Spore was the most anticipated game of 2008.

Spore is a multi-genre "massively single-player online game" developed by Maxis and designed by Will Wright. It allows a player to control the evolution of a species from its beginnings as a unicellular organism, through development as an intelligent and social creature, to interstellar exploration as a spacefaring culture. It has drawn wide attention for its massive scope, and its use of open-ended gameplay and procedural generation.

There is however an issue with Spore that has sparked debate all across the internet. DRM;

Digital rights management refers to the control and protection of digital intellectual property (content), including documents, images, video and audio. DRM limits what a user can do with that content even when in possession of it.

In this case the DRM is built into the game in form of the number of times you can install it. Should you want to install it more than 3 times (for example if you want to rebuild your PC) then you will need to phone Maxis to get an authorisation code.

This has sparked massive outrage amongst gamers and users alike and caused a deluge of bad reviews on Amazon.com for the game. Out of the 2,219 reviews (as of 13th of Sept), 2,018 awarded the game with just 1 star, all because of the strict DRM.

It also has caused the game to be the “Most Pirated Ever”, within 3 days of release the game had already been downloaded over 500,000 times.

This seems to show that the more DRM and hurdles you put in peoples way the more they will do to jump them. The answer…… make games cheaper and without DRM. That’s my solution anyway.

Call the fire brigade that’s what; and that is exactly what the scientists did at the Large Hadron Collider at the CERN labs on Friday. The electrical link between two of the particle accelerator’s massive 30-ton superconducting magnets has failed, causing a magnet quench event :-S. Due to having to warm up the section of the tunnel containing the magnet in order to conduct repairs, and then cool it back down to its -271°C operating temperature, these repairs will take at least two months.

There was a problem initially on Thursday when a cooling unit failed and had to be repaired. Following Thursday’s successful repairs, the LHC was cranked up on Friday for a routine test. During this test, one of the bus bar connections that linked cables between the magnets failed, and melted thus causing roughly a ton of liquid helium to leak into one of the tunnel sections.

This is a big setback for everyone at CERN however, the scientists are not worried too much, Considering the huge investments made on the LHC in terms of time and money – 20 years and $8 billion plus – a two-month delay is not all that massive.

On the 7th of this month Google reached 10 years old. It’s application for incorporation was accepted on this data and thus the company was formed. In those 10 years Google has totally dominated the web and become the most successful business on the internet. Miguel Helft of the New York times sum’s up Google’s meteoric rise to fame with a few stats

Here’s a quick snapshot of Google by the numbers along with some comparisons to Microsoft. The sources of the data are the companies, Yahoo Finance and comScore.

Google’s age: 10
Microsoft’s age: 33

Google’s revenue in the last 4 quarters: $19.6 billion
Microsoft’s revenue in the last 4 quarters: $60.4 billion

Microsoft’s revenue at age 10: $140 million
($279 million in today’s dollars)

Google’s revenue per hour in the last 4 quarters: $2.2 million
Microsoft’s revenue per hour in the last 4 quarters: $6.9 million

Google net income in the last 4 quarters: $4.85 billion
Microsoft’s net income in the last 4 quarters: $17.6 billion

Google employees, as of June 30th: 19,604
Microsoft employees, as of May 31st: 89,809

Google’s revenue per employee: $1 million
Microsoft revenue per employee: $672,000

Market value of Google: $142 billion
Market value of Microsoft: $241 billion

Number of tech companies with a market value larger than Google’s: 3(Microsoft, I.B.M. and Apple, in that order)

Worldwide searches on Google in July: 48.7 billion
Worldwide searches on Microsoft in July: 2.3 billion

Worldwide searches per hour on Google in July: 65 million
Worldwide searches per hour on Microsoft in July: 3.1 million

 

It’s amazing to contemplate what Google might do in the next 10 years considering what they have done in the past!

Happy Birthday Google

A

P.s I did mean to write this on the actual day but I forgot. oops!

Regular readers of my blog will know I am very interested in American politics and obviously the election race features highly within that interest. Well after nearly a year and a half of campaigning and drumming up support both parties have "officially" declared party nominees for the last stage of the "Race to the White House". In the blue corner of this political 3 round heavyweight bout we have John McCain and in the Red Corner we have Barack Obama.

Both competitors have now announced their VP candidates and boy have they stirred up some dust with them! McCain’s choice is Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin Palin, former mayor of the town of Wasilla.

Palin is virtually unknown and untested nationally which could hurt McCain’s argument that Obama, 47, a first-term senator from Illinois, is too inexperienced to handle the White House.

Palin is pro-life, pro-contraception, and a prominent member of Feminists for Life. While running for Governor of Alaska, Palin advocated the teaching of both creationism and evolution in public schools; however, she noted that "creationism doesn’t have to be part of the curriculum" and that she would not use "religion as a litmus test, or anybody’s personal opinion on evolution or creationism" as criteria for selection to the school board.

She opposes same-sex marriage, but she has stated that she has gay friends and is receptive to gay and lesbian concerns about discrimination. Palin complied with an Alaskan state Supreme Court order and signed an implementation of same-sex benefits into law under protest, stating that legal options to avoid doing so had run out. She supported a non-binding referendum on whether there should be a constitutional amendment on the matter. Alaska was one of the first U.S. states to pass a constitutional ban on gay marriage, in 1998, along with Hawaii. Palin has stated that she supported the 1998 constitutional amendment.

Barack Obama has announced Senator Joe Biden as his running mate; 

The senior senator for Delaware not only brings white hair to the Democratic ticket. He remains popular in his native Pennsylvania, one of America’s largest swing states. He is also one of the poorest members of the Senate, an institution which is threatening to revert to its Gilded Age status as a millionaires’ club. He travels home to his family in Delaware every day on Amtrak, and lives in a surprisingly modest house. All this makes him appealing to Obama-wary working-class voters. 

Mr Biden is one of the most experienced foreign-policy hands in Washington. He has been the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee since the Democratic takeover of Congress in 2007, with a particular interest in eastern Europe, and is on first-name terms with many foreign politicians.

This is a perfect compliment to Mr Obama’s biggest weaknesses, his wafer-thin résumé on foreign affairs. It will stand him in good stead in the vice-presidential debate, which could prove surprisingly important in a close race. The fact that he is a good friend of John McCain—the two men have served together in the Senate for two decades—could also help the Democrats to wrong-foot their opponent.

Let battle commence

It’s all getting rather interesting if you ask me!!

A

Sources Wikipedia, Reuters, BBC and WSJ

So it’s been out for a day and a bit now, I’ve been using it for nearly that long and have been testing it quite extensively in that period. So now I am going to write a compact review on it, I want to keep it short and quite concise as I could go into a lot of detail on things that are either missing or not up to standard but what needs to be remembered is that Chrome is still an early beta release and as a result of that it is inevitability that bugs and failings will be encountered.

So here is my compact analysis

1. The speed and load on the system
   • This browser is phenomenally fast, rendering pages is lightning quick compared to Firefox – I carried out some proper controlled tests using clean installs of both browsers on a virtual machine with no cached data at all, Chrome won hands down.
   • The system load is a lot less too I currently have 10 tabs open and am streaming live video and the total memory usage is about 200Mb’s. I just opened the same tabs in Firefox and did the streaming video as well and Firefox hit 272mbs. This trend was the same when I carried out controlled tests on my virtualised machine.
2. The Look
   • It’s a slick looking interface, very minimalistic and as a result you can see more of the page you are viewing, there is simply the address bar and the links bar. Tabs are placed in the window header so as to save space (which is a cracking idea). If Google decided to allow plugins and toolbars then I can see that minimalistic view quickly vanishing (at least for me (my Firefox window has 4 toolbars)) but for the moment I like it.
3. Features
   • Crash Protection - built into chrome is the ability to suffer a browser crash be it from a dodgy plugin or badly coded site and not have to close the entire browser, only the tab that has crashed, you can even reload the tab if you want rather than closing it. This has happened a couple of times when I was streaming via Ustream.tv today and it was so nice not to have all my tabs that I had open at the time ( I usually have around 8 at anyone time) lost.
   • Incognito mode - This I am not sure about, when you open a tab or a link in incognito mode all the information you pull from the net is discarded when you close the tab or window. No data about where you have visited or what you have done is stored locally. Now I can understand where Google are coming from on this, should you use someone else’s PC or a shared PC and want to do something like log into an Internet banking site then you of course would like to have the information stay away from the local machine. However I don’t feel it will be used solely for that, this thought was backed up by my fellow geek and house mate when in a conversation about Chrome he said to me "do you like the porn mode feature" we both laughed at that point but there has to be some security issues there for parents who are trying to protect children. They would have no idea what their kids are looking at should they find and use this mode. It’s a decent idea but needs revision.
   • To fight malware and phishing attempts, Chrome is constantly downloading lists of harmful sites.
4. The Problems

   I know I said I would not pick holes in the product, and I won’t too much but there are a few things that need outlining

   • TOS - Google’s Terms of Service for using Chrome are stirring up a few arguments, here is an extract

11.1 You retain copyright and any other rights you already hold in Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services. By submitting, posting or displaying the content you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services. This license is for the sole purpose of enabling Google to display, distribute and promote the Services and may be revoked for certain Services as defined in the Additional Terms of those Services.

• The way I read this (of course I am no law expert) is that Google can use anything you look at or send through the browser. Does that include passwords, usernames, securecodes? Where do they draw the line? how do they collect the data? There needs to be some clarification on this if you ask me. I certainly won’t be using the browser to do anything super secure like Internet banking until this is changed or clarified
• The browser is also subject to a vulnerability at the moment that would allow it to be "carpet bombed" that could expose Windows users to  malicious hacker attacks. Just hours after the release of Google Chrome, researcher Aviv Raff discovered that he could combine two vulnerabilities — a flaw in Apple Safari (WebKit) and a Java bug discussed at this year’s Black Hat conference — to trick users into launching executables direct from the new browser.

Conclusion

This post was a little longer than anticipated  but I feel it needed that to cover it enough. The browser in my opinion is good, very good. It is fast, streamlines and not very memory intensive. It’s not the securest solution out there but that will be improved over time. It works on most things but I have noticed a couple of sites that have flaws when being viewed on the browser. I will continue to use it over the coming weeks (probably most of the time as it’s so damn quick) but I won’t leave Firefox totally especially for my secure things like Internet banking and such. Also my toolbars hold too much value for me to totally abandon them at the moment.

If I had to rate Chrome it would get a solid 7 out of 10

I can’t wait to see what the next release brings!!

A

I have been using Google’s new web browser chrome for an hour now, I won’t say too much as I want to write a full review about it tomorrow.

I think I am still slightly shocked to be honest, this browser is……. find out what I think tomorrow!!!!

A