TRN's Weekly Review

So this is going to be my one consistent post (hopefully) that will be posted every Sunday and in it I will pick my top 5 news stories of the week. These stories may not be the biggest stories but they are the ones that interested me or made me laugh. Lets get this started.

The first story that I found interesting this week was "The Console Living Room". This is basically an internet archive of a lot of games from various consoles during the 70's and 80's. As someone who grew up in the Nineties I did not get a chance to play many of these games so for people like me it will be a good chance to play some of the classics; were as for older generations it will provide a very nostalgic feel.
There are currently games from five consoles, these are: The Atari 2600, The Atari 7800 ProSystem, The ColecoVision, The Magnavox Odyssey, and The Astrocade. The are many games for each console with some real classics in there such as Donkey Kong:

There is currently no sound in the games but there are plans to add sounds to the games. You have the choice to either download the games and run them in a emulator or run them in your web browser. I have only run them in my web browser and I have found them to be a bit buggy but when you get them running they are great fun.
If you want to try these games here visit here:
https://archive.org/details/consolelivingroom

The second story is slightly more serious. Alan Turing is considered a war hero and rightly so. He was one of the key code breakers in deciphering the the Enigma machine. Without his work we may have lost the war. He was also a pioneer in Computer Science and is widely considered to be the father of theoretical computer science. Alan Turing was homosexual and in 1952 he was convicted and was given probation provided that he underwent hormonal treatment. This treatment left Turing with erectile dysfunction. It also meant that he lost his security clearance and so could no longer continue his work with the government. This led him to commit suicide in 1954, his death was caused by cyanide poisoning.
This week Alan Turing was pardoned, however this was not greeted with the kind of response you would expect. Of course most people were very happy with the result but some believe that it was the wrong thing to do. They believe that if you are going to pardon Turing then you should have to pardon all the people who were convicted for homosexuality, not only the people who were war heroes. They are angry because it seems like he has pardoned because he was famous, not because he was homosexual and many people think that this is unfair. I can see where they are coming from.

Now for some more light hearted news, unless you live in China, Battlefield 4 has been banned in China. China has banned the game because the Chinese government believe it threatens the country's national security. The issue comes with the games DLC called "China Rising". This is set in 2020 and is about Admiral Chang trying to overthrow the Chinese government, he is then supported by Russia but this then starts a war between China and the USA. This is not much a problem though as the game was never actually officially released in China.


With CES looming over us there is some bad news for Windows. Apparently PC makers are planning a rebellion against Windows at CES according to Tim Bajarin of Creative Strategies. Bajarin has said that "PC Plus" is being worked on. This is a machine that will run Windows 8.1 and Android simultaneously and it will be done through software emulation. One of the reasons for doing this is to bring more touch based apps and games to Windows. This has been done because when Microsoft released Windows 8 it worked very well for touch screen computers or tablets running Windows, but worked poorly on traditional keyboard and mice devices which angered many people.

Finally while Amazon had a great success in terms of the number of sales of 426 items per second which totalled 36.8 million items ordered in total worldwide and gained more than 1 million new Amazon Prime members. However they did have trouble with shipping all of these items. The main problem lay with UPS and FedEx who could not deal with the increase of items needing to be shipped. This meant that many people did not receive gifts before Christmas. To try and rectify this issue Amazon are not giving all affected peeople $20 Amazon gift cards.

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