Last night I watched some videos of the Epic’s newly released “Gears of War 2.” It’s of special interest to me because I was VP of programming at a game company developing a game on Epic’s engine during the Unreal Tournament/Warfare time frame around 2000-2002. Working with this game engine was one of the most challenging and fun things I’ve ever done.

As I’m following current events unfold at home in the evening, I’m thrilled at the education I’m joyfully receiving in history, economics, and politics. I had rare tastes of this in High School and was largely oblivious after as I focused on Physics in University.

We've been trying out ooVoo as a means for conducting interviews online. It's not perfect, but it's pretty darned good. Meanwhile, I just saw this article about ooVoo's plans to bring "high definition picture phones" to our living rooms. Here's the link: http://www.ecommercetimes.com/rsstory/62257.html. Because this particular use doesn't really have an ad angle, I won't run it on the Videoactive Report site, but it's still an interesting scheme--especially in light of our experiments these past few days.

There's a long tradition among news gatherers to hoodwink readers, listeners, and viewers on this day with some sort of bogus news story that seems "close, but not quite." Because we're all well-conditioned to treat stories on this day with some skepticism, it's pretty harmless fun for the most part.
 
When writing today's Videoactive Report, I considered continuing the tradition. Only problem was, every story I dreamed up didn't seem so far-fetched. More to the point, it seems I run something at least once a month that I greet with extreme doubt at first glance.

Great news to graphics enthusiasts everywhere!  Photoshop, the industry standard in computer graphics software is now free.  Sorta.  Except it's not.  And it's slow.  In all fairness, this free version is really just testing the waters, and it's not meant to replace the full CS3 version currently out there.  I can't say I'm a fan though, it's just not very powerful or responsive and it feels like someone ripped the engine out of my car.  Feel free to check it out though:https://www.photoshop.com/express/landing.html

From what I understand Apple is currently considering to allow consumers complete access to download as many songs as they'd like for a monthly fee.  Different prices have been tossed around from $20 to $80.  Of course the higher the price the less likely you are to retain subscribers on a monthly basis and of course the less likely users are going to stop at Apple's estimated 20 songs per person.

Hawthorne Digital Response Labs is a skunk works created by Stephen Kelley, CTO of Hawthorne Direct, to have an excuse to get paid for playing with cool technology.
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