Thing I Ever Ate, Funny Receipts, Spelling Fails, Awful Fan Art, Work LOLs, Jesus Gets Around, Why Did You Buy Me That, Epic WTFs and Really Ghetto.

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Source: http://thenextweb.com/apps/2011/02/26/parents-shouldnt-text-a-screen-cap-collection-of-awkward-to-wtf/

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Mobile Payments Try to Take Root in Afghanistan

When someone in a far-flung rural mountain village in Afghanistan wants to transfer money to family in another part of the country, there are few conventional banking options. A new text-based payment service, backed by the country's banks and telecom providers, now offers a simpler, more convenient alternative.

In 2008, telecommunications company Vodafone and Roshan, an Afghan telecom provider, teamed up to launch a mobile-phone payroll service called M-Paisa for the Afghan National Police. Now M-Paisa has been expanded so that anyone with a mobile phone and an M-Paisa account can transfer money across the country for a small fee.

The consultancy Frog Design was commissioned to study the implementation of the M-Paisa payment system in Afghanistan. Jan Chipchase, executive creative director of global insights at Frog Design, presented details of the work during a keynote presentation at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, on February 17.

With irregular bank hours, but a high mobile penetration, Afghanistan is, in some ways, ideal for mobile payments. "The gulf between what's there now and what could be there if it is successful is enormous," says Chipchase.

Similar mobile payment systems have been very successful elsewhere. The first system designed for cash transfer via text messages, called M-PESA, was launched in 2007 by Vodafone and Kenya's telecom provider Safaricom. Since then, other mobile money transfer systems have cropped up in several countries in Africa and Asia. ZPESA in Tanzania, Obopay in Senegal, and Easypaisa in Pakistan are variations on the M-PESA theme. But of all these systems, M-PESA has seen the most dramatic growth and success. It is now used by about 55 percent of Kenya's adult population for paying everything from electricity bills to school fees.

Setting up a system of mobile payments in Afghanistan proved to be especially complicated, according to Chipchase's two-week survey. Sporadic attacks on cell-phone towers by the Taliban have crippled coverage in parts of the country, and the regime has decreed that cell towers be turned off at night.

"The elephant in the room, of course, is war," says Bill Maurer, director of the Institute for Money, Technology and Financial Inclusion at the University of California in Irvine, which funded the study. Fotini Christia, a political scientist at MIT who has studied civil war in Afghanistan, notes that many rural areas lack cell-phone coverage to begin with.

Another stumbling block is the lack of cash trade in certain parts of the country, where people still trade in commodities such as goats and gold. Many rural Afghans still lack a basic education, limiting their access to the text-based M-Paisa service.  

Christia agrees that these issues are real obstacles to M-Paisa. "People still trade in kind, in a week's supply of crops," she says.  "If it was to pick up, it's more likely to pick up in urban centers rather than anywhere else." 

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