MTV Games announced that the second installment of the popular "Rock Band" game will be released in September and will be initially exclusive to Xbox 360.  Like the original Rock Band, the game is being developed by the MTV-owned Harmonix games studio who also developed Guitar Hero. Details of the product will be announced at E3 in Los Angeles later this month but the developers have announced an unusual twist - it will be fully compatible with the original instruments, as well as the more than 100 songs that were available to download for the first "Rock Band so they have will be competing on more than the typical game planned obsolescence. 

In the original Rock Star, players can select are guitar, bass, drums or vocals as they hit the road as either an aspiring superstar solo act, or for the first time in game genre history take on the true collaborative and challenging nature of music as they form a band and jam together in multiplayer action from home or around the world.  Either way players will have to master their stage presence through the various game modes and polish their rock chops via the unrivaled Rock Band song list if they hope to make it out of the garage, into the clubs and finally on to the main stage.  Rock Band is a natural extension of the passion for Guitar Hero - and you know that there are lots of fanatics out there!

The English Cotswolds are known for their natural beauty but soon it will also be world famous for its Eco-Friendly homes in the Cirencester area.  One development,  The Lower Mill Estate, offers “distinctive, sustainable, modernist second homes, in a rural setting”.  The development was a 550 acre mining site which has been transformed into a seven lake reserve fed by three rivers and offers beautiful plant and wildlife.  The above, to-be-built house, known as the Orchid house exemplifies the uniqueness of designs where they have strived to achieve a harmony with the surrounding nature and yet blow your socks off with gorgeous, jaw dropping architecture.  

The Orchid house was designed by London based designer Sarah Featherstone and will boast many green features including  an underground geothermal heating system and a planet switch.  The project was recently sold for a price rumored to be more than $14 Million - that is one incredible second home! Other designers of properties in the Lower Mill Estate include  Richard Reid, Will Alsop .

Image Credits: www.dailymail.co.uk

Boston Dynamics has invented the most amazing autonomous Robot that they call BigDog which walks, runs, and climbs on rough terrain and carries heavy loads. This robot reminds me of a cross between RoboCop and a Star Wars’ Imperial Walker. The BigDog robot runs at 4 mph, climbs slopes up to 35 degrees, walks across rubble, and carries a 340 lb load!  They say, and you can hear, that it is powered by a two stroke gas engine and has articulated legs like an animal.  Those legas are controlled by an on-board computer that manages locomotion, servos and sensors.    The BigDog program is funded by DARPA.

Photo Credit: www.2dayblog.com

I love it, a big company learning to act like a startup. After selling his Equity Office Trust for $39 Billion, billionaire Sam Zell bought the Tribune Company for $8.2 Billion last year, with $8.0 Billion of other people’s money, and is now focused on one of the largest experiments in organization behavior ever. He is trying to change the way that the employees think about their business by instilling a bottom line thinking, a sense of urgency and focus on the customer. In the end he is also using the financial engineering he performed to drive his discipline home.

“If the Tribune deal doesn’t work, it ain’t going to change my lifestyle,” he told Tribune staffers in Chicago. “It really isn’t. But if the Tribune deal doesn’t work, or if it does work, it’s really going to change your lifestyle.”

There is a great video embedded in this article. He also does not seem to have much patience for senior managers who are seemingly not on the same page and for journalists that seem to have missed the whole Zell story.

Sort of off topic - I seemed to have missed most of  it  but now I am sick and tired of it except at least this one doesn’t have that creepy bartender in it.

Hillary Clinton recalled arriving in Northeastern Bosnian town of Tuzla on March 25, 1996, 4 months after the Bosnia war ended, under extreme conditions where they had to cancel a welcome ceremony and run for the car.  Very impressive example of her international experience except for the inconvenient reality as captured on video. 

Wow, are we having a JFK or Gettysburg Address moment? Obama may have delivered the speech of our lives:

“We the people, in order to form a more perfect union.” Two hundred and twenty one years ago, in a hall that still stands across the street, a group of men gathered and, with these simple words, launched America’s improbable experiment in democracy. Farmers and scholars; statesmen and patriots who had traveled across an ocean to escape tyranny and persecution finally made real their declaration of independence at a Philadelphia convention that lasted through the spring of 1787…. ” My favorite line - “As such, Reverend Wright’s comments were not only wrong but divisive, divisive at a time when we need unity”

Listen here

Source: Wikipedia

During a special TED conference session today Pulitzer Prize winning reporter Carl Bernstein blamed the decline in the quality of U.S. news reporting on Rupert Murdoch "the decline began in the 80’s after he bought the NY Post".   Bernstein was a member of a panel organized by the BBC exploring the impact of new media on the quality and comprehensiveness of news reporting.

A few weeks ago celebrity blogger Robert Scoble wrote that "Microsoft researchers make me cry" but couldn’t tell us why.  It turns out its the World Wide telescope.  The telescope really is not a literal telescope - it is a marvel of integrating information from telescopes throughout the world in a way that astronomers can have a much richer view of space that is bordering on a 3D virtual reality.  I saw a demo that had us zip zooming in that feels like Electronic Arts produced it but it has the scientific integrity of Johns Hopkins.   Check it.  The inventor is Curtis Wong who is a researcher with Microsoft.  It will be a downloadable application for the PC.  I look forward to flying to Pluto soon.

UPDATE:  Here is the Talk

For my mom… A BitTorrent client is any program that implements the BitTorrent protocol. Each client is capable of preparing, requesting, and transmitting any type of computer file over a network, using the protocol. A peer is any computer running an instance of a client.

To share a file or group of files, a peer first creates a “torrent.” This small file contains metadata about the files to be shared and about the tracker, the computer that coordinates the file distribution. Peers that want to download the file first obtain a torrent file for it, and connect to the specified tracker, which tells them from which other peers to download the pieces of the file.

Though both ultimately transfer files over a network, a BitTorrent download differs from a classic full-file HTTP request in several fundamental ways:

* BitTorrent makes many small P2P requests over different TCP sockets, while web-browsers typically make a single HTTP GET request over a single TCP socket.

* BitTorrent downloads in a random or in a “rarest-first” approach that ensures high availability, while HTTP downloads in a sequential manner.

Taken together, these differences allow BitTorrent to achieve much lower cost, much higher redundancy, and much greater resistance to abuse or to “flash crowds” than a regular HTTP server. However, this protection comes at a cost: downloads can take time to rise to full speed because it may take time for enough peer connections to be established, and it takes time for a node to receive sufficient data to become an effective uploader. As such, a typical BitTorrent download will gradually rise to very high speeds, and then slowly fall back down toward the end of the download. This contrasts with an HTTP server that, while more vulnerable to overload and abuse, rises to full speed very quickly and maintains this speed throughout.

In general, BitTorrent’s non-contiguous download methods have prevented it from supporting “progressive downloads” or “streaming playback”. But recent comments by Bram Cohen suggest that streaming torrent downloads will soon be commonplace and this appears to be the result of those comments.

- Wikipedia