Tech for Lunch!

I recently said that I do not usually cover the gaming industry, but it seems that it is getting more and more difficult to ignore. Some games are just impossible to ignore and I’m pretty sure you’ve heard a little something about this franchise.

Take Two’s Grand Theft Auto 4 is most definitely the best one of the entire franchise and is out to become the best selling video game of all time. The game stands to sell an estimated $300-million during its first week and perhaps a $450-million during this year.

The Grand Theft Auto franchise has become well known for it’s immersive experience and is probably most notorious for it’s high level of violence. Many lawsuits and reports have followed the previous installments stating that the games are a bad influence for teens and make crime look like an interesting avenue. GTA4 takes it all even further, but most people will tell you that, although the game is very violent and realistic, it is not that bad an influence if you can think for yourself.

You play as Niko, a fresh-off-the-boat immigrant who gets caught up into a life of crime whether he wants it or not. You get jobs or missions from your employers and your decisions truely have an impact on the progression and the outcome of the game. Let’s say you have a choice of killing someone to complete a mission, that death could make someone very mad or very proud of you, and may bring revenge upon you or a helping hand later on when you need one. This makes for an even more interesting storyline because your experience is based on how you play the game.

The city itself is very impressive, even though it is not as huge as San Andreas was. The details and the realism are what makes it so incredible. You can see potholes and garbage strewn on the streets in a shady part of town, and compare that to the smoothly paved roads and posh stores in a wealthy part of town is like looking at any real-world city. But this goes even further with different clothing styles, different lingo and even different cars, depending on the neighbourhood. That’s what I call an incredible gaming experience!

The single player campaign is certainly very interesting to play, but the greatest addition to GTA is the multiplayer online game play. Supporting up to 16 players at one time, you can choose any one of over a dozen different match types for some thrilling action.

The reviews for this game are simply unbelievable. Almost everyone agrees that every aspect is well above every standard and sets the bar for next generation games to come. I recommend for everyone to give this game a try if you get the chance or at least just watch someone who is playing it, because it plays out just like a movie. Crime pays for Take Two.

Once again, I’ve come across a really cool online application that can be very useful to some readers out there. This one is called Presdo, which you can try for yourself at www.presdo.com, no need to register to see it in action.

Presdo takes the hassle out of trying to find the best time to get together with people. Use Presdo to minimize the annoying ping pong of email, texting, and voicemail when organizing the next team lunch or trying to grab coffee with a friend. So basically, it is an online scheduling tool that you can use to invite people to an event (as simple as a cup of coffee to anything else..) and it helps you work-out the details so that the most people can attend without conflicts.

The thing that’s really cool about Presdo, and what makes it different from some of the others, is that it uses natural language to enter your events. When you get to the front page of the site, you are presented with a Google-inspired input box and not much else. You type in what you want to do using plain english, like “have lunch with Josee and yanick tomorrow at noon” and Presdo will take you to a screen with everything already filled out according to what you entered. At this point, you can modify what needs to be modified and enter the email addresses for the people you want to invite. If you have a sign-in, you would only need to do this once and you could re-use many of the things you’ve entered previously. You can use Google maps to find locations in your area and that map is included with the event to let everyone know where to go.

Once you send our the first invitation, everyone can confirm or suggest new times and locations to better accommodate them. When everyone agrees or you have the best date/time/location to get the most people, you can save the event directly in your calendar. You can export the event as an Outlook, iCal, Google Calendar or Yahoo! Calendar items.

Presdo works extremely well and is a free service. Eventually, the founder would like to offer a premium service.

It was thirty years ago, on May 3rd 1978, that the very first spam message was sent out. I’m not sure if this is a wonderful event to remember, but the first message was not of malicious intent contrary to the ones we sometimes get today.

Back then, the internet as we know it today was not quite born just yet.. The network was known as the Arpanet and was still government-owned. According to Wikipedia: “The ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network) developed by DARPA of the United States Department of Defense, was the world’s first operational packet switching network, and the predecessor of the global Internet.” While I was digging around for this story I ended up reading a few documents on the origins of the internet and it’s original purpose and I’ll probably write an article about all of this later on.

Let’s get back to the subject at hand, the first SPAM message. Gary Thuerk, the guy who sent the message had to use a text-based email client (there was no Windows at that time ;-)) and had to type all of the addresses manually. Compared to today’s spam attacks, it was a very limited number of recipients. It was an advertisement (or actually an invitation to come see) for the new DEC Computers. DEC does not exist anymore, but not because of the spam. The message was sent to a whopping 393 people and was not sent without problems. The person who sent the message was not very familiar with arpanet and its rules, nor with the software to send messages. He typed in all the addresses in the TO: field but after 320 names, they started overflowing in the body of the message. The first recipients then received the email with a bunch of addresses before the actual message. When they figured out that the last 73 names had not been included in the first broadcast, they sent another one!

The response was not very friendly to Mr. Thuerk’s pioneering message. Because the Arpanet was only used by researchers and the U.S. Military, he received many replies telling him that the system was not for his business purposes. In fact, he had managed to connect one of his DEC Computers to the Arpanet, which was also a violation of the rules.

It was approximately 10 years before another spam message was sent out in another form, and the evolution of spam followed the networks. Spam was used on Bulletin Board Systems (BBS), and today as we know it on the internet, where they account for about 90% of all emails sent in one day.

You can see the full transcript of the original message as well as many of the replies that followed here.

A friend of mine came across this article by Tamir Khason and sent it to me. It’s actually pretty funny to see that -probably by a lot of coincidence- there seems to be a correlation between the success of a programming language and the amount of facial hair that the inventor had :-) I’m sure we could do the same type of correlation for many other things, but this one seems to hold true in many cases and I thought it would be a bit different from my usual articles.

The best examples are for the C programming language. One of the most well known and widespread languages. Brian W. Kernighan, Dennis M. Ritchie and Kenneth L. Thompson all have beards and have created a language which is used by approximately 16% of open-source projects.

The article then mentions another great contender, namely C++, but this language is being used less and less as time goes by. The reason for the decline of the language is the fact that its creator, Bjarne Stroustrup, had a lot of facial hair when it was released, then only had a goatee and now doesn’t seem to have anymore.

So there are two conclusions to be drawn from this: The success of a programming language is directly related to the amount of facial hair of the creator, and it’s lifespan is also based on keeping that same beard.

Mustaches are not as successful it seems. The developers of BASIC and Perl, both had mustaches and both of those languages were widespread but very criticized.

If you need to see more proof on this theory, you should really take a look at Tamir’s articles. I linked to the most recent one but at the top of his article, you will find a link to the first one that he had written. Enjoy!

There is something new brewing in the world of computing. The Florida-based company, Psystar, offers a computer that can run any operating system, including Apple’s Mac OS X.

This is the Open Computer, which is offered in two versions, the basic, starting at $399 and the Pro, starting at $999. In other words, Apple clones are now available.

Historically, the Mac community has been able to evolve in a closed environment. But starting a couple of years ago, Apple computers were equipped with Intel processors, which facilitate the lives of people who specialize in everything that surrounds the industry of cloning and copying.

Of course, Apple’s lawyers are probably already on the case. One can assume that Steve Jobs has already declared war on these new clones. In its advertising, Psystar insists that their computers allow the users to operate Macs at a fraction of the price, since the Mac basic costs at least three times as much, with far fewer components and performance.

The Operating system that you choose to install (or get installed) is up to you and Mac OS X may be a bit more expensive, but with such a low machine price, you’re still way under Apple’s prices. Theoretically though, it is forbidden to run this Mac OS X on any device other than those made by Apple.

The only potential problems I see with these are the availability of device drivers if you decide to change some hardware in your machine or add some components…and perhaps the availability of patches which might refuse to install if they notice you are not running genuine Apple hardware.

Anyway, it will be interesting to see Apple’s reaction in dealing with this intrusion into their world. Can Apple legally prevent manufacturers from making hardware that is capable of running their software?