Sights and Sounds of Multimedia
By George Harding
E3 …
E3, shorthand for Electronic Entertainment Expo, is the premier games show in the US and perhaps elsewhere, held annually in Los Angeles. It drew a huge audience of 70,000 from 79 countries, which is amazing since the public is not invited! Only those in the games business in some way may attend. Those of us in the media are also invited, thus my ability to get a press pass. There were some 400 exhibitors demonstrating over 5,000 games, many of which are new this year. There were a number of items of note at the show.
Xbox 360. Everywhere you look, you see the evidence of a product that does not exist, at least not yet! Microsoft’s Xbox has been available for several years and has been moderately successful. Sony’s PlayStation, in its various forms, is the number one console presently. Nintendo, too, has a viable product, but it probably lags the Xbox.
Everywhere you turned, you saw Xbox 360: many of the bags had the logo; drink cups also were emblazoned by Microsoft; the Microsoft area was covered with the logos; other areas had games designed to play on Xbox 360. Everywhere!
Each of the three companies is coming out with a new product. We all know that the PC can be upgraded by increasing memory, installing a bigger hard drive, getting a better video card or do a brain transplant with a new motherboard. But what do you do to upgrade a console? Not much. As soon as a console is released, it begins to fall behind in terms of capability. The only answer is to come out with a new product.
What do all those who own the old product do? Can they play all their favorite games on the new product? Do they want to? That depends. If the manufacturer has enough games already out there and they are selling well, it would be foolish to require all owners to not only buy a new console, but also buy replacement games, right? Well, that depends on the manufacturer.
Microsoft is the first to not only announce a new product, but to also show prototypes off. The essence of the new console is faster, bigger and better! So what else is new?
The faster part is due to an upgraded motherboard. The Xbox 360 chips (three IBM Power-PC chips running at 3.2 GHZ each) scream, memory is 512 MB, 20 GB hard drive and the video card is faster. The change in video card vendors is interesting. Xbox uses an nVidia card, while Xbox 360 uses an ATI card. There’s nothing wrong with nVidia’s stuff these days, in fact it is as good as ATI. It isn’t clear why Microsoft chose ATI over nVidia, but ATI is pretty excited about the choice. Xbox Live will still be included, and the unit will be Wi-Fi ready.
The Microsoft publicity says that there will be over 160 games available when Xbox 360 comes out, which is to be before this Christmas. That’s a lot of games to be produced in a short time. It may be that some of the Xbox games will be able to run under Xbox 360.
Both Sony and Nintendo have also announced new console models, but they won’t be available until some time in 2006. That gives Microsoft a timing advantage, plus the holiday sales period.
PC Games. Always something new! There were something like 1,000 new PC products announced. Some of them look pretty good, but many are just so so. These games all take advantage of the latest abilities of video card and other advances. Some of them are so demanding that our current systems probably won’t be able to run them!
I’m somewhat disturbed by the constant trend toward violence in PC games. Many of the new games are FPS’s, first person shooters. Some of these can be played by more than one person in head-to-head battles. While these are pretty exciting and challenge youir manual dexterity, for younger gamers they set a standard of no consequences action. It is not too much of a stretch to conclude that shooting someone with a powerful weapon has no consequences either in the game or in real life. That is frightening!
The ESA is a cheerleader for game companies and the industry in general. They see their task as including doing battle against those who would put restrictions of the sale of violent games
There are several state and local governments that are trying to restrict sale of certain games to those under age. Parents should be the gatekeepers of such purchases, not the several governments, yet few parents would actively get between their kids and buying games!
E3, put on by the ESA e3expo.com and e3insider.com
Excel Annoyances …
This book is made for those who have had one or more vexing problems with Excel. If that’s you, the answer can probably be found here and lots more besides.
Curtis Frye is an established author, including several books on He has the book divided into chapters that deal with several categories of problems: Entering Data, Formatting, Formulas, Manipulating Data, Charts, Exchanging Data, Printing, and Customization.
His solutions vary from basic training on how to use a feature, to how to tweak things just so. Each Annoyance is the result of someone’s problem with an aspect of Excel. Since many people do not upgrade to the latest version of Excel when it’s available, the book covers solutions from Excel 97 through the current Excel 2003.
One of the most interesting things I learned was the existence of a function that translated numbers into Roman numerals! I never knew this existed. That’s not to say I would ever have any use for such a function, but it was interesting playing around with it. If you want to try it out, type a number in one cell and in another, type this formula: = roman(cell), where cell is the location of the number you typed. You’ll see the result in roman numbers, as advertised. Slick! Someone once threatened to file his income tax return using roman numbers, just to make things hard for IRS, and this is a way it could be done. IRS would probably object.
Screen shots are used liberally in the book. These may simply be a shot of a worksheet but often a related dialog box is also shown. Occasionally a text box includes extra information that may be of importance for a subject.
One extra feature include in the book is reference to some time-wasters, also known as games. Each is an Excel version and is free to download. There’s Pac Man, Arkanoid, BlackJack, Rubik’s Cube, Tetris and more.
There are occasional answers using Visual Basic, but for the most part, the answers simply use the settings that are already in Excel. Most users never tap the full potential of Excel, and I’m no exception. I feel I am an expert, but I certainly learned a lot by reading this book and you will too, if you use Excel at all.
Excel Annoyances published by O’Reilly www.oreilly.com 256 pages, about $25
Pictures:
Click on a Picture to see the Full Size Version
Use Back Button To Return Here
