For anyone who’s followed the rumors and speculation leading up to today’s announcement, there really wasn’t anything all too surprising: the “classic” iPod got it’s usual size upgrade, the Nano gained some weight; and, as everyone expected, the new kid on the block is the Touch, an iPod-only iPhone. However, despite the fact that nothing Apple did today was all too stunning, Apple fans everywhere still went wild as usual.

Like most of these things, the keynote started off pretty tame and got more exciting as it went along – albeit only a little. Apple CEO Steve Jobs spent the first few minutes praising the success and popularity of the iTunes music store, and then got down to business.

Ringtones

The first announcement was met with quite some applause. Apple will now – finally – allow iPhone owners to customize their ringtones. Amusingly, the applause quickly died down when everyone realized how ludicrous Apple’s ringtone customization system really is. If you want to make your favorite tune into a ringtone, you’d better hope that it’s one of the 500,000 “participating songs,” because if it’s not, you’re simply out of luck. And if you manage to find a tune you like, you’ll have to pay another 99 cents on top of the song price to actually make it into a 30-second ringtone. So, do you still want that custom ringtone?

The New Shuffle…huh?

After a little more iPod praise, Steve was ready to “start out easy” with the new “refreshed” iPod Shuffle. It took me a while to figure out what was new with this model: Was it the design? No. Maybe the size? Nope, same old. Steve’s ego? Possibly. Oh wait, it’s the color!

All Apple did to the Shuffle was give it a new paint job. The player now comes in silver, blue, green, purple, and (Product) Red. It still only holds 240 songs (on 1GB), and it still costs $79.

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As soon as my friends and I heard that Infinity Ward would be hosting a public beta for their upcoming game Call of Duty 4, we rushed over to the site and registered – just like thousands of other eager fans. Fortunately, one of our registrations was selected for entry and so, after a quick download, we eagerly launched ourselves into the experience. And here’s what we found:

GRAPHICS

From a visual standpoint the game looks about average. That being said, however, this does not mean that the game is at all bland, as there are some interesting visual elements throughout the game. One of the more drastic of these elements is the depth of field blur, which helps make the overall experience feel quite authentic. The blur activates as soon as the player sights their weapon by pulling the left trigger. It eases in pretty fast, blurring everything up close so that only the far reticule and the target remain in focus. Upon releasing the trigger to zoom out, the blur quickly fades out to reveal your surroundings – and, of course, your enemies, right as they are about to ambush you. All three maps also include high dynamic range lighting along with all the other lighting and shading techniques that we have come to expect from modern games. But, besides the depth of field blurring, there is nothing all too special – yet.

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The Big Bang of the digital audio revolution occurred exactly 25 years ago, on the 17th of August, 1982. This was the day that a Philips factory in Langenhagen, Germany, pressed the very first commercial Compact Disc, and propelled the world forward into the digital age of music.

The idea of a Compact Disc was first conceived of in 1969, but serious research wasn’t started until almost a decade later in 1977. Another two years later, in 1979, Philips teamed up with Sony to create an ominous sounding joint task force of engineers to create a new digital audio storage disc. The result of the year long collaboration was the (somewhat) famous “Red Book,” a color-bound book containing the agreed on technical specifications for all future Compact Discs.

With everything else agreed on, it was only a matter of time before the first band agreed to have their material pressed onto Compact Discs. The very first title to be released out of the Langenhagen factory on August 17th , 1982, was ABBA’s 1981 album The Visitors.

Not too long after the introduction of Compact Discs, the industry saw a plethora of variations of the shiny optical disc: the CD-ROM (1985), the CD-Recordable (1990), the MiniDisc (1992), the CD-ReWritable (1997), to name a few. Compact Discs turned out to be the launching pad for the digital music revolution, which not only introduced easy data storage, but also brought us a dark side. Lossless copying, mindless music sharing, and poorly encoded MP3 all paved the road to the music industries’ current DRM-laden, paranoid state. Regardless of the present, however, the Compact Disc was an amazing invention, and deserves recognition as such.

Happy Birthday, Compact Disc!

The whole thing started when a man, who calls himself “Magus,” in Atlanta, Georgia, went out to his local Target and bought himself a brand new Xbox 360 Premium for $350. After unpacking his new console, he noticed that there was something out of the ordinary on the rear of the console: an HDMI port, right alongside the standard component connection. Not expecting to discover this port, Magus snapped a few pictures and uploaded them to ShackNews.com. From there it wasn’t too long before almost every Xbox fanboy on the net found out about it, and asked the inevitable question: is it true?

Well, according to a Microsoft e-mail, it most definitely is.

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Despite having posted a variety of articles on Vista, I’ve had only limited access to the new operating system until recently when I purchased a new HP DV6500t laptop. The laptop came with Vista, and as such it has offered me the opportunity to some more exploring. Having spent two weeks with Vista now, there are things I like and, perhaps obviously, things I don’t. If you’re used to XP, like I am, then switching will present a certain number of adaptive challenges; below are some of my biggest qualms.

THE CONTROL PANEL

One of the things that bugs me most in Vista is the fact the Microsoft somehow decided that it would be good idea to completely reorganize the control panel in what seems to be an attempt at making it easier to use. Well, that didn’t work; for anyone who is used to the setup and organization of XP, trying to do something simple, like adding and removing programs, can be quite a chore. In Windows XP, performing this task was easily accomplished by hitting “Add and Remove Programs” in the control panel. Easy enough, right? Well, in Vista it took me a whole lot longer to do than I’d care to admit. The biggest problem I had was getting to the right place. As it turns out, “Add and Remove Programs” has been renamed to “Programs and Features.” Who’s bright idea was that?

Another change that I honestly don’t get is the removal of “Display” from the control panel. Don’t get me wrong, you can still modify all of the usual suspects, like resolution, themes, screen savers and appearances, but in order to do so you’ll have to head over to something called, get this, “Personalize.” And once you’ve figured this out and you’ve hit the icon, you’ll notice that the trusty old tabbed dialog box no longer exists in Vista as it did in XP. Instead, you simply delve deeper into the control panel.

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