Do you play First Person Shooter games? Do you feel that your 7.1 speakers is not enough? Do you feel your three 32″ LED multi-monitors setup with 3D Vision is not immersive? Do you duck, evade, and (hoping that you can) jump when you play these games? Do you feel the need of having – literally – “bullets” flying by your ears as you play Battlefield 3?

Well, throw out your gaming chair and get rid of your monitors. And play in one of these bad boys, Kotaku article: FPS Simulator.

Video below.

I usually pulls out of topics like these, but when I bump to this Calvin & Hobbes pic, I knew I had to post this:

The original article is in Gawker article here, where it points out Americans are in it for 10 more years before their income level can be back to where it was 10 years ago. That’s a total of 20 years of income pit.

What happened to the tax-the-rich plan? Calvin & Hobbes know best.

Ok, is it just me or anybody else notices that at this rate, there will be 2 maybe 3 major companies that owns every piece of technology that we use? I’m fairly sure it’s part of staying in the competition against Google’s relentless dominations, but Microsoft $8.5billion bid to purchase Skype in May this year is now approved by the EU. After being approved by the Department of Justice in June, EU has finally sanctioned the bid noticing “Skype is not an Enterprise solution”.

If you can imagine the possibility of having the developer of the number 1 software maker in the world combined with the most popular communication tools in the Internet, I think it’s hard not to be excited. Microsoft has their own technology being used with Live Messenger, but it’s a far cry of Skype’s PC-to-Landline capability, browser integration, subscription plan, hardware integration (Samsung and Sony has Skype TV in the works, complete with embedded webcam and microphone). If we can have such functions built into Windows, perhaps also merge Live ID (which at Windows 8, will become your PC credentials as well) with Skype user ID, that’s a fantastic step toward unifying (for better or worse) a global credential. Less password to remember and the right step toward integrating technology even deeper with our daily lives.

Of course, not only aiming at Google who’s been trying to merge all of our Internet experience through one pipe, this deal puts Microsoft smack dab into the fight of Cisco and Avaya; the two biggest companies in the IP-phone industry for business. The past decade have seen the IT competition peaked at the dot-com bubble, burst, spiral downs to mobile app industry boom, and mega-corporation going neck-to-neck.

In the end, I believe the best thing to do for those companies is to remember that if we mind the balance (and limit) between technology integration and advancement, and a healthy competition, the winner at the end of the day is always the customers.

Additional NewYorkTimes article

Update: Well that didn’t take long. It’s now finally official. Skype is a division of Microsoft.

Seems like Netflix is getting beefed for shows. I was never one to subscribed to Netflix since the options are fairly dissapointing to say the least. Movies are old and rarely ever blockbusters. TV Shows are couple seasons old and not the ones I watch.

But Warner Bros. and CBS apparently just signed a deal with them to bring on CW Shows. This includes The Supernatural, Vampire Diaries, Nikita, and 90210. I have to say, if anything, I’m up for rewatching The Supernatural all over again! And if Netflix will be streaming them, then I don’t see why I can’t subscribe.

Just off the news with Xbox will support TV providers too! Looks like IPTV is indeed the way of the future.

Sort of. So it got official: Kotaku Article

Xbox will be upgraded with a new menu and it will include collaboration with major TV networks. While US gets HBO and SyFy, Canada got Rogers On Demand, Maple Leafs TV, UFC, MSN to name a few. Not too shabby. But how much will it costs?

Only time will tell if this is the new trend or not, but there’s at least 1 thing I’m excited about: integration with Kinect. Check the ad video below.