L0rdDiabl0's Blog

My new blog is Online

2005-07-20T11:20:00.000+03:00

Al last, my new blog is online, go visit it here www.Technoogle.com, and note to everyone linking to this blog so that they update their links to the new blog.

I will not post here any more, so this blog is officially dead.
RIP blogger you’ve been a nice starting point.

Moving to a new blog

2005-07-13T09:16:00.000+03:00

It has been a long time since I last posted, it wasn’t intended that way but other things happened and I got unintentionally busy, and frankly forgot all about my blog.

two weeks ago I decided to start a new blog, one with a private domain name and hosting, no more blogspot, two reasons for this move, the obvious one is having my blog on my own domain and getting rid of .blogspot.com, the other reason is Wordpress which is IMO quite superior to any blogging package out there, with more than enough features capabilities and extensions to satisfy all types of bloggers.

Interesting things started happening concerning my career, I will not go into details as it is too early in this stage, but things are going really well, even more than I anticipated, this is what has been keeping me busy lately, but there’s a lot more work to do until things start taking shape, if all goes well I will achieve things beyond even my wildest dreams, wish me luck.

Now that I have my domain name activated and my server up and running it will take only a few days till I install Wordpress and setup my blog, stay tuned, the next post will be hopefully on my new blog.

Don’t Yawn Game

2005-07-03T12:04:00.000+03:00

Don’t Yawn Game
Really hard, especially late in the evening.

Yahoo Launches My Web 2.0 Beta

2005-06-30T12:22:00.000+03:00

The newest product from Yahoo called My Web 2.0 Beta is an interesting one indeed; it describes itself as Social Search Engine, something like del.icio.us meets Yahoo search, it allows you to save your favorite search results so that you can easily find them later, and also share them with other people.

You can tag your search results like del.icio.us so that it’s easy to navigate through your big search history, and also easy for other people to pass by your favorite pages.
And you can use this service to navigate through other people favorite sites, and keep up with the popular sites at any time.

Also this service promises to deliver more relevant search results based on your personal habits and relations in the social network, using the new method titled MyRank which is Yahoo’s new secret in the fight for more relevancy.

I’m surprised Google hasn’t done that earlier, since all the innovation comes from Google nowadays, and the social interaction in the web has been around for a while, and certainly it caught the attention of all great players in the market.

This new service is in closed-beta phase, only for a limited number of users; luckily I have access and will certainly experiment with it for a while, see how good it is or if the results will really improve, but I doubt that it’ll replace del.icio.us as a social bookmarking solution, as del.icio.us already has a huge community and a wonderful very simple Interface, in addition to tens of 3^rd part tools that made it much more practical.

Here’s a quick Getting Started Guide, and you can read the FAQ for more detailed info, and finally here’s a blog dedicated for My Web 2.0.

Here’s more coverage:
My Web 2.0: Social Search from Jeremy Zawodny's blog.
Yahoo Blends Personal & Social Search with MyWeb 2.0 from Search Engine Watch Blog.
Search, with a little help from your friends from Yahoo Search blog.
Yahoo Social Search, Act II from Many-to-Many Blog.
John Battele interesting take on this new service.

Technorati Tags: , Yahoo, Google, Search, Engine, Search Engine, Social, Personalized, My Web, Web, My Web 2.0, Beta

New iTunes supports Podcasting

2005-06-29T12:36:00.000+03:00

The promised new version of iTunes 4.9 is out, and it supports Podcasting in a wonderful way, it’s a must download for all iPod owners.

Here’s some of the available web coverage:

iTunes Podcasting: Wow! From Russell Beattie.
Some Initial Thoughts from Dons Blog. (must read)
New iTunes hints at coming cell phone support from Cnet News.com.

I’ll update it as more coverage is available, stay tuned.

Technorati Tags: , Apple, Music, Podcasting, Podcast, Podcasts, iTunes, iTunes 4.9

Google Earth

2005-06-29T11:29:00.000+03:00

Google released Google Earth yesterday. Very cool 3D view of the world.

Key features of Google Earth include:
• Free software download available at http://earth.google.com
• 3D buildings in major cities across the United States
• 3D terrain showing mountains, valleys, and canyons around the world
• Integrated Google Local search to find local information such as
hotels, restaurants, schools, parks, and transportation
• Fast, dynamic navigation
• Video playback of driving directions
• Tilt, rotate, and activate 3D terrain and buildings for a different
perspective on a location
• Easy creation and sharing of annotations among users

Google is releasing new products like crazy; it’s getting real hard to keep up with all the updates they introduce, I wonder how much they can persist with that enthusiasm.

Technorati Tags: Google, Earth, Google Earth, Virtual, Map, 3D

Google to launch Online Video Playback

2005-06-27T11:16:00.000+03:00

John Battelle confirmed that Google will launch today an online in-browser video playback feature; this means that you’ll be able to playback video files from Google natively in the browser without the need for external video Player, like Winamp or Windows Media Player.

This feature will be based on the open-source VLC media player, which is rumored to be available to the open source community as part of their Google code project.

This will go nicely along other services like video search and video upload, according to John the service will be used first to allow users to easily playback freely available video files uploaded by other users, and later it will be used to playback video purchased from Google via the upcoming Google Payment System.

What is the importance of this new feature?
These are my early thoughts:

-This represents yet another assault from Google on a Microsoft’s product, this time it’s Windows Media Player, another battle in the Media War, the most important war in the next decade, forget Operating systems or web search, Media is where the real money lies.

-Confirms my earlier predictions here and there about Google Plan to move all applications from Computer-based to Web-based, in advance for its WebOS or its Unified Interface for all your needs.

-Another step in Google’s direction to depend on the open-source community to further develop its products, and in my opinion it’s one of the wisest choices Google has made recently, as open-source community proved many times how far they can take a product (Firefox) and how much features they can add to a product for free.

This is only the beginning, no one can predict where this product will go and how will it be used in the future, but it’s certainly a step in the right direction.

Technorati Tags: , Google, Microsoft, Media, Video, Playback, Player, WMP, WebOS, Open Source, Search, Upload

Being Alive

2005-06-25T22:48:00.000+03:00

Mira was wondering in her last post "I'm alive or am I alive" what it means to be alive for real, I worte a comment on her blog that was very long, she suggested that I post it as a trackback so here it is:

Being alive for real can be done first by finding your true beliefs, embrace them, live by them, and work very hard under them in the course of evolution, in the hope to add something valuble to the world, and in case you couldn't, at least you've tried.

I don't mean that you should only work for your beliefs, no I mean work whatever you like the most without it being against your beliefs.

But your work must be productive and in the course of evolution, meaningless work can't make you satisfied only happy for a short period of time.
Lots of people spend their life following just happiness, only to discover at the end that it was only instant and lasted for a short time, and that they've been living a lie running after an emotion.

Happiness is only an emotion, even a cheap one forms and fades very quickly, and it's wrong to depend on it in your life or work, becasue it'll never make you satisfied.
The true happiness in life is not what makes you happy, but what makes you satisfied with yourself to the fullest, and not regret your actions and life.

Only that way, you'll feel satisfied and content with your life, or in another word you'll be actually LIVING.

You must not be satisfied with the generic choice, the one 95% of the people follows: study, work, make lots of money, get married have children, buy expensive stuff and property then die.
You'll have to find your own life even if it was against your Environment, family, friends.

Everyone has a unique life and interests, and it's utterly wrong to be a passive and follow your society and surroundings, you'll be insulting your intelligence that has been giving to you for a reason.

Before you think of how to live and survive, you must first choose your life, consciously and courageously, before you reach a point where you'll regret your whole life.

RSS turning point

2005-06-25T11:02:00.000+03:00

You may be surprised to read that, as RSS had been there for years, but yesterday marks a great day in the history of RSS and the Internet as a whole, it’s the day Microsoft acknowledged RSS and announced widespread support to RSS.

It includes:
1- Full RSS Support in upcoming Internet Explorer 7.
2- RSS Support in its upcoming OS Longhorn.
3- Adding new Extensions to RSS to support listing among other things.

The announcement came from Dean Hachomovitch, general manager of Microsoft's Internet Explorer team, and took place yesterday in Gnomedex 2005 technology conference in the US city of Seattle.

According to him, Microsoft has decided that subscribing via RSS, will become the third leg of its information-access triangle, Browsing – Searching – RSS Subscribing.

I felt that Microsoft had a thing for RSS from the day they announced XML file formats for upcoming Office, I knew that they had yet unknown uses for RSS.

A few years later expect that RSS will no longer be just a way to subscribe to Blogs or Podcasts, it’ll be an integrated part of user experience from browsing to Email to Document creation and even co-editing, it’ll be more of a way to handle and present information on a global scale with things we can never yet imagine.

Microsoft is THE Mass-Market company, and it’s the only company that can take RSS to the masses, RSS supporters and enthusiasts can rest now as Microsoft is more than capable of taking RSS to the next level.

You can check out these links for more coverage:
Steve Rubel: The Day RSS Turned Pro.
Dave Winer has linked to various stories in his blog Scripting News.
Also Robert Scoble has gathered many useful links on blog reactions on RSS news

Technorati Tags: , Gnomedex, Gnomedex2005, Gnomedex 2005, RSS, Microsoft, Longhorn, IE, IE7

Blogger now offers free Image Upload

2005-06-25T00:14:00.000+03:00

At last, Blogger came to its senses and did the thing that should’ve been done from the beginning.

Blogger now offers native image upload for free blogs up to 300MB, now you can include images in your posts. Just click the new picture icon and it will allow you to upload an image from your computer, for detailed instructions look here.

No more wrestling with Hello, or linking from Flickr.

Technorati Tags: , Google, Blogger, Image, Upload

Unplanned break from blogging

2005-06-22T16:12:00.000+03:00

It wasn’t my intention to take a break from blogging, but I was a bit bored and couldn’t come up with subjects to post about, sometimes they were few and the other times there were a lot of stuff to post about so it was hard to choose from them, eventually I decided to give up for a while especially since there were other distractions (GTA: San Andreas) to keep me occupied for a while.

I appreciated this break; it made me concentrate on other things that I’ve been ignoring for a while, and also fueled my creativity and got me interested again in blogging, after I started to lose Interest recently.

Now I’m back with a passion, and decided to take blogging to the next level, so I intend to increase my rate of blogging, hopefully I’ll do couple of blogs per day maybe more, and I’ll Link to interesting reads and stories that I stumble upon.

I spend a lot of daily time browsing and discovering new things and usually I pass by very interesting reads and stuff, so I thought it’s better to share them with my dear visitors than keep them to myself.

I’ll get started in just a few days, stay tuned, and sorry for the lack of updates.

Busy… Playing GTA: San Andreas

2005-06-16T13:55:00.000+03:00

Well… It’s been a long time since I last posted, obviously I’ve been busy, but this time it’s not work or studying this time it’s because of this game “Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas”.

If you’re not familiar with this game, it’s one of the best selling and most famous games of all time, not only because of how good this game is, also because it’s accused with generating violent behavior among younglings, and was blamed for a number of shootout incidents in the US.

This game has very high production values, nearly the best in the games Industry, for example the charcacters voices were done by famous Actors like Samuel L. Jackson and Ice T.
At last it has been released for the PC after 8 months from being released on PS2; its graphics looks very outdated but the games is fun and addictive as hell, no matter how many hours I play, I can’t get enough of this game and keep going back for more, I’m spending all my free time on this game, I rarely go online now and my RSS reader is crammed with 100+ unread updates.

Well that’s it for now, I’m sure the addiction will wear off in the next couple of days, but for now I can’t help myself.

Technorati Tags: Games, PC, PC Games, PS2, GTA, San Andreas, Gaming

Technorati Tags Script

2005-06-12T17:15:00.000+03:00

Celebrating the new Technorati Public Beta and to ease the work accosiated with adding tags, I wrote a tagging script in Javascript, I think it’s in good shape now after a few days worth of tests, just open this page then right click on this link and choose “Add to favorites” for IE users and “Bookmark this link” for Firefox users, then whenever you need to add tags to your post click on the Bookmark and type your tags separated by space (for two words tags you need to group them with +) click OK then it will generate the source code, just copy the code to your post and you’re good to go.

If you encounter any Bugs or have any comment, criticism, or anything else, please feel free to leave a comment or send me an E-mail.

If you feel a bit alien about tagging then read on.

Tags have a rather broad meaning and multiple uses; I will not talk about them here because they’re not the focus of this post, now I’m in the process of writing a long detailed article about Tagging in general, but I’m busy with various things and it’s progressing slowly, check back from time to time.

What are Technorati Tags?
Technorati Tags are simply words that define the subjects tackled by a certain blog post; with tags people can categorize their posts so that other people can find them more easily.

So when somebody is interested in iPod stuff, they keep a watchlist of iPod tag so that they can read any blog that talk about iPods.

For blog Authors Tags are very effective tools in promoting their blogs, since I started using Technorati Tags 1.5 months ago my blog’s traffic had increased by a great deal.

The traffic I get from Technorati Tags account for nearly 30% of my blog’s traffic, and that’s a huge percentage considering the neglectable work of adding Tags.

I urge all my fellow bloggers to tag their posts since its advantage is worth the effort.

Technorati Tags: , Technorati, Tag, Tags, Tagging, Script, Javascript, Tool

New Technorati Public Beta is live

2005-06-12T17:04:00.000+03:00

Technorati has announced a public beta of an updated Technorati, the new design in beta phase is intended to be accessible to more people, specifically beginners and novices in blogging, the new interface now is friendlier and contains more stuff.

I’m a huge tagging supporter, so what I like most about the new design is the improved integration of tags in the search, and the ability to receive RSS feeds of certain Tags, now you can easily keep up with all the posts about a certain topic.

Also a significant improvement is the new Watchlist capabilities which allow users to read their updates on one page without the need for third-party RSS reader.

Go experiment with the new design and don’t forget to send your feedback to the awesome guys responsible feedback@technorati.com.

Celebrating this event, I’ve written a tagging script, you can find it on this page (blogger messed up when I linked it in here).
check the next post for details.

Technorati Tags: , Technorati, Beta, Blogs, Weblogs, Watchlists, Tags, Feed, Feeds, Script

PS3 will run Linux, and maybe other OSes

2005-06-11T12:08:00.000+03:00

During a recent interview with Sony Computer Entertainment president Ken Kutagari, he said that the PS3 (PlayStation 3) will not come with a pre-installed Hard Drive and it has to be purchased separately; the reason for this move according to him is that “no matter how much capacity we put in it, it won't be enough”.

But the exciting news is that the PS3’s HDD could come preinstalled with Linux OS, and he also said that the PS3 will be able to run other Operating Systems such as Windows or Mac OS X if the publishers want them to do so.

Also users could benefit from the Cell famous capability of running multiple OSes (Virtualization) in turning the PS3 Game machine into a Supercomputer capable of running the most demanding applications outside the realm of games.

Running Linux on PS3 mean that its architecture will be completely open, and programmers will be able to do anything with it.

I can’t even imagine how the enthusiastic community is going to benefit from this opportunity, but upon its release the PS3 will be the hottest gadget ever.

Technorati Tags: , Sony, PS3, PlayStation, Linux, OS, Windows, Mac, Mac OS, HDD, Hard Disk, Hard Drive, Interview

MS Toolbar Offers Tabbed Browsing in IE

2005-06-09T10:36:00.000+03:00

Looks like Microsoft couldn’t wait for IE7, so they introduced tabbed browsing to the current version of IE via their new version of the Search Toolbar (thanks Mark Jen for the heads up).

If you’re an IE user you should really download this toolbar (8MB) and get a taste of what you were missing, personally I’m staying with Firefox which offered tabbed browsing since forever and it’s above all secure.

Technorati Tags: , Microsoft, IE, Internet Explorer, Internet, Web, Explorer, browsing, tabbed, tabbed browsing, toolbar

Google is now the most valuable media company

2005-06-08T20:37:00.000+03:00

Reported by Cnet yesterday that Google reached a current stock market capitalization of more than $80 billion, and it is now worth more than any other media company in the whole world including the Giant Time Warner Company.

This is a result from Google going IPO 10 months ago, in which its shares raised from 85$ to $293 apparently due to its popularity.

Even with Googles excellent performance and no threatening competition, the company is overvalued and one negative incident could lead to a huge collapse in shares prices.

Is Google just another Internet Bubble waiting to burst? Or is it really an extraordinary successful company? Personally I wish for the latter, because I think the market can’t handle another big collapse.

Technorati Tags: Google, Time, Warner, Time Warner, Business, Market, IPO, Shares, Internet, Web,

Is Apple working on a Grand conspiracy against Microsoft?

2005-06-08T12:13:00.000+03:00

Usually that type of conspiracy theories comes from me, but this time Jason Calacanis beats me to it, he thinks that Apple is gonna make their OS free, or at least a free light version of the OS.

“Clearly that’s the next big move for Apple. Make the OS free, convert 2-10% of the desktops out there to Mac and make it back on value added services like iTunes, software, and .Mac storage/email. Plus, when folks get addicted to the OS they will crave the slick hardware and the experience of going to the Apple store.”

I don’t think such thing may happen in the near future, but Apple could surprise us as it did with its latest move and to think of it, it could accomplish many important things to Apple:

-Redeem its biggest mistake, not licensing its OS and leaving Microsoft to dominate the market.

-The biggest hit to Microsoft in the history (it’s a good reason on its own).

-Destroy Microsoft dominance of the user-friendly Operating Systems.

-And eventually forcing Microsoft to offer a light version of its OS for free and thus losing one of its most profitable businesses.

-Gaining a huge Entrance into living Room Computers, which is undoubtly the future of computing.

And then people will use Apple products more often to accompany their Media Systems like iTunes, iPods, Video capable iPods later, and whatever Apple chooses to release.

Apple could even open its DRM (Digital Rights Management) to others so that they can use it in addition to Microsoft Solution and not letting Microsoft dominate the market, and many more benefits and opportunities that may arise later.

What will really happen? We should wait and see.

Technorati Tags: Apple, Microsoft, Mac, iMac, WWDC, WWDC2005, iPod, iTunes, Mac OS, Mac OS X, MacOSX, Windows

Steve Jobs Keynote and the aftermath

2005-06-07T00:57:00.000+03:00

As some of you know today is the Worldwide Developer Conference, WWDC2005 and also it’s the date for the historical keynote of Apple’s CEO Steve Jobs, why historical? Because it follows the rumors of the biggest change in Apple’s recent history, embracing Intel’s CPUs and dumping IBM’s.

The keynote has been covered by many sources MacNN, Engadget, TUAW, check them out for kenote details.

Not to repeat the former links ,I’ll try to mention the most important points in the keynote:

-Apple literally dominates the digital music business:
End of last quarter 16 million iPods sold.
76% market share of all MP3 players.
430M songs sold and downloaded.
82 percent iTunes market share in the month of May

-Apple this week says it will deliver the 2,000,000 copy of Mac OS X Tiger. In under 6 weeks since it’s released.

-Apple will start the transition to Intel starting mid 2006 till the end of 2007, here the official Press Release

-The reason for the transition is that PowerPC isn’t enough and Intel delivers much better performance per watt.

-Mac OS X is cross-platform by design, and for the last 5 years every release of Mac OS X has been built for both Intel and PowerPC-based Macs, and during the keynote Apple was showing Mac OS X Tiger running on Intel System.

Dave Winer says he has some bits of juicy info the others don't have:

1. Apple is not going into the software business; their operating system will not run on other hardware, like IBM, HP, and Dell.

2. While Windows is not explicitly supported, they won't do anything to prevent Windows from running on their hardware.

This bit of info if turned out to be right is quite impressive; it will allow us to have Windows in addition to Mac OS X on any Mac Computer, and if they sell Macs with high end specs, there will be no reason for me (or anyone else) to buy PC anymore.

There’s a lot more viewpoints and predictions, but it’s getting late now, I’ll continue tomorrow.

Technorati Tags: Apple, Intel, Mac, OS, Mac OS, Mac OS+X, Tiger, CPU, Steve Jobs, Keynote, iPods, ITunes, Music, WWDC2005, WWDC, ,

Cleaning my virtual world

2005-06-06T19:04:00.000+03:00

It’s been quite some time (4 months) since I last cleaned my system, today I didn’t have much work to do and my system’s state was completely unbearable, so I decided to dedicate this day to the feared horrible task of cleaning all my system and it contained of the following tasks:

-Cleaning my inbox and deleting old and useless E-mails: It was the longest most boring task ever, but I managed to shorten the number of E-mails from 600+ to an amazing 145, so it was certainly worth the effort.

-Uninstalling unnecessary and old Programs and Games: my 160GB Hard disk was nearly full, so I had to get rid of some of the old games and I managed to free about 20 GB.

-Cleaning and archiving my Bookmarks (Favorites for IE users): Due to my horrible memory I got used to the habit of adding all the interesting sites to my Bookmarks list, and although I always made sure to categorize them in the suitable folders, some 100 sites were left in the main directory without classification, so today I went through all of them, deleting the unnecessary ones and categorizing the important, and thus spending a long time Online.

-Cleaning my desktop and other folders: This morning you could barley see the wallpaper from all the scattered downloads, folders, and shortcuts, so it was very necessary that I delete some of them and categorize the rest.

I haven’t finished this task yet but it got me very bored and decided to take some time off, check what’s up online and write this post.

The initial result from the cleaning is amazing and very satisfactory, and it made me regret that I didn’t perform it earlier, now everything is clear, organized, neat and now I can find everything more easily, overall it made me feel very happy, and increased my productivity.

I’ll make sure to do this maintenance every week from now on, to keep things from piling up.

Lifecycle of Bloggers

2005-06-05T13:22:00.000+03:00

The Lifecycle of Bloggers as experienced by an ace blogger.

Good thing I’m still at the beginning, the later stages don’t seem very pleasant.

Technorati Tags: Blogging, Blogger, Blog, Blogs, Lifecycle,

Apple to switch from IBM to Intel

2005-06-04T11:55:00.000+03:00

Now it’s official, after more than a decade from using IBM’s CPUs in its computers, Apple plans to cancel its long-time partnership with IBM in favor of Intel CPUs, the move will first affect lower-end computers like Mac mini in mid 2006 and then higher-end ones like Power Mac in mid 2007.

The reason for the recent move is yet unknown, maybe because IBM can’t provide decent volumes of PowerPC or maybe because they’re too expensive in comparison to Intel CPUs, probably Steve Jobs will reveal the reason during his keynote speech expected Monday at Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference in San Francisco.

After this change there will be no difference whatsoever between Apple Computers and usual PCs, same Platform (CPU+MB), same RAM, same Graphics Cards, same everything.

Why would anybody pay extra money for a Mac after this? When he can get a PC with the same specs many times cheaper, Apple needs to lower the prices for its Computers or offer other advantages to keep up with the competition and distinguish its computers from the lot.

Steve Jobs assured earlier that Mac OS X since it’s built upon open-source FreeBSD could easily work on Intel Platforms.

At least I hope that with this move we will be able to run Mac OS X on normal PCs, that would be simply AWESOME!!!

Technorati Tags: Apple, Intel, IBM, Mac, PC, CPU, Steve Jobs

First Mac mini, now Intel Mini

2005-06-03T10:26:00.000+03:00

When Apple announced its innovative Mac mini and with the entire buzz that it generated at that time, I expected that other PC manufacturers will follow suit and join the ‘mini’ fever.

At Computex Taipei 2005 AOpen a maker of computer components in cooperation with Intel announced its new PC barebone which design looks very similar to Apple’s Mac mini, with a noticeable difference in putting the switch button in the front side while Apple Mac mini has it on the back side.

This mini PC will be based on Pentium M processors and Intel 915GM chipset with integrated DirectX 9.0 graphics core, and it will features audio, Ethernet, FireWire and USB 2.0 ports same as Mac mini, But due to the expensive parts used in this Cube mini it may be priced higher than Mac mini which costs $499.

By the time of its release we will likely see different versions from different system builders because AOpen intend to sell the Cube mini as a barebone which will let system builders or end-users to configure it according to their needs, certainly better that the limitations imposed on Mac mini with only 2 versions.

Although this mini PC is very similar to Mac mini, it will not pose a great threat to its market, because the majority of Mac mini buyers is PC owners who want to get their hands on affordable Mac, the battle between them will be on the Media Center (Living Room) market, which IMHO Mac mini is the winner because of its Software that simply destroys any PC Software on that level, as no Windows can challenge Mac OS X in security, ease of use or sexiness, Mac OS X is simply too sexy to be resisted, and the multimedia iLife suite offers amazing experience superior to any similar PC Software.

Personally I would go for a Mac mini for a second computer and not trade it for any similar PC, but that’s me.

Technorati Tags: Apple, Intel, Aopen, Mac, Mini, PC,

XML Documents for Microsoft Office 12

2005-06-02T11:46:00.000+03:00

Microsoft officially announced new open XML Office File Formats for its next Office Suite 12, it will replaces the old binary format as the new default format but will continue full support for the old format including the distribution of a free downloadable "converter" that allows users of older Office versions to work with the new formats.

But what of the benefits? I’m not sure yet what Microsoft has in mind as innovative uses for the new format but certain things come to mind like the easy integration of various files and the ability to access data from various documents without opening individual files, and hopefully we can view documents as RSS feeds.

More details will be out soon, so we’ll have to wait.

Technorati Tags: Microsoft, Office,Office 12, XML, Documents, Document, File, Format,

The dullest blog in the world

2005-05-30T11:06:00.000+03:00

Don't believe me! check it out

Gigabyte goes Extreme with SLI

2005-05-29T10:51:00.000+03:00

Checkout this pic of the new Gigabyte Motherboard that supports 4 SLI graphics cards:

P.S. SLI is a technology that enables motherboards to run multiple Graphics Cards in parallel, and thus multiplying the Graphics performance with the number of used cards.

Can you believe this? 4 SLI cards on one board, that’s crazy… I can’t think of any game that could utilize this huge power except maybe for Unreal Engine 3 games, or current games running on multiple high resolution Displays, but that’s surely overkill even for the extreme gamers, and I can’t even imagine the power requirements of this setup but absolutely 650+ Watt Power Supply is the minimum.

Is there somebody crazy enough to buy this board?

Technorati Tags: Hardware, Motherboard, Motherboards, Mainboard, Mainboards, Gigabyte, SLI, Graphics

RSS Ads, How they should be done?

2005-05-28T12:30:00.000+03:00

This post was intended as a reply to Richard’s latest post about RSS Advertising, but it got so long so I though it was worth a post of its own.

In his latest post on IONRSS Richard MacManus discussed the issue of RSS advertising, and he described how Google contextual Ads are not suitable to the nature of Feeds, I’m not gonna rewrite his words; go read it on his blog.

He mentioned some valid points about the special relation between Publisher and subscriber, and about the per post association of Ads, and I agree with what he wrote, but the beauty of Click through advertising is that it’s intuitive and understandable with constant value across all sites and blogs, and that what made them so popular.

If we want to consider the use of the branding value of RSS Ads in feeds, first we must solve multiple problems:

The one he mentioned about the nature of Textual Ads not helping this purpose, and thus it requires different Ads designed for raising brand or product awareness.

And there’s another problem with the determination of a Site or Blog’s Value, surly the cost of an Ad on Engadget is not like the cost of an Ad in other blogs, who determines the value of a blog? Is it the blogger? (Like magazines) or is it calculated according to hits? But hits don’t always apply because of the nature of blog’s visitors; a very popular blog or site dedicated to gadgets is not worth as much as a blog or site with much fewer hits dedicated to business solutions.

And for the reasons above, it will be a very hard work (if not impossible) to come up with automated system to calculate Ads value, and with the absence of such system this kind of Ads has a small chance of spreading like contextual Ads.

Technorati Tags: RSS, Advertising, Ads, Feeds, brand, branding,

Google Print is Online

2005-05-27T12:34:00.000+03:00

Google has made available the new interface print.google.com that allows you to search for materials only in Google Print Database, and from my initial experience the existing database is very huge and contains lots of varied books from all categories, and it’s growing by the day.

But don’t get too excited just yet because you cannot read a whole book online, due to copyrights issue you can only browse a few pages from each book (5 pages) in addition to the table of contents, but that works well with Google’s policy as a search engine to help you find a book whose content contains a match for your search terms and if you like the contents of the book and the few available pages you can purchase it from online store.

Also there are a number of books that you can read all of its contents, but they are generally very old so they have no copyright restrictions and are considered public domain.

Nonetheless it’s a very useful service that for the first time brings the powerful online search capabilities to the Physical world of books and libraries.

Go play with it and see what you can come up with.

Technorati Tags: Google, Print, Books, Library, Online

A murdered blogger's final entry reveals the indentity of his killer

2005-05-26T17:37:00.000+03:00

This is a sad story of a blogger that got killed with his sister shortly after making his final entry on his blog, and thanks to his post the murderer was arrested.

Here’s the final post:

"Today I missed my Japanese class again, since I have gotten a bad throat. I only went to the class once this week, so I am probably so far behind now. I will catch up in the summer tho so no worries hehe. Anyway today has been weird, at 3 some guy ringed the bell. I went down and recognized it was my sister's former boyfriend. He told me he wants to get his fishing poles back. I told him to wait downstair while I get them for him. While I was searching them, he is already in the house. He is still here right now, smoking, walking all around the house with his shoes on which btw I just washed the floor 2 days ago!"

RIP fellow blogger.

Technorati Tags: Blog, Blogging, Blogger, Murder,

Google caught Lying, Updated

2005-05-26T10:03:00.000+03:00

Everybody now knows about Google’s newest service Homepage Personalization that got released a week ago, and soon after the service got released, everybody discussed and talked about this new move from Google, and how with this service Google is directly competing with other portal services like Yahoo and MSN, then came an official denial from Google CEO Eric Shimdt:
“Google is focused on search and is not a Web "portal." A Web portal is a site which offers a range of personalized services on one page”

Is he serious? Does he expect us to believe him? Of course not, even if the new service is not named My Google (not to compete with My Yahoo), it still count as one.

And this is not only my opinion, but apparently some other Google senior Employees agrees with me on this, as Marissa Mayers Director of Consumer Web Products said that in a recent post in her unofficial (BETA) blog:
Update: It seems like I've been fooled, apparntley this blog is not real just a spoof and made for fun, but that doesn't mean that Eric is right, nonetheless I'll leave my post as it is just for fun.

“Fusion is a very exciting new concept from Company X - it's a sort of way of accessing all sorts of different things from one page, sort of like a doorway page, or a gateway page, but we don't want to call it one of those.
Fusion actually means "the merging of different substances into a union" or "the change of a substance from the liquid to the solid state" - this is what we're trying to achieve - making the interweb a pre-defined structure where everything worth seeing is merged into one place and we provide the way to see it via Company X.”

I think it’s obvious that the above is a definition of Web Portal, even if she didn’t blatantly say so, and to make things more obvious she finished her post with this:

“Well I hope you all enjoy using MyFusion, if any of you have suggestions as to what else we could add to the page be sure to let us know*.”

My Fusion = My Google, need I say more?

I don’t know if Eric is aware of this post, but I doubt that, and it’s not Marissa’s fault to talk about company’s secrets, it’s Eric fault in the first place to deny such an obvious thing and insult the intelligence of everyone.

Technorati Tags: Google, My Google, Yahoo, My Yahoo, Portal, Web, Fusion, Personalized, Customized, Homepage

Help Determine Search Relevance

2005-05-23T23:55:00.000+03:00

It has become known through the time that the default choice for finding things on the Internet is Google, Why? Because a few years ago it was indeed the best one with the simplest interface so we got accustomed to it, and never looked back.
But have you ever wandered if it’s still the best one?

RustySearch is a new ambitious search project intended to find the best search engine that gives the most relevant results, it’s essentially a "blind" engine which gives you results randomly from either Yahoo, Google, Ask, or MSN, then asks you to rate the results (more on the details here).

And according to the first 5000 rated search queries, Yahoo came on top with the most relevant search results, then came the famous Google, followed by MSN and Ask Jeeves.

This result is certainly surprising, as most of us (at least I) assume that Google is the best Search Engine, but apparently Yahoo is constantly improving its search capabilities, maybe I should check Yahoo more often.

But again maybe it’s a too early to judge now, the result could change as the number of rated queries increase, as the difference between Google and Yahoo is small.

This project is our best shot to really find out which search engine is better, because it depends on the Feedback of users, and no one can denies that the user is the best one to decide which of the results is the most relevant to his search.

I urge you to use RustSearch for your next couple of searches, as a way to support the project, and help them (and us) find out which one is really the best.

Technorati Tags: Search, Google, Yahoo, MSN, RustySearch, Relevance

Turn Gmail into a portable hard drive

2005-05-22T17:31:00.000+03:00

Today while doing my daily routine of surfing for new interesting things, I stumbled upon this new very interesting service Gmail Hard Drive, this site enables you to use your Gmail account as a 2GB Online Storage that you can access from everywhere, I don’t know about you but I really needed a service like this, only if I could upload at a higher speed.

Technorati Tags: Gmail, Storage, Hard+Disk, Online

Bloglines to launch new Blog Search Engine this summer

2005-05-21T18:17:00.000+03:00

Stephen Baker did a brief interview with Bloglines CEO Mark Fletcher, and he told him that his company Bloglines (part of Ask Jeeves) will release a blog search engine this summer that will surpass the likes of Technorati, Feedster, and PubSub, this seems like a very ambitious one if it aims to surpass the likes of Technorati, I’m very excited by this news, Bloglines is my favorite RSS reader and the addition of blog searh engine is certainly welcomed, but also I use Technorati and support them by tagging my posts and I really find it very hard for any new tool to beat it, but we’ll see.

Technorati Tags: Technorati, Bloglines, Interview, Serach Engine, Search, Blogging, Blogs, Blog, RSS

My Google launched, Analysis

2005-05-20T14:23:00.000+03:00

If you didn’t believe me back then (when I talked about Google's WebOS) I hope you do now, Google has started stitching scattered services and grouping them into something very simple, very useful that you will have a very hard time ignoring it and not using it.

In a move similar to what Yahoo has done with My Yahoo, Google Labs has started offering customized Google home page with a search box at the top, how customized you ask? At the moment not very much, you get to chose between those items:
Gmail Messages, Stock market updates, New York Times, BBC News, Google News, Weather, Wired News, Slashdot, Movies, Driving Information and Quote of the Day + Word of the Day.

IMO this is an excellent selection of items as a start of course, because what this service really needs is Universal RSS Support so that you can choose whatever feeds you usually follow and have it delivered directly to your Google’s homepage, and we’re in luck as full RSS support is only 1-2 months away according to Director of Consumer Web Products Marissa Mayer.

Strangely Google named this service” Google Personalized Homepage”, when a name like My Google seems a lot more appropriate and well understood among Internet Users (My Yahoo,…), probably they’ll change the name upon official release.

Why this step is very important?
Because 50% of the Internet population uses Google as the default search engine, and more than half of them use it as their homepage, so when you open your browser page instead of being greeted by Google’s normal search box you’ll be updated on everything you want, and later maybe Google will add buttons and links for every other common action on the web, so tell me with all this functionality, simplicity why would you leave Google’s homepage? Why would you ever think of using other services? And is there any need for other competing Companies? I hope you understand what I mean.

Marissa Mayer said on Google’s Blog concerning this new service:
“It's part of a strategic initiative we refer to as 'fusion' to bring together Google functionality, and content from across the web, in useful ways”

Is this a bad thing? I’m not sure, it brings much needed functionality to you so easily, so the usual consumer couldn’t be happier than that, and from a consumer viewpoint I liked the interface since I use Google as my homepage, and when they add RSS support and other functionality this service will be simply irresistible.

But companies should be scared, very scared, especially the ones that offer services competing with Google’s recent services or upcoming ones, like RSS reader companies (Bloglines, Newsgator) Email services(Yahoo, MSN), Search Engines(Yahoo, MSN, ASK Jeeves) Shopper Sites and many more.

Google obviously is not gonna stop at this, soon they’ll bring other functionality to the “My Google” service like maybe Picture-Audio-Video uploading, Blogging, Shopper suggestions and maybe Instant Messaging later, and when the time is right they’ll start serving you Ads customized to your interests and start making money, a lot of money.

Google’s Goal is to have a Unified Interface (Portal) for all your Web needs, and they are working towards it very quickly.

Google Web dominance Plan is underway, be warned.

Technorati Tags: Google, WebOS, Plans, My+Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, RSS, Personalized, customized, homepage, ,

Nvidia’s new GPU specs leaked.

2005-05-20T00:05:00.000+03:00

Looks like information is circling the web right now concerning nVidia’s upcoming GPU codenamed G70 (formerly called NV50), and according to different sources it will be officially called GeForce 7800 GTX, seems like the right name.

According to the Inquirer, it’s going to be very similar to PS3 GPU but of course without the 10MB embedded DRAM Cache memory which is very useful in the Console to supply enough buffer to render HDTV quality frames (with AA), and HDTV displays are rare among PC users so adding this costly Buffer memory is unnecessary.

But AFAIK PS3 GPU won’t have Embedded DRAM on it like Xbox 360 GPU, unless Fuad knows something nobody knows and that’s unlikely considering Fuad’s history.

Also the Inquirer suggests that it will be 90 nanometer solution, but I highly doubt that because 90 nanometer manufacturing process isn’t supposed to be mature enough for High-End High-Volume manufacturing, so probably they’ll use the already tested 110 nanometer process which is IMHO more reliable and can be clocked high enough (look at 6600GT), but again they might surprise us like what they did with GeForce FX.

Here’s the Full Specs taken from multiple sources, so probably 80% of them will apply.

# 256-bit Memory Interface

# 24 Pixel Pipelines
# 8 Vertex Pipelines
# 38.4GB/sec mem bandwidth
# 10.32 billion pixels/sec fill rate
# 860 Vertices/sec (million)
# Core clock- 430MHz
# 260 Million Transistor
# Shader Model 3.0 Support
# CineFX 4.0 engine
# Intellisample 4.0 technology (improved AA and AF)
# PureVideo Technology (Enhances the output of Video playback, requires Drivers Support and Software Support)
# OpenGL 2.0
# SLI Support
# Probably 256 – 512MB versions will be available
# under clocked RAM @ 750MHz from 256-bit 800MHz GDDR 3 Ram
# RAMDACs 400
# Single card requires min. 400W PSU with 12V rating of 26A
# SLI configuration requires min. 500W PSU with 12V rating of 34A

Apparently those cards require insane amount of power requirement, because not any 400W can do 26A on 12V rail it requires quality PSUs from known brands like Vantec or Thermaltek.

I wonder what the cooling solution will look like; I hope they don’t go for a dust buster like GeForce FX 5800 back then.

It will certainly be available as PCI-Express solution only, with an AGP one coming 2-3 months later, so 90% of the market (including me) will have to wait.

Sources say that this GPU is 1-2 months away, so we’ll have to wait and see.

Technorati Tags: GPU, VPU, Graphics, G70, NV50, nVidia, GeForce 7800, Specs, Hardware, ,

Xbox360 GPU is not R520!! Sony is screwed.

2005-05-19T15:14:00.000+03:00

Quoted from AnandTech:
“The R520, not the GPU in the upcoming Xbox 360 but rather the next-generation PC GPU, was running in an Intel PCIe system at ATI's booth“

According to AnandTech, ATI was demonstrating working R520 silicon behind closed doors at their booth at E3, and the system was running Remedy's upcoming title called Alan Wake, one of the Next-Gen titles (Xbox360, PS3) and the game wasn't running perfectly smoothly.

Although this came as quite a surprise for me, it also answered some questions I had in mind, specially the One concerning the mentioning of “Unified Shader Architecture” feature in Xbox 360 Specs.

Now it makes perfectly sense that Microsoft chose to include WGF (also known as DirectX 10) class GPU in its upcoming Console Xbox 360, which means that the Xbox 360 will contain a very advanced GPU that is more than a year away from being released for PCs, unless ATI surprised us and had Unified Shader Architecture in R520.
Also this means that Xbox 360 in terms of graphical power is way superior to PS3 which will contain the current Generation Shader Model 3.0 class GPU.

I don’t know if the Developers will exploit this feature from the beginning, but if they do Xbox 360 owners will be treated to Games with Picture Quality unmatched by any Platform (PS3 or PC) for more than 18 months till that type of GPU is available for PCs and PC Developers start releasing games for it.

I don’t know if Sony is aware of that, but apparently they’re screwed… Big time.

Technorati Tags: Microsoft, Consoles, Xbox, Xbox 360, 360, Sony, PS3, PlayStation, PlayStation 3, GPU

Technorati Tracks 10 Million Blogs

2005-05-18T13:55:00.000+03:00

Congrats to Technorati on this great Achievement, and while I’m on the subject, I would like to thank Dave Sifry CEO of Technorati for starting the Company and being one of the first people that supported Blogging and built this amazing tool for it, we need more people like him if blogging has to go mainstream.

Technorati Tags: Technorati, Blogs, Blog, Blogging, Dave Sifry,

Next-Gen Consoles war: PS3 and Xbox 360 Face-to-Face.

2005-05-17T12:42:00.000+03:00

Now that the Specs and Pictures of both consoles PS3 and Xbox 360 are out, it’s time to do a detailed comparison between them based on the announced Specification, it might not be completely correct but it’s the best prediction I can come up with, Enjoy.

Design
Well it’s a matter of taste, but personally I like the PS3 a whole lot than Xbox 360, it just looks simple, elegant, curved, with a very sexy design and attractive silver finish, for me it’s a clear win for PS3.

CPU
PS3: Cell processor at 3.2GHz, capable of 2.18 teraflops of performance.
Xbox360: 3 symmetrical cores running at 3.2 GHz each, Power-PC based, capable of 1 teraflops.

PS3 wins here, as it’s capable of 2.18 teraflops compared to 1 teraflops which Xbox 360 offers, Cell Processor is probably the most advanced CPU in the world, it has 9 internal cores (1PPE + 7SPE + 1 redundant SPE) and it’s designed to favor Vector calculations which are perfect for gaming and running codecs and predictable processes.

Memory
PS3: 512MB total, 256MB XDR system RAM at 3.2 GHz; 256MB of GDDR3 VRAM Graphics at 700MHz.
Xbox360: 512 MB GDDR3 RAM, 700 MHz DDR.

It’s a tie here as both consoles will have 512MB, but maybe there’s a slight advantage for the PS3 because of XDR system RAM which has more bandwidth than GDDR3.

Graphics
PS3: RSX "Reality Synthesizer" by nVidia, 550MHz Core frequency, 128 bit pixel precision and 1080p support, 300 million transistors, 90nm process, Said to be more powerful than two GeForce 6800 Ultras (I’ve seen the power of 2 6800 Ultras and believe me it’s extraordinary).
Xbox360: ATI Chip (probably R520), 500MHz Core frequency, 10MB Embedded DRAM.

I guess it’s a tie here, because both consoles will have Next-Gen Graphics Chips, PS3 Chip will come from nVidia and Xbox 360 from ATI, so I’ll assume that they’ll have similar performance like the last generation, until proven otherwise.

Backwards compatibility
PS3 is said to be compatible with both PSone and PS2 games.
It’s unknown yet whether Xbox 360 will have backwards compatibility, so I’ll ignore this for now.
Update: Xbox 360 appears to be backward compatible with some of Xbox games (probably the popular ones), according to Robbie Bach, senior vice president and chief Xbox officer.

Media Support
PS3: Blu-Ray (BD) discs for media; also supports CD – DVD
Xbox360: Support all versions of CD – DVD.

PS3 wins here by offering the same media support as Xbox 360 plus BD support for High-Density Media that will probably come out in the next couple of years.

Communications
PS3: Ethernet, Wi-Fi (Wireless Networking), Bluetooth.
Xbox360: Ethernet, Wi-Fi.

PS3 wins here, with amazing wide range communications capabilities, especially Bluetooth that the Xbox 360 lacks; it will enable people to move data like Sound Files, Video Files, and Photos from their mobile phones to the console, a true Media Center capability.

Controllers
PS3: It will support 7 wireless controllers on Bluetooth.
Xbox360: Will support only 4 controllers.

PS3 supports more Controllers and thus it's better, but the good thing is that they're both wireless.

Storage
PS3: Detachable 2.5" HDD
Xbox360: 20 GB Detachable 2.5" HDD (can be upgraded)

Xbox 360 wins here because it has 20GB HD included, but with PS3 it’s not included with the console and has to be bought separately, no specific sizes were defined but probably there will be different sizes starting from 20GB the same as Xbox 360, seems like Hard Disks have become a standard for consoles.

I/O
PS3: USB2.0 - Memory Stick - SD - Compact Flash.
Xbox360: USB 2.0, 2 memory unit slots (Proprietary)

PS3 wins here with wide range of Media support that makes life easier moving stuff from other appliances like Mobile Phones, Digital Cameras, PDAs, to the console, and this clearly outdone Xbox 360 which only offers USB2.0 and its own Memory unit.

Release Date
Xbox 360 will be released at the end of this year, and PS3 is slated for spring 2006 release date which means it’s a whole year from now, undoubtly this will give Microsoft a big advantage to sell its console for Next-Gen early adopters (believe me there’s a lot of them), and also benefit from the Christmas Boom in addition to have enough time to release a lot of hot exclusive games to draw gamers.

Games are the most important factor in deciding the fate of both Consoles, and it's exactly the reason of PS2 supremacy over Xbox.
I wish I was able to compare launch Titles between the two consoles, but Sony has not announced any of them yet, so it’ll have to wait a few days till we can see what Game Companies have to offer in E3 Expo.

Sony really surprised me this time in a good way; I wasn’t expecting such amazing specs with lots of features, I expected a new console with some added functions but from those specs we can expect a very powerful Game Console and a full-blown Media Center that promises to give Microsoft’s Xbox 360 a very hard time.

I'm very excited about both Consoles, and I'll be following them very closely in the time to come.

Technorati Tags: Xbox, Xbox 360, PS3, PlayStation 3, PlayStation, Microsoft, Sony, Comparison, Specs, Consoles,

PlayStation 3 Revealed!

2005-05-17T10:54:00.000+03:00

Isn't it gorgeous, I'd have a one just for its Design.

Hardware:
Backwards compatibility with both PSone and PS2 games.
Blu-Ray discs for media; also supports: CD+RW, DVD, DVD-ROM, DVD-R, DVD+R
Cell processor at 3.2GHz
2.18 teraflops of performance
512MB total: 256MB XDR system RAM at 3.2 GHz; 256MB of GDDRVRAM at 700MHz
Graphics:
Chip is called RSX "Reality Synthesizer" by nVidia
128 bit pixel precision and 1080p support
300 million transistors; 90nm process
Said to be more powerful than two GeForce 6800 Ultras

Taken from HardOCP:

Expect a full comparison between PS3 and Xbox 360 soon, come back later to know who is the winner.

Technorati Tags: PS3, PlayStation 3, PlayStation, Sony, Hardware, Specs, Specifications

XM Subscribers reach 4 Million

2005-05-16T21:56:00.000+03:00

WOW, it’s really amazing how they managed to get so many subscribers, the Company has added 1 million new subscribers in five months, and it predicts the number will reach 5.5 million by the end of 2005.

XM is the first Satellite Radio Company in the US that offers more than 130 different Digital Channels, broadcasted naturally using a Digital Signal, the company offers different receiving appliances and there are a number of Cars that have compliant receivers.

It’s good news, because it’s a sign that Satellite Radio is at last kicking off, and as the number of potential customers increase we’ll see other companies enter the market, and it’s not far that we (at least people in the US) will be able to receive custom Radio Channels depending on our interests, I’m pretty enthusiastic about this.

Technorati Tags: XM, Satellite, Radio, Broadcast, Channels,

Signs You're Spending Too Much Time on Your Computer

2005-05-16T18:18:00.000+03:00

This is something funny for a change, I read it few days ago.

11. You tilt your head 90 degrees to smile.
10. You try to switch views while driving.
9. You wait for Linux to crash before taking a break.
8. You use PayPal to give your kids their allowance.
7. You miss your friends when you're away from the computer.
6. Just before the accident everything goes blue and you see "YOU.EXE caused a General Protection Fault in module YOURLIFE.EXE at 0011:000000a0".
5. You have monitor "tan".
4. Your spouse has to IM you for dinner.
3. You start using expressions like AFAIK or LMFAO during face-to-face conversations. 2. You set a power supply up in your bedroom, so you can fall asleep to the familiar hum of the fan.
1. You're arrested for punching monkeys at the zoo.

Technorati Tags: Humor, Fun, Funny,

Xbox 360 Revealed!

2005-05-13T12:23:00.000+03:00

Yesss, that’s right, yesterday Microsoft at last blew us away with the full official announcement of its Next-gen Console Xbox 360 (yes it’s the official name) only few days before the big event E3 (Electronic Entertainment Expo.) that also will witness the official announcement of Sony’s new Console PlayStation3.

The announcement covered Technical Specs, Design Decisions, New Features and Launch titles, but also it left much unanswered questions.
But the release date was confirmed to be in Fall this year maybe around Christmas time, but no price was yet announced.

What are you waiting for…, Head over to GameSpy or IGN for full coverage about Xbox 360, later perhaps I can share my thoughts about it but now I’m too busy catching up with all the info and scoop circling in the Web.

Technorati Tags: Xbox 360, Xbox, Launch, Microsoft,

More improvements coming to Blogger.com

2005-05-12T14:19:00.000+03:00

Well that’s good news; apparently Google is working on various new improvements to my favorite blogging service Blogger.com, the announced coming improvements are:

1- Native Image uploading
The most annoying problem in Blogger right now is the lack of Native image uploading, and Hello is too buggy and requires various steps to upload a photo which makes it frustrating, I’m glad they listened to the community and decided to add this feature.

2- Gmail Integration
Another good feature that enables users to update their blogs and submit new posts from their Gmail accounts without the need to do it from inside Blogger.com.

3- Enterprise Blogger Version
It’s a required feature if Google wants to attract more serious business-companies bloggers, it will add some native privacy features which eases the creation of private groups and thus be able to control who can view their blogs.

In addition to the continuing work on improving the performance.

It’s Good to know that they’re working on adding those important features to the already excellent Blogger.com, the market is getting more competitive by the time and they need those improvements and many more to keep the lead they have now over other services.

Technorati Tags: Blogger.com, Blogger, Blog, Blogs, Google, Improvements, Image, Gmail

Google Web Accelerator Halted

2005-05-11T23:58:00.000+03:00

Google has stopped allowing downloads of its Web Accelerator, and the reason as they claim is because the service reached the maximum capacity of users, and they’re working to increase the number of users supported on this service.

I highly doubt that reason, as I’m sure Google has the hugest computing power on the Web because of its numerous demanding services and gigantic number of users, and surly a new service with a small adoption rate is not gonna put pressure on Google’s computing resources.

Whether the alleged reason is right or not, it’s a wise move because apparently the service has a number of bugs that demand instant attention and debugging, especially the one that resulted in users wrongly logging into other users accounts which allowed them to read their private messages and post as them.
The negative community Feedback also might have contributed to the decision, as the browsing time saved from using this service does not warrant the amount of data gathered about the user and the potential violation of privacy that might happen either accidentally by the mean of bugs or intentionally by using this data to extract certain info.

So this time might help Google further study this service and look at the Feedback the community provided and maybe work on improving this service like save more time, or provide less privacy-violating means used in this service, or at least provide some more assurances about the secrecy of gathered info.
Google has a great history in listening to Feedback and acting by it, and I believe in their abilities, so hopefully they’re gonna reach a settlement with the community.

Technorati Tags: Google, Web, Internet, Accelerator, Google Web Accelerator, Web Accelerator, Bugs

Google Web Accelerator Part III: Hidden Objectives

2005-05-09T13:37:00.000+03:00

Where does Google Web Accelerator fit in Google plans? How is Google going to benefit from this new tool? From looking at the facts and with a bit of imagination I can summarize the benefits in two sections:
1- Another step in taking over the web
2- Priceless Data Mining Source

1- Another step in taking over the Web
Google Web Accelerator represents another service Google released that’s irrelevant to its Search nature, despite what a representative said that this tool is in-line with Google’s Mission to organize the world's information and make it accessible, because this tool speeds the Internet through interfering with the work of different things (Browser and ISP) and such thing has never been done before, not by a search Engine or any company else.

What most people don’t realize is that this new service is just another step in the direction Google heading that will result in conceiving a Google Web OS (or Platform) or what I like to call a "unified Web Portal" that will allow users to perform just about everything they might possibly want in the Internet from one interface that is Google.
Think about Google’s actions:

- Buying Picasa Company and then releasing Picasa 2.
- Hiring Ben Goodger, lead programmer of the Firefox Web browser.
- Hiring experts in negotiating deals and setting up fiber-optic networks.
- Updating Google Toolbar to contain AutoLink feature which sparked a lot of controversy.
- And now releasing Google Web Accelerator, in addition to lots and lots of other tools and services that were released under Google Labs for testing, mentioning them and discussing hidden objectives behind them requires a whole article.

It’s not very useful for Google (financially speaking) to release those incoherent services unless they plan to test them now and group them later in Web OS that transforms all your web experience into Google, those small pieces of services and tools will be joined, each specific service handles what it's good at, and most of them are definitly the best in their category, and then Google will make money from displaying Ads on the interface, those Ads will be accurately customized to suit your interests based on your Surfing habits, or possibly it will allow you to pay a monthly or annualy subscribtion fee for premium services or removal of Ads.

2- Priceless Data Mining Source
Also this new service will allow Google to obtain priceless info about the world's surfing habits beyond search, they'll be looking at what people are doing on the Internet, what they're reading, what they're buying, just imagine what Google can get from running endless analysis on that data.
This will grant Google a tremendous advantage in planning their future projects and moves, and this info if handled right (and I’m sure of that) will give Google the desired Edge over their competitors: Yahoo, MSN, and Ask Jeeves.

Marissa Mayer, Google's vice president of Web products said to Cnet that they don’t plan to do anything with the gathered data, but I highly doubt that
"To date, we're not doing anything with this data in terms of market research. We have no plans, but should that change we would aggressively notify our users and give them some escape hatch,"

The most obvious thing is that Google is moving ahead very quickly in different directions, and it’s competing in different grounds, and if you look at big picture of Google history and available services, you’ll realize how I am close to the truth in my speculation.

And it’s not only Google in the scene, but also Yahoo and MSN realized where internet is heading and they’re definitely preparing themselves and releasing services similar to what Google is doing, and sometimes even outdoing them in the case of Yahoo’s excellent move in buying Flickr with its huge community and tagging system.

What does the future hold for us? Nobody knows (Well except the guys at Google) but I tried here to speculate what might happen, but again I could be wrong and only time will tell.

Technorati Tags: Google - Google Web Accelerator - Web Accelerator - Web - Internet - Data - Analysis - Future - Accelerator - WebOS

Google Web Accelerator Part II: Worries and Concerns

2005-05-07T15:22:00.000+03:00

Since the introduction of this service two days ago there have been a lot of feedback mostly negative in the form of complaints concerning bugs and privacy issues, one user reported that when visiting his discussion group page he saw the name of another group member and he was identified as that member, apparently this is due to a bug in relating cookies to IP addresses, Google recognized the issue and they’re working on a fix.

Also this service sparked a lot of debates and complaints about privacy issues and what is allowed to be used in the sake of accelerating the internet, as Google not only will have info about the user similar to his ISP but also its servers will contain some of the data that normally stays on the user’s machine and I mean here Caches and Cookies.
No one denies that Web history, Caches and Cookies are one of the most feared things among Internet surfers, they represent a log of every user’s action in the internet and for that reason there are more than a dozen of programs that is designed to completely delete them and remove any trace of them.

But now they’re being moved to Google’s servers, and although they’re protected and secured according to Google representative, no one can guarantee that they will always stay this way, and not be exploited later by some script or hack.

In another word this service is moving another function that browsers usually handle to servers on the internet, and IMHO it’s just a step in transforming everything to the net.
I see the future as browsing the net through online browser (or interface) that does everything on distant servers (Google’s maybe?); and your browser will be a mere plug-in in your computer, more on that in Part III.

Another thing noted by Benjamin Adam, is that when he mistyped the name of his blog he got a Google branded Error page instead of the usual page that one gets from IE or Firefox, not only that but that page suggested doing a Google search to clear up the problem, Well… it seems like Google has outdone Microsoft in its own game as in IE you still get the same old error Page you always have.

You tell me it’s no big deal; I agree in this particular case, but in the general sense this is a taste of what Google can do with this kind of power and control over one’s connection, maybe someday it’ll act as a proxy, blocking access to certain sites or giving the advantage of speed to certain websites and services, or maybe not. But this kind of power sounds scary.

The next post will be the last episode (and the most exciting one) in the Google Web Accelerator series, and it will be about conspiracy theory and the hidden objectives behind Google moves, till then.

Technorati Tags: Google - Web - Internet - Accelerator - Privacy - Browser

Google Web Accelerator: seeing the Web through the Eyes of Google

2005-05-05T14:35:00.000+03:00

Google Web Accelerator, The latest Beta Service from Google Labs is a web accelerator software that’s designed to make surfing the internet faster, but take note that it’s useful only for broadband users and not for Dial-up users (like me ), but don’t get upset that Google left Dial-up people with nothing, because the problem (bottleneck) is in our slow connection not the web, and they can do nothing about that.
Google Web Accelerator is a client software that comes with a plug-in that will be installed on your computer; it’s available for Windows users only and it works on both IE and Firefox (good move from Google).

How it works:
This service will accelerate your web browsing using different means such as:
- Sending your page requests through Google machines dedicated to handling Google Web Accelerator traffic.
- Storing copies of frequently looked at pages to make them quickly accessible.
- Downloading only the updates if a web page has changed slightly since you last viewed it.
- Prefetching certain pages onto your computer in advance.
- Managing your Internet connection to reduce delays.
- Compressing data before sending it to your computer.
- Parallel downloading: Download multiple parts of the page (images for example) at the same time.

But beware there’s also some privacy concerns along with this service, because when you use it Google will have information on you similar to your ISP and that’s a lot of info if you know what I mean, for example:
- Google will have all the URLs you visit along with the time of the Request, your IP address and information about your computer and connection
- All the information you enter in web forms will go through Google
- Google will temporarily cache cookies that as some of you know might contain valuble information (Username, Passwords, Account information, …)
- Google Web Accelerator will store caches of websites you frequently visit on your system in addition to prefetched pages that you did not visit, and it has nothing to do with your browser’s cache.

But Google promises to never rent or sell a user's personal information to third parties without a user's explicit permission, so hopefully your personal information will be safe, I wouldn’t worry about this if I were to use it, but there’s some paranoid people out there.

Tomorrow I’ll talk about my speculation of Google’s purpose in introducing this service in particular and Google’s recent moves and other services in general, stay tuned.

Technorati Tags: Google - Web - Internet - Privacy - Accelerator

50 Million Downloads for Firfox

2005-05-03T11:37:00.000+03:00

Congratulations to Firefox team on this very amazing achievement, they managed to get 50 million downloads in less than six months after its official launch last November.
It proves how committed and enthusiastic community can affect a product; it’s a fruit of a joint work from Programmers, Artists, Marketers, and Fans.
Somewhat I feel proud because I contributed as much as I could in spreading Firefox (Recommended all my friends to use it, Wrote about it couple of times in the magazine)

If anybody is still using Internet Explorer… shame on you, switch to Firefox immediately and get rid of all Pop-ups, Adware, Spyware,… and get many many more features.
Celebrating this achievement, here’s a Firefox new tweak guide for startups and veterans alike.

Technorati Tags: Firefox - Celebrating

Google Ads to target (pollute) RSS

2005-05-01T10:58:00.000+03:00

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) in undoubtley the best thing that occurred to Internet since its creation, and IMO we haven’t seen a bit of its full power, it literally holds the future of the internet, and it’s especially important for the huge number of blogs that you want to keep following.

And since the first days of its introduction a couple of years ago, companies rushed to support it and embrace it, and a whole firms was created to releases products dedicated to it like aggregators, and worth mentioning here is Yahoo as it was the first big player to fully embrace RSS and customize its services to support RSS, and just recently Yahoo delivers Web search results via RSS.

But Google… despite being the biggest portal on the web, it completely ignored RSS like it never existed and they haven’t put anything in RSS or supported it neither in their existing services nor new ones, at least they should’ve customized Google News to support RSS feeds which is less than a week’s work for one programmer.
Possible Reason IMO for Google’s behavior is the threat that RSS poses to the way Google make money (Ad Sense system).

What brought me to this subject in the first place?
A few days ago Google at last started to recognize it but with what? With targeting Ads for it!!!
I’m not against making money, especially for a company offering great services, but at least they should support the technology first before they utilize it for making money, but obviously they waited till they came up with working “Ads System” and then decided to acknowledge RSS.
But whether they’re intending to support it with REAL services is still unknown and only time will tell.
I know I’m going to be criticized for it but I’ll say it: I see Google is slowly turning from Search Engine Giant to Ads Giant.

Technorati tags: Google - RSS - Advertising

Google Sightseeing

2005-04-29T11:16:00.000+03:00

Unless you’ve been hiding in a cave, you’ve certainly heard of Google’s newest Service Google Maps which allow you to view Satellite images of North America and recently UK, so it was only a matter of time before someone steps in and utilize its great capabilities in something fun and useful.
If you haven't seen it yet, check out Google Sightseeing and add it to your feeds. This blog takes you to the best tourist spots in the world via Google Maps' satellite imagery, and offers some really amazing images from different parts.
Very interesting site indeed.

Technorati Tags: Google - Maps - Sightseeing

Shaam 2005 Part I

2005-04-27T00:07:00.000+03:00

Now after a nice break I’m relaxed and refreshed and I can return to my normal habits which include blogging, as I promised in my last post here’s my experience of Shaam 2005:

A bit of a History
As a hardware enthusiast I’ve always complained about the lack of high end products in the market, and the expensive prices of them in case they became available, during the last year and as a part of my work I had several meetings with the major distributors and told them my point and heard their side of the story, to make a tall story short I urged them to order high end products in small quantities and I convinced them how the market is evolving and more people are searching for high performance, and luckily they were submissive and this year’s Expo proves it.

Concerning Hardware this year’s Expo was a huge change, nearly all of major brands (Asus, MSI, Gigabyte) has ordered high end products especially for the Expo and especially for our lab, this brings us to the Issue of Al Rakameiat Test lab which was my responsibility during the Expo.

The Test lab:
As Casual Readers know we do various reviews and group tests in the newspaper, and wanted in this Expo to give all the users a taste of it, so assembled 10 PCs nearly all of them were top of the line concerning hardware and we supplied each PC with the whole suite of our Benchmarks and testing Software, we made all those PCs available for the attendees to do experiments with them and we were there to answer their questions and inquiries, and we did a lot of live demonstrations upon people’s requests and questions,

-We compared Pentium 4 to Athlon 64 in various applications.
-We demonstrated how cooling is important for high-End CPUs.
-We performed live overclocking, and we proved how much performance you can get from it
-We demonstrated the difference in games between Mid-Range Graphic Cards and High-End ones
-And so on…

We told the Major distributors about the concept of our lab prior to the Expo and they were all very enthusiastic about it and supplied us with more than enough Mid-Range and High-End Products to fill a dozen PCs, our top PC was a blast to see and experiment with, all the time people were gathering around it waiting for their turns to experiment and play with it, and here’s the specification of it:

-AMD Athlon 64 4000+ (the fastest CPU in the world).
-Asus Star Ice Cooler (Special Cooling for the CPU) it’s definitely the biggest cooler you’ll ever see, it was really the star of our show everybody was stunned by the view of it.
-Asus A8N-SLI (one of the best Motherboards with SLI Technology which gives it the ability to run two Graphic Cards in parallel)
-Dual Asus GeForce 6800 GT 256MB GDDR3 (2x of the best Graphics Cards around)
-Dual (RAID 0) 74.3 GB Western Digital Raptors 10.000 RPM (the best Hard Disk installation in the world and the most expensive too)
-BenQ 26in LCD-TV (very beautiful colors yet very expensive)

Our other Hardware was amazing too, we had Gigabyte 3D1, it consists of Gigabyte SLI motherboard and a Graphics Card with Dual-Cores GeForce 6600GT (the only one in the world), we were running it on Athlon 64 3500+, All of Pentium 4 Equipped PCs were based upon the new Socket LGA 775 and half of them were running PCI-Express Graphics Card.
We assembled all of our Hardware inside glass cases so that everybody can see the hardware running all the time.

The result (thank god) was a huge success to our lab, everybody was more than pleased and many of them told me that our hall was the best thing in the whole Expo, and you can expect how our hall was crowded nearly all the time and we barley had time to breathe, in the first day we didn’t have time for lunch.

That's it for now, I've said enough for the time, next I'll try to talk about the Expo in general but that's another stroy for another post.

Technorati Tags: Expo - Hardware - Shaam 2005

It’s been a While…

2005-04-23T18:06:00.000+03:00

It’s been quite a while since I last posted, and it’s mainly due to Shaam 2005 (Local IT Expo), as some of you know I work at Al Rakameiat the Local IT newspaper, this year our participation was the hugest ever, My job included overseeing the test lab and the hired crew and answering people’s endless questions, we were showcasing 10 PCs nearly all of them are top of the line, and they were equipped with the latest Benchmarks and testing programs.
Overall it was a fun but exhausting experience, I’ll try to post the details about it soon, but the most important thing is that now I can have my normal life back, I really missed it.

Yahoo! 360, Better late than never

2005-04-15T12:11:00.000+03:00

Once I heard about the debut of this new service Yahoo! 360, I was pretty excited and wanted to try it badly, so I asked the coolest Yahoo Employee Jeremy Zawnodny for an invite and luckily he didn’t turn me down and sent me one right away.
That was 2 weeks ago, unfortunately I didn’t have a chance to play and tinker with it until recently so here’s my already-late review of it.

Everybody knows that Yahoo is the second most popular portal on the Web (ofcoures the first is Google), so it was surprising that it took so long for Yahoo to enter the blogging market, and nearly all of its competitors were ahead of it, Google’s Blogger.com, MSN Spaces and even Ask Jeeves (through Bloglines.com) but as they say better late than never.

In 360 Yahoo decided to build on MSN Spaces rather than Blogger.com, so it’s better that we refer to this service as “Social Networking” Service rather than a blogging service, because blogging is merely a part of its functions and IMO it’s the lesser part of it, and If you plan to use it mainly as a blogging tool you’ll be disappointed especially seasoned bloggers who demand advanced features and easy customization and that exactly what the service lack, it’s easily the most simple blogging service available in the market, and obviously it is intended for beginners and newbies.

360 is tightly integrated with other Yahoo services like Y! Messenger, Y! Groups and even Y! Music, 360 allows you to import your contacts from Yahoo! Messenger, Yahoo! Address Book and even Microsoft Outlook.

What I most like about Yahoo! 360 is how easy I can share things with friends and other people; you can share your Photos, your Reviews, Music you listen to (through Y! Music), Yahoo! Groups you’re subscribed to, and also you can share your list of Favorites (Movies, Books, Music,…), and you can decide who gets to see any of your things and how private or public to make your lists.

Also 360 allows you to connect to your friends very easily and helps you find new friends, and through your 360 main Page you can see who’s online and who’s not from your group of friends, and you can notify them to certain important things using Blast messages which you can share with all your friends or a specific group of them, and you can even send regular Messages or IM (Instant Messages) to your friends using 360.

In Short Yahoo! 360 in its Beta period is Excellent and pretty comprehensive, it represents a unified platform for all your social interaction needs.
But Yahoo needs to work on improving Blog hosting service and add advanced feature and customization options so that it can attract bloggers.

BTW my page is here: http://360.yahoo.com/l0rddiabl0 but it’s still work in progress.

Like Google, Yahoo chose to offer invites during the Beta period of 360, so unless you recieve an invite you can’t try it, fortunately I have 100 invites remaining, so anyone willing to try this new service drop me a comment with your E-mail in it so that I can send you one.

Grab em while they last.

State of the Blogosphere Part II: 31.6 million blog and counting…

2005-04-13T11:32:00.000+03:00

According to a new survey by CBS released today, the number of blogs that have been created on the different hosting services has reached 31.6 million blog, and it is expected to grow to 53.4 million blog by the end of the year.

That means the number of blogs will increase by 68% in the next 8 months and that’s a huge increase in such a short time considering that blogging has started getting famous in 2002.

Blogging is increasing in an unexpected speed; if it keeps that pace maybe a couple of years later it’s going to be one of the main uses of Internet beside E-mail.

About blogging market share, the current market leader is Google’s Blogger.com (also known as Blogspot.com), it’s hosting more than 8 million blogs or 25% of all blogs, in the second place there’s LiveJournal.com then comes Xanga.com, also worth mentioning here is Microsoft’s “MSN Spaces” hosting service which managed to host 4.5 million blog in beta period alone (which ended a week ago).
I’m sure the future is bright for MSN Spaces and in less than a year from now it’s going to be one of the three major players in blogging.

Do you feel safe blogging?

2005-04-11T00:08:00.000+03:00

If your answer is yes, then fellow blogger you’re definitely wrong and you should reconsider, blogging is not as safe as you might think, and everything you write on your blog can be used against you if it upsets/insults certain people, and it might get you fired from your Job like Mark Jen who was fired from Google because of some info he posted about the company and turned out to be confidential (Detailed Story here), there’s a lot of other people that got fired or didn’t get certain Jobs because of what they wrote in their blogs, you can find a list of them here.

Well… I got you scared, didn’t I? No need to panic if you don’t plan on writing things that might affect/disturb someone, but if you still insist to use blogging as a way to complain/vent then you need to take a look at this guide for safe Blogging.

Take care and Safe Blogging.

The Google way of finding free music

2005-04-09T23:17:00.000+03:00

Search Engine Google is so powerful you could even use it to find free downloadable Music, just enter this term in the search box
-inurl:htm -inurl:html intitle:"index of" mp3 "kill bill" (I used this term to find Kill Bill Soundtrack) and replace Kill Bill with the name of Artist, Album, Song, Whatever… and then navigate through the first few links and you should find your music of choice ready to be downloaded, simple isn’t it?
Be sure to tell me if it works for you.

Do you speak Blog?

2005-04-08T22:44:00.000+03:00

If you’re one of those new bloggers, you could benefit from this Article “Understanding Blog Speak” it contains a list of common blog word definitions (Aggregator, Blogosphere,…) and the Author “Duncan Riley” is asking for opinions on what he’s got so far and what he might be missing, so if you have other terms be sure to drop him a note.

State of the Blogosphere

2005-04-07T13:58:00.000+03:00

As a new blog owner it’s natural that I am constantly browsing new blogs and other blogging services, recently I registered at Technorati and claimed my weblog as a way to help its enormous community find and search my blog, as they recently celebrated 1 billion links Tracked also it’s now tracking more than 8.4 Million blog and that’s a HUGE number by all means.

I think Technorati is great and offer many helpful services besides indexing your blog like Watchlists which enables you to track what is happening on the web concerning any topic you choose, or you can track certain websites and blogs.
Also you can install their Search service on your blog, but what they really lack is the analytic power of its competitor BlogPulse.

BlogPulse provides amazing services for everyone, Top Links, Key Phrases, Key People, and Conversation Tracker but the best tool they have is Trend Tool, with it you can create your own Trend Graph comparing whatever things come to your mind to see what was popular and hot over any given period of time, you could play with it for hours without getting bored.

For an example here's a screenshot comparing Apple to iPod and Mac mini, and here’s a list of things that we can easily read from this Graph:

1- It proves that Apple popularity is mainly due to its iPod (no surprise here) especially after iPod Shuffle announcement that took place at MacWorld Expo (9-13 Jan).

2- The obvious spike in iPod Graph before Jan 1st is the result of its popularity as a Christmas gift.

3- iPod is generally increasing in popularity among bloggers.

4- It seems that Apple popularity is more closely related with iPod after MacWorld Expo, even with the introduction of Mac mini, maybe it’s an indicator that iPod Shuffle really filled a gap in the MP3 Players market for Apple.

I could go on and on with this analysis but it’s not my focus, the main point is to prove how much information you can gather from Graphs like this and how they really applies to the society and the changes that occur within.
Just imagine what you can come up with from thousands of other comparisons.

Blogging in general and Advanced Services like BlogPulse gave us a great way to measure the Pulse of the Tech-oriented society, and how every change affects them.

On the Business side, I’m sure Intelliseek is a perfect buy for any company willing to gain upper hand in the blogging world, like Google or MSN or even Yahoo, it’ll be a great companion to their blogging services, I’m wondering which company will make the move first or even if one of them is in the negotiation process right now, only time will tell.

In other news, I added a hit counter using www.sitemeter.com and it’s great so far, with more than enough info on blog statistics.

“The Great New Ideas” Where do they come from?

2005-04-05T20:18:00.000+03:00

Another Excellent blog Entry from Tom Evslin, in it he talks about the source of great new product ideas.

“The point of this story is that no survey or focus group will ever tell you what the next great thing is going to be. That kind of idea, that kind of product, comes from visionaries who understand a new technology well enough to dream up an unintended use and who are stubborn and skillful enough to implement what nobody even knew to want.
These are the products and services that change our lives.”

I completely agree with him that successful companies or projects don’t always have to follow customer’s wishes or desires, and sometimes personal innovation is the key to achieve the next hit.

That doesn’t mean the market is insignificant and we shouldn’t listen to it, on the contrary the market is always right and you should always pay attention to its needs and growing trends and act accordingly, but also one should try to read “between the lines” and realize where the hidden potential lies, and how some existing resources and technologies could be utilized to create a completely new capabilities and uses that shape up the next great product.

Search Engine giant Google, One of my favorite companies, realized this thing and encourages its employees to innovate by allowing them to spend 20% of their work time on projects of their choice, also they are not afraid to release a lot of Beta products and services whenever possible, as it helps them test the market response and feedback to determine which of them worth dropping and which is worth further improvement.

I wish all companies do the same and trust its Employees, and I’m sure their performance will improve.

"Brothers in Arms" Review

2005-04-04T15:50:00.000+03:00

This is my First complete Review in English (I've written quite a lot in Arabic) hope you like it, I didn't intend it to be this long but there was a lot to tell, Enjoy

Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30
The Latest WWII Game (is it any different?)

“Oh no… not another WWII game” this was my reaction when I first heard about this game, so I wasn’t expecting anything exceptional from this game, as I thought we have seen everything that can be done in a WWII game, but his game proved me wrong and it demonstrated how WWII theme has something new to offer, Kudos to Gearbox on this fine job, and this is my in-depth review of the game.

Graphics:

It’s almost the worst element in the game, not that it’s real bad just nothing spectacular or worth mentioning and it just pales in comparison to the amazing Graphics we’ve been spoiled by in games like Doom3 and Half-Life 2, and that proves that the game is a direct console port and the developers did not work enough on improving the Engine to benefit from the powerful PC Hardware, so you can expect that every model and mesh in the game is low-Polygon count and low-res Textures, particle effects are good and allows for realistic-looking explosions.

The Developers added to the graphics a bloom effect (like StarWars BattleFront) it’s one-thing-suits-all effect that its generally used in console games to blur out all the details in the game, it’s generally used as a cheap substitute for Anti-Aliasing, character animations are top-notch and their movements are so life-like that you can’t get bored from looking at your teammates watching their idle moves.

I must not forget to mention character models which despite of being low in Polygon count, the developers did excellent job on their faces that they look detailed with Amazing expressions on their faces like fear and caution.

Battle Effects such as explosion and getting pinned down by bullets are great and adds to the realism with blur and de-saturation.

Gameplay:

This is where the game stands out, it was a relief to see that the game does not follow the steps of all WWII FPSs like Medal of Honor and Call of Duty, which to this point follow the same rule “very-scripted-heavy-action”, instead this game relies on squad leading and tactical fighting.

You Play Sergeant Matt Baker a newly assigned Squad leader which has been dropped in Normandy in the night before D-Day, and the game missions take place in the next 8 days.

The missions are generally good and most of them is exact recreation of real missions that took place in that period from every building, hill and road to the mission objectives which they varies from assaulting enemy positions to defending conquered areas, Level design is interesting and clever and allows for different approaches in completing the mission.

You’re charged with leading one or two teams into the fray, and you use real tactical maneuvers throughout the game, Like suppression and flanking, but that doesn’t mean the game is hard and requires a lot of team management on the contrary you can issue all your orders with just a few buttons, the controls are cleverly simple so that you can get accustomed to them fairly quickly and then use them as an experienced leader.

All of the above could’ve been in vain if team mates AI was bad, but fortunately team AI is excellent and they can take care of themselves even without your orders, when they get fired upon either if they’re moving or standing still they quickly run for cover and start to fire back, also they cover each other when one of them needs to reload, and the AI is very aware of the surrounding environment so they cleverly find appropriate cover when needed, and sometimes you see them switch for another cover if they got hit or don’t have a clear view of the enemy.

Enemy AI is fairly good and manages not to spoil the experience, but it’s not great and could’ve been better, you rarely see the soldiers leave their cover or try to flank you instead they remain behind their cover shooting till you kill them.

Situational awareness System, allows you to monitor the Battlefield from bird-Eye view and you can zoom in any of your units or enemy units to examine its surroundings, it supposedly allows you to plan your attack and approach carefully, but in practice it’s not really necessary, I remember myself using it only dozen times in the whole game, but maybe some other player will find it useful.

The game tries to reflect the horror of the War, by getting you to experience the death of your friends and teammates throughout the course of the game, but it doesn’t work so well because the game does a poor job in introducing them and getting you to really know them, so you can’t feel emotionally attached to them from a only couple of minutes with them, I even didn’t know their names until after they died, they should’ve prolonged the scenes where your friends are talking and maybe introduce some bits about their former life, Men of Valor did a better job than this game and also did Medal of Honor: Pacific Assault.

I must not forget to mention the excellent checkpoint system in the game, the developers made a wise decision to ignore regular save system in PC version which would’ve spoiled the game, instead they used checkpoint system and they placed them according to the pace so they don’t seem too far or near, but as always there are some exceptions I noticed in a couple of places

Another thing worth mentioning, is that when you keep dieing in some Area for a long time (6-7 times maybe) you get an option to heal yourself and your squad and reload, this option helps greatly in certain areas where you or your squad are very low on health and can’t finish the mission.

The Weapons are great and they act as you expect them to do in real life, like the weapons recoil after you fire and the shaky aim that takes a few seconds in the crouching position so that you get a fairly steady aim.

But also the game has its share of problems; the most annoying one is the Effectiveness of the weapons and the damage done, one shot to the head is not enough to kill enemy soldiers most of the time, so you have to shoot them twice in the head or more in other parts of the body to take them down.

And the Enemy tanks have like Magical Awareness of you, no matter how I managed to sneak and hide so that I can reach the tank from behind, I find it waiting with its guns pointed at my direction or even worse it starts shooting before I appear from cover.

Sound:

The Sound in this game is on-par with the gameplay, weapons sounds realistic also do explosions and the sound of whizzing bullets and all other Sound Effects, concerning music the Theme music is excellent and suitable, but the game chooses to forego music inside missions to keep the experience realistic as possible, but I would’ve preferred a bit of music in certain critical moments of the game to add to the feelings, like when losing a teammate or in a critical fight, something Call of Duty did.
Voice Acting is decent and convincing, but nothing exceptional.

Value:

The game is very short, I mean real short that you can finish it in one day if you got carried out in the action, but luckily it’s replayable thanks to the non-linear feel of missions, you can always go back and execute the missions using different approaches and it’s rewarding each time especially when playing in higher difficulty, also the game encourages you to replay the game as it has a lot of Extra content that you can’t unlock unless you finish missions in higher difficulties

I have to mention the Extra content which is great, and lots of it explains how the Developers designed the game and the missions using real photographs and reconnaissance photos in addition to documents and journals from that time.

Conclusion:

Brothers in Arms is great game and can easily be put in the same league as Call of Duty, it’s certainly one of the best WWII games and IMO it’s the best game we’ve had so far this year (not that it’s been long enough), I strongly recommend this game to all WWII and First Person Shooters Fans.

My First Entry

2005-04-01T16:30:00.000+03:00

This is my first blog, so I’ll start it by talking about blogging in general and why I finally chose to add my thoughts to the blogosphere

The first thing that drew my attention to blogging was the incident of Mark Jen blog after he started his work in Google and how he then was forced out of it because of what he stated in his blog and turned out to be disclosed information (for detailed Story read here), this proves how powerful blogging was and how it moved from being Online personal Journal to a form of Media that has its influence and consequences.

And my reasons in joining the blogosphere can be summarized in these points:

1- Its one of the hottest issues in the Internet, and I don’t want to be left out of it.

2- Its about time I start to write and document my thoughts and notes on everything that occurs to me, as I have bad memory and I forget things very fast, so blogging will allow me to document my ideas and thoughts so that I can access them anytime I want when the need arises.

3- Sharing my ideas and thoughts with friends and other readers, and getting Feedback on my writings.

That’s it for now; maybe someday I can talk on the blogging issue in detail.