EU: do the people have any say?

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Well, given the way the vote was swung by national governments in the last referendum for the consitution, it’s starting to look like the people might have something of a say, but given it’s track record on eg. Patents, I’m still waiting and seeing.
Now one million signatures have been collected to stop the EU parliament from going on holliday once a month to Strasbourg at a cost of EUR. 200 million per year. Aside from the ministers, aides and paperwork having to be carted around, the rent in Strasbourg (for buildings only used 12 times per year) is inflated.
France especially wants to keep it’s parliamentiary perks.

Matrox Triplehead2Go

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Matrox released this some time ago, but I just found it, so here it is:
The Triplehead2Go is a box you connect a single VGA (analog) out from your PC to and then connect 3 monitors to through it’s own VGA (analog) outputs. It’s not a graphics card – Matrox has decided to not compete with the likes of Nvidia and ATi, it processes the signal to create a max resolution of 3840×1024.
Reviewers rave about the size, immersion and cost of the product (3 monitors + the Triplehead2Go cost less than $1000) but unfortunately the desktop management software falls short, getting games to work properly can sometimes be a fiddle and if you have an ATi card you can forget about it. What surprises most reviewers is that there isn’t much of a framerate hit, and the bezels between the monitors doesn’t cause much disturbance to the viewer.

Good out of the box thinking by Matrox, but unfortunately it looks like this technology will have to mature a bit (by games manufacturers, ATi and Matrox) before it becomes a ‘must have’.

AVSim review
Tomshardware review
SimHQ review
List of compatible Matrox games

iPods cheapie cheapie

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Because they’re planning to launch a new product, they’re selling refurbished units with one year’s garauntee for massively cut rates on the Apple Website.
A video iPod 30GB for $179, a 2GB iPod nano for $99, for example…

Uhm, that is… if you can get it posted to you somehow – the USA Apple store doesn’t ship beyond the USA and they’re not available on the Netherlands / UK sites either.

So, if you have any idea how to get a white 30GB one here, please tell me – at $179 I’m finally overboard and want one.

NAM critisices the US

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Over 100 countries, mainly third world, but including some large first world ones such as Venezuela and Malaysia, make up the Non-Aligned Movement, who are neither pro the US or Russia.
They have decided they don’t like the ‘Axis of Evil’ type sayings the US has been making, and that they see no problem with Iran’s enrichment of uranium.
Due to the size of this majority, this is being called a new kind of ‘cold war’ – and that there’s fighting talk, led by President and nutcase Chavez. I somehow doubt that the NAW has the coherence to stick up for each other in a NATO kind of sense, so I don’t see that the US will be seeing this as a somehow credible threat – but who knows, with time it could evolve into one.

Campaigning MMOs

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A presidential hopeful, Dennis McCauley has had a campaign stop in Second Life, to talk to the citizens there. Apparently there is room for improvement, but considering this is the first time it’s been done, I’d say it was a bold move. The political commentary is all about whether this is genius or suicide, which is kind of missing the point IMHO.
The point is that this guy has found a large and hopefully receptive audience which has been untapped politically – most hardcore MMO players don’t do politics at all, and this is a great way to reach them. From the experience they will have learnt lessons, and hopefully will put those into practice next time it’s done.