You know 'pimped' is a word that has gone out of style when
Dell uses 'pimped out' to describe their latest system.
At the CES keynote, Michael Dell had some choice words about this red machine covered with flame graphics. I guess Dell is trying to target the gamer audience, because in addition Dell questions XBox360s street cred, calling them poseurs because Dells are "much faster than any gaming console you can buy". And while that may be true, game developers are exiting the PC market and going to the consoles to bring their game experience to the widest audience possible. The future of games on the PCs are MMORGs and FPS. The consoles will have everything else.

Last week at CES, Pioneer unveiled a standalone Blu-Ray player for $1800. Sony's Playstation 3 is speced to include a Blu-Ray drive, which has analysts believing the Sony PS3 could launch with a $500 price tag. When it comes to pricing Sony products, analysts have been wrong before -- such as predicting the PSP would be $500, when it actually released at $349. The war of the consoles, this time played out by Microsoft vs. Sony, is turning into an interesting one -- the field to be won is not in hardware, but in software.
What a short sense of history we have. DVD players initially were expensive -- about $1800 for the top of the line Sony units -- in time as DVDs were adopted as the next-generation format (there was a brief format war between DVD and DivX), the cost of manufacturing players dropped, and now DVD players can be found for less than $100. The Playstation2 when it was released was $50 less than a Xbox, and $50 more than the Nintendo GameCube. It also had the advantage of releasing first and including a DVD player at a time when the cost of a PS2 was equivalent to a standard low end DVD player.
I expect much of history to repeat with Blu-Ray. Xbox 360 does not have a Hi-Def media player bundled in. As people move to HDTV, the desire for HD content increases. I've experienced this myself after watching kwc's HDTV Plasma. When it gets to that res, what used to be acceptable now begins to look rather low-quality, and the search for HDTV content begins. Much of next-gen gaming is aimed at HD content, and consumers will get to the point where I believe given the choice between an HD console without HD-DVD or Blu-Ray (XBOX360) and a HD console with Blu-Ray (PS3), from a hardware standpoint, I believe the consumers will choose the PS3, because it is easier to justify the purchase of 1 thing for a slightly more expensive cost because it is less disposable. If PS3 as a gaming platform flops, you still have a Blu-Ray player. This, is also why I believe Blu-Ray will be the format of choice for high def video content. Even with the possibility of USB ports to hook up additional devices (such as external Blu-Ray or HD-DVD) consumers are likely to notice that it is at an additional cost, and given that they've already done the core plus buying peripherals marketing scheme any further purchase looks like a bad buy. If Xbox360 flops, all you have is the library of bad Xbox games to fall back on.
What it really comes down to, however is the software, and Nintendo is actually best poised to leverage its library of game classics as a major sales point. Playstation 3 seems to be putting it's bet on Blu-Ray, while Microsoft, in their race to be first out the door will be the first to be obsolete. Maybe that won't matter as they sell games, but as far as I can tell, game sales for Xbox360 have been rather weak. Christmas is over, and with the arrival of credit card bills, many consumers who may have thought about a next generation gaming system will probably wait for another system to release before making their decision.

With the announcement of the MacBooks, one of the features that Apple lists is the "ExpressCard/34". Unless you are into hardware, you probably haven't heard too much about the ExpressCard, because it's relatively new, and the use of ExpressCards relies on three pieces of technology that until very recently haven't been assembled together -- the right chipset, PCI Express architecture and ExpressCard.
What is an ExpressCard/34?


The ExpressCard is a way of getting a PCI-Express expansion slot onto a laptop. It's a new format of I/O device card designed to replace the PC Cards of yesteryear.
How fast is an ExpressCard?

It's much faster, theoretically capable of a throughoutput of 500MBps (250MBps in each direction) when compared to the PC Card (132MBps) The speed of the ExpressCard makes it ideal for doing data transfer without compression (useful for harddrives and other detachable media devices). For comparisson, USB 2.0 is 60MBps, Firewire 800 is 100MBps, Gigabit Ethernet is 125MBps.
What else is new in an ExpressCard?

There's two formats for ExpressCards at this moment, the ExpressCard/34 with a width of 34 mm and the ExpressCard/54 with a width of 54mm. Unlike the PC Card, instead of relying on an ejection button, the ExpressCard sticks out a little bit so one can just pull it out with their fingers.
What can we see in the future for ExpressCard?

I expect to see ExpressCard addons to include HDTV tuners (HDTV quality video display would choke a PC Card) and as the replacement for the PC Card, so we can expect to see any device produced for the PC Card to make its way onto the ExpressCard as well. Already available are some memory card readers and network adapters.

A Gallery of Book Covers that you can comment on.

One of my resolutions this year is to try and eat a little healthier.
Years ago, I linked to the The Meatrix, an advocacy campaign against factory farming. Now, the Sierra Club has created
True Cost of Food, a short animated film on sustainable food.
Some handy-dandy food sustainability links:

• The Eat Well Guide:A listing of places that support sustainability.
  
• Seafood Watch, the Monterey Bay Aquarium's list of seafood that is okay to eat and those to avoid.
  
• The Meatrix: Fight the Factory Farms (link to the Flash Movie).
  
• Krafted: How Kraft uses genetically engineering in their food products without consumer knowledge.
  
  
• Take a Pass on Chilean Sea Bass: How our eating habits are driving the Chilean Sea Bass to extinction.
  
  

My sister and I went to San Francisco to check out the MacWorld exhibit hall. The iPod has definitely started a resurgence of interest in Apple products -- unlike last year, every square inch that could possibly be used as exhibitor space was utilized, and it was actually pretty hard to take good product photos at the show. While the introduction of the MacBooks and the new revised iMacs with Intel was pretty major, it wasn't quite as cool as the iPod shuffle being introduced.
Like last year we managed to get there a little bit before the exhibit halls opened and take some photos of crowds assembling outside Moscone and some of the San Francisco advertising billboards. And just like last year, the billboards changed after the keynote was over. This year, about half of the billboards were advertisng MacWorld, which were replaced by what seemed to be Apple's theme for the show: "What's an Intel chip doing in a Mac? A whole lot more than it's done in a PC."
I'm not really quite certain that MacWorld should be called MacWorld anymore. The emphasis now seems to largely (from the number of vendor products at the show) seem to be largely targeted at the iPod.
iPod car integration still seemed to be very popular.
Flickr Photoset: MacWorld SF 2006
For a full summary, read on.