Finally beat Ninja Gaiden for XBOX earlier yesterday… only took forever too, lol. Started to play on the newly added difficultly Very Hard… gave up after while, rather not go through the long days (hours) of killing bats over and over… for money, lol.
Now to play San Andreas then over to Halo 2 when that is released in alil over a week.
I’m definiately not going in a plane with this!
quote:
A University of Florida scientist has grown a living “brain†that can fly a simulated plane, giving scientists a novel way to observe how brain cells function as a network.The “brain†— a collection of 25,000 living neurons, or nerve cells, taken from a rat’s brain and cultured inside a glass dish — gives scientists a unique real-time window into the brain at the cellular level. By watching the brain cells interact, scientists hope to understand what causes neural disorders such as epilepsy and to determine noninvasive ways to intervene.
As living computers, they may someday be used to fly small unmanned airplanes or handle tasks that are dangerous for humans, such as search-and-rescue missions or bomb damage assessments.
“We’re interested in studying how brains compute,†said Thomas DeMarse, the UF professor of biomedical engineering who designed the study. “If you think about your brain, and learning and the memory process, I can ask you questions about when you were 5 years old and you can retrieve information. That’s a tremendous capacity for memory. In fact, you perform fairly simple tasks that you would think a computer would easily be able to accomplish, but in fact it can’t.â€
While computers are very fast at processing some kinds of information, they can’t approach the flexibility of the human brain, DeMarse said. In particular, brains can easily make certain kinds of computations ? such as recognizing an unfamiliar piece of furniture as a table or a lamp ? that are very difficult to program into today’s computers.
“If we can extract the rules of how these neural networks are doing computations like pattern recognition, we can apply that to create novel computing systems,†he said.
I have to agree with this article almost completely, but maybe not all, as I have not read it completely 
quote:
Opinion: In Part II of his series on Microsoft’s biggest failures, David Coursey claims the software giant has failed miserably to create upgrades that excite its users.When was the last time Microsoft released an upgrade that got you really excited? An upgrade you wanted because it did something new that you actually needed done?
I’m not talking about a security fix or a patch necessary to make something work properly (which would seem to include Windows XP SP2), but something that gave you new functionality so important that you just had to have it.
In my life, I remember wanting Office 98 to get long file names, or was that Office 95? Office XP tried to make interesting but little-used features easier to find, a strategy reversed by Office 2003, where a nice upgrade to Outlook became the star. None of these set the world afire.
Source: eweek