Quite possibly one of the most amazing pieces of art made with MS Paint…. apparently it took him 500 hours! While I agree it looks amazing especially for MS Paint, I am wondering if after 500 hours you could create anything if you made a picture pixel by pixel. I remember back in high school, we used to make pictures in MS Paint. They were normally very poorly made and were just jokes. We didn’t spend nearly that amount of time to create a picture. You have to wonder, what does that value an hour of his work at? Since 500 hours is a lot of time to be spending on a single picture in MS Paint. Although, just the fact it was made in paint will increase the publicity of the picture.
Sirius Canada vs XM Canada
Both SIRIUS Satellite Radio (NASDAQ : SIRI) and XM Satellite Radio Holdings Inc. (NASDAQ : XMSR) have released some subscriber information in regards to Canada. Sirius has announced they have surpassed 200,000 subscribers in Canada, while XM Radio Canada has passed 90,000 subscribers. By comparing these two tidbits of information you can begin to see that Sirius is poised to take complete control of the Canadian marketplace. By converting these figures into percentages, Sirius controls approx 70% of the market. Meanwhile in the United States, XM continues to hold on to the market share lead but Sirius has been experiencing larger growth as of late. Sirius is slowly but steadily catching up to XM, and this will continue to happen since Sirius has been putting a lot of effort into increasing the quality of their programming.
I have a feeling that the upcoming NASCAR deal will help to increase the number of American Sirius subscribers but it won’t have much effect on the Canadian numbers. NASCAR just isn’t going to be a major selling point in the Canadian market. For Sirius to continue to keep up their lead, they need to promote the fact that their service has more variety, and higher quality programming. Sirius also needs to keep up their visibility in Canada; their advertising at CFL games was a very good idea! All I want now from Sirius, is a 24 hour-a-day NHL channel to get my hockey news without having to listen to other sports news.
Ten Worst Internet Acquisitions Ever
As the market for acquiring fledgling Internet companies heats up, it’s worth taking a look at all those acquisitions that didn’t quite work out. For every Internet acquisition that’s successful there seems to be dozens that die on the vine.
One big one that I don’t see on the list is Mirabilis (ICQ) being bought by AOL. I also have to disagree with the Hotmail being bought by Microsoft one. I think that almost everyone at some point in their life has/had a hotmail account. I would have put this on a list of good acquisitions.
IBM, CRAY Awarded Supercomputer Project
Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA), announced that they will be giving $250 million to Cray Inc. (NASDAQ : CRAY) and $244 to IBM (NYSE : IBM) for the development of very large supercomputers. They have been selected to develop DARPA’s High Productivity Computing Systems (HPCS) program. The amount of money that the government spends on pure computing power is enormous, and it will bring results quickly. Investors also feel that this is good news for the companies involved, as both IBM and Cray stock have gone up today. IBM closed up 44 cents and CRAY closed up $1.70 on the day. CRAY stock had a huge volume of shares traded today. They ended the day at 4.80M, way above their average of 240 thousand. When I think of government supercomputers, I immediately picture the movie “Wargames”. These computers are built completely to compute complex formulas and advanced function but I could picture them saying, “Would you like to play a game?”
Gears of War Top Selling 360 Game
Gears of War just released less than a couple weeks ago has already sold over a million copies. This makes it the fastest selling Xbox 360 game on the market so far. There have even been claims that it is the fastest selling title of 2006. When you break the record for games sold, you also normally break the record associated with Xbox Live as well. Gamerscore Blog says that 850,000 unique gamers have played a match online so far, and have cumulatively unlocked 7 million achievements. Now thats a major accomplishment. Hopefully Gears of War is just the start of the train of A+ games that sell millions of copies.
Gears of War TV Commercial
Watching TV the other day I watched a really cool Gears of War commercial. The song in the commercial is “Mad World” by Gary Jules. The song although not what I would have picked for a song in a Gears of War commerical really made this commercial amazing. This really shows off the game well, even if it is just a small clip. It is incredible the amount of graphical power the Xbox360 possess, that they can put a commercial on tv made ingame footage and people would think it looks good. Not too long ago, video game commercials if they did exist.. would have been pre-rendered FMV sequences that wouldn’t reflect the real game at all. Take a look at the link to the video no youtube.
Youtube
Google Surges Past $500
At about 9:50am this morning Google Inc. (NASDAQ : GOOG) shares raced past the $500 milestone. This is an amazing milestone for the company to surpass having been publically traded since August 2004. Shares continued their long rise for the company as investors feel that the stock can only head higher. So far in today’s trading the stock is at 504.22 and is up 1.85% or 9.13 per share.
Pilot Snaps Photos of World’s 2nd Tallest Tower above Clouds!
These are some rare photos, taken by Russian pilot Letchik Leha, of the Ostankino Tower in Moscow which sneaks above the clouds. The pictures look funny with the top spire of the tower as the only piece that is above the cloud line. The CN Tower in Toronto is taller but nobody has ever taken a picture of it above the clouds like this!
Microsoft could save 45 mil. tons of CO2 emissions with a few lines of code
Microsoft has already announced that they will build aggressive, energy-saving technology into Vista. But that’s not enough. Redmond should issue a software upgrade to every computer running Microsoft Windows worldwide to adjust each machine’s energy-saving settings for maximum efficiency. Energy savings would be worth $5 to $7 trillion dollars.
There were a few good points made in this article. It seems as though as we are progressing into the future we are consuming more and more. If Microsoft did implement the sleep mode on all existing windows machines, I’m sure it would save some money in the short term but the long term is another story. Computers are getting more and more powerful, and to create this power they are having to use more and more electricity. The author of the article should take a closer look at the hardware developments and see how they can be improved to reduce electricity usage. If everyone did their part and reduced their energy usage, I’m sure the world would be a better place.
Air Canada shares fall in Market Debut
Shares of Air Canada (TSX : AC.A) slipped in morning trading during its market debut on the Toronto Stock Exchange. The recently spun off IPO of ACE Aviation Holdings was priced at $21 per share, but the stock fell by about 6% to trade at $19.75 as of noon EST. The IPO raised C$605 million with $325million for ACE. When the IPO is complete, ACE will continue to control 75% of the company and Air Canada will have $2 billion in cash or cash equivalents.
An interesting side note, the last time shares of Air Canada traded publically, they were going for 6 cents back in August 25, 2004. That was the day they got delisted from the stock exchange, after having been in bankruptcy protection for 16 months.