360

Leaked from today's 404 episode:

- Microsoft may announce the next generation of Xbox on May 21.

- Chinese people burn Apple products to pay respect to the dead; Americans do it just because.

- Here's a list of porn currently being watched in the Vatican.

- The season finale of "Alf": could it have been done differently?… Read more

The annual Game Developers Conference, which attracts tens of thousands from the gaming industry, had all of the usual players this year: Nintendo, Sony, EA, Activision, etc. But they weren't the only players in town this week at GDC.

There was plenty of buzz about Ouya, the new $99, Android-based gaming console that broke Kickstarter records like Adrian Peterson breaks tackles.

Now, before the serious gamers out there savage me, let me be clear: The Ouya isn't going to be displacing the role of traditional consoles like the PlayStation or the Wii (although the Wii U has gone nowhere). … Read more

Leaked from today's 404 episode:

- Jeff's Bioshock Infinite review: in a class by itself.

- Get that tune out of your head! Scientists find out how to get rid of earworms.

- I rewatched this video over the weekend and it blew my mind.

Bathroom break video: Eastern Wayne Harlem Shake fail.… Read more

I cut the cord years ago. My wife sat across from me on the sofa and finally convinced me that paying well over $100 a month for the privilege of a bunch of random cable channels wasn't worth it. We could save money, learn to live lower to the ground, read more, and watch TV shows and movies on demand. Netflix, Hulu Plus, and iTunes. I agreed. With apprehension.

It worked. We relaxed, we used an over-the-air antenna, we caught our TV shows on broadcast networks and just sat through commercials. I even borrowed an old DTV Pal DVR … Read more

The video game industry once again had a down month as console and software sales slipped.

Total industry sales hit $810 million in February, representing a 25 percent drop compared with the same period last year, market researcher NPD said yesterday. Hardware sales were down 36 percent to $244.2 million, and console and portable software sales across the physical retail channel could only reach $352 million -- a 27 percent drop compared with February 2012.

The Xbox 360 once again led the hardware market, earning the top spot in console sales for the 26th month in a row. According … Read more

This app takes your home PC and turns it into personal cloud storage. While this idea may sound interesting, in reality xCloud doesn't offer a real cloud-based service, but rather enables you to connect your mobile device to your PC remotely. This app has many issues that need to be addressed: security is weak and the execution leaves much to be desired.

Downloading the application seems easy enough, but the whole setup takes time. In addition to a mobile client, you must also download a companion server to your PC and register both pieces of software. xCloud requires a … Read more

Gears of War: Judgment has turned at least one aspect of game creation on its head, according to a behind-the-scenes video about the upcoming game for Xbox 360.

The 7-minute video sheds light on how the shooting game's co-developers, Epic Games and People Can Fly, integrated the two lead writers early in the game's creation -- instead of adding dialog and conversation later in the process.

Rob Auten and Tom Bissell, the lead writers for the fourth iteration of the game, spent a year creating 20,000 spoken lines for Judgment, which they estimate clocking in somewhere near 100,000 words. There are only about 17 minutes of cinematic cut scenes, so a lot of the dialog occurs during gameplay. Players can also increase the difficulty of levels in Judgment, and these experiences contain different script material for enhanced replay value. … Read more

Want to toss YouTube videos from your phone to your TV? You got it. It's called "Send to TV," and it's a feature of Google's YouTube app that Android users have had for some time.

But now that Google has rolled the feature out to Apple's iOS devotees, and expanded support for more streaming devices, the feature is seeing a second wind.

But how do you do make it all work? Well, I gave it a shot with an iPhone 5 and the YouTube App for Xbox, but it could just as well have … Read more

How well do you know the landmarks of London? Get up close and personal with a stunning 320-gigapixel image of the city captured atop the BT Tower.

Snapped by panorama experts 360Cities, the epic photography endeavor required the use of four Canon 7D dSLR cameras outfitted with some heavy-duty equipment.

Each camera used an EF 400mm f/2.8L IS II USM lens, Extender EF 2x III teleconverter, and a Rodeon VR Head ST robotic panorama head. After shooting 48,640 individual pictures over the course of three days (shortly after the 2012 Olympics), 360Cities spent the next several months assembling and stitching together the final gargantuan image.… Read more