One of my software affiliates, GriderSoft, will be hosting a public beta of the newest version of his Windows registry security tool MyRegSecure.

See below for more details:

MyRegSecure is getting a much-needed update!

The new MyRegSecure 1.1 will use significantly less memory, have new features, and be more secure. To test these changes, Grider Software is going to host a public beta for MyRegSecure 1.1. The expected release date for MyRegSecure 1.1 Beta is June 1, 2011.

Improvements and new features will include:

• - Uses up to 97% less memory.
• - Dynamically loads registry structure.
• - Smaller executable, fewer generated support files, and less hard disk space usage.
• - Load RegEdit from the Registry Explorer.
• - Explore keys in the Important Key List just by double-clicking.
• - Compatible with the new and included AutoUpdate program.

More information to come.

Late last year, Viacom decided to sell the game developer Harmonix. Rumors suggested that Electronic Arts or even Activision might buy them out. Fortunately for the consumers, neither of those rumored deals was made! We all saw how Activision handled its ownership of Guitar Hero, effectively running the franchise (and possibly the music-rhythm genre, itself) into the ground by release one or two games every year! And we all also know how Electronic Arts's EA Sports brand has handled Madden NFL over the past 6 years with all competition in the pro football gaming market being effectively stamped out.

No, fortunately for us gamers, Harmonix decided to set up a holding company in order to buy themselves and once again become an independent developer.

As stated in an interview between Joystiq and Harmonix founder and current Vice President Chris Rigopolous, Harmonix has also severed ties with Viacom-owned MTV.

• Good news? Or bad news?
  • The good news
  • The bad news
• So what's the future for Harmonix?
• My personal wishlist

Considering the recent claims from the fundamentalist Christians over at Family Radio that the world is going to end, and the Rapture will occur, this coming weekend (May 21, 2011), I thought I'd take a look at how the world would be different if all the Christians were, in fact, Raptured.

While those who claim that the end is nigh will argue that anybody left behind is in for a world of misery, I thought I would lighten the load by offering the following Top 10 reasons why the Earth might be a better place after the Rapture:

I recently had my full review of Portal 2 posted on Game Observer (now defunct as of 05/13/2014).

If you are interested, you can also prepare for my review by reading my pre-release blog for the game, in which I express concerns that Portal may go the way of Call of Duty, Guitar Hero, and other games that oversaturate themselves with annual or bi-annual releases until the public gets sick of them. Hopefully that doesn't happen.

In the meantime...

Yes GlaDOS, we brought you back because we really do love to test!

Apparently, a very long time has passed since the first game. The Enrichment Center is very different. Under the care of the watchful AI, Wheatley, the entire facility has been slowly falling apart. The degrading, decrepit test chambers make for much more interesting visuals than the sterile, white and gray chambers of the first game. They are now overgrown with weeds and vines, panels are falling off the walls, broken glass litters the floors, and fallen and bent metal beams and girders obstruct some of your paths. It’s just too bad that with all the debris and vegetation littering the environment, that none of it is interactive. It slightly breaks the immersion when you walk through dangling leaves and they don’t react to your passing at all...

I recently discussed some the problems inherent to time travel in works of fiction. Most notably, the paradoxes contained in the Terminator and Back to the Future movies. But now I want to take a step back and look at time itself.

Does "time" even exist?

The standard notion of time is that it is a fourth dimension just as fundamental and intrinsic to the universe as the three spatial dimensions of length, width, and height.

But the truth is: time is just an abstraction of the human imagination. It is a convenient construct that we use to explain relationships between things in our universe. Like motion, time does not exist without the objects that we use as a frame of reference for measuring it.

Time is scientifically defined as a relationship to the rate of decay of a radioactive caesium atom. It is also often linked with the speed of light, which is often seen as a “cosmic speed limit”.

But is this view of time really necessary? Is time truly a fundamental property of our universe?

“What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning”
   - Werner Heisenberg, father of quantum physics.