I'm not surprised, Windows 7 is actually rock solid OS. Everything is done perfectly and feels good. Vista itself wasn't bad, but drivers for it weren't ready. It was the necessary to move from XP.
It's hard to think how Microsoft can make the next Windows better from Windows 7.
Even in the Low Cost Carrier class, there's Air Asia who really are the worlds best LC airline. Food is reasonable, especially if you pre book. Seats are a little small but it's often half the price of premium carriers.
True, I'm currently traveling and just enjoying SE Asia and Air Asia does great job getting you around cheaply. I'm a quite tall and large guy, but I always book the emergency exit doors which plenty of space and its just US$4-5 extra. Only bad thing about Air Asia is that their both check-in lines in Bangkok are almost always full of people and you have to wait, but that's understandable.
As most of my flights are only about 1-2 hours, I also appreciate that food and all the other extra things aren't included in the price. You can just go eat at the destination and you save that on the price too. On longer trips (Europa - SE Asia) I usually book Air Berlin business class, because it's often cheaper than most airlines but you get the business class treatment, great food and free beer:)
While I previously had a fast constant internet connection, this year I moved to Asia and got to see how bad the internet connection can be at times.
Requiring an internet connection to start the game isn't really a problem, there aren't really that many situations where I would even want to be without one, but if the connection drops or becomes really slow at times it creates problems.
While I don't know how long this has been in effect, I haven't had any problems with my copies of Settlers 7, Assassins Creed 2 and Splinter Cell. Now I'm also more happy to buy HAWX 2, which I've been thinking of doing for a while.
That being said, I can predict this story will once again have just comments dissing DRM in general. Personally, I just want to enjoy the games and I'm getting too old to just rant about it while I can have actual fun too. As long as the DRM works, there is no problem for me. Combine this with the easiness of Steam and I'm more than happy to buy games.
It actually resembles a lot how US got into power. They ignored European copyrights completely and in the same way took what they needed without giving back. Karmas law, eh?
I think they're really much more worried about China becoming the super power that it will. You can be quite sure that the world will be a lot different in 10-15 years, and China will be the new country number one.
I haven't been to their network, but somehow I think it's one of those ircd's that hide user ip. Since they snatched the irc servers, they also got the masking keys and can now unmask all the ip's. Without getting the servers it wouldn't had been possible. Besides, there's probably more info and evidence on the servers.
A HTTP redirect system requires extra http request to be made without even knowing where the client is. You could be making that request from South Africa to North America, adding big delay.
When 99.9% of internet users use their local ISP's DNS it just makes sense to build it like that. Sure it's not perfect for the odd geeks who have changed their DNS settings, but that is so small minority it doesn't make any sense to slow down their whole system.
Akamai has been in this business for a very long time and has their infrastructure on datacenters all over the planet. They know what they're doing.
Then Akamai would only be a load balancing service. It's purpose is also to serve you content fast and geographically close - doing HTTP redirect would add unnecessary hops, perhaps to the other side of the world.
Just set up some email routers to automatically append text that insults Muhammad to all SPAM messages. Pretty soon the spammers will all have their buildings burned down, their families threatened, etc. You just use one set of assholes to attack another set of assholes--the perfect solution.
Or tell USA there is oil to be robbed where the spammers live.
Uh, Chinese language websites have been there for decades and there are billions of them. The same goes for russian language sites and all the other languages with non-ascii characters. It's just that you aren't finding them because they're not in English.
Apple has already started moving to cloud based services, so most likely the data center will be for those. It will also mean that the future iPhones, iPads and Mac computers will be even more locked down than previously. For example if you take a picture, it's directly uploaded "to the cloud". This is a huge privacy violation and means you don't really own your data anymore. It's almost funny who is alone in still giving you the change to own your data. Google, Apple and BlackBerry all want to move as much data and information as possible out of your devices, while the only phone models still giving privacy and ownership over your data is Windows Phone 7 phones. Seriously, look at how the things are going - it's not good. And the only reason the bad guys look like good guys now is that they have masked themself. Apple has it's cool and hippy image going, Google is catching geeks because it's supposedly open source (even while you can't even build Android for your phones) and BlackBerry is for businesses. Microsoft is the only one giving you choice, but on slashdot they're supposedly always the bad guy.
To be honest.. Java, XML and Eclipse sound like a horrible platform for development. Eclipse itself isn't ready for enterprise development - it's mostly a free tool to teach students Java programming. Java makes everything isolated, horrible to develop to different versions (your old Android phone doesn't have the latest Java? Too bad, you're out of luck) and forcing the use of XML.. it might be verbose, but damn it's horrible and has its own drawbacks.
In my opinion there is a huge advantage for Windows Phone 7 - You can develop with extremely professional tools like Visual Studio, you have XNA which is also used to create Windows and XBOX360 games and you can use more current languages like C#. WP7 phones also have more strict requirements regarding hardware so you know beforehand what you need to be aware of. Android is one hell of a fragmented mess ranging from underpowered cheap phones to top of the line phones, all with varying resolutions, capabilities and hardware.
As the book also notes, multi-touch on Android is really crappy. On iPhone and Windows Phone 7 it just works like expected. Things like this NEED to work in the system, you don't leave it to the application developers to do work arounds.
Android has a lot of possibilities, and as much as I like it (I own a HTC phone with Android), it really isn't up to par with iOS or WP7 - from both developers and users point of view.
I moved to live in Thailand around 6 months ago. This was the first time I noticed the true power of Facebook. Everything was there - people I met, places I visited, lots of pictures of the new city I would be living at and most importantly, I discovered lots of interesting new things, like a couple that bakes bread and other stuff we eat only back home and I could order from them. You didn't even really need to know so much specifics, because everything was interconnected when just knowing a few people. Getting to know the new people and places was amazingly easy, and at the same time I get to keep up with my old friends and family members. Otherwise you would have to be active to talk to all those people often, which would be a lot of work. Now I can quite passively still keep up, they can keep up with me and the relationship still remains. But when moving to a new place, it is amazingly easy to get to know everybody that way.
And lots of games - especially multiplayer, strategy and sandbox games - tend to last much longer than that 5 to 10 hours. For example my Steam account shows I've spent 500 hours for Modern Warfare 2, which comes down to $0.12 per hour. And don't eve get me started how much I've spend on Civilization series..
As it is, games are really quite a cheap form of entertainment. You can easily spend the same amount on a bar night and it may not even be any fun at all.
Humble Bundle is a success because of the publicity it gets. It gives them lots of sales, but the same model doesn't work without the publicity and if there would not be nothing special about it, well they would get all the reporting from gaming websites and sites like slashdot. Remember that if user pays $5, it's less than $1 per game. The normal prices were at least $20.
For those that don't know the story behind the guy of MegaUpload, MegaUpload and other sites in the same family, it's definitely an interesting one.. In summer TorrentFreak made an article called The Mega-Money World Of
MegaUpload.
The whole article is interesting read, but here are some interesting bits:
Kim ‘Kimble’ Schmitz is a quite unbelievable character. Born in 1974 in Germany, he grew to become a computer hacker, successful businessman and convicted criminal. In 1998 Schmitz received two years’ probation for hacking into corporate networks and abusing telephone services but the draw of big money was just around the corner.
In 2001 Schmitz pulled off a huge stock market bluff which netted him a small fortune. After buying shares worth hundreds of thousands of dollars in the almost bankrupt LetsBuyIt.com, he announced that he would invest 50 million euros in the company, but in reality he didn’t have the money. His declaration led to the biggest single-day rise on the German stock market which allowed Schmitz to sell his shares and pocket $1.5 million profit. He was arrested for insider-trading in 2002, sentenced to a term of 20 months and given a 100,000 euro fine.
Also in 2001, one of Schmitz’s companies loaned another one 280,000 euros and conveniently both went bust shortly after. Schmitz later pleaded guilty to embezzlement and received another two years probation.
According to a recent report from New Zealand, Schmitz is currently under investigation for using multiple names to register three luxury cars including a Rolls-Royce Phantom convertible. The cars are adorned with personal plates – GOD, WANTED and GUILTY.
The vehicles are registered to an address in Coatesville, New Zealand, which turns out to be a very special venue indeed – Schmitz’s newly-acquired mansion and the country’s most expensive house, a snip at just over $20 million USD.
An investigative piece found Schmitz in Hong Kong business records with the new name "Kim Tim Jim Vestor", allegedly having a Finnish passport, acting as director of several "Mega-" companies, among them Megaupload Ltd. and Megarotic Ltd.
As of 2008, Kim currently lives on the top floor of the Grand Hyatt in Hong Kong with his wife and child. He goes by an alias of “Kim Vestor.”
http://www.gfy.com/showthread.php?p=15096149
I also had Skype actually crashing, which seems really weird if it happened to everyone at the same time. It could also be the reason why the network started going down.
Heh, one of the games I've completely forgotten ever playing. I remember it was actually pretty good (I was really young tho), but not so much about the levels.
This was also back when you could borrow games from video rental stores for a week or so. It was a good way to test the whole games and got me nagging my parents to buy a few I really liked too.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not surprised, Windows 7 is actually rock solid OS. Everything is done perfectly and feels good. Vista itself wasn't bad, but drivers for it weren't ready. It was the necessary to move from XP.
It's hard to think how Microsoft can make the next Windows better from Windows 7.
Even in the Low Cost Carrier class, there's Air Asia who really are the worlds best LC airline. Food is reasonable, especially if you pre book. Seats are a little small but it's often half the price of premium carriers.
True, I'm currently traveling and just enjoying SE Asia and Air Asia does great job getting you around cheaply. I'm a quite tall and large guy, but I always book the emergency exit doors which plenty of space and its just US$4-5 extra. Only bad thing about Air Asia is that their both check-in lines in Bangkok are almost always full of people and you have to wait, but that's understandable.
:)
As most of my flights are only about 1-2 hours, I also appreciate that food and all the other extra things aren't included in the price. You can just go eat at the destination and you save that on the price too. On longer trips (Europa - SE Asia) I usually book Air Berlin business class, because it's often cheaper than most airlines but you get the business class treatment, great food and free beer
While I previously had a fast constant internet connection, this year I moved to Asia and got to see how bad the internet connection can be at times.
Requiring an internet connection to start the game isn't really a problem, there aren't really that many situations where I would even want to be without one, but if the connection drops or becomes really slow at times it creates problems.
While I don't know how long this has been in effect, I haven't had any problems with my copies of Settlers 7, Assassins Creed 2 and Splinter Cell. Now I'm also more happy to buy HAWX 2, which I've been thinking of doing for a while.
That being said, I can predict this story will once again have just comments dissing DRM in general. Personally, I just want to enjoy the games and I'm getting too old to just rant about it while I can have actual fun too. As long as the DRM works, there is no problem for me. Combine this with the easiness of Steam and I'm more than happy to buy games.
It actually resembles a lot how US got into power. They ignored European copyrights completely and in the same way took what they needed without giving back. Karmas law, eh?
I think they're really much more worried about China becoming the super power that it will. You can be quite sure that the world will be a lot different in 10-15 years, and China will be the new country number one.
I haven't been to their network, but somehow I think it's one of those ircd's that hide user ip. Since they snatched the irc servers, they also got the masking keys and can now unmask all the ip's. Without getting the servers it wouldn't had been possible. Besides, there's probably more info and evidence on the servers.
What could possibly go wrong?
A HTTP redirect system requires extra http request to be made without even knowing where the client is. You could be making that request from South Africa to North America, adding big delay.
When 99.9% of internet users use their local ISP's DNS it just makes sense to build it like that. Sure it's not perfect for the odd geeks who have changed their DNS settings, but that is so small minority it doesn't make any sense to slow down their whole system.
Akamai has been in this business for a very long time and has their infrastructure on datacenters all over the planet. They know what they're doing.
But that is mostly an uncommon situation. 99.9% of internet users will use their ISP's or otherwise close DNS.
Then Akamai would only be a load balancing service. It's purpose is also to serve you content fast and geographically close - doing HTTP redirect would add unnecessary hops, perhaps to the other side of the world.
Russia and Nigeria have oil.
But Nigeria's oil industry is already owned by Shell. And they're working with US government to plant agents inside the Nigerian government so that the cheap oil keeps flowing.
a major company shouldn't picky-pack on users and actually own their infrastructure that wouldn't go down like that?
Just set up some email routers to automatically append text that insults Muhammad to all SPAM messages. Pretty soon the spammers will all have their buildings burned down, their families threatened, etc. You just use one set of assholes to attack another set of assholes--the perfect solution.
Or tell USA there is oil to be robbed where the spammers live.
Uh, Chinese language websites have been there for decades and there are billions of them. The same goes for russian language sites and all the other languages with non-ascii characters. It's just that you aren't finding them because they're not in English.
Apple has already started moving to cloud based services, so most likely the data center will be for those. It will also mean that the future iPhones, iPads and Mac computers will be even more locked down than previously. For example if you take a picture, it's directly uploaded "to the cloud". This is a huge privacy violation and means you don't really own your data anymore. It's almost funny who is alone in still giving you the change to own your data. Google, Apple and BlackBerry all want to move as much data and information as possible out of your devices, while the only phone models still giving privacy and ownership over your data is Windows Phone 7 phones. Seriously, look at how the things are going - it's not good. And the only reason the bad guys look like good guys now is that they have masked themself. Apple has it's cool and hippy image going, Google is catching geeks because it's supposedly open source (even while you can't even build Android for your phones) and BlackBerry is for businesses. Microsoft is the only one giving you choice, but on slashdot they're supposedly always the bad guy.
My wife would become jealou.. oh who am I kidding, she would just laugh and call me gay.
To be honest.. Java, XML and Eclipse sound like a horrible platform for development. Eclipse itself isn't ready for enterprise development - it's mostly a free tool to teach students Java programming. Java makes everything isolated, horrible to develop to different versions (your old Android phone doesn't have the latest Java? Too bad, you're out of luck) and forcing the use of XML.. it might be verbose, but damn it's horrible and has its own drawbacks.
In my opinion there is a huge advantage for Windows Phone 7 - You can develop with extremely professional tools like Visual Studio, you have XNA which is also used to create Windows and XBOX360 games and you can use more current languages like C#. WP7 phones also have more strict requirements regarding hardware so you know beforehand what you need to be aware of. Android is one hell of a fragmented mess ranging from underpowered cheap phones to top of the line phones, all with varying resolutions, capabilities and hardware.
As the book also notes, multi-touch on Android is really crappy. On iPhone and Windows Phone 7 it just works like expected. Things like this NEED to work in the system, you don't leave it to the application developers to do work arounds.
Android has a lot of possibilities, and as much as I like it (I own a HTC phone with Android), it really isn't up to par with iOS or WP7 - from both developers and users point of view.
It's interesting how US was jabbing so much about cyber warfare and how they need to defend themself, and still they're the first one to attack.
I moved to live in Thailand around 6 months ago. This was the first time I noticed the true power of Facebook. Everything was there - people I met, places I visited, lots of pictures of the new city I would be living at and most importantly, I discovered lots of interesting new things, like a couple that bakes bread and other stuff we eat only back home and I could order from them. You didn't even really need to know so much specifics, because everything was interconnected when just knowing a few people. Getting to know the new people and places was amazingly easy, and at the same time I get to keep up with my old friends and family members. Otherwise you would have to be active to talk to all those people often, which would be a lot of work. Now I can quite passively still keep up, they can keep up with me and the relationship still remains. But when moving to a new place, it is amazingly easy to get to know everybody that way.
Google didn't buy On2 for their business and software, they bought them for their technology and patents.
And lots of games - especially multiplayer, strategy and sandbox games - tend to last much longer than that 5 to 10 hours. For example my Steam account shows I've spent 500 hours for Modern Warfare 2, which comes down to $0.12 per hour. And don't eve get me started how much I've spend on Civilization series..
As it is, games are really quite a cheap form of entertainment. You can easily spend the same amount on a bar night and it may not even be any fun at all.
Humble Bundle is a success because of the publicity it gets. It gives them lots of sales, but the same model doesn't work without the publicity and if there would not be nothing special about it, well they would get all the reporting from gaming websites and sites like slashdot. Remember that if user pays $5, it's less than $1 per game. The normal prices were at least $20.
The whole article is interesting read, but here are some interesting bits:
Kim ‘Kimble’ Schmitz is a quite unbelievable character. Born in 1974 in Germany, he grew to become a computer hacker, successful businessman and convicted criminal. In 1998 Schmitz received two years’ probation for hacking into corporate networks and abusing telephone services but the draw of big money was just around the corner.
In 2001 Schmitz pulled off a huge stock market bluff which netted him a small fortune. After buying shares worth hundreds of thousands of dollars in the almost bankrupt LetsBuyIt.com, he announced that he would invest 50 million euros in the company, but in reality he didn’t have the money. His declaration led to the biggest single-day rise on the German stock market which allowed Schmitz to sell his shares and pocket $1.5 million profit. He was arrested for insider-trading in 2002, sentenced to a term of 20 months and given a 100,000 euro fine.
Also in 2001, one of Schmitz’s companies loaned another one 280,000 euros and conveniently both went bust shortly after. Schmitz later pleaded guilty to embezzlement and received another two years probation.
According to a recent report from New Zealand, Schmitz is currently under investigation for using multiple names to register three luxury cars including a Rolls-Royce Phantom convertible. The cars are adorned with personal plates – GOD, WANTED and GUILTY.
The vehicles are registered to an address in Coatesville, New Zealand, which turns out to be a very special venue indeed – Schmitz’s newly-acquired mansion and the country’s most expensive house, a snip at just over $20 million USD.
An investigative piece found Schmitz in Hong Kong business records with the new name "Kim Tim Jim Vestor", allegedly having a Finnish passport, acting as director of several "Mega-" companies, among them Megaupload Ltd. and Megarotic Ltd.
As of 2008, Kim currently lives on the top floor of the Grand Hyatt in Hong Kong with his wife and child. He goes by an alias of “Kim Vestor.” http://www.gfy.com/showthread.php?p=15096149
I also had Skype actually crashing, which seems really weird if it happened to everyone at the same time. It could also be the reason why the network started going down.
Heh, one of the games I've completely forgotten ever playing. I remember it was actually pretty good (I was really young tho), but not so much about the levels.
This was also back when you could borrow games from video rental stores for a week or so. It was a good way to test the whole games and got me nagging my parents to buy a few I really liked too.