Mary Bale, the woman who put poor Lola the cat in a wheelie bin, receives the full wrath of Facebook, Lenovo to launch Xbox Kinect competitor, and Britain doesn’t care about 3D televisions. My thoughts on the news this Sunday 29, August 2010.

Quick note; as my Thoughts on News posts seem to be happening a lot more often than I had expected to be doing them, I’m going to put a little more effort in. This doesn’t mean a massive change to the original format, but from now on the links will be in the ‘related links’ section at the bottom of the post, rather than throughout the post itself. Now, onto the news.

A Guardian.co.uk article by Euan Ferguson questions the mentality of the British/Facebook public after the seemingly over the top reaction to Mary Bale. Mary Bale is the woman who was recently caught on CCTV stopping to stroke a cat as she walked down the street, shortly before noticing a nearby wheelie bin, and proceeding to put said cat, called Lola, into the wheelie bin. The cat spent some 15 hours inside said wheelie bin, before being rescued by her owner.

There will be people who will find Mary Bale’s cat entrapment humorous, but the majority of the watching public were, understandably, in various degrees of outrage. The aforementioned Guardian article points out that, while Mary Bale’s actions were hardly merit-worthy, the general response from the public and media would be more appropriate to, say, a murderer.

The article goes on to question whether Britons (and Facebookers) care more about animals (specifically the fluffy pet kinds) than we do about humans. I’ll admit that, while I think Mary Bale should have been locked in a small room with no lights or food for fifteen hours as punishment for her actions, I agree that a public reaction sufficient to have the police offering an escort for her safety is a bit much.

So do we care more about cats than people? Sometimes I think I do; there are some unbelievably stupid and ignorant people out there.

Lenovo are all set to debut a controller-less gaming console in China that may be a competitor to the Xbox 360′s new bullet point; Kinect. Lenovo aren’t being too subtle about the similarities to there console, named the eBox, has to Kinect, and are making noises about possible widespread release after its initial release in China.

Firstly, they appear to be making strong insinuations that this console is an Xbox/Kinect competitor, but Kinect isn’t out yet, so we don’t know if there’s anything to compete against. It’s entirely possible that Kinect could tank, in which case basing your console entirely around a concept that nobody wants seems like a bad move; if Kinect fails, Xbox 360 is still a successful gaming console in its own right.

There are no images or footage of the console in use, so it is questionable as to whether the console will even be that good, but lets assume for a second that it is, and is legitimate competition to Xbox and, I guess, PS3 and Wii. Is another console a good thing?

Usually more competition is better; it stops companies from settling on high prices because customers have no other options. There can also be too much competition; mobile phone web browsers, for example, have been giving web designers headaches since the term ‘WAP’ was coined. If the game console market wasn’t due for some major changes – if the only progress would be faster chips and bigger [storage] discs – then I would welcome another competitor to make the existing brands try that little bit harder to get my money.

Unfortunately I don’t feel that way. I believe the gaming industry is close a major shift, a shift that most electronic devices are making. Over the past few years more and more devices have become so computer-like that computers are being used to do their jobs. People are using their computers to time shift and record television, control all of the non-essential components of their cars and, crucially to this point, play games. PC gaming is nothing new, but these days, with services like Steam and decreasing prices of faster computers, you don’t need an expensive gaming computer to play the same games you can play on a console, and they look just as good.

My point being that another format – another place for exclusives that mean you potentially have to own four consoles to play all the best games – is not what I want right now. Perhaps in the future, consoles will become small, dedicated PC’s that run the Xbox Live operating system or the PlayStation Network OS, and I won’t have to fork out £300 for a PlayStation 3 when there are only two games I want to play that I can’t get on the Xbox!

Finally, and unsurprisingly, a recent poll has shown that Britons aren’t likely to invest in a 3D TV. Personally I think it’s a combination of the point I made in my post on Toshiba’s new glasses-less 3D TV, that 3D in your living room is more like watching a puppet show in a box than being immersed in another world, and fact that a sizable portion of the country haven’t moved to HD yet!

A large portion of Britain will have a HD TV, but that can simply be put down to the fact that you can no longer buy a non-HD TV above 22″. But just because they have a HD TV doesn’t mean they watch HD content. It costs more to get HD channels, Blu-rays are more expensive than DVD’s. If we were to take black and white television as 1G, colour television as 2G, DVD and DVD quality content as 3G, then manufacturers and content providers are trying to push us onto 5G before we’ve fully accepted 4G.

Personally, I get very excited when these technological advances creep into the shops, and I can’t wait for the Star Trek holodeck experience, but I don’t think we should be surprised that a sizeable chunk of the population, who have probably only recently coughed up for a big HD television, aren’t ready to move on just yet.

That was my thoughts on some of the news this week.

Related Links