Toteu blog

It’s another bleak forecast for the future in the new video game “Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars.”

Yet it’s so much fun you probably won’t mind the prospects of an Earth politically splintered and environmentally devastated by an ever-spreading crystalline alien substance called Tiberium.

This latest saga marks one of the best, and only, games of its type for the
Xbox 360. (The T-rated, $59.99 title is also available for Windows PCs for $10 less).

Like other real-time strategy titles, the gameplay is centered around collecting resources (in this case truckloads of Tiberium), constructing barracks and other structures, and then sending your newly minted army into all-out war.

Nothing here really breaks away from the real-time strategy genre’s conventions, and that’s just fine.

The frenzied managerial pace of building forces, collecting tiberium and defeating rivals remains an intense experience. The hours will quickly pass as you conquer one mission after another.

There are several ways to play, but I recommend going through the single-player story modes first.

They not only serve as a good primer to the Xbox 360 controls and various units you can build (tanks, troops and air fighters among them), they also advance an intriguing story that’s filled with plenty of cheesy sci-fi twists and turns.

Anyone who’s played earlier games in the series, which date back to the mid-1990s, will get an especially big kick out of seeing what fanatical Nod leader Kane and other characters in the long-standing series are up to now.

Speaking of characters, one of the hallmarks of the series returns with a campy vengeance in “Tiberium Wars.”

The full-screen, full-motion video segments between missions tell the story and feature great appearances from some Hollywood talent such as Battlestar Galactica’s
Tricia Helfer,
Billy Dee Williams and
Michael Ironside.

Yes, it’s often painful watching these actors “act” in a video game. But I had a smile on my face the whole time, and seeing this classic feature from older “Command & Conquer” games conjured up a warm retro feeling.

Whether you enjoy the video sequences or the addicting gameplay, “Tiberium Wars” is a welcome return to a reinvigorated franchise.

Three stars out of four.

SAN FRANCISCO (AFP) - Google on Thursday provided software developers with technology to keep online applications like e-mail running on computers even if Internet connections are dropped, unavailable or unreliable.

The world’s most popular Internet search engine introduced the Google Gears Web browser extension at the opening of Google Developer Day 2007 in Sydney, Australia.

Google’s offering provides developers with a free tool to make Web-based applications more appealing and comes as a threat to the Microsoft empire, which is built on sales of software installed on people’s computers.

“With Google Gears we’re tackling a key limitation of the browser in order to make it a stronger platform for deploying all types of applications and enabling a better user experience in the cloud,” Google chief executive Eric Schmidt said in a statement.

“We believe strongly in the power of the community to stretch this new technology to the limits of what’s possible and ultimately emerge with an open standard that benefits everyone.”

The browser extension downloads enough data to a computer to enable people to continue using Web-based programs such as e-mail, calendars, or word processing even while on flights or otherwise cut off from the Internet.

“This announcement is a significant step forward for web applications,” said Brendan Eich, chief technical officer at Mozilla Corporation which makes the FireFox Internet browser.

Google Gears is open-source, meaning developers are free to adapt it as they wish, and the Mountain View, California-based company said it will work with other firms to develop standards for offline functionality.

“We’re very excited to be collaborating with Google to move the industry forward to a standard cross-platform, cross-browser local storage capability,” said Adobe vice president Kevin Lynch.

Google expects the new technology to increase the popularity of its host of Web-based applications but said its intent in releasing the open-source technology is to enhance all programs of that type.

A trend away from downloading software onto personal computers and toward using applications hosted and maintained online is considered a defining characteristic of “Web 2.0,” the latest iteration of Internet life.

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Google Inc. said on Wednesday it had created Web software that runs both online, and offline, marking a sea change for the Internet industry by letting users work on planes, trains, spotty connections and even in the most remote locations.

The technology, called Google Gears, would allow users of computers, phones and other devices to manipulate Web services like e-mail, online calendars or news readers whether online, intermittently connected to the Web or completely offline.

By bridging the gulf between new Web services and the older world of desktop software, where any data changes are stored locally on users’ machines, Google is pushing the Web into whole new spheres of activity and posing a challenge to rival Microsoft Corp., leader in the desktop software era.

“The Web is great but it doesn’t work very well when you don’t have a Web connection,” Jeff Huber, Google’s vice president of engineering, said in an interview. “Gears addresses a functional gap on the Web.”

Google plans to make the Gears technology available for free as “open source” software, meaning other developers are free to use and enhance the software in their own products.

Gears promises to expand the usage of scores of Google products and services, as well as thousands of programs from independent software makers, by making them more accessible at previously inconvenient times and places.

The technology also allows developers to build Internet search and indexing of Web pages into their own software applications, Huber said.

Many such products will be able to make limited searches offline, since they will have downloaded data automatically when connected. Google’s full Web search functions would return once the user reconnects to the Internet.

Early partners who will use Gears in their products include design software leader Adobe Systems Inc., maker of Flash animation and Acrobat document-sharing software, as well as new Apollo tools that work online and offline, Adobe said.

Other organizations working with Google are Norway’s Opera Software ASA, maker of a Web browser popular with mobile phone users, and Mozilla, the group behind Firefox, the biggest alternative to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser, according to Google.

BEYOND DESKTOP

Analysts said Google’s move capitalizes on a growing trend over the past couple of years for Web applications to behave as responsively as desktop software.

Microsoft already offers technologies like Groove, which allows users to work offline, then synchronize changes when connected later. But the software giant has been reluctant to make existing products work both online and offline.

Technologies such as AJaX, shorthand for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, Adobe’s Flash or Microsoft’s new Silverlight technology have made this increasingly possible.

“Now the Web is becoming so good that there is less and less of a reason to build software that just runs on desktop computers,” said Gartner analyst David Smith of Bedford, New Hampshire. “In the past, developers had to make some pretty clear trade-offs between the Web and software for desktops.”

Google Gears promises to help further close the gap for software developers across the industry. “This is a very big step, but I would say it is an obvious step,” Huber said.

The first Google product to feature Gears will be Google Reader, which allows consumers automatically to track updates to hundreds of Web sites. Users could connect temporarily for updates, then go offline and read up on recent Web news.

“We expect this to be extended to other Google applications over time,” Huber said, without setting any timeframes.

Once retrofitted, for example, Google Apps, the company’s free, advertising-supported group of Web programs including word processing and spreadsheets that can be shared and edited by groups, could work with only periodic Web connections.

Huber said Gears’ biggest impact could be in parts of Africa, Asia and Latin America, where poor or non-existent Internet connections hobble access to digital information.

Google made the announcement ahead of its Google Developer Day conference, which is taking place on Thursday in 10 cities around the world starting in Sydney and culminating at the San Jose Convention Center in Silicon Valley later in the day.

Otilia (Anamaria Marinca) and Gabita (Laura Vasiliu) are college roommates. They may live in the wintry squalor of 1987 Romania — in the last days of Communism — but their lives seem familiar to us despite that gigantic difference; they have exams coming up, friends and lovers, future opportunities and current challenges. They may buy their perfume on the black market, but they still buy it — they’re kids, essentially.

There’s school; there’s the joy and effort of friendships; there’s the looming reality of future mandatory military service; most pressingly, Gabita needs to have an abortion — in a rigidly-policed state where that’s been illegal for decades. Otilia is going to help her — How could she not? — but neither of them are prepared for what that’s ultimately going to cost.Written and directed by Cristian Mungiu, 4 Months 3 Weeks & 2 Days is the sort of film that will inspire a visceral reaction from most moviegoers — a quick grimace, a darting look away: Wow, that sounds not-fun. And no, 4 Months 3 Weeks & 2 Days is not ‘fun’ — but it’s incredibly affecting, magnificently acted and superbly made; in a lot of ways, it reminded me of last year’s Oscar-winner for Best Foreign Film, The Lives of Others, insofar as both depict universal challenges of human existence — what to do about one’s problems, how those difficulties can poison how we deal with others — with the harsh realities of fascist power making those challenges even more difficult to deal with. I cannot imagine how hard it must be to decide to have an abortion and see it through in the here-and-now; watching that agonizing choice played out with additional layers of challenge — bribes, secrecy, covert meetings and the looming possibility of jail — is achingly painful and fraught with tension.

Mungiu’s film is naturalistic — the cinematography is made up of either loose tracking shots or long, locked-down single-take scenes — and we never have a scene without Otilia on-screen. (Gabita may be in trouble, but Otilia is the one who has to take action.) That doesn’t mean, though, that the film is without craft; Mungiu’s sense of timing and space is exquisite, and his actors give performances so good that they disappear into their roles. As Gabita, Vasiliu is stressed-out and desperate; Marinca’s Otilia is more worldly-wise, more self-assured — until she runs into the realities of what has to happen and how. Praise should also go to Vlad Ivanov, who plays Mr. Bebe — the abortionist Gabita puts her life in the hands of.

Ivanov’s performance is magnetically repellent; Bebe is a man who knows exactly what he’s doing — the risks, the dangers, the ending of lives — and what does has made something in him turn monstrous and meticulous, carefully calibrating how hard he can push his luck and the spirit of his charges. As I said, Ivanov is magnetic in his careful, soft-voiced corruption — and what he ultimately asks of Otilia and Gabita is a grim, inescapable demonstration of the fact that making something illegal often simply places it outside the law. The scenes with the three sitting in a hotel room discussing the nuts-and-bolts of what has to happen and then the ugly business of payment — in cash and more — are fierce and blunt and matter-of-fact, and so superbly acted you feel as if you’re watching a documentary. (There’s one shot in these sequences — with Bebe sitting talking to Gabita as she stands, her head cut off by the framing of the shot — that says more about the physical realities of abortion than a thousand polemics.)

4 Months 3 Weeks & 2 Days is supposedly the beginning of a series of films Mungiu is hoping to make called The Golden Age, each about life in Communist Romania. I hope he’s successful; if this film is an example of the kind of rough-hewn humanity and blunt realism we can expect in future films, I’d definitely seek them out. As it is, 4 Months 3 Weeks & 2 Days moved me and challenged me, made me feel and made me think, demonstrated the personal and political challenges of a heartbreaking choice that, in many ways, is no choice at all– and that’s a rare enough achievement, and one worthy of seeking out.

NEW YORK - The parent of MySpace is buying the media-sharing site Photobucket for about $300 million, bringing together two of the Internet’s most popular hangouts.

The deal announced Wednesday will give MySpace and sister sites under News Corp.’s Fox Interactive Media access to Photobucket Inc.’s photo and video technologies, while Photobucket gets Fox’s resources to accelerate development of its tools.

Peter Levinsohn, president of Fox Interactive, said Photobucket also would be able to incorporate advanced slideshow generators and other editing tools from Flektor Inc., which Fox also announced Wednesday it bought.

“Together, they represent a powerful combination and we are thrilled for them to join our network,” Levinsohn said.

Financial terms of the two deals were not disclosed. But three people familiar with the Photobucket deal, citing anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the price, said Fox was paying about $300 million for Photobucket, about half of the $580 million News Corp. paid in 2005 to buy MySpace.

The Photobucket deal comes just weeks after a public spat in which MySpace partially blocked content from Photobucket. It was announced the same day CBS Corp. said it purchased global online social network Last.fm for $280 million in cash in a move to attract younger viewers and listeners across its businesses.

MySpace offers a mix of messaging tools to encourage its youth-oriented visitors to expand their circles of friends. Central to the site are personal profile pages where users can post photos and video clips, blast messages to friends and have visitors leave comments.

MySpace users often embed material from outside sites like Photobucket and Google Inc.’s YouTube, both of which make that easy by providing the programming code to cut and paste into MySpace profile pages.

The practice has made Photobucket one of the leading sites on the Internet, even though relatively few access content directly through its home page.

Under the deal, Photobucket would remain a standalone operation within Fox, and users of rival social-networking sites such as Facebook could continue to incorporate Photobucket content in their profiles. For now, Photobucket will continue to offer basic services for free, with a fee for more storage and other features.

Most noticeable for users will be the acceleration of new editing tools, such as cropping and red-eye removal, Photobucket Chief Executive Alex Welch said. With the resources of a larger company, he said, Photobucket won’t be spending much of its time “in a firefighting mode.”

According to Nielsen/NetRatings, the acquisition isn’t likely to boost MySpace’s audience given the significant overlap already between the two. MySpace alone had 56 million U.S. unique visitors in March, while Photobucket had 15 million. The combined audience would have been 58 million had the combination been in effect then.

But Levinsohn said users don’t hang out at two places at once, so the combination still would mean more time spent on Fox properties overall.

And it could give Fox a foothold on sites run by its rivals, especially as Photobucket makes more sponsorship deals of the type that led to a block by MySpace in April. Photobucket had encouraged users to build slideshows promoting Sony Corp (NYSE:SNE - news).’s “Spider-Man 3,” which MySpace considered a violation of policies banning unauthorized commercial activities.

The block was mysteriously lifted after about two weeks, but both sides had been silent on the details of their peacemaking. Executives from Fox and Photobucket said Wednesday that the acquisition talks were unrelated to that dispute.

Fox’s agreements to purchase Photobucket and Flektor represent the latest acquisitions of startups by larger Internet companies. In November, Google bought video-sharing site YouTube for $1.76 billion. The Flektor deal closed Tuesday, while the Photobucket acquisition was signed Tuesday and should close next month.

Flektor’s deal represents a coup for that site, which has been open to the public for only a month. Flektor, like Photobucket, will remain a standalone site, but Fox already has concrete plans to incorporate into MySpace its Web-based tools for creating slideshows, video mash-ups and other interactive presentations.

Jason Rubin, Flektor’s co-founder, said the deal lets the site grow its audience more quickly than it can alone. So far, he said, the site has fewer than 40,000 users, nearly all through word of mouth.

Shares in News Corp. rose 25 cents, or 1 percent, to $23.97 Wednesday.