Every year hundreds of newscasters try to bring the public the most important events on the global, national, and local scale, and every year things go terribly wrong and someone ends up making an awful double entendre or getting hit by a skateboard. The annual collection of best news bloopers is online. Watch it with your teeth cringed and your hands covering your face, knowing if your job were on camera this would be you.
Judging by media coverage, 2014, has been a bad year for the aviation industry. But as the world anxiously awaits updates from the year’s fourth major air tragedy, an examination of the data shows air travel has never been safer.
It has undoubtedly been a horrendous year for Malaysia-based carriers, concluding with the missing AsiaAirlines flight QZ8501, with 162 passengers and crew. In March, Malaysia Airlines’ flight MH370 went missing over the South China Sea, with 239 on board—it has not yet been found. In July, the airlines suffered a second blow MH17 was shot down over Eastern Ukraine, killing 298.
Also that month, an Air Algerie crash in Mali killed 116.
But here’s a statistic on how safe it is to fly: as of September 2014, the average rate of crashes was 2.1 per one million flights.
“It will probably come as a surprise to most people, but really it was a very safe year,” Paul Hayes, of the aviation consulting firm Ascend told the Wall Street Journal.
Since the first commercial jet airliner took off in 1949, the rate of crashes has been declining, despite an increase in air travel, according to data from the Geneva-based Bureau of Aircraft Accidents Archives (BAAA-ACRO). The organization defines an accident as a crash if the aircraft was beyond repair.
And 2014, has had the lowest number of crashes—111 to date—in the jet age.
Kim Dotcom, founder of file hosting service Mega, today revealed his company will be launching a browser-based chat service “soon.” Dotcom referred to the service with the hashtag #MegaChat, though he confirmed with VentureBeat that this many not be its final name.
This is not the first time Dotcom has talked about the upcoming service, which gets mentioned every few months but has yet to hit public availability in any form. There is naturally a lot of hype surrounding it, given the increasing importance put on secure communications on the Internet. This time, the entrepreneur is promising the service will be encrypted, browser-based, and offer “high-speed” file transfers:
Mega will soon release a fully encrypted and browser based video call & chat service including high-speed file transfers. Bye bye Skype :-)
Back in February 2013, Kim first unveiled that Mega would be expanding into email, chat, voice, video, and “mobile.” We haven’t heard much about the secure email service since August 2013, but the company has since released a few mobile apps, and of course the other three fall into the same category: the upcoming Skype competitor.
In fact, Dotcom last year named Gmail, Skype, and iCloud as services that don’t offer enough privacy because they are based in the U.S., where the American government can demand access to data under certain circumstances. Since the news today focused on a chat service, he called out Skype again:
No US based online service provider can be trusted with your data. Skype has no choice. They must provide the US Government with backdoors.
In November 2013, the chat service was expected to arrive “in early 2014.” Mega users were supposed to be able to exchange messages in real-time with each other as well as be able attach files to those messages. The company also promised secure audio and video calls.
It’s not clear why it has taken so long to get the service out the door, though we suspect the browser-based requirement could have been a factor. The ability to run a service without having to download a separate application or install a plugin is a great trend, but it does present a few technical hurdles, particularly when attempting to offer end-to-end encryption.
Dotcom urged his Twitter followers to catch a glimpse of the service in this video of Julian Assange and Edward Snowden:
The video was published in September, though, as we’ve noted, this offering has been in testing for many months. We know it’s coming “soon,” but with just three days to go in the year, it looks like this will be a 2015 release.
When you get to be as big a company as Toyota, you can afford to go out and get A-list talent for your commercials. Over the last few years, the automaker’s created a series of ads starring boy band SMAP’s Takuya Kimura and film icon Beat Takeshi.
In the commercials, collectively known as ReBORN, Kimura and Takeshi play historical figures Oda Nobunaga and Toyotomi Hideyoshi, reincarnated in modern Japan. The latest installment even has a special guest star as Hugh Jackman, Wolverine himself, shows up to help spread the word about Toyota’s newest eco-friendly cars.
Jackman actually appears in two Toyota ads. In the more straightforward of the two, he drives along the coast in a hybrid Crown sedan, sings an English version of J-pop vocal group Greeeen’s “Kiseki,” and really doesn’t do a whole lot else.
▼ Well, except for look dapper, of course.
On the other hand, the actor’s work in the 18th ReBORN commercial is a little more surreal. Titled Ferry Chapter, and viewable here on Toyota’s website, it opens with the reborn samurai Nobunaga and Hideyoshi reminiscing on their experiences trading with European merchants in the 16th century.
“In those days, we were overwhelmed by the technology and production of the rest of the world, and how they had things like guns and cakes,” recalls Hideyoshi.
▼ Guns and cakes. Really, who could ask for anything more?
Nobunaga thinks Japan may have reached a turning point, though. “Japan can become a world leader in hydrogen technology,” he points out, before going on to talk about a new car from Toyota that produces only water as a byproduct of its operation.
“It’s called the Mirai,” Nobunaga explains, which is also the Japanese word for “future.” “The name’s a little on the nose,” he admits as footage is shown of the car, which Toyota expects to have ready for market next March.
“Japan, which has few natural resources, can develop a hydrogen society for the future of the planet,” Nobunaga declares. “Doesn’t that sound great?” he asks. Before his companion can answer, though, their conversation is interrupted by some very thickly accented Japanese coming from a very famous face.
“That’s the golden country, Jipangu, for you!” the sea captain exclaims, using the name for the country which Japan thinks used to be much more in vogue among non-Japanese speakers than it really was.
Startled by the newcomer’s sudden appearance, Hideyoshi asks Nobunaga if the seafarer is an acquaintance of his. “Nope,” he responds, and as Jackman continues watching them while they climb into their Prius, Hideyoshi implores the other samurai, “Let’s get out of here, quick!”
It’s an unusual, off-beat ending to the encounter, even by Japanese commercial standards. In the ad’s final moments, the samurai decide to head for a skyscraper in the distance. The camera doesn’t show us the next stop on Jackman’s voyage, but if we had to guess, our money would be on a repeat visit to the port of Tomonoura, the town where Wolverine fell in love.
▼ We know we enjoyed our time in the town that named a rose after the Marvel superhero.
"Sometimes you will need to make decisions that direct the course of your life, and not every decision in life can align with some flowery quote from Instagram. Not every decision is a dinner party story. Not every decision is something you proudly proclaim on social media.
We’ve pushed ourselves into this peculiar ideal where we’re not living unless we’re euphoric all the time, but some kinds of happiness are harder won, some of the best things in life come from places of pain, some of the truest joys are meant to be kept small and secret.”
We’ve all seen them. We’ve all pitied them. We’ve all admired them.
Japanese trains are full of odd sights — but perhaps none so odd as the spectacle of people managing to get some shuteye no matter how crowded or what position they are in, whether standing, sitting, kneeing or (unfortunately for those around them) leaning. No matter how fast the train is going, no matter who is watching — the Japanese are able to sleep anywhere.
Even more impressively, they are more often than not able to wake up in time for their stop. It must be some sort of innate ability taught when salarymen join major corporations.
A new music video called “Dreamer Nippon Inemuri” is proving popular because it pays tribute to these sleepy commuters, featuring a series of shots of people sleeping while riding a train. (“Nippon Inemuri” literally means “Japan dozing”.)
The roughly 50 sleepers were filmed by digital marketing planner Kairi Manabe over two days on public transport. We’re not sure if this counts as infringing on their rights but the results are interesting to watch — not least to admire the tenacity of these train passengers determined to get some sleep no matter what.
The music for the video is by Yusuke Emoto.
The video is actually a Web commercial for Home’s, a real estate portal site which offers a function where you can filter searches based on the commuting time. In other words, it’s encouraging you to move somewhere that’s closer to work! “A long, long way to bed” as the video poignantly says at the end…
In 2014 we searched trillions of times. What do these searches say about us? Explore the Year in Search www.google.com/2014 and follow the conversation on #Y...
Y'know, Rockstar's open-world games would be a great place to make a goofy comedy about bumbling crooks…
The Most Wanted trailer clip from the folks at YouTube's Commandoflauge channel hits all-too-familiar beats that are standard fare for loads of criminal caper flicks. But, something about seeing those familiar plot points done in GTA V makes them feel funnier. Maybe it's how unrealistic everything feels by virtue of being done in a video game engine. If this wind up being a full-scale production, then it'll be worth watching just to see how it actually gets made.
Over the past few months, I’ve somehow fallen back into multimedia in a big way. Besides the three video/text features I have going here on the side (Metroidvania, Anatomy of Games, and especially Game Boy World), Retronauts is back for a much-improved new season. I even made a video out of the most recent episode:
And now USgamer has a podcast, too. It’s potentially worth listening to, if you enjoy such things.
I also hosted a one-hour play session with Brandish, as part of my growing addiction to odd RPGs no one likes.
Needless to say, I’m beyond excited for the new SaGa game that will be coming to Vita and selling 20,000 copies.
Anyway, I’m going to go sleep now. I have new scripts written for each of my three video side projects, but since I’ve been suffering from a horrible cold lately I can’t record them. Thus I must rest to hasten my recovery. Damn this frail mortal meat-prison of mine.
The survey results — which came from 500 random phone calls via Marchex’s Call Analytics customer phonecall monitoring technology — show that people increasingly don’t want to pay for old-fashioned TV. (Name one other industry where one in four consumers calls up the company to ask not to have access to its main product?)
In place of TV consumers want the internet — through which they can get the video they want, which can also include TV programming — instead.
And numbers from BI Intelligence show that digital media — following a boom on the mobile web — is about to replace TV as the top venue for both audience share and ad revenue.
Chen Zhao, director of analytics for the Marchex Institute, told Business Insider, “It’s clear that consumers want very specific things from their cable providers — and at the most fundamental level, they increasingly just want a reliable internet connection to serve as a gateway to their own channels and choices.”
The internet is literally slicing up TV’s old business, according to new data from PwC. Look at how Netflix has become a head-to-head competitor to all of cable TV in the US:
Cable subscriptions among 18- to 24-year-olds dropped to 71percent in 2014, down 6 percent from the year before.
7 percent of pay TV subscribers aged 25-34 also had Netflix in 2014, up from 51 percent.
58 percent of 50- to 59-year-old TV subscribers also had Netflix in 2014, up from just 19 percent in 2013, the Wall Street Journal reported.
In the short time since that Credit Suisse report, most indicators have shown that TV’s share of both audience and ad dollars is in a long, slow decline as viewers move their attention to their phones, tablets and laptops. The death of TV may not be as swift as that of the hardline phone, but it’s happening.
However, it’s not until you see the following charts — compiled by BI Intelligence — that you realise in terms of viewers’ eyeballs and ad dollars, TV is already “over.”
Above: Credit: Business Insider
TV has been relegated to second-rung status by the arrival of mobile media, in just the same way that newspapers and radio were demoted by the internet.
Like newspapers and radio, TV still has a massive audience and commands lots of ad revenues. But TV’s audience simply isn’t as big as the audience being corralled by Google, Facebook, Apple and their competitors.
Most people don’t understand this yet: Because TV routinely gets huge global audiences for things like the World Cup and the Super Bowl, it “feels” as if TV still has the biggest media audiences.
It doesn’t. The internet and mobile web combined have the biggest audiences. In a couple of years, they’l also have the biggest bucket of ad revenue, too. (Ad dollars are always a year or two behind audiences.) TV is now a secondary concern if you want to reach viewers with either ads or content, data from BI Intelligence shows.
At Business Insider’s Ignition conference in New York, BI Intelligence prepared a chart that shows how TV is losing share of the media audience to online and mobile channels. TV no longer commands the largest portion of audience time. More importantly, digital media, at a 49 percent share, is close to claiming a simple majority of viewers media consumption.
TV lost its top spot in 2012. It’s now at only 37 percent of the market for eyeballs:
Above: Credit: Business Insider
One of the reasons TV seems so dominant, even when it’s not, is that digital audience time is often broken into separate “online” and “mobile” buckets. Those distinctions are meaningless to consumers, of course. But slicing that distinction is the only way TV still comes out on top with audiences.
Here’s the breakout. TV only comes top if you split web and mobile viewing:
Above: Credit: Business Insider
Note that in 2014, mobile on its own is the second biggest audience.
This, again, is a huge turning point in the world of media. The impact of mobile — which really only came online after 2007 and the launch of the iPhone — has vastly extended the reach of digital media. Web media may one day have eclipsed TV on its own. But that would have taken a lot longer without phones. It was the arrival of mobile media and video on the smartphone screen that really tipped the balance away from TV.
You’ve probably had that experience yourself: sitting on the sofa “watching” TV when you’re really looking at your phone or tablet.
The ad spending on web + mobile is approaching the point at which it will eclipse TV, probably in 2017:
This new option is the result of a partial integration with bitcoin processor BitPay, according to a report from Coindesk. The companies are planning to make an official announcement soon with more details.
The rest of the information page provides instructions for using the new payments method, including a warning that Microsoft cannot issue refunds for bitcoin transactions. It also notes that Microsoft is not yet accepting bitcoin directly, only as a way to add money to a Microsoft account first before purchasing content, the webpage says.
BitPay is a Georgia-based bitcoin processor founded in 2011 by Antonio Gallippi and Stephen Pair, and has raised $32.5 million to date.
Researchers studying the universe are ramping up to take the "image of the century" — the first ever image of a supermassive black hole.
Since the 18th century, astronomers have discussed the possibility of exotic objects in space so massive that their gravitational grip swallows everything that dares to get too close, including light. We call these objects, black holes, but in truth we do not know what a black hole really is because we've never actually seen one.
While the evidence for the existence of black holes is compelling:
"We have abundant evidence that black holes — or something very much like them — exist," Todd Thompson, astronomy professor at Ohio State University, told Business Insider earlier this year. "This evidence comes from the orbits of stars around the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy."
Now, a dedicated team of astrophysicists armed with a global fleet of powerful telescopes is out to change that. If they succeed, they will snap the first ever picture of the monstrously massive black hole thought to live at the center of our home galaxy, the Milky Way.
This ambitious project, called the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), is incredibly tricky, but recent advances in their research are encouraging the team to push forward, now.
The reason EHT needs to be so complex is because black holes, by nature, do not emit light and are, therefore, invisible. In fact, black holes survive by gobbling up light and any other matter — nearby dust, gas, and stars — that fall into their powerful clutches.
How to glimpse a black hole
So, how do you see something that is invisible? The answer leads us to the most advanced sub-millimeter telescopes in use today — telescopes that detect wavelengths of light longer than the human eye can see.
The EHT team is going to zoom in on a miniscule spot on the sky toward the center of the Milky Way where they believe to be the event horizon of a supermassive black hole weighing in at 4 million times the mass of our sun.
Every black hole has a point of no return, called the event horizon. Once light, or anything else in the universe, passes the event horizon, it never escapes and is swallowed up. Forever.
We can still see the material, however, right before it falls into eternal darkness. The EHT team is going to try and glimpse this ring of radiation that outlines the event horizon. Experts call this outline the "shadow" of a black hole, and it's this shadow that the EHT team is ultimately after to prove the existence of black holes.
"If we see the shadow, that will be the most powerful evidence we have that [black holes] do exist," MIT's Shep Doeleman told PBS.
A difficult task
This shadow, however, is incredibly small from our perspective.
The spot on the sky where the team is looking is the size a grapefruit would appear on the moon, as seen from Earth. The Hubble Space Telescope couldn't even see something this small.
That's why the EHT team turned to radio dish telescopes in Hawaii, Arizona, California, Chile, and Spain that, when combined, can resolve details more than 2,000 times finer than Hubble.
Recently, other EHT researchers, at the University of Arizona, simulated what our galaxy's central black hole and its shadow should look like, to get a better idea of what they might expect from their observations.
"That ring of light makes the black hole easier to find than if we were looking for complete blackness," Dimitrios Psaltis, of The University Of Arizona, said in a statement. "These simulations also help us find ways to distinguish this signature from all this swirling plasma around the black hole."
As shown in the clip below, the black hole at our galaxy's center is emitting jets of extremely hot plasma in confined columns at opposite ends. These columns are known as jets and have been observed around other objects throughout the universe. The EHT team wants to see beyond these jets, to the event horizon.
Using the university's powerful supercomputer, they created a black hole that is even more scientifically accurate than the visually stunning black hole in Christopher Nolan's latest film "Interstellar."
"Our team of four here at the UA can produce visuals of a black hole that are more scientifically accurate in a few seconds," Feryal Ozel, also of the University of Arizona, in the statement. Some of the visuals in "Interstellar" took a special-effects team of 30 and up to 100 hours for the computers to process.
Building the telescope team
To further improve their chances of seeing a black hole's shadow, the EHT team is continuously adding new telescopes to their global network. This is because the sensitivity of their measurements increases with each additional telescope, allowing them to measure finer and finer detail.
The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) — the world's most powerful submillimeter array — is slated to join the EHT project soon, along with additional telescopes in Mexico and the South Pole.
Last July, scientists installed the world's most precise atomic clock, costing $250,000, at ALMA's Operations base. The clock will sync ALMA's telescopes to other observatories of the EHT to ensure their recordings are accurate to within milliseconds. In fact, this atomic clock is so precise it will still be accurate to within a second 100 million years from now.
"The Event Horizon Telescope is the first to resolve spatial scales comparable to the size of the event horizon of a black hole," University of California, Berkeley astronomer Jason Dexter told Universe Today. "I don't think it's crazy to think we might get an image in the next five years."
Google is to start replacing its CAPTCHA tests with a simple request for users to confirm they are not a robot. The company believes the new system will be easier for humans and harder for computers.
Until now Google, and numerous sites that use its CAPTCHA service, have asked web users to type two words shown in images of scans from books. Only one of these words is actually the test; the other is a cheeky way for Google to get help with words its system wasn’t able to automatically recognize after scanning.
Humans struggling to make out the words and the test thus becoming an irritation is one problem with the system. The other is that it’s no longer as secure as originally intended. Ironically Google’s own attempts to develop automated recognition for figuring out building numbers captured in shots for its Street View maps were so successful it was able to achieve 99.8 percent accuracy when it used the tool on its own CAPTCHA system.
Google now says it will roll out a revised system that, on the face of it, simply asks the users to tick a box next to the words “I’m not a robot.” What’s actually being tested is the time it takes the user to figure out what to do and move the mouse, plus the movement of the mouse throughout the process. The theory is that humans will do this in an unpredictable, imprecise manner, whereas computers trying to replicate the task will be too neat and predictable.
Users on mobile devices will carry out a separate test in which they are shown an image, then asked to pick the matching image (or images) from a selection of nine shown below. That’s the type of task that humans can do much quicker than a computer, partly because we have the ability to determine and match a few key features.
It’s not the end of the traditional text-based CAPTCHA however. That will remain as a back-up test in case the new test doesn’t produce a conclusive result.
After seeing footage of GTA V on the next gen consoles, I'm beginning to think that GTA V isn't just a video game. A full blown parallel reality? That's more likely. A real life breathing city that exists somewhere? That'd be more accurate. This footage of Los Santos at night in GTA V is unreal.
If you grew up in the ’90s, chances are the original PlayStation was a part of your life. Arriving on the console scene long after rivals Nintendo and Sega, PlayStation was an altogether different kind of beast. Its games shipped on CDs, it boasted spiffy three-dimensional graphics, and one of its flagship titles even featured music by abrasive electro pop group The Prodigy. It may have been a dull grey slab of plastic, but PlayStation was the console that all the cool kids wanted.
By some cruel trick played on us by the forces of nature, Sony’s original PlayStation turns 20 years old today. This makes us feel tremendously bitter and old, but at the same time we thought this would be a good opportunity to look back at some of the great games that came into being through the console, and also to revisit the surprisingly dramatic tale of how PlayStation was born.
Humble beginnings
The original PlayStation launched in Japan on December 3, 1994, but it’s fair to say that the seeds were planted as far back as the late ’80s when video game giant Nintendo began working with Sony to produce optical discs intended for the distribution of their software. Nintendo’s own disks, which were released only in Japan for the Famicom (NES) Disk System add-on, were prone to data loss and could be easily copied by consumers, so Nintendo hoped to use new-fangled CD-ROM technology, a field in which both Sony and fellow electronics maker Philips were already key players, to distribute its games in the coming years.
Forming increasingly closer ties, Nintendo ultimately signed a deal with Sony–who was by this time was also making audio chips for Nintendo–to produce a disc-based add-on for their Super Famicom (Super Nintendo Entertainment System in the West), extending the console’s lifespan and allowing it to compete with rival video game company Sega, who was also exploring CD technology. Nintendo also granted Sony permission to build a console of its own, dubbed the Play Station, that as well as supporting Sony’s new disc technology would be compatible with Nintendo’s proprietary game cartridges.
▼ The prototype image for the SNES add-on that would go on to become the stuff of legend
With the hardware almost ready to go into mass production, Sony looked set to make its first foray into the video game industry, safe in the knowledge that it would be doing so with the help of the global market leader. At the 11th hour, however, Nintendo CEO Hiroshi Yamauchi got cold feet when he realised that the contract he had signed would give Sony significantly more power over software distribution than he had anticipated. Much to the company’s embarrassment, Sony was ditched by Nintendo in favour of Philips, with Nintendo breaking things off not through a series of boardroom meetings or awkward phone calls, but by publicly declaring that it would instead be working with the Dutch electronics company to bring its CD add-on to the world.
Sony, a company whose experience lay mainly in TVs, audio equipment and semiconductors, was now left red-faced and with a console that they could not legally take to market. Clutching at straws, they approached Sega in the hope of partnering with them and sticking it to Nintendo, but the gaming company reportedly scoffed at the idea of working with a group that had never released a single game or piece of gaming hardware as long as it had existed. Sony was on its own.
A question of space
Things were looking grim for Sony, but a man named Ken Kutaragi, the same Sony engineer who had singlehandedly developed the Super Famicom’s sound chip after–or so the story goes–being decidedly unimpressed with the original NES’s bleeps and bloops, pushed forward the notion that there was money to be made in the video game industry. Rather than scrapping the entire project and wasting thousands of hours of work, Sony’s bigwigs ultimately decided to make the best of a bad situation by launching PlayStation, as it had been rebadged, entirely on their own and going up against Nintendo. With the backing of then-CEO Norio Ohga, Kutaragi was tasked with making PlayStation a success.
Fortunately for Kutaragi, a decision later made by none other than new rival Nintendo helped PlayStation become a household name right out of the gate. Despite experimenting with the format and it being the very cause of the troubles between Sony and Nintendo, Nintendo’s CD-ROM add-on never saw the light of day. Instead, the games company pulled a complete 180 on the storage medium, citing long load times and–as later turned out to be painfully true–the ease with which CDs could be pirated as their reasons for not making the new format a part of their next console, the Nintendo 64, or Ultra 64 as it was then known.
But game developers were already very much in love with CDs. They allowed for vastly more data to be stored, making it possible to include things like pre-rendered backgrounds, full-motion video and high-quality voice samples in games. Not only that, CDs were markedly cheaper to make than Nintendo’s cartridges and were a format that consumers were becoming increasingly fond of and familiar with. Slow load times or not, developers such as Square and Enix (then entirely separate entities) urged Nintendo to ditch cartridges for optical discs, but Nintendo dug its heels in and vowed to stick with its existing format. As a result, a number of big-name software developers chose to cut ties with Nintendo, shifting development of their games to newcomer PlayStation, a console which had not only been built from the ground up with CD technology at its core, but whose creator was at that exact time aggressively courting software developers. Securing key titles such as Final Fantasy VII and Dragon Quest VII, both of which were originally destined for Nintendo’s next console, PlayStation suddenly became the only place to play a number of much-loved franchises, and fans took notice.
Commercial weirdness
Like Sega before it, Sony aimed to distance its console from Nintendo’s own by positioning it as something intended for more mature audiences. Taking advantage of its clout in the music business and numerous corporate connections, Sony wooed developers, recording artists and commercial makers alike, establishing Sony Computer Entertainment (a name that, notably, omitted all mention of the term “game” due to its slightly childish connotations) and building an altogether sexier and more mature public image for its console; one that its key demographic of teenagers and young adults would be enticed by.
PlayStation launched in Japan on December 3, 1994 and with its futuristic 3-D graphics and grown-up image was met with much fanfare. The console took almost a full year to reach North America and Europe, but by the time it, did Sony had already started bombarding the TV-viewing public with a series of bizarre ads (a strategy they would go on to employ once again in 2000 for the launch of PlayStation 2) that set tongues wagging and expectations high.
▼ The original PlayStation launch date teaser
▼ The console’s UK ads were equally odd. Heads up for the manic staring Scottish kid at 00:42.
▼ The “Society Against PlayStation” ads took a slightly different approach, at one point even showing an actor tossing the very product he’s selling into the bin.
Got game(s)
It was PlayStation’s software library, though, that was key to its success. Sony lacked a mascot to rival Nintendo’s Super Mario or Sega’s Sonic The Hedgehog, so instead aligned itself to be seen as home to the kind of content that older, more image-conscious consumers would be happy to associate themselves with or be seen to enjoy. As well as ports of arcade titles that pushed technological boundaries, games appeared on PlayStation which featured mature themes that would have seemed positively alien on Nintendo’s decidedly family friendly platforms.
We’re sure we would have eventually seen some of the following games on some console or other had Sony not decided to step into the ring, but it was thanks to their little grey box that we first got to experience some of these 32-bit gems:
▼ Capcom’s Resident Evil, complete with its now legendary ropey voice acting and live-action video.
▼ Straight from the arcades, 3-D fighter Tekken spawned a number of sequels and was one of PlayStation’s flagship titles. Developer Namco even slipped a watered-down version of Space Invaders into the game’s loading screen to keep impatient gamers entertained.
▼ You may have forgotten it existed, but Destruction Derby took our breath away back in the ’90s. There were bits actually falling OFF the cars!!!
▼ Psygnosis’ futuristic racer Wipeout had The Prodigy’s “Firestarter” as one of its background music tracks. Enough said.
▼ Riiiiidge Raaacer! How did that woman holding the placard not get mowed down at the start of every race?
▼ Free to shove as much game data as they liked onto the disc, Square brought us the now iconic RPG Final Fantasy VII
▼ Metal Gear Solid was one of the first truly “mature” titles many gamers ever played, and featured hours of cinematics and expertly voiced dialogue. It even had credits appearing during the opening level.
▼ Grotesquely proportioned as she once was, would the gaming world be the same without Tomb Raider’s Lara Croft?
Despite its unlikely beginnings, PlayStation went on to take an enormous chunk out of Nintendo’s share of the console market, and spawn a number of successors and the brand, as we know, is still going strong. By the time it was discontinued in early 2006, more than 102 million units of the original console had been sold worldwide, and in many countries “PlayStation” had become a generic term for the box under your TV that plays video games. Not bad, as we’re sure Sony would agree, for the little console that got dumped at its first prom.
Happy 20th birthday, PlayStation. Your younger siblings might have smarter graphics, online capabilities and controllers that lack the long lengths of cable required to make the spaces between our couches and TV sets veritable death traps, but your blocky, awkward graphics, that weird ticking noise you sometimes used to make, and, yes, even your frequent disc read errors will always have a special place in our hearts.
We’re constantly amazed by the creative ways people come up with to reuse defunct technology, and here’s another one to blow your mind. One YouTuber has used his programming and music skills to reproduce popular tunes and game music using… floppy disk drives!
With the rapid progression of technology many things fall by the wayside never to be used again. Remember cassette tapes? No? How about CDs? Just about, huh? Some kids today probably don’t even realize that you used to have to buy your music in a physical format.
In the world of computers, one such obsolete technology is the floppy disk.
Once upon a time, you had to have a whole library of the things just for your Word documents, deleting files whenever you could to make space and worrying that your data would get corrupted by ejecting the disk too early, but these days you can carry around your entire media library on a tiny USB stick. Despite our fond memories of the past, I think you’d be hard pressed to find anyone who would actually rather we returned to the days of watching your file sizes like some people watch their weight. However, one person has found a new use for all those old disk drives he–for whatever reason–had lying around.
Anand Jain, known as MrSolidSnake745 on YouTube, uses floppy disk drives to recreate music from retro games along with other popular tunes.
It all began back in October 2011 when he used three drives to play the Imperial March from Star Wars. He now has a setup of eight drives and has created around 60 songs with his floppy drive orchestra that you can download for free here.
Using the sound of the drives reading, Señor Snake somehow perfectly recreated the songs of gaming from your youth. It’s a nostalgia overload!
Check out some of his videos below.
▼ Super Mario World – Athlete’s Rag on Eight Floppy Drives.
▼ Here’s the original song for comparison.
▼ And for you young ‘uns who never had the joy (?) of hearing it, here’s the sound of a 3.5″ floppy disc.
▼ Final Fantasy VII – Those Who Fight Further on Sixteen Floppy Drives.
▼ The original boss theme.
▼ Song name? Darude – Sandstorm. Seriously.
Pretty impressive, no? If you’re a big fan of his creative work you can support Anand on Patreon here.
I'm still not sure if Better Call Saul is going to be good but I do know that I miss watching Breaking Bad so much that I don't really care. I'd watch characters like Saul Goodman and Mike Ehrmantraut in anything. Here's the first real good sneak peak of the upcoming TV show.
It shows Saul meeting Mike for probably not the first time. The series premieres on Sunday February 8th on AMC.
What makes or breaks your decision to purchase something new and unfamiliar? For some shoppers it may be the peculiarity of a product that loosens their purse strings. Others may be won over by the low price or high quality of an item. And then there are those who have a weak spot for cleverpackaging.
Of course, price and quality matter, but the packaging of a product plays a significant role too despite the sad fact that it usually ends up in the trash soon after the product has been taken home. If you’re fond of interesting, creative, unique packaging designs, take a peek at this little collection!
You’ve probably heard of the idiom “don’t judge a book by its cover”, but at the same time, the existence of such an idiom is probably also proof that humans tend to be swayed by appearances. Which is why manufacturers spend time and money on package design to capture the attention of consumers. If I saw these interestingly packaged products on the shelf at a store, I would probably have a hard time keeping myself from reaching for my wallet!
▼ Earphones that play music.
▼ We wonder if this spaghetti tastes anything like New York City.
▼ Orange juice in a cute orange packaging. That’s a really small carton of juice though.
▼ Black melon bread that passes itself off as an afro haircut.
▼ This could be a good way to test if someone has had too many beers.
▼ Doggy treats that are good for the teeth.
▼ Little blisters of olive oil dressings, perfect for picnics and parties.
▼ This perfume probably rocks.
▼ Matches being carried by a tiny truck.
▼ Beverages for lonely people.
I don’t think I would want to french kiss a green drooling monster, but I would probably be tempted by that intriguing packaging nonetheless. Have you ever bought something just because its packaging looked nice?
If you have ever had the good fortune to spend any amount of time in Japan, you might have noticed that TV programming is a whole different animal there. It is entertaining, the news is informative, and there is food everywhere.
The Japanese love their food, and with good reason. So, NTT DoCoMo makes the most of a good situation by illustrating the speed of its expanded LTE service, now being aggregated on its incumbent 1700MHz spectrum.
Cooking and recipe shows are commonplace in Japan, and in some cases, food just pops up, even on programs where the topic is something else entirely. In this case, DoCoMo decides to take a basic recipe for shrimp to the next level.
Why mix in flour, eggs, and breading to be sautéed when an air-cannon, some valves, and open flame can do the trick in a faction of the time. If you think this was fast, wait till they try the dumpling recipe.
Some crazed genius made a song from the MailChimp ad at the introduction to every Serial episode./cdn0.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/2886264/skateboard-gif.0.gif)
A young Christian Bale.
Jason Alexander, Jerry Seinfeld and Julia Louis-Dreyfus on the set of Seinfeld.
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Every black hole has a point of no return, called the event horizon. Once light, or anything else in the universe, passes the event horizon, it never escapes and is swallowed up. Forever.
Using the university's powerful supercomputer, they created a black hole that is even more scientifically accurate than the visually stunning black hole in Christopher Nolan's latest film "Interstellar."
The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) — the world's most powerful submillimeter array — is slated to join the EHT project soon, along with additional telescopes in Mexico and the South Pole.
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