• ARM® Cortex™-A8 600Mhz+ CPU running Linux
• 430-MHz TMS320C64x+™ DSP Core
• PowerVR SGX OpenGL 2.0 ES compliant 3D hardware
• 800×480 4.3″ 16.7 million colours touchscreen LCD
• Wifi 802.11b/g, Bluetooth & High Speed USB 2.0 Host
• Dual SDHC card slots & SVideo TV output
• Dual Analogue and Digital gaming controls
• 43 button QWERTY and numeric keypad
• Around 10+ Hours battery life

Why would you be even remotely interested in this thing? Read on!

One of the major stumbling blocks for undecided consumers is the price of the Pandora which currently sits at a fat $329. “I could buy a PSP for nearly half this price, why should I buy a goofy looking Nintendo DS with no published game library?” Well, you’re right. There are a couple commercial developers who are currently writing games for the Pandora and will probably sell them after the console hits consumers’ homes but that doesn’t really compare at all with the game library available for the PSP or DS. However, the real beauty of this handheld lies in the Open part of Open Pandora.

Anyone can write software for the Pandora and it doesn’t require that you buy an M3 for your DS or potentially brick your PSP by programming it with a specially modified firmware. This thing runs Linux. Angstrom linux to be precise. That means you have a whole library of applications and games that have already been written that just need to be ported to the ARM architecture found on the Pandora. By far the popular suggestion and the reason the Pandora looks like it does is console emulation. Emulators have already been ported for consoles ranging all the way back to Amiga and even Playstation emulation is possible at full speed. My PSP sure as hell can’t do that based on my last attempt to play UN Squadron for the SNES in an emulator but it looks like PandaSNES will.

While gaming and console emulation were the primary driving forces behind the Pandora’s design, it also fills a much needed gap between low-horsepower UMPC’s and netbooks. Being that it’s about the size of an original Nintendo DS, it fits in your pocket. Try stuffing a netbook in your pocket and if you haven’t already busted your seams, you’re sure to get the old “Is that a EEE in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?” I must point out that the Pandora should not be considered a netbook replacement as the small screen size and cramped keyboard will probably wear you out quickly if you’re trying to do some serious web browsing or office work. However if you’re looking to do some IMing on the go or casual web browsing between gaming sessions, I think it’ll fit the bill nicely with its built in WiFi and Bluetooth.

While you’re at it, why not load up an SD card with movies and music? The ARM Cortex CPU and the DSP core have enough oomph to play videos in their original encoded form. This is one of the things I’m looking forward to most as having to re-encode videos to a specific profile and resolution for my PSP is annoying. I want to be able to drop some random .mkv on my SD card and watch it just as though I were sitting at my PC, except I’ll be on a bus or cramped into cattle class on an airplane.

This article would normally be peppered with more than just Youtube links to the various emulators and applications that have already been ported or written for the Pandora but unfortunately the main Pandora forum is down due to the overwhelming demand for the console. I’m in for one just because this thing is too geeky to pass up. What say you?

DamagedGoodz dotNet is now in its fourth incarnation but we’re back and, well, mostly the same as ever but this time it’ll be different! I swear!

I’ve salvaged as many of the old articles as possible from the previous two aborted fetuses of a site. What about the original DGz site? It’s still up and running somewhere on the intertubes. I’ll leave it as a challenge to the reader to go out and find it.

The site layout and whatnot is very much work in progress. And it’ll probably be slow work indeed. Damnit Jim, I’m an engineer not a web designer! If something is really broken, drop me an email and I’ll take a look. Some of the articles didn’t entirely survive the transfer. Once I track down the people who wrote them and somehow convince them to continue writing for the site, I’ll see about getting those fixed.

I’ve failed at websiting three times now, let’s make this one count!

I’ve been looking for the source of these amusing comics for a while. I was finally pointed to this video which explains the whole thing. Apparently this clip is from a Japanese TV show about how to piss people off?

Vonage was found guily for violating 3 patents held by Verizon, and was demanded by a jury of their peers (uh-huh) to pay $58 million, along with a 5.5 percent on all future sales. Note Vonage’s last quarter loss of $65 million. Here’s a link

On an unrelated note, for some reason when you search www.cnn.com it will never seems to find its own news stories. Weird.

• Sony “Home” Video
• “Little Big Planet” Video

Check the article out here. I wanna get a Wii that looks like this:

How does one even review unreleased music when not in the employ of a major label the mainstream music press? I cannot say, although I wish I would have posted this closer to late January when I first got my advance heard the album, because it would enhance my credibility. Anyway, let’s cut to the chase - this is album is a fucking disaster. Remember the awkward douche-chill lyrics of “Making Days Longer” from Since We Last Spoke? Now, stretch out that angst across an entire 47 minute album. The Horror! Oops! That was a good release by RJD2, why couldn’t he have done something like that? Because he hates breaks now? What happened to the RJD2 who would “tape a break from a KFC commercial?” Without fail, every track that started cool (e.g. “You Never Had It” and “Reality”) turns into a commiseration of, “You like Gnarls Barkley too?!” Even if you removed the lyrics, the music is still mostly mediocre-wannabe Dangermouse/Gorillaz fare. The only track that doesn’t make me feel like a MySpace predator is the instrumental “Legends” which hearkens to rhythm-free IDM, more Casino versus Japan than Dangermouse.

The worst part of the other tracks are the middle-school lovelorn lyrics reminding me of the embarrassing “Le Desir” or the stalker anthem “Sleep” (First she worked in a little shop, where I saw her everyday / She wouldn’t talk, she wouldn’t smile, but I liked her anyway), both from B. Fleischmann’s otherwise stellar release Welcome Tourist. RJD2 has nothing to offer this outing, comparatively - at least Fleischmann had the stomping crunch of “Guided by Beats” and contrasting noise/warmth of “A Letter from Home” to make the rest of the album worthwhile; The Third Hand only has that awkward “I’m watching you outside your bedroom window and masturbating” vibe that ruins any chance for enjoyment on the vast majority of the album. It’s like going out on a date with your best friend and his girlfriend, but end up bowling alone while they make out. For forty-seven minutes. At least this time, you don’t have to call your mom for a ride home.

Windows Vista, in all of it’s forms, has been getting universally lukewarm reviews. While this has been quite satisfying to me, there is a large contingent on certain social networking sites that feel the need to defend and rally around spending hundreds of dollars to lose features. The article in question is hilarious first, because when i was doing background research to write this, I came across an article with a completely opposite view from last year by the same author. Whoops! Looks like its fashionable to be contradictory. His next mistake is dissing Bruce Schneier … one of the modern founders of hardcore cryptography and security. In my mind, he has already lost any credibility without even examining his claims further, but for completeness there are some Vista-esque points I wanted to mention.

One of the things being discussed on Digg and in the article is the idea of the Protected Media Path that Vista uses. No one involved in the aforementioned discussions would mention the proper technical name of course, but the confusion comes from not understanding things like the ICT and the analog hole . The Protected Video Path (a subset of the PMP) is a requirement to encrypt audio/video data passing over the PCIe bus. Wow, I’m sure that really helps performance out…but this is not the issue under discussion at the moment. The primary confusion is that there is a set of people who take Vista’s restrictions too far, claiming that all video is down-sampled to 960×540 and digital audio outputs are disabled when playing back music, etc. These people damage the credibility of the legitimate critics of Vista who simply hate its reduction of features (virtualization restrictions, etc.) and terrible performance. The people whining about HDCP don’t understand that the existing software for XP that plays back HD DVD and Blu-ray already refuses to allow output of video over a digital connection (HDMI/DVI) unless both the video card, video card drivers, and display are HDCP-compliant. XP won’t even down-sample to half-resolution/analog audio for you the way Vista would.

The author also mentions how since legal DRM playback options don’t exist in Linux, Vista must somehow be superior. Well, legality aside, you sure as hell can playback EVO and VOB files in VLC (which still runs in Linux the last time time I checked). VOB can even be decrypted thanks to DeCSS, but with the WinDVD 8 device key floating around , I’m sure it won’t be long before any HD DVD or Blu-ray disc will also be capable of being played.

The last thing Ou drags into the discussion is gaming performance not being hindered by Vista’s DRM requirements. I agree that it isn’t hindered directly - however, it is hindered indirectly by the fact that the absurd driver layer (which some allege will reset the computer if a voltage drops low on the PCIe bus to prevent hardware snooping) is not yet ready for prime time so existing NVIDIA/ATI drivers suck. Gaming performance blows ass in Vista . These guys agree . Read the whole articles for either of those, but you can see an average 5-10% performance hit, sometimes much worse, sometimes trivial. Certainly not a good reason to spend $200. There is also the allegation that DirectSound has been dropped in favor of OpenAL (wtf?!), so surround sound gamers who like EAX, etc. better enjoy stereo for a while until a driver compatibility layer and/or per-game patches are released.

My final $0.02 is on the subject of performance - across the board (regardless of gaming), it sucks. Even power consumption is higher. 32-bit Vista is universally faster than 64-bit Vista , and 32-bit XP is faster than either (even 64-bit XP sucks less than 64-bit Vista ). What I find funny is that it seems (despite conventional logic) Aero glass performs better than Aero basic (the UI included in the cheapest/most common of the four major versions of Vista). Aero glass can’t even compare to Beryl .

The bottom line is, George Ou doesn’t know what the fuck he is talking about (and can’t even spell Blu-ray), and neither do the rest of the mouth-breathers at Digg. Anyone who doesn’t have a desire to lose performance and features shouldn’t upgrade to Vista. If you are lured by the shiny twirlings of Aero glass, try a LiveCD w/ XGL , as you’ve got nothing to lose.

So, I’m sure many of you have noticed that Viacom has recently requested that Google remove their content from Youtube. Given that much of that content is currently available on comedycentral.com, you could say it’s not a big deal. However, I think I finally understand why Google bought Youtube. I’ve found that it is nearly impossible to find the clips that used to take a few seconds to find on youtube. Yes, I have all of the recent Daily Show and Colbert Report episodes downloaded, but I definately don’t have the search mechanism on my system to find the clips I want to see, and especially when friends are over and we just want to recap on some really funny clips…well, you get the jist. Anyhow, I’d really like to say that Viacom really dropped the ball; I find it unbelievable that they weren’t able to work out a deal with Google, especially given that they seemed to find an agreement with Joost, a company started by the creators of Kazaa and Skype (aka P2P applications).

Speaking of Joost, does anyone have a spare invite to the service and is willing to fork it over to one curious tech user who no longer watches real television? For those of you who don’t know what Joost is, it’s a video P2P service that essentially replaces cable by provided cheap access to HD video channels on the internet. It is still in beta, but according to their website it should be public by the summer. Although I ultimately standby on-demand content, I feel that Joost is a good start to get the television industry migrated over to an internet platform.

And finally, I’ve got to plug this amazing podcast I stumbled upon last year called My Silver Mount Zion. For those of you not familiar with the band Silver Mount Zion, they are an offspring of Godspeed You Black Emperor, both bands of which are post-rock, I guess you could say, so that is primarily what this music podcast covers. They play a variety of independent music, and the hosts are entertaining but not overbearing (meaning they still play a lot of music but have fun with it). They have a hiatus, I guess you could say, but a new episode was published this month, which I am currently enjoying. I highly recommend it, please check it out!

Godspeed.

-Chief

Nabaztag/tag’s new talents :

• He can hear : Tag/tags can hear you through their bellybuttons
  • Voice command : tell your rabbit what to do and he will obey
  • Voice messages : send voice messages directly to your friends’ rabbits from your tag/tag
• He talks even more : streaming audio
  • Ability to play messages or any audio feed for an unlimited period of time
  • Ability to play Podcasts and MP3 WebRadios
• Sense of “smell” : RFID tags reader(*)
  • Stick the small electronic tags (RFID) to your personal items (ie.- books, keys, wallet). When you wave them up against his nose, Nabaztag/tag will recognize them and react according to your predetermined instructions.
• More new features :
  • Shiny white finish and a colorful little tail (volume control)
  • Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g
  • Supports both WEP and WPA encryption
  • Audio jack for external hardware

Equipped with all these capabilities, Nabaztag/tag will gradually learn, invent and discover new services to show off his new talents.

Buy one here