I didn't really enjoy the first one - hopefully they've cleaned up their act a bit, and gotten some story into the game.

Anyways, Valhalla Knights 2 (for PSP) is hitting stores shortly.

Marvelous Entertainment USA and XSEED Games announced today that Valhalla Knights 2 for the PlayStation® Portable (PSP) has officially gone gold and will ship to retail outlets nationwide starting on October 1, 2008. Developed by Marvelous Entertainment Inc., Valhalla Knights 2 is the sequel to the hit 2007 PSP title. The game is the first co-published title under the previously announced partnership between Marvelous Entertainment USA and XSEED Games.

Valhalla Knights 2 offers more features, content and freedom of customization, allowing players to create the ultimate six-member battle party and embark on an incredible adventure penned by the scenario writer of Final Fantasy XII. The player must fulfill a 1,000 year old prophecy and destroy an ancient evil hiding in the center of the world. In addition to the intense single player experience, Valhalla Knights 2 also features two-player Co-op adventures and wireless Vs. battles. Explore over 100,000 skill, race, appearance and equipment combinations. Experience more job classes, weapons, monsters and magic than ever before!

Valhalla Knights 2 carries a suggested retail price of $29.99 and is rated “E10+” for “Everyone 10 and Older”. For more information on Valhalla Knights 2, please visit the newly launched website at http://www.valhallaknights2.com

MS have decided to drop the price of the Xbox360. And HARD.

No word on other consoles - expect Sony to follow suit if they want to stay (or even hope to become, depending on your market area) competitive.

PYN is doing a DRM-laden "trial run" with putting Ghostbusters on a USB key:

We don’t know what file format and compression settings are used on the film yet, but a spokesperson for PNY explained to Custom PC that it does come with a form of DRM that prevents you from copying the movie. ‘They have DRM protection,’ explained the spokesperson, ‘so customers can download the movie onto their laptop or PC if they wish, but they have to have the USB drive plugged in to watch the movie, as the DRM is locked in the USB drive.’

Prediction: the DRM will get cracked by some nerd with something to prove. Anyone else who wants the movie will simply get it the old-fashioned way... or buy the DVD if they don't already have it.

Bill Melendez - the only man ever authorized to animate Charlie Brown - has passed away.

Melendez founded his own production company in 1964 and with his partner Lee Mendelson went on to produce, direct or animate some 70 "Peanuts" TV specials, four movies and hundreds of commercials.

The first special was 1965's "A Charlie Brown Christmas." The show reportedly worried CBS because it broke so much new ground for a cartoon: It lacked a laugh track, used real children as voice actors, had a jazz score and included a scene in which Linus recited lines from the New Testament.

However, the show was a ratings success and has gone on to become a Christmastime perennial.

Melendez created Emmy-winning specials based on the cartoon characters Cathy and Garfield, and was involved in animated versions of the Babar the elephant books and the C.S. Lewis book, "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe."

If you've never seen his work... go out and pick some of it up. The man was brilliant.

There are some ridiculous terms-of-service agreements out there, and valleywag hits the five worst:

Did you know that when you download Google's new Chrome browser, you agree that any "content" you "submit, post or display" using the service — whether you own its copyright or not — gives Google a "perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute" it? Google's ambitions for Chrome are even larger than we thought; by the letter of this license, Google will own all information that flows through its browser. But Chrome's terms of service are just the latest in a long line of ludicrous legalese.

Of course, most of the people who use these services will never read the terms of service - and when the TOS is 20+ pages long, they can hide all sorts of nonsense in there that most people will just "agree" to without thinking.

Star Trek: The Experience is closed down.

The culprit? Greed. Their Vegas landlord is killing their lease.

It's a sad day.

Comcrap have announced their latest plan to screw the consumer: re-implementing the same nonsense that made millions of people leave CompuServ back in the day.

"As part of our pre-existing policy, we will continue to contact the top users of our high-speed Internet service and ask them to curb their usage," Comcast said Thursday.

"If a customer uses more than 250 GB and is one of the top users of our service, he or she may be contacted by Comcast to notify them of excessive use," according to the AUP. "At that time, we'll tell them exactly how much data per month they had used. We know from experience the vast majority of customers we ask to curb usage do so voluntarily."

Of course, if you do certain things (play World of Warcraft, have instant messaging) that's a lot easier limit to hit than they let on. But never let the truth get in the way of Comcrap's trying to weasel out of actually providing the service they advertise!

And of course, Comcrap gets away with this because it's an illegal monopoly in most of its "service" areas. When your "choice" is Comcrap, abysmally slow dialup, or ridiculous-latency satellite, there's not much choice at all.

The New York Times covers the big flaw in the recent Wind Power hype - wind power is completely inconsistent in its generating capacity.

Apparently it's so bad that wind farms are having to turn off, cutting their output, just so they don't overload people's homes.

The basic problem is that many transmission lines, and the connections between them, are simply too small for the amount of power companies would like to squeeze through them. The difficulty is most acute for long-distance transmission, but shows up at times even over distances of a few hundred miles.

An interesting piece in IEEE Spectrum pops up on an experimental technique for getting more RAM. Basically, it's performing data compression before things are stored in RAM.

Reminds me a lot of the "Ram Doubler" type programs on the old Mac OS... but hey, if they can actually make RAM more efficient through software with a relatively small performance hit, it could do wonders on devices like the memory-stripped PSP.

If software designers yield to temptation and ask for more memory than they could possibly need, they risk wasting a lot of money—even pennies matter when you're producing millions of units. Or the product could end up being too power hungry. Yet if they skimp on RAM, they may prevent the unit from running some new killer app that would allow the gadget to beat the competition. Such mistakes sometimes force companies to redesign their hardware, a process that is enormously costly and time-consuming.

We have spent the better part of three years trying to give designers of embedded systems a third option: to increase effective memory by compressing the data stored in RAM using just software.

California's highway toll tag system has been compromised according to an article over at Tech Review:

In the past, authorities have insisted that the FasTrak system uses encryption to secure data and that no personal details are stored on the device--just two unique, randomly assigned ID numbers. One of these is used to register the device when a customer purchases it, while the other acts as a unique identifier to let radio receivers at tolls detect cars as they pass by.

But when Lawson opened up a transponder, he found that there was no security protecting these IDs. The device uses two antennas, one to detect a request signal from the toll reader and another to transmit its ID so that it can be read, he says.

And here we go again - the same fault in these is probably all over the place.