Microsoft has announced (well, not announced, but Gamasutra just spilled the beans) XNA Game Studio Express,  a free product which will allow independents and studios to write games for the XBox 360. It will actually cost \$99 to be able to deploy your games to the 360.

Oh, hey and …

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Tufte's "Beautiful Evidence" Looks Great, Lacks Filling

Aug 13, 2006 by [Larry O'Brien]{.reviewer .fn} "Beautiful Evidence," by Edward Tufte

????? There's a sad irony in this book: Tufte is the guru of information density but his latest book contributes little to his previous …

An anonymous commenter says that recent issues of Game Developer Magazine (*cough* founding editor *cough*) discussed multicore game programming and that, rather than divvying up logical areas like AI and physics, what today's developers are concentrating on is speeding up the world-render pipeline. That makes sense, given the graphical emphasis …

On this day, 25 years ago, IBM launched the Personal Computer for \$1,565 in select Computerland stores and Sears & Roebucks. This led to significant things.

I've pretty much given up on the whole Konfabulator / Sidebar widget thing, but I laughed out loud when I saw this:

This one just shot through the blogosphere: the idea that VS Express might have been bundled with Vista. Although I do not believe that VB.net is actually a "beginner's" language, that there could have been such a powerful environment broadly available is a sorely missed opportunity.

This one just shot through the blogosphere: the idea that VS Express might have been bundled with Vista. Although I do not believe that VB.net is actually a "beginner's" language, that there could have been such a powerful environment broadly available is a sorely missed opportunity.

I've abused Jeff Atwood's comments section enough, but I want to continue ranting about multicore machines.

One of the themes in his comment section is that games don't speed up on multicore machines. This is largely true. Jeff points out, correctly, that most games are video-processor bound and not CPU-bound …

My colleague Roland Racko, who runs the website voicewizard.com, warns me that I may be prematurely enthusiastic about Dragon's capabilities.  I've dictated this blog entry on my mobile device, an Axim PDA, whether the transcription works, we'll have to see. [Note: It misspelled Axim and missed "to see"]