Technology Reviews | Internet Startups | Social Media

Ranking the most played online games can be difficult considering differences in perceptions and choices among gaming fans. However, if we take parameters such as popularity, ease of play, community support, and value for money into consideration, then the following Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPGs) make the grade and fill the top five slots for the most played games, online.

World of Warcraft
The best online game from Blizzard, probably, the best online game in the world! Apart from fantastic graphics and ease of play, two other things that stand out in this game is the feature that enables you to leave play and resume from the same point. The other is the constant updates that Blizzard keeps adding to the game’s features.

Final Fantasy XI (Game Lair)
Final Fantasy XI (Game Lair) from Square takes the second spot for me. Three features that stand out in this game are its huge popularity, superb storyline and ease of play.

Aion
Almost equal to WoW in features, Aion finds itself in the third slot due to excellent graphics and playability. Aion is all about the exploration of an ethereal world divided by good on side and evil on the other. Two features that stand out: PvPvE system and the ability of its characters to fly.

City of Heroes (Game Lair)
Though City of Heroes finds the third spot on the list, this game is good enough fill the No1 slot if ease of play is the taken as the only benchmark. This is the best MMORPG available for casual gamers.

Eve Online
A list of top 5 online games cannot be complete without a sci-fi MMORPG. Eve Online is the best Internet based video game for sci-fi lovers. Players can enter a surreal world where gamers can indulge in corporate wars and try to take control of the economy apart from indulging in exciting and engaging game play.

All 5 games are top draws, but they have a downside, too—they are highly addictive!

If you’re the most popular guy or girl in your group, then you are probably the most informed person of the lot. Everyone likes people who are well informed about happenings and up to date on all things that go around us. Oftentimes, the information we give can make a lot of difference to the people concerned. When we give people the information that they seek, we immediately register ourselves in their minds and the next time they look for information, the first persons who come to their minds will be us. Having the latest info wherever we are and at anytime of the day is important for us not just to make friends and be popular, but it can also be very essential for our own needs.

Consider this situation; your friends and you are planning to go for a movie and all of you are out of your homes and offices. You want information on the latest movies in the city and the theaters nearby that are running the shows. You need info on the movie times and the cast etc. There’s no fixed broadband connection for you and calling up the yellow pages or other similar services is a waste of time as they don’t have the full info, and it’s literally impossible to check all the venues, one by one. What is the option left? The only option is mobile broadband. Mobile broadband can help you access the info on movie times, venues and location at a few clicks of your mouse. Last minute searches while on the move are possible now with mobile broadband.

Moreover, it’s not simple, trivial things like movie timings alone that you can access at the last minute. You can find out the nearest hospitals, police stations, train stations and other essential services when you’re traveling. Who know? Your last minute search could save a few lives and make a lot of difference to the lives of people you know. Get last minute quotes, flight reservations, hotel bookings—all done in the very last minutes by looking for them on the Internet. With mobile broadband around, there is no last minute anymore because with the speed and the scope of your searches through mobile broadband , you’ll always be one step ahead of others even in the so called last minutes.

Drug abuse is something like a global pandemic, now, and most countries are finding ways to counter this problem, and possibly find ways to totally eradicate the scourge from the planet. Many governments of nations fund organizations that are involved in educating and counseling people on the ill effects of drug abuse. Although, many de-addiction programs and rehabilitation centers are run by government and non-governmental organizations to treat and counsel addicts, a significant percentage of addicts treated and counseled here get back to their addictive habits for want of proper follow-up practices. Typically, in a traditional drug rehab program, an addict is detoxified, and counseling is provided to the addict to help him or her understand the negative effects drug abuse can cause to one’s health and life. The addict stays clean until such time he or she is within reach of the counselors, but once he or she is out of the range of the support group and gets within the range of the addict group, the addict immediately returns back to drug abuse. This is one of the reasons why traditional de-addiction/rehabilitation programs have not achieved the desired results. Now, some bright minds have come up with innovative solutions using technology to bring about better results.

Marlon Parker, who works as an IT lecturer in the Cape Peninsula University of Technology in South Africa has come up with a solution that uses technology with a bit of ingenuity. He found that the cell phone was a very important instrument that can be used to counsel drug addicts even after their rehabilitation programs. He found that the cell phone, given its popularity with the younger generation, could play an important role in helping the counselors reach out to the addicts who are in need of constant counseling. He also found that social networking sites, especially Facebook, could help the addicts and counselors stay in touch with each other. The result is Mixit–a free chat service for drug addicts. Mixit is a free instant messaging service that can be run on cell phones and computers. It uses General Packet Data Service (GPRS) or 3G instead of the standard Short Messaging Service (SMS) technology. Addicts can get in touch with counselors on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, and there are about 8.6 million users of Mixit, today, which speaks highly of the benefits of this technology.

Researchers at the Center for Health Enhancement Systems Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have come up with an innovative solution making use of Information Technology to improve treatment and recovery programs to victims of substance abuse. They named this program “Innovations for Recovery” and launched it in 2008. Using a combination of mobile technology, computer applications and the Internet, the researchers found that assessment, alerts, tracking, social support, counseling, and education can be imparted virtually to addicts who need help. They found that this model improved the addict-counselor interaction process easier and effective. Similarly, a recent pilot study done showed that Interactive Voice Response (IVR) technology is useful in monitoring subjects with alcohol dependency problems. IVR is an automated telephone information system that can be used by alcohol addicts to self-monitor their progress by interacting with the system through a series of voice operated responses and by pressing a few buttons. The studies concluded that the subjects found remarkable changes in their behavioral patterns and addictive urges through the use of the IVR system. Effective monitoring and support through the use of technology definitely improves results are the findings of all the studies done, so far.

And, we thought that cell phones, social networking sites and the Internet were only for people who wanted to pass the time or make money! Professionals imparting treatment and counseling, and the addicts who need help will only stand to gain more using technology, and the reach and effectiveness of counseling and treatment for substance abuse can only get better from this day forwards.

All business professionals and technocrats can look forward to some eventful times ahead. There are quite a few conventions, conferences, and training programs lined up for professionals in various fields. These events are to be held in different parts of the country on different dates, different venues and by different companies. Let’s have a look at some of them.

The 7^th International Conference on Scalable Vector Graphics

Google plans to host the 7^th International Conference on Scalable Vector Graphics in Mountain View, California from October 2-4, 2009. The conference plans to cover subjects like specialized technical visualizations and interactive multimedia art. Participants can look forward to presentations, beginner and advanced level workshops and the chance to interact with the peer communities such as the SVG community and the W3C SVG Working Group.

The 2009 HighEdWeb Conference

The 2009 HighEdWeb Conference is for Web developers, designers, marketers, writers, and everyone who wants to explore web issues concerning colleges and universities. The conference proposes to cover a wide variety of topics related to the Web and higher education. The conference is to be held in Milwaukee, WI from Oct 2-9, 2009.

Mequoda Summit Boston 2009 -Online Publishing and Internet Marketing Conference

The Mequoda Summit Boston 2009 will be held from Oct 7-9, 2009 in Cambridge MA. This event is open to all editors, marketers and publishing executives that are looking forward to widening their online marketing knowledge database and create more online revenue streams.

VSLive! Orlando 2009

VSLive! Orlando 2009, is one the best known conferences in the country for developers. This event is to be held from October 4-7, 2009 in Lake Buena Vista, Florida. Participants can look forward to keynotes by industry heavyweights, breakout sessions by industry experts, pre-conference workshops, networking opportunities and many more. Consider getting some of your tech buddies together and get a Destin vacation rental.

AdRevenue 09 – The Economics of Online Display Advertising

AdRevenue 09 is an event that will explore the changing economics behind the online display advertising industry and will discuss ways to increase revenue for online publishers. The event is to be held in New York NY on Oct 09.

International Conference on Information Technology Next Generations (ITNG) – Software Testing Track

The ITNG 2010 Software Testing track plans to bring together industry leaders, researchers and practitioners together under one roof to discuss ideas and explore possibilities in software testing theories and processes. The event is to be held for 3 days, starting April 12, 2010 and ending April 14, 2010 in Las Vegas, Nevada.

It looks like the brilliant minds of our society will have to do a lot of traveling in the coming months. Flight tickets better be booked right away to get good deals, and it would be a good idea to check out the Internet to find good deals on vacation rentals, which are better choices to staying in expensive and claustrophobic hotel rooms. Free thinkers need plenty of space, so, vacation rentals like condominiums, apartments, rental homes or even beach houses can be your perfect accommodation choices during your travel to the above events.

Over the past one-hundred years it is mind-boggling to observe the advancements in technology. It is even more amazing to see how viewpoints have been reshaped by various breakthroughs. Those who have spend most of their lives working with computers and/or the internet, can probably relate to the frustrating, em

barrassing and awestricken moments that are oftentimes realized. In our rapidly changing technical times, some of the best companies have looked extremely stupid, while others have amused us with their observations. Here are 28 of our favorite quotes:
1. “Everything that can be invented has been invented.”

-Charles H. Duell, Commissioner, U.S. Office of Patents, 1899

2. “I think there’s a world market for about 5 computers.”

-Thomas J. Watson, Chairman of the Board, IBM, circa 1948

3. “It would appear that we have reached the limits of what it is possible to achieve with computer technology.”

-John Von Neumann, circa 1949

4. “The Internet? We are not interested in it”

-Bill Gates, 1993

5. “There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home.”

-Ken Olson, President, Digital Equipment Corporation, 1977

6. “Windows NT addresses 2 Gigabytes of RAM, which is more than any application will ever need.”

-Microsoft, on the development of Windows NT, 1992

7. “If McDonalds were run like a software company, one out of every hundred Big Macs would give you food poisoning, and the response would be, ‘We’re sorry, here’s a coupon for two more.’ “

-Unknown, at least to us

8. Naturally we feel that mentally ill people are not what we are looking for when we hire programmers – although there is no empirical data to support or contradict that view…… Is it appropriate to give tests for mental illness to anyone applying for any kind of job?

-Weinberg The Psychology of Computer Programming

9. “If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization.”

-Gerald Weinberg

10. “Software is like sex: It’s better when it’s free.”

-Linus Torvalds

11. “There are only two industries that refer to their customers as ‘users’.”

-Edward Tufte

12. “Never trust a computer you can’t throw out a window.”

-Steve Wozniak

13. “UNIX is simple. It just takes a genius to understand its simplicity.”

-Dennis Ritchie

14. “PHP is a minor evil perpetrated and created by incompetent amateurs, whereas Perl is a great and insidious evil, perpetrated by skilled but perverted professionals.

-Jon Ribbens

15. Real programmers are surprised when the odometers in their cars don’t turn from 99,999 to 99,99A.

-Unknown

16. “The three most dangerous things in the world are a programmer with a soldering iron, a hardware type with a program patch and a user with an idea.”

-The Wizardry Compiled by Rick Cook

17. “They have computers, and they may have other weapons of mass destruction.”

-Janet Reno

18. “Computers are getting smarter all the time. Scientists tell us that soon they will be able to talk to us. (And by ‘they’, I mean ‘computers’. I doubt scientists will ever be able to talk to us.)”

-Dave Barry

19. “There are two major products that come out of Berkeley: LSD and UNIX. We don’t believe this to be a coincidence.”

-Jeremy S. Anderson

20. “The only people who have anything to fear from free software are those whose products are worth even less.”

-David Emery

21. “If Java had true garbage collection, most programs would delete themselves upon execution.”

-Robert Sewell

22. “Fifty years of programming language research, and we end up with C++?”

-Richard A. O’Keefe

23. “First learn computer science and all the theory. Next develop a programming style. Then forget all that and just hack.”

-George Carrette

24. Technology is dominated by two types of people: Those who understand what they do not manage. Those who manage what they do not understand.

-Putt’s Law

25. These machines have no common sense; they have not yet learned to “think,” and they do exactly as they are told, no more and no less. This fact is the hardest concept to grasp when one first tries to use a computer.

-Donald Knuth

26. “Programmers are in a race with the Universe to create bigger and better idiot-proof programs, while the Universe is trying to create bigger and better idiots. So far the Universe is winning.”

-Rich Cook

27. “It’s ridiculous to live 100 years and only be able to remember 30 million bytes. You know, less than a compact disc. The human condition is really becoming more obsolete every minute.”

-Marvin Minsky

28. “Can creation ever surpass its creator??”

-Mankind

Since a good majority of our audience are techies, we decided to do a fun post of the best tech related t-shirts. Below you will find an assortment of t-shirts just for techies:

For Techie That Knows He God

Sometime you find yourself in a sea of n00bs and you need to remind them whose God

Error 404

Sometimes you just don’t want to be bothered, just return a 404 error with this t-shirt

Programming Mistakes

Programming relates to real life pretty often, sometimes when you don’t wait it to

I Survived Y2K

Remember 1999, when everyone expected every piece of technology to completely fail? Well it didn’t happen, so hears a t-shirt for it.

Got Root?

Show off those l33t h@x0r skillz with this nifty Got Root? t-shirt

I am not Anti-Social!

Tired of speaking to people and having them wonder “Whats this guys problem?” Well this is the shirt for you.

A Shirt For Your Kids

Show those other tech Dad’s how cool you really are

Input & Output

Show your technical understanding of the Human body

Try This!

Tired of those annoying computer/network questions? Let them ask you and just point to the shirt

Have A Zombie Issue?

We are all familiar with the Apple app commercial, here is a nifty t-shirt for those Zombie emergencies

The Real Internet

This shirt tells the truth about the people who are actually on the inter-webs

Don’t see a t-shirt that you like? Got a better idea for one? With the explosion of online t-shirt printing companies you now have the ability to make your own. Just choose your favorite slogan, user icon, or image and throw it on a shirt.

You can’t keep all the information you need in your head. A well-compiled cheat sheet is a nice way to quickly find questions to your answers and what’s more, structured data is easier to remember and keep in mind.

While Excel is an awesome tool for storing, structuring and organizing data, it has so many features and options that it is almost impossible to remember them all, so the following cheat sheets should be useful:

Keyboard Shortcuts and Function Quick Reference

This cheat sheet is broken down into 4 sections:

• Working in documents;
• Selections;
• Editing and formatting;
• Useful functions.

Excel Basics Cheat Sheet

This cheat sheet (pdf) is not really brief; it’s rather a short overview of most useful Excel features presented in a handy format. This makes it a perfect choice for those who only start using Excel. The main sections include:

• Shortcuts for Getting Around
• Know Your Mouse Cursors
• Select Exactly What You Want
• Work with Worksheets
• Edit a Worksheet
• Create a Basic Formula
• Format Cells and the Worksheet
• Preview and Print [click to continue...]

Video games are just for the boys, and video games are for the nerds and not for the cool dudes. You cannot have average looking nerdy type characters playing hero roles in the games.  Video games cannot be played by girls, because girls are too dumb to play them smartly.  Why make video games for girls anyway, when most games are only played by boys and men? If someone did try to start a video game business, either making or selling video games for girls, then they will end up losing their business in under a year flat.

All the above statements are unfortunate misconceptions, or they are the personal views of a minority who haven’t come to terms with the popularity of video games among young girls. These people are totally oblivious to the fact that the gaming industry has already released quite a few video games for girls, and have a lot of releases coming up.  In addition, the notion that girls can’t or don’t play video games is like thinking, our grandmas didn’t have sex when they were young. C’mon, if girls couldn’t or didn’t play games, why are these video games selling like hot cakes?

The video gaming industry has realized the enormous potential the market holds for girl-centric video games. Some games for girls include dress up games and many other games like make-up games, costume games and so on. These games offer girls the chance to explore each one’s individual skills and creativity, and also the chance to channel those traits towards a common goal by sharing them with their co-players. Good online gaming companies offer interesting and cheap dress up games that can be played online, or downloaded onto computers, cellular phones and IPods.

Role playing games like dress games appeal to young girls, and the parents are only too happy to invest money on games such as these, as they feel these games are a healthy alternative to hard core video games, and also because these games do have an educative value to them. The misconceptions about video games are changing now, and the gaming industry is not the bastion of the boys alone, anymore. Who says video games should only be about violence, fast cars, muscular bodies, sexy women, guns and bullets?  They can be refined, pleasant, and educative like dress up games, as well.

Apple iPhone 4G

The new Apple iPhone 4G is inspired by the curves and tapering found on their famed Macbook Air. Some mock-ups floating around have suggested that the body will be an aluminum unibody design. That seems possible but so are tons of other innovative industrial designs out there.

The new design is exciting but the new technology introduced will sure to be even more amazing.  Speculations include a dual-core processor and better graphic chips that can deliver higher video resolutions and better still images when taking a photo.

One of the biggest features to excite people is the front mounted camera. This will give the new iPhone 4G the ability of video conferencing on both Mac and PC. Being compatible on multiple platforms is the key to the success of this feature. Hopefully video conferencing will be compatible with Skype and MSN and maybe we will even see iChat for PC? This feature would create a huge step forward in communication and information sharing.

The biggest draw to the iPhone 3Gs was the improvement in battery life. Hopefully this is something they will continue to improve on the iPhone 4G while also focusing on increased memory. No new information on the plans for expanding carriers has been announced but Version is working on  a 4G data network .

With so much speculation around the interwebs no one is sure of what exact features will be in the newest version of the iPhone or even if it will be called the 4G. We are just going to have to wait for the July 2010 release date, meanwhile you can get some free ringtones for your iPhone.

Blackberry 9550 aka Storm 2 aka Odin

The Blackberry Storm  plans on releasing an updated version of their Blackberry Storm smart phone. The new model, Blackberry 9550, has taken into consideration community feedback on problems and issues with their previous release.

The Blackberry Storm 2 will include much needed WiFi support and improved processing speeds. They have also added a 3.2 mega-pixel camera for improved photo and video quality. You will able to see your higher quality photos on their expanded 360 x 480 resolution screen. The gaps between the display and the frame are now much smaller and there is no more wobbling or dust collection.

The biggest improvement is the removal of “click back” touch screen interface. There is speculation that the new version will give the user the ability to turn this feature back on, not sure why you would want to. This will surely improve the use of the Blackberry’s touch screen that has also been improved.
For now, the OS is practically the same, version 5.1, and likely won’t change too much but the phone reportedly has more memory, which improves performance. Storage memory has also been doubled to 2GB.

The network will be on Quad-Band GSM/Edge technology and will most likely release for Verizon and Vodafone. There has been speculation that Blackberry’s 9520 phone will be supported on the AT&T network and the Rogers Wireless network.

Below is a video of Crackberry.com’s First Look at the Blackberry 9550 Odin:

We will continue to post more information on the future Apple iPhone 4G and the upcoming Blackberry 9550 Odin.