Thursday, November 20, 2008

PlayStation addict diagnosed with 'mental detachment'

An Italian 13 year-old boy was rushed to the hospital after his father found him in a shocked stupor. The kid, one Lorenzo Amato, didn't seem to respond to anything around him - he couldn't even speak. Cue panicked father, sound the sirens.

Once rushed to the emergency room, the doctors first thought that the kid must have suffered from a stroke or some other serious brain impairment.

Eventually, the father described to the doctors that he discovered Lorenzo in this way after a PlayStation (not specified which kind of PlayStation) marathon for hours on end.

Antonio Buccoliero, a local politician in Italy, commented on the matter:

They eventually managed to take care of him once they understood that this was a strange kind of mental detachment connected to his PlayStation.


Again, they didn't seem to specify which kind of PlayStation.

From all indications, it seems that Lorenzo Amato has recovered from whatever mental shock he's been through (man, I wonder what he was playing at that time?). However, that doesn't mean he's on the greenlight. Apparently, he's scarred and traumatized for life.

The report explains that he asked his father to get rid of his PlayStation, saying that "I feel like throwing up if I even have to think about it."



I only have two questions: 1. What game was this kid player that is almost killed him (literally and figuratively)? 2. What's wrong with today's youth where you can cause so much stress on yourself from a video game?

I have been playing games since about 1990. I have never been in a drunken stupor to the point were I was rushed to a hospital unless it involved a fight after a Madden tournament or NBA Live. Wow - they just dont make kids like they used too.

Wednesday, November 19, 2008

Directions to Mercury's neighborhood



I hope Mercury Morris breaks out another freestyle if the Titans can get closer to the perfect season.

3rd Down 4 to Go: NFC Review


NFC East
1. Dallas (6-4) - If Tony Romo rights the ship and steers the Boys to a 11-5 record, could he oust Kurt Warner from the MVP throne. Highly unlikely that Romo does this, but it appears they will catch fire now that they most desperately need it.
2. Philadelphia (5-4) - Playoffs? We're talking about playoffs. Can you smell the last onion on the cheesesteak we call the Andy Reid-McNabb era in Philly? Expect an Iversonesque fire sale from the Eagles soon.
3. Washington (6-4) - It appears the Skins are wearing down Portis and his knee is riding metal to metal. Say hello to the NBA version of the Phoenix Suns, the best team for periods of the time of the season that can't catch a good break.
4. New York Giants (9-1) - Does losing Brandon Jacobs make this team better? Ward is better out of the backfield for the air game (not to mention 500 yards on the ground) and Bradshaw is a bruiser in his own right.

NFC South
1. New Orleans (5-5) - With 3 division games to end the season, there is hope. Yes, a small amount. Like the amount of hope gas prices will drop to high school prices of $1.09/gallon. I believe in miracles.
2. Carolina (8-2) - The running game has been superb as of late. But wat up Jake? Look likes he needs a mid-season emergency Tommy John surgery.
3. Atlanta (6-4) - When was the last time a team had all of the following: Coach of the Year, Rookie of the Year, Most Improved (Roddy White) and the Rushing Champ? Arthur Blank is crying himself purple right now.
4. Tampa Bay (7-3) - How can a team continue to rack up these ugly wins? Shouldn't last year set the precedent for being good enough to get to the playoffs and lose be enough to enact a rule that Tampa shouldn't be allowed in unless they score more than 24 pts in 3 of their last 6 games? Sorta how the Flint Tropics had to sell out their games for the rest of the season with stunts like this to make it to the NBA. I love this sexy movie.
NFC West

1. Seattle (2-8) - I didn't even have to update this section all season, it reads the same: It's not that the Seahawks are that good, but more of saying that this could be the weakest division in football. Seattle may struggle early with a number of receivers out, but it should be better after the return of Branch and Engram. Man this division sucks.
2. St. Louis (2-8) - The Haslett era started with about as much promise as Charlie Weis and the Irish. Let's see if the Rams clean house after this or let the team move back to LA.
3. Arizona (7-3) - This team may be in line for the Tampa Bay curse of locking up your division too early, not playing down the stretch, and then stinking it out the first round. I hope not, this team can pass on anyway. As long as the Giants don't rough up Kurt Warner, they will be ok.
4. San Francisco (3-7) - Although the jury is still out on the Martz/Singletary era, this team is playing better so far.

NFC North
1. Green Bay (5-5) - Very mediocre division. Since we are past week 10, ladies and gentleman, meet Ryan Grant. This guy is like a bat, only comes out in November/December.
2. Minnesota (5-5) - Adrian Peterson. Adrian Peterson. Adrian Peterson. Adrian Peterson. Adrian Peterson. Thats all that comes to mind with the Vikes. That and how would Vick look running the wildcat with Peterson....hmmm?
3. Detroit (0-10) - At least you have Allen Iverson across town right? And you are not the Wolverines.
4. Chicago (5-5) - This team is one Kyle Orton ankle break away from out of the race. Devin Hester needs to break a kickoff back soon.

Original Playoffs Picks
Dallas, Green Bay, Seattle, New Orleans, WC - Philadelphia, Minnesota
Revised Playoff Picks
New York, Green Bay, Arizona, Carolina, WC - Dallas, Atlanta

The ultimate phone breakdown

Before 2007, using the internet on your phone would make you want to kill yourself, if you were dumb enough to believe the crap splattered across that tiny screen even was the "internet." But the combination of increased bandwidth and better mobile software means that more phones really are promising to deliver the real internet, in living color. We tested eight different browsers, and while some put smiles on our faces, others proved that rendering HTML correctly is a far cry from actually giving you an awesome web experience. And what about 3G vs. Wi-Fi? Everything the carriers have told you is a lie. This is the true state of mobile web.

Before we give you the rundown of each of the most prevalent mobile browsers, here's how they all stacked up in a timed test of how fast (and how well) they could render websites, chosen for their diversity and particular challenges:

This second chart runs through the same procedure with all of the phones that had Wi-Fi options:

It's a pretty daunting pile of numbers, so let's break it down into standard prose, rating each browser as we go:
Android
A fast, smart mobile browser based on WebKit. It tackles most sites with (almost) unrivaled grace and speed. Panning and zooming could be smoother and more responsive, but with a ton of options for getting around a page—various touch methods and the trackball—few sites will be challenging to zip around. The only thing we really miss is multitouch for zoom. Buttons just aren't a very elegant or precise solution, and while the whole-page magnifying glass technique is nice, we'd love something a bit more refined. Overall though, we're happy campers on Android's browser. Grade: B+

BlackBerry Bold
Leaps and bounds ahead of the browser BlackBerry users have put up with for years, it renders most pages correctly, even if scripts give it a conniption fit (hence its long load times for Wikipedia and the WSJ). It uses the standard "click to zoom" metaphor, which works well enough, though getting around a page with the trackball can be kind of a work out for you thumb. The Column View, which squeezes a whole page into a single column, is fairly convenient and makes it easier to get around wider pages, even if it doesn't work equally as well on every site (nice on Wikipedia, ugly on Giz). Hopefully they fix the script performance in the Storm, which is using an updated version of the Bold's browser. We humbly suggest they ditch their home-baked browser for one based on WebKit, which would help out there. Grade: B-/C+

iPhone
What can we say? It's still got the best mobile browser around. It crushes basically everything but Android's browser—which is also based on WebKit—in speed and outclasses its still classy brother-from-another-mother (and everyone else) with the ease and elegance of its multitouch zooming. Some pages still give it fits, and it's missing Flash support, but it really does deliver an unrivaled mobile web experience. We love it, but make no mistake we're eagerly waiting for something better. (Mobile Firefox? Is it you?) Grade: A-

Nokia E71 Symbian S60
Hey look, another web browser with WebKit guts! It doesn't perform quite as well as Android's or iPhone's iteration where speed or render accuracy are concerned (can any Symbian nuts explain why?), but it does a serviceable job. The big thing it has going for it is Flash Lite 3 support, though performance there is kinda assy and memory intensive. Navigation is tougher with the E71's d-pad than with a trackball, but the whole page magnifying approach makes it easy enough to get around (too bad you have to dig through a menu or two to get to it). Not bad, but short of excellent. Grade: B-

Internet Explorer on Windows Mobile
Jesus Christ. This is a joke, right Microsoft? Hahaha. No really, this is the worst smartphone browser on the planet. It couldn't render its way out of an ASCII-art paper bag. It totally screwed up every single test page, except for Wikipedia, which it only mostly screwed up. Good luck navigating a page if you're granted the miraculous occurrence of it being rendered in a state that's usable. Grade: F-

Opera Mobile on Windows Mobile
Microsoft's own intentions notwithstanding, you can use the internet on a Windows Mobile phone. You just need Opera Mobile. It's kind of hobbled by Windows Mobile's assy performance, but it usually gets the job done. Not as quickly or always as accurately as its WebKit rivals, but it's definitely usable. Interestingly, it benefits more from the extra bandwidth offered by Wi-Fi than the WebKit browsers do. Menu-based zoom is annoying and imprecise. Touch-based panning worked okay, though a little laggy. We mostly navigated with the Samsung Epix's optical cursor, which worked pretty well, somewhere in between a d-pad and a trackball. Grade: C

Sprint Instinct
Holy CRAP. This is not the painfully lousy browser the Instinct shipped with not by a long shot. The original was slow and fairly feeble, even if it was the head of its (dumbphone) class. The new 1.1 browser really is a life-changing upgrade. It suffers in the chart because it's much slower than most other browsers, and zooming is still clumsy, but once the page loads, it's much smoother to pan and actually move around. I got a bit annoyed that it lied about pageload time, hanging at the last 2 percent of the status bar for half the load, but it usually gets things right. This is the best non-smartphone browser you can get. Grade: C+

LG Dare
Like the Instinct, the Dare proves you can actually get a usable browsing experience on a feature phone. It's a little nimbler at loading pages than its Korean blood rival, but the reason it ultimately posts lower marks than the Instinct is that it buckles way more easily under a moderate to heavy pageload, turning it into an unresponsive picture of the website you were trying to look at. Still, it renders most pages fairly accurately, and we like the sliding zoom scroll bar, at least in theory, since it seems like an intuitive way to deal with the zoom issue. Unfortunately, it works more like a glorified pair of buttons. (Note: I don't think the speed was actually a piddly 300 Kbps—I think it just had a problem dealing with DSL Reports' mobile speedtest, even though it's text-based for the dumbest of phones.) Grade: C

Methodology
We tested every browser only using the full—not mobile—versions of selected sites, over 3G and, whenever possible, Wi-Fi. All scripts were turned on, and the cache was cleared before each round of testing. We took the average of a series of five sequential speedtests to give us an idea of the bandwidth we're dealing with, and timed how long it took to completely load a site according to each browser's progress bar. We assessed whether or not it rendered the page correctly, on a scale ranging from "excellent" to "good" (a couple things out of place) to "utter fail" (I've seen prettier train wrecks).

A few additional issues to note: Internet Explorer would not work on Wi-Fi. Opera yes, our Skyfire install, yes, Internet Exploder, no. (Samsung suggested it might be because of Opera.) We didn't pursue the matter because of how IE did in the 3G tests: A page that looks like a pile of blended dog poo is going to look like that no matter how much faster it loads. Sprint's updated Instinct and Verizon's Dare, which we included as best-of-class examples of feature phones, don't have Wi-Fi capabilities. We left out Opera Mini and Skyfire, since they both leave most of the hard work to servers which essentially spit out a kind of image file—besides, we don't think this kind of internet-by-proxy browser will be around for much longer.

The Big Gulp
Remember our mantra it's code that counts? It's true for mobile internet too. An awesome browser can make up for a mediocre network, but a terrible browser delivers a crappy experience no matter how great the network is. It's all about the browser. As it stands, WebKit is clearly the best thing going, but even then, software implementation matters, or Nokia would deliver as good a performance as Android and iPhone. Proving the point, it's striking how little Wi-Fi actually boosted speed beyond 3G—hell, WebKit browsers on 3G slid past some of the others that were running on Wi-Fi.

Another thing to note is that the zoom metaphor is a tricky thing to nail. Buttons are too brutish, the magnifying glass is imprecise. Multitouch seems to be the best way to handle zooming in and out in a way that's intuitive and precise. Hopefully we'll see other developers start to use multitouch interfaces in touchscreen phones (*cough*ANDROID!*cough*).

As much as this blow-by-blow battlemodo shows you all the problems we encountered, the big picture is that really, mobile web is pretty dandy right now, and getting dandier. It could be more reliable, faster, maybe a little more versatile, but for the most part, yes, you can access the internet on your phone. Compared to just two years ago, that's really saying something. We can't wait to see what it'll look like in two years. Maybe Internet Exploder will actually work. Nah, that's a little too sci-fi.