Tech for Lunch!

Twitter has become very popular for keeping everyone informed about what you are doing almost instantly. There are a few ways to get information to and from the site, the most useful and popular one is via SMS - aka Text Messages from your mobile phone.

When the massive Earthquake hit China last week, Twitters used their mobile phones to update their statuses letting everyone know about their situation immediately. Many updates even came during the earthquake.. now that’s way faster than the media! Twitter reportedly became a source of information for major news organizations covering the China earthquake.

Twitter users get a maximum of 140 characters a message; ironically, Twitter designer Biz Stone envisioned its potential as a communication tool by a “tweet” warning he received about a California earthquake while about to board a train.

This is proof that even though it is sometimes mundane to know about every little move all your friends make in one day, it can also be extremely useful to have access to these kinds of services. Chinese users ended up notifying the world of an event, through a California-based service… that’s what I call Networking.

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.

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?

Sony has announced another delay in the launch of PlayStation Home. It is a project for a 3D virtual world for users of the PlayStation 3 console, a sort of meeting place, exchange and encounter for the members of this community.

Initially, the project was announced in July 2007, Sony had stated that everything would be ready in the autumn of 2007, but officials have seen fit to delay the launch to spring of this year. However, Sony now indicates that the first testing service (beta) will be held next autumn.

In a statement issued yesterday, the president of Sony Computer Entertainment, Kazuo Hirai, said that the project is not yet ready: “We are well aware that we once again ask the current and future users of the PS3 to be patient, but we have come to the conclusion that we needed a little more time to improve the product, in order to be able to offer a product that comes out of the ordinary.”

PlayStation Home aroused much enthusiasm in the PS3 community. Any user will be represented by a virtual character (avatar), which may interact with those around him, in a village in 3D, just like life in the community; this environment will consist of public and private spaces.

Each member of PlayStation Home will have its own “apartment” where he can receive one or several people, listen to music, watch television, discuss with your partner or group, decorate the walls with photos, etc..

As for public spaces, they will house cinemas which will be presenting trailers for movies or games, there will be game rooms, where people can enjoy, alone or in a group, different arcade games, billiards or bowling.

Sony has already announced that the virtual world, which will be downloadable from PlayStation Store, should not exceed 500 MB of memory on the hard drive.

Yesterday, I went to the Montreal edition of the Heroes Happen {here} launch event by Microsoft. This is the launch tour for Microsoft’s next-generation server platform Windows Server 2008, Microsoft SQL 2008 and Visual Studio 2008.

I always enjoy going to these launch events because you get to see the actual products and their features in real life and in fairly accurate representations of the real work environments. This one was no exception, but I didn’t get to see everything I wanted to see. The event was split into two different “tracks”, namely the IT Pro track and the Developer track. I usually attend only the IT Pro sessions because they are much closer to my every day occupations, but I decided to go to the last dev session because I wanted to get a good look at Silverlight. The word “Silverlight” was not even mentioned one single time during the final session I attended which was the Web Developer’s session!

The first session was an overview of the new features implemented in Windows Server 2008 and that will certainly be tomorrow’s article because there are quite a few things to cover. The most interesting one for me is the ServerCore feature which allows the installation of a server without any GUI at all. This allows to run a server on less powerful hardware and still benefit from the product’s features. They also covered the new features of SQL 2008 and VS 2008 briefly. This session was the best one because there was a lot of attention to the new features and how they can be implemented quickly and easily in many businesses.

The second session was a more technical look at the Server 2008 specific features and a few live demos so that we could see them in action. The only problem is that a few of these demos didn’t work as planned. Granted the problems were not necessarily because of the software but mostly because of the presenters, It’s not as convincing as when you get to really see it work. The ones I was most curious about worked for the most part, but I’d still have liked to see a bit more polished demos for a launch like this. I went to the Windows Vista and Office 2007 launch last year and, let me tell you there was a huge difference in the style of presentations and depth. You can’t blame them since it’s not for the same crowd… Yesterday’s presentation was for a much more technical and forgiving crowd when it comes to software and scripts not working the first time you try them.

For the final session, I was supposed to see the Hyper-V products, Microsoft’s virtualization environment for Server 2008, but I opted to go on the Developer’s side to see the web developer’s features in SQL2008 and Visual Studio 2008. That session was very interesting for me because I do not have a chance to use these tools as much as I would like, but I can see they have listened to what users have been asking for. The new CSS management tools and the javascript/AJAX capabilities alone are worth an upgrade, no questions asked.

Overall, it was a very good day and it was pretty much what I expected. Interesting presentations, free lunch and a day of learning and seeing lots of geeky stuff with a couple of friends… Can’t go wrong with that. Microsoft has some great products coming our way and I look forward to them.

I know that this was a few days ago, but since I posted an article about selling domains for profit recently, I thought it was still interesting to mention it here. If you were quick enough to get your hands on a good, catchy and relevant domain name a few years ago, you might want to start being proactive and not just wait for someone to make an offer on it. Putting it up for auction, could be a good way to get rid of it and make some cool cash while you’re at it. This article has the full story on how it all happened.

Chris Clark bought pizza.com in 1994 for the usual reservation price of 20$ and has kept it all these years. He originally bought it for his company to try and get contracts with local pizza businesses but it never worked out. He still held on to it thinking it wouls someday be useful. A couple of years ago, he and a friend used the domain to make it a pizza directory with ads returning about 5000$ a month.

The natural traffic on sites with single words like these is impressive. Without ever having to advertise, sites like tees.com, vodka.com, sex.com and pizza.com get regular monthly traffic just because people are curious and because the domain names match exactly the keywords being typed into search engines.

After earing about the sale of vodka.com for $3 million on the auction site Sedo.com, Chris Clark decided to see what the interest might be for his domain. The auction started slowly but then shot up to the $2 million reserve price that was set and ended a $2.6 million for the final sale price. Sedo keeps 10% for running the auction and running background checks on bidders because of the high numbers being rolled in.

Just as previously reported, Facebook has begun rolling out their IM client on some selected networks. This was the only available information since the complete roll out schedule has not been made public. it is to be released to limited networks first for load testing and bug-hunting, and then rolled out to broader networks.

The new chat bar appears at the bottom of every page and cannot be removed. The client has all the regular functionalities that you would expect such as the ability to show yourself as offline and lets you know who is available for chatting.

The integration is very well done and should prove to be a great addition to Facebook. I know that it will give a good reason to many people for leaving a browser with Facebook open all the time.   You can find a full post about the features with screenshots here if you can’t wait to try if for yourself.  You can “pop-out” the chat windows to allow many chats at the same time and a better visibility and the status window shows your friends letting you know who is active or not.

Mini-feed items will also appear directly in your chat windows for the person you are chatting with if they are related.  So if you are chatting with someone who does something on your profile, you get instantly notified.

I hope the networks I am in get this very anticipated IM Client rolled-out because I am really anxious to try it out. Not that I have that much chatting to do, but I like the technical integration that they have made and I want to try it out even more for myself.

The Guinness World Record^TM for the world’s lightest mobile phone has been awarded to Modu for its tiny and sophisticated mobile phone.

Modu was awarded this prestigious honour after careful consideration by the Guinness World Records^TM judges, who declared that: “The lightest mobile phone is the modu, which weighs 40.1 g (1.41 oz).” Guinness World Records added: “modu’s dimensions are 72.1 mm (2.8 inches) x 37.6 mm (1.4 inches) x 7.8 mm (0.3 inches).”

The Modu Mobile phone is the first modular cell phone which allows it to be so small. You can slip it into various Modu jackets and Modu Mates which allow additional functionnalities and an entirely new user experience. Although it is the lightest in the world, the Modu still has all the standard functions of any standard mobile phone and is very easy to use.

I personally find that small gadgets like these do offer some enhanced portability options because of their size and weight, but with the “small and sexy” comes the “fragile and easy to lose”. I haven’t had one in my hands(yet) so I can’t say for sure, but I’d probably be a little worried about easily breaking it during normal use.