Anyway, Valve has now announced the release of Portal 2, after realising exactly how popular the original was. It should be coming out sometime in December this year. Portal 2 will be set many many years after the events of Portal unfolded. Yes, GlaDOS will be back, as the sweet, yet homicidal antagonistic robot. And yes, Chell will be back.

What I’m really interested in, is the fact that Portal 2 will most likely be featuring a new version of the Source engine, which should give us an accurate idea of how Half-Life 2 : Episode 3 will look. Although it hasn’t been confirmed yet, considering the fact that the 2 games obviously underwent concurrent development at some point in their product development cycles, it’ll be great to investigate what new whistles and bangs the boffins at Valve have incorporated into the already-rather-amazing Source engine.

P.S. To those of you who’re die-hard fans of the game, I hope you’ve heard Still Alive by GlaDOS. Amazing song, makes me laugh each time I hear it…

P.P.S. Am really looking forward to meeting the Aperture Science Companion Cube again.

P.P.P.S. The cake is a lie…

It’s an interesting thing though – the beauty bit hasn’t always been that consistent for the past couple of years. I mean, stuff like the California doesn’t quite look all that pretty. The rear end is way too huge, thanks to the huge metal folding roof. Still, it goes like stink, and it’s a comfortable cruiser.

Ferrari 599 Hybrid

Anyway, the point is this…Ferrari have announced a hybrid version of the 599.

Close your mouth, assuming your jaw just fell slack.

Trust me, it’s not just the paint job. It’s supposed to be all ‘green’ under the hood as well! Well, it’s not much, but they have a couple of electric motors to the rear tyres. The batteries are neatly arranged under the floor of the car, to keep the centre of gravity as low as possible, which is really important for this car, especially if it wants to be taken seriously as a Ferrari.

What I don’t get, is why Ferrari is bothering at all. It’s not like they sell cars in huge numbers and can make a world of difference to the environment. What if, the hybrid 599 is not at sharp as a regular 599? What if it’s slower (which it probably is)? Why would anybody buy one, assuming it goes into production, which it won’t anytime soon, mainly because the production cost is too high? Will Leonardo di Caprio abandon his Prius, and scamper for a Ferrari showroom? I don’t know and I don’t care… It’s important that this car either be a proper Ferrari, or a proper hybrid. It can’t be both…

I’m a big Porsche fan. One of the real nutters. I guess it can all be traced back to that one game – Need For Speed : Porsche Unleashed. That game really got me hooked onto Porsches. Fine, I do appreciate all other kinds of cars, but I’ll always have a special place in my heart for Porsches.

Porsche 918

That special place in my heart just may have caused a major cardiac arrest. I mean, just look at it. It’s the new Porsche 918, currently a near-production concept, spiritual successor to the Porsche Carrera GT, the limited production mid-engined supercar.

The Carrera GT was originally meant to be a prototype for a Le Mans racer, but somewhere along the way, it got transformed into the car we know today. A road going, all out supercar. Fine, so it’s quite slow, if you compare it with the supercars of today, like the Zonda, but in its time, along with the McLaren-Mercedes SLR, they were the fastest cars money could buy.

Firstly, it looks gorgeous. I mean, it’s a widely recognised and acknowledged fact that the people working in the design department of Porsche are among the laziest in the world. No matter how hard they try, each 911 looks almost exactly the same as the previous model. It’s like each time they’re instructed to design another body, they just doodle till the night before the deadline, and they hurriedly fish out last time’s blueprints and quickly make some meaningless squiggles, and carefully change a line or two, and rebrand it as a new car. Honestly, the design dept. at Porsche is possible the laziest in the whole world… And when Porsche does occasionally come up with a new car, it either looks hideously ugly (Cayenne), or just like a stretched kangaroo 911(Panamera), or a Boxter with a roof welded on (Cayman). But this looks utterly beautiful. Still recognisable for the Porsche it is, but at the same time, looking rather different from the rest of the range. As a result, this might be one of the first Porsches in a long, long time, that might be universally acknowledged as a pretty car.

What’s more, this supercar’s a hybrid, just like the Ferrari 599. Except, it’s more extreme. With a 3.4 litre V8 straight out of an American Le Mans racer, putting out 500 bhp, this car ought to be fast. What’s more, there are a couple of electric motors on the front axle, putting out another 200+ bhp, making the total effective power output over 700 bhp. Couple that with the fact that this weighs under 1.5 tonnes, and you’ve got yourselves a serious supercar… Can’t wait for this car to come out!

Koenigsegg Agera

It’s sufficient to say that it’s bonkers. Boasting of numbers like 0-60 mph in 3.1 seconds and a flat out top speed in the vicinity of 250 mph, the Agera manages to pull of a rather rare trick. It is both oh-so-desirable and oh-so-very-fatal.

I mean, exactly how much power can you extract from a 4.7 litre v8? The effing Bugatti Veyron only manages 1000 bhp after 16.4 litres and 4 turbo-chargers! Another interesting fact is the weight of the body – just 72 kilos, which makes it much, much lighter than your average American…

Once you realise that it’s looks suspiciously like the old CCX (that’ s because it’s actually a heavily modified CCX), you realise that this isn’t just any supercar. It’s probably going to carve a little niche of its own. I’d just recommend that niche be in a mental asylum of sorts. And a couple of cells for the guys who came up with it as well… But then it dawns upon me, Koenigsegg need something to keep their customers happy. While they may be upto something in their secret workshops in the Scandinavian mountains, it’s important that the world see that they’re upto something and not just faffing about. I’ll just hope and pray for a 1500 bhp hypersupercar in the next few years or something….

Now a bit of a history lesson. The Koenigsegg CCX or Competition Coupé X is a very mad car. It does 0-60 mph in 3.2 seconds, 0-125 mph in 9.8 seconds, and will go onto a top speed of 259 mph. Plus, the Koenigsegg CCX also holds the world record for the fastest speeding ticket ever recorded. The car was clocked by the rozzers doing about 242 mph. Must’ve been just a blur. Whoosh…and it’s gone.

Originally, the CCX was meant to have a Ford sourced engine, but later an in-house-production engine, a 4.7 litre was put in, with dual superchargers to finally end up producing a mind-warping 806 bhp at 6900 rpm and 678 lb·ft of torque at 5700 rpm.

So, going by the rule of more is better, the Agera should be even faster than the CCX.

Now though, Microsoft responded, by releasing a security update – KB971033 – which is an update for Windows Activation Technologies, which is the rebranded, upgraded version of Windows Genuine Advantage. It basically does the same thing – check if your version of Windows is original, and, if it’s not, begin to nag like nothing else on the face of this earth. It will progress from changing your background to black to eventually shutting down your PC every 2 hours, before locking you out of your PC completely.

removeWAT 2.2

Anyhow, Hazar has come up with another crack for this removeWAT version 2.2. I won’t be posting a link to the said software, but it should suffice to say that assuming you require it for purely academical reasons i.e. a proof-of-concept test, I suggest you use your search engine of choice to look for it.

This new and improved version will not only deactivate WAT, but in fact, install the WAT update first, then proceed to deactivate it. Proving that this guy is way smarter than the bozos at Microsoft. Hats off to you Hazar for making Redmond eat humble pie…