A lot of my visitors may have not heard of CitiesXL, and that’s mainly my fault as it’s slipped under my radar along with the fact that I haven’t really been updating the site as often as I should, but things are changing for the better in the near future. As beyond the reviews of generic big tech events, I’m also going to start doing previews and reviews of games and software that I get access to. Thanks to the friendly people at Cities XL’s development company they allowed me to participate in the beta since last night and after I figure out how everythings works I’ll be starting off this new trend of full reviews and previews with Cities XL as the first.

I tried really hard to get some of those cities xl beta keys to give away but alas they didn’t have any further available for giveaways but if that changes I’ll be sure to get some for my most loyal visitors. After only 1 night with the beta i’ll say this much it’s definitly a hell of an experience, and blows things like simcity out of the water, but like any beta it’s a work in progress and it shows. But more information will come after I, you know actually do the proper tutorial and have a city that’s not about as bad off as california’s budget is :).

You know sometimes you see something that’s technologically amazing that it was pulled off and looks as good as it does, but sometimes that thing that’s so amazing is just sort of creepy as well no matter how much you tell yourself it isn’t. Well the new baby commercial from Evian water, is totally amazing but also a little bit frightening/creepy at the same time. Don’t get me wrong the kids are cute, the graphic’s work are impressive, but something just still makes it awesomely creepy.

It’s definitely worth a look, and the picture above really doesn’t show how funny and cute and still creepy the video remains to be. So definitely take a look at it below if you have a few seconds it’s definitely worth it :)

Ok the unbelievable has happened reports are breaking everywhere that Michael Jackson is dead! He died today of Cardiac Arrest. The calls started coming in at 12:20pm and by 5:30pm the report is that after being rushed to the hospital and 45 minutes of resucitation they were not able to save him and he passed away.

No matter what you thought of his personal life his music was amazing and he touched hundreds of millions of peoples lives and the world is a bit sadder now that hes gone. He will sorely be missed!

After Microsoft pulled the plug on it’s OneCare product line it announced that it would be re-releasing the antivirus product as a free product before the end of 2009. Microsoft already offers AntiMalware in the way of Windows Defender, considering the fact that even though sales of OneCare wasn’t that great, in many AV tests OneCare rated in the top 3 so the fact Microsoft is basically repackaging it and releasing it for free no strings attached should give Norton, McAfee and the other Antivirus makers that seem to just release more and more bloated software year after year a nice run for their money.

According to Janice Chaffin, president of Symantec’s Consumer Division, “Microsoft’s free product is basically a stripped down version of the OneCare product Microsoft pulled from the shelves. A full Internet security suite is what consumers require today to stay fully protected.” which I find to be COMPLETE AND UTTER BULL.

As a computer technician, and network engineer let me just break it down for you. Microsoft already has a “Suite”.

Firewalls have been built in to XP and Vista, in fact Vista supports bi-directional filtering. But even when it comes down to this it doesn’t really matter to the average consumer sitting behind their linksys router NAT’d and firewall’d already so why do we need additional firewalling? Oh ya so that Norton can randomly screw up and blog mail and messenger and other oddities that I’ve seen over the past 3 years.

AntiPhishing… last I checked this was built into IE8

AntiMalware… Windows Defender in Vista and Windows 7

AntiSpam… Windows Mail / Outlook already have spam filters and their constantly getting better.

and now Microsoft is moving Morro to be a free Antivirus to complete the security “Suite” as the Norton and Mcaffee schills continue to sound their “we’re better because you pay for us” Bulls*it. The fact of the matter is in the modern day and age if you do your windows updates, and run a basic free antivirus your pretty much as safe as you ever will be, What Norton and the big Antivirus manufaturers want is to scare consumers into thinking they need their bloated slow and useless software when the simple fact is.

Ok i’ve rambled for long enough, on to the goodies care of neowin for the leak. Remember Morro will apparently be releasing for free before the end of 2009 to work side by side with Windows Defender (hence the similar look).

You won’t be seeing any dotpitch in between these cell sized pixels with the entire LCD display measuring only 0.27 inches and sporting an impressive 600×480 resolution. This is probably the most definitive bit of information that micro-displays are getting sharper and more advanced.

This latest display prototype is Kopin Corporation which had to shrink the individual color pixel dots down to 2.9 x 8.7 µm to reach this standard just for a bit of reference the basic human hair is 100 µm wide, meaning these dots are 2% of that basically much closer to the size of a red blood cell in our body than anything else.

No one can really complain about fidelity at this insane pixel density, but Kopin promises that the development is a necessity so that they can later scale the same technology up to doing 2048×2048 displays on the size or slightly smaller than the typical postage stamps. Kind of funny isn’t it all those big boss people screaming how their TV’s are “True HD because they do 1080p, LOL just now a screen the size of a postage stamp will have the same resolution, and god forbid you start imagining if they scaled it up to full you know 24″ screen sizes :) Can’t wait to see the video cards to push something like that :) Ahhh don’t you just love the way technology keeps leaping forward every day.

Source: BusinessWire