MI-80 De Oppresso Liber

The demo for LucasArts’ latest entry into the Star Wars videogame franchise landed on Xbox LIVE yesterday, and fan results are mixed.

For anyone who has avoided the recent marketing blitz, Star Wars: The Force Unleashed is an action/fighting game developed and published by LucasArts for a number of platforms. Slated for release on September 16th for North America, the demo includes an early level of the game in what is considered its final, or near final, state. The game has been positioned as a darker slice of the classic saga, positioning the player as a secret apprentice to Darth Vader set on eliminating the remaining Jedi. The game itself takes place in the timeline between the third and fourth movies.

Since Firefox restarted the browser wars innovations have been pouring in, and it appears the next generation or browsers will be no exception. While most of the new features in Microsoft’s upcoming Internet Explorer 8 focus on usability and performance, a couple of security enhancements have leaked into the limelight.

The major announcement so far is IE8’s “Safety Filter” which builds upon the existing Phishing Filter. To recap the Phishing Filter uses a local white list and a server-side blacklist to check websites in real-time for the possibility that they’re trying to defraud the user. In IE8 this is being expanded to look for malicious code attempting to take control of the users’ computer.

Alright, let's think about filtering the Internet logically from AT&T’s perspective. It's easy to say the idea sucks, especially if one fears that he will be filtered or have his privacy invaded. The real question, though, is does this even make sense for AT&T?

First off, there is the real issue behind this debate: bandwidth. The current collection of American internet service providers simply does not have the bandwidth it promises to customers. This varies, but one major regional ISP gave the factor of 2MB of bandwidth per month per customer. Perhaps that was more true ten years ago, but the current generation of consumers use much more than that. For every few grandmothers who check their email once a weekend, there is someone else consuming GB's of data each month eschewing the graph. But the fact remains – the contract a consumer signs says (for example) 8Mb/s is the speed cap; nothing is stated about limiting how much one can download or how often he can utilize that cap. In theory one could use that all day, every day.

So it's that time of the year again! The local temperature went from 70 to 30 overnight, half the people I know are sick, and the guys and gals over at Penny Arcade are ramping up Child's Play again.

To quickly recap Penny Arcade is a web comic devoted to video games. A few years back someone wrote the classic “video games make kids violent” article and the Penny Arcade guys said enough is enough and decided to appeal to their legions of gaming fans to give the mass media something positive to report about gamers. The result was Child's Play, an annual charity where children's hospitals build-up Amazon wish lists (there are alternative ways to give, but that's the biggest one) and all you do is login to Amazon, pick something out, and it goes straight to that children's hospital to be given to the kids on Christmas. Having only run the past few years in 2006 it collected over one million dollars in donations and now expands to dozens of hospitals all around the world!

Having used Linux solely for nearly four years now, I've gained a respect for what Linux can and can't do. By no means is it the perfect solution for every problem, but there are some misconceptions heard again and again that I plan to set straight.

1. Linux is Behind the Times

One comment heard often is “Linux was five years behind XP, and it's 10 years behind Vista!” Well, here are some facts:

• Windows began separating the basic user from the administrator account by default in Vista, over 15 years behind Linux.
• Windows added a firewall in 2001, over seven years behind Linux's 1994 addition of ipchains.
• Linux was the first operating system with x86_64 support, beating Windows XP Pro x64 by two years.
• Windows added an attractive 3D accelerated graphical interface in Vista, a full year behind Linux's XGL.
• Linux's package management system can install, uninstall, and update software from one interface. Everything installed from Apache to OpenOffice and Quake 4 may be updated with one press. Windows has nothing like this on the road map.

And Linux isn't slowing down. The Xen project has added an incredible level of virtualization to Linux, with more work going into the kernels development to add enterprise ready virtualization built-in [4]. Microsoft promised built-in Xen-like virtualization in Windows Server 2008 next year, but has announced that feature has been delayed and should be available sometime after launch [1], possibly in SP1, meaning Linux will lead with built-in virtualization by at least a couple of years before Windows catches up.