07 September 2008

    Michael Jackson is 50



    This Friday, king of pop turned 50. Michael Jackson said in a telephone interview on Good Morning America on ABC that he planned to celebrate his birthday with his children, The AP reported. “I’ll just have a little cake with my children, and we’ll probably watch some cartoons,” Michael Jackson said.

    The pop superstar, who has been divorced twice and has 3 children, also said he was trying to provide a normal life for his children. “I am letting them enjoy their childhood as much as possible,” he said, adding: “I let them go to the arcade and go to the movies and do things. I think that comes naturally. I want them to get to do things I didn’t get to do.”

    Death Race: Movie Review



    A lot of gamers or probably mostly boys might remember Twisted Metal. Twisted Metal is a game in which players try to kill off each other inside a play area using their amped-up modified vehicles. Think of it as a demolition derby with rockets and explosives-galore. It was dark, gritty and hell, was it really violent. Upon seeing Death Race, this is what we saw and imagined; a Twisted Metal-esque movie. Honestly, we did not expect much due to this fact. But did it really live up to our low expectations and maybe even went beyond it?

    The plot is really simple. It is 2012 and America had a recess with its economy. It became so bad that people committed crimes just to live through the day and the prisons became really crowded (they should see how our situation here in the Philippines look like). Prisons were then too costly for the government so private institutions bought them and maintained them for profit. This is where Death Race was created; a race in which prisoners compete using cars with weapons and if they get five wins and they get out of prison. It is streamed live on the internet and it gave huge bucks to the owner of the prison. Jason Statham's character, Jensen Ames, was setup by a masked man and was imprisoned for "killing" his wife. Now, he has replaced a dead racer, the famous Frankenstein, and only needs one win to get his freedom and daughter back.

    Our verdict for Death Race? Well it's a mixed bag. Some people will surely like it and some will surely rant about it for ages. First for the positives is its very simplistic story and development. It's truly an action flick where plot goes and adrenaline takes the podium. The whole time we were really off our seats, especially during the races. Just take our word when we say it's rather cliche-ish and very predictable. For the negatives, well we believe it was violent. Really violent that some people will see it as disturbing (there's probabla a reason why it was rated as R-13 anyway). The acting to was really not that good also. We know Jason Statham could have done better as well as the other actors. The Death Race could be an exhilirating, death-defying ride or it could be the death of you.

    Can Google Chrome Beat Firefox?




    After releasing their desktop application for Google services, the search engine giant just released another application in the form of a browser called Google Chrome. Ok, so by now you must have heard/read about it. It’s getting great reviews from the early testers/users and there are reports that Mozilla is already feeling the pressure.

    I gave it a test drive and I must say that it is an excellent browser. It loads pages really fast and consumes less memory than Firefox. There is of course the issue of add-ons installed in my Firefox so the comparison regarding memory usage is not quite accurate.

    The interface is great. The positioning of the tabs is very efficient. It gives you more space for reading which the other browsers didn’t take into account. This is great if you are browsing from small notebooks with wide screens. The tabs, menus and toolbars consume precious browsing space.

    The start page is similar to Opera’s speed dial. The only difference is that it displays your most visited pages other than your personal bookmarks. There is also a quick bookmarking star similar to Firefox’s quick bookmark. I personally liked the feature that lets you drag the tab outside the browser to open it in a new window.

    Chrome also comes in incognito mode. It’s a feature that allows you to browse privately. It will not save any information regarding your browsing if you use this feature. This is very useful if you are using another computer other than yours. Its own task manager is also a very useful tool which allows you to close a single misbehaving page instead of closing the whole browser.

    The browser is still in its early stages but is already creating a lot of buzz and great responses from its users. Firefox still leads in customizability but given the proper support from third party developers, Chrome can definitely become a major player in the browser wars. Firefox’s enormous amount of add-ons and plugins still makes it number one in my book but I have to admit that Chrome is pretty cool and won’t mind having it around.
     

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