Doug Aamoth…

Now THAT is a delicious looking piece of pie. That’s the size of slice I like when everyone else at the table’s on a diet. “Yeah, you know what?,” I’ll say, “Gimme a huge piece, like a real man-piece. You went to all this trouble to bake this delicious pie and I’d love to eat almost 29 percent of it in one sitting if nobody else minds.”

Anyway, Ars Technica is reporting data from 158 pages of Microsoft e-mails, one of which contains the above figures. You’ll notice that NVIDIA accounts for about 29% of Vista crashes, while Microsoft and “Unknown” account for almost 35% combined. I’m inclined to propose that “Unknown” should be considered a Microsoft problem until someone can figure out what’s causing those crashes.

Ars also points out the following…

The data points in the table cover an unspecified period in 2007, and Microsoft makes no attempt to break the aggregate data down into which device drivers, specifically, returned the highest number of crashes. If the number of failures were split by month and then graphed, we’d presumably see the number of NVIDIA driver failures per month decreasing as the company slowly brought its driver issues under control.

…so take that into consideration.

Whatever the severity of NVIDIA’s involvement, I can personally vouch for some wonkiness here and there — mostly graphics settings being forgotten when the computer comes out of sleep or hibernation modes — involving NVIDIA cards on my Sony VAIO VGN-SZ650 notebook and an HP s3100n desktop, but I haven’t had any major meltdowns that can be attributed to the graphics drivers on either system.

Your thoughts? Anyone having graphics problems with Vista?

Games like Civilization and BioShock might get some MMO treatment if developer Take-Two sees fit to chase some “potential untapped opportunities.” You’ll also notice that it’s pondering a BioShock movie, which would be wonderful and creepy and probably directed by Tim Burton, if I may take the liberty of throwing some wild speculation into the mix. The above image was taken from a document issued to Take-Two shareholders explaining why the company declined EA’s recent wooing.

via Kotaku

At first, I just owned a Wii. Then around Christmas-time last year, I got me an Xbox 360. I’ve decided that the Xbox is for big boy games and the Wii is for fun games.

Enter: a fun game — Deca Sports by Hudson Soft. There are ten sports in all. They are; Beach Volleyball, Soccer, Badminton, Basketball, Curling, Figure Skating, Archery, Supercross, Snowboard Cross, and Kart Race. They all look fun, especially Curling.

The game is coming out on May 20th and I’ll surely be buying it. You guys can come over and play. I have one extra nunchuck but I lost my second Wii-mote somehow, so bring one if you have one. What’s your take on the video’s feel-good music?

via NWFB

ShareThis

Look at you, you boring old regular non-superhero version of a stapler that sits atop my otherwise paperless workspace. You make me sick.

I have half a mind to put you up on eBay in the hopes of garnering $10 that I can use to buy a stapler that actually looks fun, like the Koziol Clark Superman Stapler seen on the right.

Sure, it doesn’t look exactly like Superman but, hey, let’s hear it for some advancement in the stapler design field. You’ve come a long way, baby.

If you’re in the market for a new stapler or you’re just looking to replace your stupid dumb current stapler, you can buy one here.

via Nerd Approved

ShareThis

Looking for new notebook? You can really load up a Dell Vostro and then watch as $500 melts off the asking price once you hit $1249. I configured one for fun and almost had a hard time getting from the $499 base price to $1249. Almost.

POWERFUL BUSINESS SOLUTIONS ARE GOING FAST [Dell.com]

ShareThis

A fire at LG Chem in South Korea on March 3rd has contributed to a worldwide notebook battery shortage, according to Reuters. Asustek is expected to be hardest hit, as the shortage “could affect up to 40 percent of second-quarter shipments” from Taiwan’s second-largest PC maker.

A Dell spokesperson acknowledged the shortage today and has blamed it for recent replacement battery price increases, but said little more than “We sell battery packs. The prices of those battery packs for people ordering extra batteries have gone up.” In the short term, PC manufacturers may be able to stabilize high battery prices against plummeting flash memory prices.

The plant isn’t scheduled to resume battery production for another 2-3 months. In the meantime, manufacturers have been able to purchase some batteries from plants owned by Sony and Panasonic while waiting for LG Chem to resume production.

ShareThis

Here’s the Lynx, from XCOR Aerospace out of California. It’s a cute little two-seater that’s capable of taking off from a standard runway and flying you up almost 40 miles into space so you can truly appreciate how big the oceans are.

You’d say to the pilot, “Hey have you heard that Irish drinking song called ‘Big Strong Man’? They claim that the guy is so big and tough that he ‘drank all the water in the sea and he walked all the way to It-a-ly.’ That’d be impossible, right captain?”

But surely, I digress. The Lynx will be ready to go in 2010 and “will offer affordable access to space for individuals, researchers and educators,” says XCOR CEO Jeff Greason, which is just a roundabout way for him to tell us all that he’s very wealthy because I can guarantee you that I won’t be able to afford a ticket for one of the inaugural flights. They will offer several flights each day, though, so maybe I could fly standby or something.

via Businessweek

ShareThis

In order for Sprint and Clearwire to really get this WiMax thing underway nationwide, they’re going to need some pretty substantial moolah — like $3 billion.

According to the Wall Street Journal, “Comcast, the nation’s largest cable operator, would put up as much as $1 billion, while No. 2 Time Warner Cable would add $500 million” along with smaller cable operator Bright House Networks chipping in another $100 million to $200 million. Google’s another possible funding source as well.

It’s not surprising that Comcast and Time Warner want in on the action, as WiMax service would otherwise be competitive to their current broadband offerings. An area of concern, should this partnership materialize, might be whether or not Sprint’s relatively aggressive pricing for data services will mesh with Comcast and Time Warner’s penchant for making money hand over fist. Consumers could ultimately lose out should monthly WiMax service cost more thanks to too many cooks in the kitchen.

That concern might get diluted somewhat, though, as sources familiar with the deal told the Journal that the cable companies would be able to purchase wholesale access and resell it on their own. They’d also get equity stake in the entire project, though, so there’d be an incentive for the WiMax service to make money on the whole, which could result in higher service prices across the board versus if the venture was backed solely by Spint and Clearwire.

ShareThis

I’ll start off by half-apologizing for that headline but these Ninja Gaiden games don’t come out all that often so I gotta strike while the iron’s hot. Anyhoo, ‘Ninja Gaiden: Dragon Sword’ is out today and it’s gotten some pretty good reviews from the big gaming sites.

The gameplay features a top-down isometric view of the action along with stylus-heavy combat a la ‘The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass’. You also apparently hold the DS sideways like a book “to assist in the operation of the stylus which allows players to view a wider range of scenes.”

ShareThis

Not cool, man. Not cool. Two fake ads surfaced on Craigslist.com saying that Jacksonville, Oregon resident Robert Salisbury “was forced to leave the area suddenly and his belongings, including a horse, were free for the taking,” according to a report by KGW News.

Salisbury returned home to find upwards of 30 people ransacking items from his barn and the exterior of his home. When he told the people that he didn’t place the ads and asked them to stop taking his stuff, many of them waved printouts of the ads at him and insisted they weren’t doing anything wrong.

Local police have issued amnesty to anyone who returns Salisbury’s belongings but haven’t been able to get everything back or find out who posted the fake ads in the first place. The horse was returned, which is good because horses are really expensive aren’t they? Like, more expensive than cars in some cases, right?

ShareThis