Level 23 Priest

The Problem
Wow classes are not balanced for PVE soloing. I’m not suggesting that they aren’t balanced for other efforts or that they should be changed, but as we all know, some classes have a real problem soloing in PVE.

Some Background
I’m not a whiner, and I’ve been playing MMOs for over 5 years, so I have some experience beyond Wow. Here in Wow, in the past few months, I have played all the classes and studied the wiki guides.
Let’s look at the biggest example you are all familiar with: The Priest. The priest is the squishiest of the classes. I’m sure it’s possible to solo the priest in PVE. I’ve gotten a priest up to level 20, but it’s no fun. It’s a lot of work to solo a priest. The mental and input “load” is very high. Many different skills are required and everything needs to go just right to take down mobs, even if you are a few levels higher than they are. And if two mobs run you at the same time, forget it. You are in for a long walk from the graveyard.
Class Solo Ability
I’ve played all the classes in PVE, and some in dungeons. Some up to level 60 [ I know. I’m no expert until I’ve Raided at level 85 with every class. But bear with me for a while here. ]
The following ranking is based on how much work it is to take down foes and stay alive, and how many times you die while soloing in pve. Work is measured by how much attention you have to pay to what is going on and how many different skills you have to use per minute to get the job done. The more different skills you use and the more attention you to pay, then the higher the number in the ranking, that is the harder it is to play this class in solo pve.

It seems that the solo ability of the classes can be ranked like this:

1. Hunter – a great solo class. Comes with this own tank, which is a big deal, esp when working two or three mobs at a time. No problem soloing at level. Basically, pick a target, hammer the bow skills, pretty much at random, and your tank will watch your back.
2. Warlock – a good second solo class. Also has it’s own tank, some minor healing and good DPS, but long casting times and lower armor rank the warlock second. You need to pay attention to which skills you are using because they have long casting times, and you need to watch your health and use your minor health slurping skill. Sure there are subtleties beyond that, but they are most useful in parties, not in pve.
3. Paladin – Great armor and good healing put this class next, IMHO. My experience is that a paladin can level effectively solo, but it’s not where as easy as Hunters and Warlocks to do so. You need to watch your skill bar since some skills have long cool downs and you need to heal yourself. But the heals are good when you do them, and you can do them during combat. No ranged weapon. Bummer. But did I hear that this was being fixed in the next update? Can’t pull with no ranged weapon.
4. Warrior – Great armor and good damage, but poor healing. I’ve played the warrior less in pve than the other classes since they seemed less interesting. Maybe they rank here or below the Rouge and Druid.
5. Rogue and Druid – Stealth and good Melee skills rank these two classes about the same. I’m sure there are subtleties that folks might argue separate them, but basically they are about the same experience to solo. It seems that to solo effectively, you want to be a few levels above your mob foes. Druids drop back to casting from melee when you heal, which is a bummer. Rogues have a ranged weapon which is useful.
6. Mage / Shaman – I’ve grouped these together. If we are talking about solo pve up to level 20, these classes are about the same amount of work. Long casting times might actually rank Mage worse than the Shaman.
7. Priest. – We all need priests for healing in dungeons and raids, but they are not effective at PVE solo, so we don’t grow enough of them in the wild, right?

Compare with Other Games
Let’s look at some other games I’ve played. When I play an MMO, I always play all the classes. I guess I bore easily so I want to experience all the variety in the game. Let’s look at some of the games I’ve played:

• Guild Wars – Classes are well balanced. They all solo well through lower levels. At higher levels – at level 20 in high level areas of all continents – all the classes solo well with heroes. And now with mercenaries [you play with other characters from your account or other chars you create for this purpose.] Soloing the high level content on all continents is possible with all classes. I’ve done it.
• Dekaron – all classes are designed and balanced for soloing PVE content to the highest levels. I’ve worked to high levels with all classes. A real manual grinder in the Asian tradition. Private servers abound.
• Ether Saga – again all classes are well balanced for soloing. All classes can have pets. This is a grinder game which becomes tedious after about level 40. When you find yourself putting a game on automatic for a day at a time, then it’s time to move on.
• Jade Dynasty – all classes are well balanced for soloing. Another grinder at the higher levels.  I found a private server that levels more quickly. But it’s still a grinder at higher levels.
• Heroes of the Three Kingdoms – All classes are well balanced. But some are easier than others to level to level 40, but differences are minor. This game seems to have disappeared from the Perfect World site. Not sure what happened. Two currencies and lots of confusion about what you have to buy with which currency make this one a non-starter. Not a grinder tho. The quest system is very nice and complete.
• Aion – Played this on a private server – Gamez AION.  Classes seem well balanced and on the private server, they level quickly. But there is so much running around – some areas you are grounded – I got bored and moved on.

Friends and Guilds
So the first point that will probably arise when you say you can’t level a priest is: “Go find a friend or a guild”. And that’s a good point. I’m very social in games, when I get the opportunity. I’ve partied when ever I can and done a fair number of dungeons. I have no problem with doing those things, but it’s not easy to find friends or a guild that is useful.
I play during the day, when other folks are working. Friends I’ve met are only showing up on weekends or I never see them again online. Guilds often to be more about signing up members than signing up members that play. Although one guild had a 15 day kick rule. You don’t sign on for 15 days and they kick you. Since guilds are by character and not by account, I guess I’m kicked. Not been back to that alt for a while. The guild was no help for leveling anyway. They were too high a level to be interested in helping me get to level 20, or 40 or whatever.
Dungeon wait times [as Blizzard knows] are long even during busy times. The problem appears to be that there aren’t enough people playing priests? I wonder why?

History of Guild Wars
Let’s look at an example of what Wow might do based on the ideas from Guild Wars. First a little history.
Guild Wars started with a single continent and then added three more. From the beginning the game had Parties and NPCs called Henchmen, that you could add to your party to solo in PVE. These henchmen were adequate to the task at lower levels, but at higher levels they did not allow solo of the content. In the third expansion they added Heroes, which are NPCs that you gain as quest rewards and fight along with you. As you play the game you build your stable of heroes and customize them so they quickly become stronger than any henchmen.
As recently as May 2011, Guild Wars added Mercenary Heroes. http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Merc_Hero This allows other characters in your account, or PVP characters created for this purpose, to be customized for use in PVE. I guess Mercs were added by popular demand. I never saw the forum posts, but over a year before it appeared, I privately wondered why I couldn’t play my other account characters as Heroes. Well now you can. When this happened, I was quickly able to build a merc team to solo the hardest content in the game – the end quests of the Prophecies campaign – with any class. So it made it possible, and the whole game more fun.
In GW, a Merc is a clone of a character from the account. You get a COPY of the character at the time of the clone with:

• The armor look, but standard stats like Hero armor.
• No weapon.
• No Skills
• One fixed base class of the character.
• The secondary class can be changed at any time.

This scheme is based on the way heroes work in GW already. Basically, you clone a hero that looks like another character in your account. From then on, you armor buff them, weaponize, and skill buff them as you see fit. Those changes have no effect on the character that was cloned. In fact the original character can be deleted. This means that you can make temporary characters, clone them, and then delete them.
The whole Hero thing would be a very large change to make to Wow. But there is a limited way to enhance Wow with these ideas to add a significant way to party, to level the playing field for all classes in PVE and to grow more priests in the game.

Mercenaries in Wow
I propose that in Wow, Mercs are a clone of another character from the account on the same realm and of course, faction. They appear as a party member next to the player in the state they were left in when the character was last used. There is no way to change them once they appear. They can’t be re-dressed, re-weaponed, and no access is given to their inventory from the current character. I’m not suggesting that Wow adopt the Merc idea from GW so you get a clone of the characters and customize them from the start. But only that you get a clone of the character as it was when it was last used. For example, skills, talents, and the hunter pet, or warlock minion, are all set up by logging into that character and changing it, then going back and adding it as a merc you get the updated state of the character.
Mercs work as follows:

1. Allow clones of other characters on the current account, from the current Realm and Faction to be added to your “party” as Mercenaries. Adding a merc to your party must be done “out of combat” and has no cooldown. Removing the merc is easy, just Kick her. No voting. Again, adding back has no cooldown. This allows for simpler travel, if you like. See later travel issues.
2. You can only add mercs from alts on your realm that are at your level or above. If the alt is below your level, then it does not appear as a choice to add. This is because the system does not buff a merc to work at your level.
3. Each Merc you add gets a simple interface with three buttons: Fight, Defend, Passive. That’s all. The spell effects are not available, but are automatic, and intelligent of course. The spell bar is the same as the last one the merc had when you played him. There’s a quick way to set Fight, Defend, Passive for all Mercs that you control. Do we need Go?
4. Mercs fan out to the left and behind in an intelligent way like pets and minions do. They don’t jump all over you and so close that you can’t select foes,  NPCs and other players.
5. The number of mercenaries is limited by level of the character adding them. Level 1-10 – none. Level 10-20 – one. Level 20-40 – 2, Level 40-Max – 3. If there are more than one player, then each may add mercs based on their level. Currently high level players are not de-buffed or limited  from power leveling low level characters, so we don’t add de-buffing rules for players now.
6. However, mercenaries are de-buffed to not more than Character Level + 5 and their spells, armor and weapons are reduced to appropriate levels, or damage, based on that de-buffing. Mercs are not a path to Power Leveling. They are a means to make parties when other players are not available or to balance your party for PVE.
7. Mercs level with you as long as you are partied with them. But they drop out of your party if you level beyond their true level. Any leveling that occurs is not transferred back to the original alt, but is transitory with the merc.
8. De-buffing? What if you have Slam, a level 85 warrior with a ton of powerful skills and  you merc him with Splat, a level 10 character. How do you de-buff Slam to work with Splat? I don’t know, but I’m sure that there are intelligent ways to do it that are simple. Not trivial, but simple. Slam doesn’t have to be insanely great, to help out at level 10. But if you merc him with Punch, a level 60 character, you expect that he will be more help and not make stupid decisions.
9. If you have a resurrect skill of some kind, you can use it on a dead merc. If the merc dies, and you can’t res him, then you dump him from the party and add him again to get him back. If the hunter pet dies [or warlock minion dies], she will rez him intelligently when she can. Shaman merc with self resurrect will attempt to do so.
10. If a merc has a resurrect skill, she will res you at first reasonable opportunity to avoid you walking the long way from the graveyard. If more then one party member dies, then members are prioritized by class. Priests / Shaman / Paladin with resurrect skills are rezzed before others that don’t have those skills so the party can be returned as intelligently as possible.
11. Above level 20, Mercs use their mount to follow you when you use your mount. Assuming they have a mount. If they don’t yet have a mount, then they are going to be left behind. Which mount to use when there are several is a minor issue. Maybe a simple dialog in the character itself to set the “default” mount. This use of mounts includes using flying mounts.
12. Travel with Mercs. When you fly with a flight master, your Merc is de-rezzed like a pet / minion, and re-rezzed at the destination. When you take a boat or dirigible, then the merc stays rezzed and accompanies you, just like another party member or pet / minion  would do. Yep, boats might get more crowded. But you can kick and re-add a merc with no cooldown.
13. Mercs are not available in dungeons. Or are they? This might solve some of the current dissatisfaction with dungeons.
14. Mercs are not available in Raids. Or are they?
15. Got a problem with copyright? Call them Sidekicks or something else.
16. Mercs are not available in PVP. Or are they? I’m not suggesting that I have an idea how to make this fair.

De-buffing powerful characters to work pretty well at intermediate levels is probably the most challenging part of designing mercs. When you debuff an 85 to work at level 10 or 20, it’s ok to be suboptimal. But when you expect an 85 to work at level 60, then you expect more out of the merc. To get the best “performance” from your merc, require as little debuffing as possible. For example, if you really need a 60 Priest, or Mage with specific skills, then don’t take an 85 and expect it to just happen. Maybe building the 85 with skills/ talents available at 60 would be best. You don’t’ need to manually de-buff weapons or armor. That is done automatically. De-buffing weapons and armor is the easy part. Rebuilding a skill bar that would be empty if all high level skills are removed is harder. Maybe the automatic skill / talent de-buff is done by down grading each skill / talent rather then removing the ones not available at the lower levels. The de-buff is designed to be “fair”, not to be perfect in some way.
The design presented here probably has some holes left in it, but basically I think it’s sound and reasonable to implement. The AI behind NPCs and Mobs should be adequate to drive a merc, so it’s not that Wow would need to design a whole new subsystem to play them. I’ve tried to limit the impact on the interface, database and basic concepts to make Mercs a reasonable enhancement that we might actually see in a reasonable timeframe.

Example Scenarios
Let’s look at some examples of how Mercs would work.

• To build characters in a realm, start with a hunter and work the hunter up to level 20, for example.
• Then add another class, and at level 10, party up with the merc hunter to level 20.
• Then level the hunter up to level 30 or 40 or whatever, and come back to your alt and use the hunter to level them up.
• For instance, you have Spike, a level 20 hunter with his pet. And you have Squash, a level 10 priest that needs some help. You play Squash and add Spike as a party member. Now you do your PVE quests and Spike and his pet do damage and tank for you for mobs that attack you or that you attack.
• As you level up, Spike and his pet level up too. They don’t add new skills or talents, but they become stronger, less de-buffed [re-buffed], as you level up.
• When you reach level 21, Spike stops leveling up, but stays with you and fights. It would be a bad idea for Spike to leave you suddenly without aid in a fight. But you can no longer add Spike to your party.
• To level up further with Spike’s help, just go back and play Spike and level him up.
• Notice that you can use Squash as a healer with Spike if you add him at the same level. So when Squash and Spike are both at level 20, Squash can be the healer for Spike for some harder PVE quests, or maybe in dungeons.
• Say that you and your friend want to do an instance dungeon, but you are both warriors. No healing. Well you can add a priest from your account as a merc, or a priest and a hunter, and then  you can party the instance dungeon yourselves.

Summary
Some classes are not well balanced in Wow for PVE. Some classes like the Priest, Warrior, and to a lesser extent, Rouge, Druid, and Shaman, need help to form a balanced party for PVE. This fact is recognized in the formation of dungeon parties, but is not addressed for PVE. While guilds and friends are a solution, it is not always possible to take advantage of friends and guild members.
Mercs are a solution to this problem. By allowing the account to serve as a source of party members, Mercenaries would allow all the classes to be played with their strengths in PVE. This will mean that more folks play the roles of priests, mages, shaman, rogues, druids and maybe someday, Monks.

- windy

Death Knight Night Elf at 61

Once you level at least one character in your account to level 55, you can create Death Knight class characters of any Race on any Realm. Death Knights start at level 55, so all the drudgery of getting to level 55 is eliminated, but there are other problems to deal with. There are many notable experiences and problems for a Death Knight:

• While you start at level 55, you have only 20 silver in your bank.
• The starting quest chain is a tight story line, which is exciting and engaging. While it is not as rich with cinematics and dialog as the Undead quest chain in the Silverpine forest, it leads you through a story that places you in the world and fills in your back story.
• You will find yourself at level 58 with an updated weapon and some new armor pieces when the quest chain ends.
• The story ends differently for Horde and Alliance based on your race. But I’ll not spoil your experience by telling you the end.
• Your only starting profession is First Aid and it is leveled for you to about level 200, so you can built quite nice bandages should you need them.

The Coming of Transmogrification

You will want to carefully save your great looking armor which is updated with some nice pieces in the starting quest chain. In an upcoming update, you will be able to change the look of armor to look like armor you already have, so you will be able to take dungeon pieces that you get and keep your consistent Death Knight armor look.

Solo Leveling Experience

While I’m no expert here, having only played for a couple of months, I find that the Death Knight is a very powerful class to solo with. Working in the Blasted lands at my level of 58 – 60, I found that the quests were easy to accomplish and self healing was not a problem. Quite powerful mobs could be taken down quickly with only a few strokes of my powerful weapon and spells. I’m using the X-elerated guide and talent suggestions. The talents were set for PVE DPS [Player vs Environment, High Damage per Second ] and this achieves a character that levels as if it is a couple of levels above the mobs. In my limited experience, only a hunter has a similar experience when working at level.

Your Funds are Limited

Again, I’m no expert in Wow, so your mileage may vary. And you may know better.

In no time I was level 60 and could purchase a flying mount, but with a very limited lifetime, I didn’t have nearly enough gold to pay for the skills. As you end the starter quest chain, you have a mount and are a Journeyman Rider, so you can move at 200% walking ground speed. But of course, we all want to fly as well as ride. Flying is very expensive. Apparently, one has to buy Expert Riding and a Flight Master License, which are 225G each. In Orgrimmar I found the Flight Trainer and a Wind Rider NPC. The basic Wind Rider – in your choice of 3 colors – is only 45G. The skills however are very expensive. I started out with only about 40G after leveling to 60 doing quests.

To build up my funds, I’m taking two approaches:

• Gathering professions. I’m a skinner and a miner. I plan to mine and skin for loot to sell at Auction. My dwarf hunter working from level 40 – 55 has had quite good luck with auctions of loot from skinning and gathering. The various cloth items are in large supply and fetch reliable income in the auction house.
• Dungeons. Doing a series of dungeons I find that I’m quite effective and this gives funds and loot to sell at auction. The DK is very powerful. While Frost is not the right talent set for tanking, it is quite effective at Damage.

You need to get your mining up to level 200 or more to mine the minerals found in areas at level 60, so be prepared to work long hours in lower areas. Also skinning needs to be 300 or so to skin mobs in dungeons or while leveling, so again there is much work to do in lower level areas,.

Reputation from Dungeons

I want to upgrade my reputation to Revered with as many Cities as possible. This has the advantage of allowing me to purchase large bags with 16 slots for about 1G. Apparently you may purchase one bag from each city at this price once the Rep is Revered. Perhaps more bags at Exhalted, but I’ve not tested that. My Dwarf Hunter wore a tabard for Darnassas to get a Saber mount and was able to purchase large bags from both Darnassas and Ironforge while working dungeons to level to 55 to allow us to create a Death Knight.

However, watch out beyond level 55. The Random Dungeon option in the finder begins sending you into Burning Crusade dungeons where the cities are not available and regardless of your tabard, you will be gaining only Thrallmar, or another rep. This won’t help with your city rep. You need to choose “classic dungeons” from the finder rather than  Random.

Quite Impressive

I have been quite impressed by the Death Knight class. My experience with Warriors below level 20 indicates that they solo poorly, but the DK is an excellent solo leveler and is quite effective in Dungeon play. I look forward to many hours as I gather funds for my flying mount.

- Windy

World of Warcraft

I have recently been playing World of Warcraft. While the game has much to recommend it, especially since they have a trial or starter edition that is free-to-play [up to level 20], it has a serious problem with its design of “realms” or “shards” as some games call it.

“Shards” or “Realms” of course is the name used  for the “instances” of the server that are required to support very large numbers of players. These games are MMO – Massively Multi-Player – and “Persistent” which means that they do not place players in private “instances” of the game as they play. But it is not possible to have hundreds of thousands of players all playing in the same server at the time. How is the game going to solve the problem when thousands of players show up in the same town at the same time for a party or just to hang out on a Saturday night?

Well the point is that World of Warcraft solves this problem very badly. There are better solutions out there. Let’s look at the Wow solution and then look at some other games and see much better solutions.Where Are Your Characters?

To examine the problem more closely we need to understand where the characters are that you play.

They are in a database. All the information about the characters for an account are stored in a database.

So what are the performance issues? There are two issues:

• Access to the database to retrieve and save character information as each change occurs to the character. This does not include each damage hit you take, but each change to your inventory, and each change to experience you achieve, such as each quest you complete, each monster you kill or each activity such as crafting or trading that changes your character in such a way that you would not want to lose the change if you logged out at that instant.
• And the surrounding game state, that is the nearby players, and monsters and other state of the environment that affects your character. This is separate from the database.

Let’s Have a Party

So let’s see what happens when a game has a party and everybody decides to show up in the same town at the same time. Guild Wars does this all the time. About six times a year they have week-long festivals that severely tax their servers. I’m not familiar enough with Wow to know if they have parties too, but I’m sure they have the “Saturday Night” effect, I’ve experienced it, and it is a real mess. I have been playing some human characters that start out in Elwynn Forest. At about level 6 you are sent on a quest to the nearby large city of Stormwind. Well don’t go to Stormwind on a Saturday night. The place is mobbed by high level characters with their huge pets, and mounts, jockeying up and down the narrow streets showing off and visiting with their friends. I could not walk down the street, and for some reason it picked me to bump off the server repeatedly. It took several tries before I was able to “Transport” home and get out of that place. It was so bad that I moved to another Realm, but the problem is that with Wow, your characters don’t exist on that other realm.

Guild Wars parties are never a mess on festival days. Let’s see why.

Guild Wars Districts

Guild Wars Districts

There is a universal Guild Wars database, so all your characters and all your friends characters are in one place. Then if you want to party, the system automatically puts you in a “District”, which is the game server “instance’. If you and your friends end up in different Districts, that is no problem, you can still Whisper to each other and agree on a District where you can meet. Then you pull down the menu at the top left of your screen and it moves you to the District that you choose. Of course when you are Questing, your party is given its own instance of a server so you are alone, but this design works perfectly well for “Persistent” MMOs too. During festivals I have seen this list grow to a hundred or more districts of one town. If you move to another town where there is no party, then there are only one or two Districts.

One might argue that Guild Wars is not as popular as Wow and so it has no database problem, and this is true, but there is a design that solves the Database Scaling problem: Multiple Servers. In this case we just add more servers when we have so many users that the database can no longer handle the load.

Jade Dynasty

Jade Dynasty is a “Persistent” MMO run by many folks in Asia, and by Perfect Worlds in the US.

Jade Dynasty Server List

In this case there are only two, but there could be several. Each server has a unique set of characters and you can’t “Visit” or “Party” with  your friends on other servers. But if they are on the same server, then you have “Realms” which are like Districts. Once you log in to the server with your username and password, you are presented with an initial Realm, and it remembers the last one where you visited. There are special Realms for Trading to keep other realms free of all the traffic of trading.

Jade Dynasty Realms

To find what Realm you are in, just click on an icon next to the compass.

Jade Dynasty Realm at Compass

So if you and your friends meet in Jade Dynasty, then you have to go back to the Login Screen and switch Realms.

Realm Selector

Of course it takes a little longer to logout – which takes you back to the Character Selection screen – and then change the realm, which takes you back through the big list above.

 Heros of Three Kingdoms

Heroes of Three Kingdoms

HoTK is another game from Asia that Perfect Worlds provides. HoTK fixes this problem in the way that Guild Wars does, with a pull down to choose the Realm right in game.

As you can see they have a large number of Realms. The drop down from the Compass let’s you switch Realms instantly to join your friends or participate in “instance” dungeons that are only supported in certain Realms. For example, to do quests for “Mounted Combat” you need to switch to the “Events” which are only given in Realm 11.

Wow Design

The Wow design has no realms really, but only “servers” so each time you switch to another one, you have none of your characters. Of course as you play, you probably won’t meet other folks from other servers. But if you run into Saturday Night as I did, you are faced with the problem of building characters on other servers. Fenris is apparently completely loaded. And Galkrond and Nazgrel are billed as being for “New Players” but I created some characters on Galkrond and then tried to start them off, and ran into a mob in the starting area. It was so bad that I started the same character again on Nazgrel. So I have three instances of the same character on three different servers. What a mess is that?

It’s not possible to combine the Servers at this point since all these games depend on character names being unique, so if they mashed them together they will have to somehow allow you to rename the characters to make them unique. I remember that 2Moons once did this. After they combined the servers, when you logged in, your characters were forced to unique names and then you were given a chance to rename the characters to unique names of your choice.

World of Warcraft needs Realms.

But when they do this, they will end up with too many servers. If they actually implemented Realms, they probably will find that they don’t need all of those servers. If  you notice the list, there are a large number of PVP servers. This is probably due to high load on those servers. Well that load is due to “Game State” load, not database load, and since Wow only has one way to “shard” its world – Servers – the design has only one way to deal with Game State load, and that is to make more servers.

What a mess.

Allow Players to Move

With their server-only design, they could allow users to Manually load level their servers. They could provide a free means to move a character or a whole group of characters between servers. It should be free and completely automatic – no person required to do it. It could work like this.

In the Character Selection Screen, there is a new button called Move to New Server. This presents a wizard that has two steps:  You choose the server and a new name for your character.

1. The server choice is simple. You know where your friends are, or, you are given some indication about the loading in terms of total recently active character population on that server. Say an average of character hours over the last week or month – which ever would give a smooth estimate. This would allow folks to make intelligent choices about moving to less populated servers.
2. The next step of the wizard checks to see if the character name is unique. If the current character name collides on the new server, then, you can choose a name that will not collide, and of course it’s checked immediately before you go on, and you get to see if it’s unique right away and don’t have to commit until you get to try several options. This is unlike the character creation screen that only tells you after  you commit.

They could limit character moves to once a week for each character if there is some reason. But you should be able to move your whole stable around once a week if you like. Also it should be free to move since the idea is to level the load on areas that are over crowded. Don’t charge for something that benefits everyone.

IMHO,

- ww

Cyber War

As I write this we are seeing daily reports of hacking and break-ins to commercial and defense enterprises world wide:

• Sony network down for over three weeks with customer passwords, emails and credit card information information stolen.
• Anti-bank Trojans stealing millions of dollars from customers’ bank accounts in Brazil.
• Oakridge National Laboratory was the target of a spear-phishing attack that only compromised a few megabytes of data before it was stopped.
• Millions of dollars being stolen from cell phone users in China by viruses infecting smart cell phones.
• The Stuxnet worm infects Iran’s nuclear program.

But it seems we are not doing a set of straight forward things that we can do to prepare for and mitigate the impact that cyber war is having on this country. We can start with some simple and comparatively inexpensive steps.

A Process

First of all, what is the process that we should follow?

1. Identify the threats.
2. Settle on a policy and do “minimal” legislation to allow us to act.
3. Identify funding sources.
4. Build a small team to act on the policy.
5. Use benign attacks to test without warning.
6. Harden US defense and commercial targets against attack.
7. Share the policy with our allies.

Here are each of these steps in more detail.

Identify the Threats

This will be a short process. There is no problem coming up with a large pile of documentation about the threats to National Security and Commercial interests in this country. This should take the White House Cyber Czar about 10 minutes because there is no doubt that he already has this document prepared.

Settle on a policy and do “minimal” legislation to allow us to act.

I suggest that the policy should be that:

The a new team for Cyber War Defense is given new powers to attack – in a non-destructive way – the commercial and defense interests of the US to assess the threats and to cause the parties to close the holes that are found.

Legislation Required

This process probably requires legislation so that the process is not illegal.

They are not authorized to steal anything to destroy data, only to demonstrate that this could have happened by actually doing a break-in.

The legislation should not and need not give law enforcement any broad powers of search, seizure or traffic sniffing beyond what they already have.

The legislation should require that companies promptly fix problems found in key software. Currently some bugs remain in the wild for many weeks or months before they are fixed.

Legislation should also require that best practices be followed by all commercial and national defense agencies. The best practices themselves are not in the legislation but are developed by a small non-political and fast moving panel of experts.

Best Practices

The legislation identifies a small panel of technical experts that built a standard of best practices. This is not a political document, but a technical standards document. It is free to reference other works rather than incorporate them since there are many sources of best practices available.

These practices need to include standards for the modernization of computer hardware and software as well as the operating procedures of employees and IT departments. It is unreasonable for many large companies to still be using Windows XP and Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 in this day of high threat attacks.

I have recently heard pundits expounding on the spear-phishing attack at Oakridge with the suggestion that training should be employed, with drills, to train people to avoid clicking on emails. Apparently the attack at Oakridge was mounted by sending emails to employees that appeared to have come from Human Resources and that stated that all employees must update their health insurance information. It seems clear that a national laboratory should have a firewall that prevents outgoing links from bringing back any software that will be installed on computers. Training might be well and good, but something more robust is possible and called for in this case, and maybe for all organizations that have anything to lose from a cyber attack. Don’t depend on people when a machine can perform the function. More later about best practices.

Identify funding sources.

Just as the FDA certain powers over commercial interests that sell contaminated food, or drugs, this legislation should give the Cyber War Defense team the power to access consulting fees that will fund this organization. The fees are set based the commercial rate for such consulting, and on the hours to mount the attack plus the hours for the Outreach Team to work with the company to close the breach found and bring the company up to the best practices standard. Only companies where the attack succeeds are charged.

Government organizations pay the going rate for inta-government consulting.

Build a small team to act on the policy.

A small team of 20-50 people is enough to built attacking tools and test the commercial and defense organizations in the country.

The team is organized as follows:

1. A subgroup to identify existing tools and build new tools to aid in mounting attacks.Tools like Metaspoit and other hacking tools form a basis of attacking and threat management tools.
2. Exploit identification team uses state of the art techniques to identify exploits to be incorporated into the tools and used by the other groups. This process includes active testing of popular browsers, flash, pdf and web server software on all platforms to identify bad file formats and other attacks that cause crashes or other behavior that can be exploited for attacks. This is what the cyber attackers do constantly, we need to be better than they are, at what they are doing.
3. Commercial sub-team with expertise in attacking banks, game companies and other commercial interests.
4. Defense sub-team with expertise in attacking defense installations and national laboratories.
5. Utilities sub-team with expertise in attacking water, power, nuclear installations and other infra-structure targets.
6. Outreach team whose job it is to liaison with the exploited enterprise to harden their installation based on the threats exposed, and the best practices identified.

Use benign attacks to test without warning.

The teams above attack the high value targets without warning and when they succeed, the Outreach team notifies the enterprise to quickly fix the problem. No prior notification is required for a company to be tested. DDoS [Distributed Denial of Service] attacks are not typically used for these attacks unless it is shown that a brief DDoS attack will open another vulnerability that cannot be opened in other ways.

The attacks and their results are held in confidence by the Cyber War team. No mention is made of success or failure of any tested organization.

Best practices are used in notifying companies of problems in commercial or open source software. Typically this means that the authors / sellers of the software are notified in private and given ample time to provide a patch before any public mention is made of the vulnerability.

Harden US defense and commercial targets against attack.

Wash, Rinse, Repeat.

By executing the above process continually, and prioritizing the organizations targeted with the benign attacks, the entire country can be quickly brought up to a state of Cyber-War-Readiness.

Share the policy with our allies.

It seems clear that we should share our policy, our tools and our best practices with our allies.

Except for exploits found that others do not yet know about, and the results of attack testing on US targets, it is not clear that any of the tools or methods or information need be secret.

Some Best Practices

Attack surfaces are the places where attacks can occur. The number of instances in an organization, the rate of usage and complexity of a surface, such as Flash, or Windows XP gives a measure of the Area of the surface. The number of exploits reported / fixed per month or per year gives also gives a measure of the Area of the surface.

• Unified Threat Management Software [UTM] at the perimeter of an organization should be employed to filter the outside world from attacking an organization. The UTM should be running on an embedded or Linux OS rather than Windows to eliminate a Windows attack surface from the UTM.
• Eliminate Flash / PDF – Flash and PDF form a large and frequent attack surface. While the browser and email programs used to be the preferred attack point, it is now Flash and PDF files. Every week or month more bugs are found and updates are required. While updating is advised, a “hardened” organization should simply eliminate Flash and PDF files from unknown sources. The UTM can filter out all Flash/UTM from the outside world and replace it with blank images of the appropriate size, or a PDF file that states the policy.
• No downloading via links. With centrally managed IT resources, no company should allow users to install anything themselves on their computers. Again UTM can assure that no programs from outside can be installed, and this includes Browser plugins.
• Eliminate use of Java. Java via the browser can form an attack surface. This surface is probably not far behind Flash and PDF in frequency of use.
• Reduce the number of file formats. Willingness to receive various levels of DOC, Power Point, and other file formats from others is an invitation to break-in. Reduce the number of formats and secure their transmission. Eliminate email as a transmission method wherever possible.
• Smarter Image Scanning can eliminate JPG/ PNG / GIF etc as an attack surface. Modern browsers can process a large number of image types, and the more types, the more vulnerable the browser is to attack. A smart proxy server in the UTM can eliminate many of those types by translating the images and in doing so can process the image so that it is assured there is no hidden payload. If an image is converted from GIF > PNG, then it is clear that no payload will survive. Only JPG / PNG should be supported and UTM should translate everything else and fix up the web page references to reference the correct translated image. This will eliminate images as an attack surface.
• Cross Site Scripting and other Cross Site attacks can be eliminated by the UTM proxy disallowing certain references that might compromise the site or the browser.

Longer Term

Currently, virus detection is performed by looking for signatures of known virus variant. Some viruses can modify themselves, much as HIV-AIDS virus does, to avoid detection. It seems clear that a new non-signature method of detection is required.

As mentioned in the above point on image scanning, it is possible to detect virus payloads in images by processing the image in some way that only a valid image would survive. This type of processing is also possible for PDF files, where a file could be scanned looking for embedded features such as form-scripts and embedded media – images or flash- that form the attack.

By using the UTM to remove advanced features from some files – Flash, PDF and others – the organization is protected from attacks on the surfaces provided by those advanced features.

What’s Happening?

Maybe these things are quietly happening behind the scenes while we are annoyed by noise from the likes of the “Protect IP” legislation which is an effort of big companies like Sony to protect a questionable amount of revenue from lost sales. It seems they have lost more money recently due to to their own cost cutting in their IT departments by not having appropriate security measures than they can hope to gain by any “Protect IP”, and meanwhile we are all less Cyber-Secure.

-ww

What’s the big deal with apps over webpages?

Short History Lesson

In the day of the web, starting 20 years ago, say 1990, web pages were all the rage. By 2000 we had the (dot)com boom. Nobody was talking Apps then. We weren’t writing hundreds of thousands of apps for our PCs then. The concept of having a single program on the PC that could display hundreds of thousands of websites was the way things went. We could have had a PC app boom then.

Java – The promise of Apps for Everyone

In 1991, Sun inc tried to create the language of apps for our PCs with the Java language. Java was designed to be architecture independent so that it could run on any type of PC. At the time there were many hardware architectures rather than just two or three. Java is an interpreted language and so starting in 1995 by incorporating it into Netscape Navigator, Java was marketed for a time as a portable language for writing client side applications for the web. There were even Java based “Web Stations”, small computers running Java and a browser that could act as front ends for web sites and applications, but these never got any traction. Soon Java migrated to a more popular language for the back-end, servers. In the form of IBM WebShere, BEAsys WebLogic [now Oracle], and the Open Source Apache Tomcat environments are three popular examples of this movement of Java into the web server environment.

Why the Web Rather Than PC Mini-Apps?

Why was there no PC mini-app boom as there has been for smart phones? Probably because there was no single company that would benefit greatly from their adoption. If Microsoft, or AOL or another of the early players had made a bid to push small lightweight applications into the PC rather than pushing web pages, the result may have been different. AOL played into he hands of the future web, and in a sense caused it’s own demise, by adopting HTML and web sites as their platform. AOL failed once the internet gained momentum since the AOL walled garden was too expensive and other ISPs [Internet Service Providers] gained a foothold. It’s hard to justify $30/mo plus overcharges once there are folks providing unlimited time for $9.95 /mo to reach the same internet, indeed to reach the same AOL websites, which of course could be reached backwards through the internet as well as through the captive AOL dialup network.

Why Apps Now Rather than Websites?

I believe we have an application boom now rather than just an extension of websites because Apple and the Cellphone Providers are in control. Apple is making millions by taking a 30% cut on the sale of apps, even tho many of them are free. Millions of sales of apps for $3.99 makes Apple millions. You can’t skim millions from folks visiting websites on their phones. I guess this is the Apple Smart Phone Tax.

Consider the situation of Apple and the Apple Store if smart phones were web site based? There would be no App Store, but the google search engine. Apple would not be in control, could not refuse to sell your app, even if it were free, as they do now. The cell phone companies could not influence your experience. Apple could not so cavalierly refuse to put flash on your smart phone since so many websites, and secondary advertisers, rely on it. Instead of being so arrogant, Jobs and Apple would be working with Adobe for some standards to limit Flash for mobile to make the experience better.

Apps can be controlled in ways that websites cannot. Since you have to go to one place to get your applications, Apple and the cell phone carriers are in control of your experience, rather than you being in control.

Google has bought into his control model, even though they do not now take a tax as Apple does. There is not one Android app store. But we still have applications rather than websites on our android phones.

Technical Non-Reasons for Applications on Phones

Let’s look at some of the non-reasons to have applications on phones.

• Websites are not formatted for phones and tablets. True, but that’s the result of the motion to applications rather than the reason. There have been a number of mobile web standards [@WikiPedia] starting as early as 1998. We do have website standards for mobile devices, just no wide industry adoption because they lose control if they adopt web standards rather than application models.
• Use of websites cause more traffic than applications. Possibly true. One way to think about applications is that they are cached instances of graphics and local scripting which are downloaded once, usually via WiFi, and then can be used frequently when the use of a website would cause additional data traffic. But this assumes that the data traffic shortage is more than an artificial method of charging higher prices.
• The Browser is too complicated. It is true that the web browser is often the most complicated and largest application on a PC. The modern browser, MS IE, or Firefox, is larger than other PC applications including word processors or spreadsheets. With the complexity of the scripting languages, context sensitive style sheets and the plugins such as Flash, PDF and others, the size of browsers is out of control, but PC memory and performance is growing very fast and can keep up. But all smart phones have browsers, so this is really an argument about mobile website standards rather than an argument about the size of a software application.

Almost All Apps Use Websites

We need to remember that almost all smart phone applications actually use websites to function. Very few applications are of any use without access to the network. Perhaps Angry Birds will function without the network, but it may actually check in to tell the company that you are playing the game, and to look for updates.

Rather than communicating with HTML, applications use JSON, XML or other serialization formats which may be lighter weight than HTML. Typically, though not always, the protocols do not involve image transfer. Although viewing photo galleries, album art and movies can hardly be said to be free of graphics.

Stove-Piping or Where are the Mashups?

Another problem with applications is the problem of stove-piping. This is the problem of many different, but similar services that are not integrated. There are many music sites, many photo sites, several – although hardly many – social sites, and in the application model, each site has its own application. This fragments the community. If for example, you want to review recent photos and postings from your friends, you need to visit several different sites – facebook, flicker, photobucket, picasa, etc. Windows Phone 7 has provided a point of integration for the applications to show photos in one place on the phone, but few if any of these services have bought into the integrated services. I believe that this approach is bound to fail. The phone service must allow the user to integrate the services by pointing the phone at these services directly, or third parties will need to do for phones what Mashups did for the web.

A mashup site is a site that integrates two or more web services into one experience which is more useful than either separately. Common mashups integrate mapping services – which google provides as an API – with another service. I’m sure that many mashup applications have appeared. It would seem that each of the, for example, photo sites has little incentive to provide an easy way for their content to be mashed together with other sites since this would mean removing the branding and changing the experience. There is a brand recognition war going on which reduces the optimal user experience.

What the Other Side Wants

The cell phone companies want the high profits that come with expensive data plans. They lost their high profits when dialup went to $9.95/mo. They lost again when broadband went to about $39.95/mo or less.

They are not about to lose their high profits on cell phones and they are in control. There are no contenders for new cell phone services. The difficulty in building a network or buying into the networks that are out there make this impossible. We have the same situation we had with Standard Oil or ATT&T [before the breakup]. We have one or a few monopolies controlling a resource in a monopolistic way, controlling prices, access and increasingly, content. For a perspective on this read “The Master Switch” by Tim Wu [@Amazon ].

Unlimited data plans are going or are gone. With the purchase of T-Mobile by ATT&T and the Comcast purchase of NBC, our internet is increasingly in the control of fewer and fewer hands rather than more. The profits are in the data plans for smart phones. So that’s where the artificial scarcity in bandwidth is and that’s where the high prices are. There are more profits if they charge high prices for every one separately – since everyone has a phone – instead of the family – there is only one broadband link per home.

What Can We Do?

Format for the Mobile Screens. As companies who want to reach mobile users, move toward open standards. Make your websites mobile aware so that using the browser on a phone or tablet will work nicely. Your websites can tell which device is attaching, and can know how big that screen is, so format a site for that screen.

Build Mashup Applications. As a developer of applications, build mashup applications that can be reconfigured by the user to point to more different places to integrate those places. The more you put in control of the user, the less control Apple, and the other content providers have. Photo mashup apps, music mashups.

Don’t buy in. As a consumer, don’t buy into the cellphone network artificial data scarcity. Buy phones with WiFi and use it – Carefully. Know about Firesheep and other nasty security issues. Purchase and use tablets and other devices that do not have cell phone data plans. WiFi bandwidth is not controlled, yet. So use it, rather than data plans.

- w

AION Logo

I have been watching the AION game for some time, and since it was released in this country by NCSoft, I had hoped that they would use the same model as they do with Guild Wars, which is purchase followed by FTP [no subscription]. Well they apparently are greedy, and have gone with the WoW model, which is Pay for the game and then pay $15 / month. Sorry, but I’m not interested in this model.

However, I have found a FTP Private server. Oddly enough. GameZ AION is a private server with enhanced EXP, Currency and Drop rates.

Problems with the Game

I won’t be doing a full review here, I’m sure you can find lots of those on the web. I’ll just be relating some of my own issues and observations after playing the game for a few hours.

Installation

It takes a very long time to install the game. The install procedure at GameZ involves downloading and installing the NCSoft installer which will install the client. However, it doesn’t download it quickly, but runs it into your computer over about an hours time. This is because it’s a very large client. 18 GB on your hard drive. Yes, that’s Eighteen Gigabytes. Most MMO clients are between 1 and 2 GB. This is a whopping 18GB. Once you install the game using the NCSoft installer, you install and start another small program which directs the program to GameZ. Don’t start the program normally since it will point to the NCSoft servers.

Character Creation

Once you start the game you can create a character of either race.  There is something funny going on at NCSoft regarding races. Apparently they did allow two races, and then they didn’t for a while, and now they do, but they soon will only allow one race per account per server. What a mess. Well GameZ confirms that  you can have accounts with both races, so don’t worry about any pop-ups from the game that indicate that your characters will have to be moved.

There are a bewildering number of character options, mostly in body shape. Have fun, or not.

The name format restrictions are lame. A single word with a leading capital letter, and no spaces. But at least you can check to see if your name is available.

Character Selection

Graphics

The graphics are awesome. Over the top. Although all the environments I’ve seen are muddy and dark. The problem is that you better have a high end, very high end, system to run this game on. As you can guess from the client download size, this will push modern systems to the brink. I have a high end laptop [Alienware m15x] that is 4 years old and it is tapped out running this game. I suggest you have more than 4GB of memory. The client is over 1GB of memory, so less than 4GB does not cut it. My laptop is 4GB, but I don’t get to use it all due to 32bit Vista memory usage, and it’s barely enough memory with the OS and Firefox to read the wiki. There is a very nice wiki however. Check it out. I found the quests I needed when I got stuck.

Also you need a very high end graphics card with more than 512MB of graphics memory.

Desktop machines will fair better with this game.

The performance on my laptop was herky jerky especially in town. Pandemonium is a huge city. I’m not sure whether this is the server or my laptop, but I suspect that it is my laptop. I don’t have the patience to install the game on my high end desktop to determine which it is.

Gameplay

Game play is of course colored by the private server high exp/drop rates. You are quickly at level 9 and asked to ascend before you really get started, but there are several issues that show up immediately.

Picking up loot is a chore.

Picking up Loot

Every kill requires opening a dialog and scrolling down to pickup what you want from the kill. And each time you right click to select an item you are tossed back to he beginning of the list and have to scroll down again. Bad design. What were they thinking. One of the problems is that the inventory is so small that you have to be careful or you will instantly fill it.

Inventory is Small

Only 27 slots in your inventory. Apparently they want you to spend real money in the store to expand your bag. Notice the high currency after only a little while playing the game. That’s a good thing.

Navigation is the Real Problem

But the show stopper for me is the navigation. As I have mentioned with other games that I’ve reviewed here, navigation can make or break a game play experience. And it breaks this one.

Quest Log

The quest log is designed by someone who has not played the game. You have to open too many windows to get from the quest log to a marker on the map. You open the quest log, then you click on the quest, and as you can see there are a pile of them. Mostly because NPCs tend to dump groups of quests into your quest log when you complete one quest. Then when the panel on the right is open, you click on a blue name – the target or the NPC for the quest, and up pops another dialog with a Locate button in it. All I wanted was a marker on the map, and I had to type a key and click three times? Showstopper.

The quest tracker shows the quests that you have checked in the log.

Quest Tracker

But none of the items in the quest tracker are click-able. So no help there.

Once you do get a marker, you can get a transparent overlay map like this to navigate with.

Map Navigator

This is a reasonable and innovative idea. N toggles this display so it’s easy to bring up or dismiss as you fly along. You will be doing quite a bit of flying as it turns out. Wings are available for both races from the start.

Not only is navigation a problem, but quests lead you all over the place, when you cannot fly, or run more than a few seconds. So it takes freaking forever. Here’s an example:

Quest Map

I just finished one part of the quest called “Fear This” in the Mumu Village on the left part of the map, the next part of the quest is to talk to the NPC at the cross on the right part of the map. I can’t fly in this area. I have to walk. There is a “charge” skill that allows you to run for about 10 sec every 4 minutes. Big deal. Ok, I get that they want me to open up more of the map. Notice that the NPC is in an area where I have not yet been. But I can’t TP, I have to walk. So to walk, since there is no Auto-Route. I have to hold down the W key and steer for about 10 minutes to get there. That’s just plain bad design. A waste of time.

Bottom Line

This is too much game for my laptop. Maybe someday. The herky jerky lag, probably due to my laptop, makes the game no fun to play.

Update: I installed this on the Core I-7 quad processor, 6GB machine and it’s not herky-jerky at all. It took over an hour to install and the program file folder is over 21GB.

The quest navigation is too much of a pain. If the performance was good, I might put up with that for a while. The long runs to complete quests are just plain torture, there’s no getting around it. While the landscape is beautiful – if it wasn’t so dark and colorless in most places – does not make up for the fact that it takes so long to get around between places to complete simple quests.

Maybe later on some new laptop in a year or two. Interesting to try, but not a keeper now.

- Windy

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AlienFX Side Panel

Since May 2007 I have had an Alienware 7500-R4 system. Here is the configuration. At the time Alienware shipped systems with 4GB or more, but only supported Vista x86, which meant in my case that I only had access to 2.7GB of the 4GB that I purchased.

Lights Did Work

The AlienFX software worked for about 2 years after I upgraded to Vista x64, apparently because a flash memory on the ELC board – Electronic Lighting Control?  – saved the settings. But when I upgraded the system to 8GB recently, the system came up dark, and the lights have never re-appeared. My case is now permanently dark.

Alienware Support is no Help

Contacting Alienware support on this issue has been a comedy of errors with respect to the AlienFX software. But the bottom line is that Alienware / DELL no longer supports software for the AlienFX hardware on modern operating systems. There was never any support for Vista x64, and while they support Windows 7 x64 on new systems, the new AlienFX boards are apparently different and Alienware does not support any upgrades of the AlienFX boards to more modern ones that will work with Windows 7. Of course downgrading the system to run Vista x86 at this point is hopeless for so many reasons, not the least of which is that the system now has 8GB of memory.

A Long Life Ahead

Of course, any high-end system purchased as recently as 2007 will run Windows 7 quite well. So these systems are not near End-of-Life. I expect to get another 2-3 years out of mine before replacing the motherboard and hard drives. The case and 1KW power supply should at least another generation beyond this one with a new MB and hard drives.

But I don’t want a dark case for the next 8-10 years.

I considered asking Alienware for the drawings of the ELC motherboard. But they are so officious and stuck in their ways at this point that it is of little point. Let’s take a look at the AlienFX hardware for the P2 circa 2007 case and consider some alternatives.

AlienFX Hardware

AlienFX in Case

AlienFX hardware comprises three components:

1. LED lights in clusters around the case to allow multiple leds to turn on to provide various colors. These connect to the ELC Motherboard via what look like PATA cable connectors. There are three PATA headers on the ELC MB.
2. An ELC motherboard which connects the LED light wires, power, and a USB connection to the ELC daughter card which contains all the active components.
3. An ELC daughter card which connects to the ELC MB with an angled connector similar to an SODIMM connector, if not exactly an SODIMM connector.

ELC Motherboard top

ELC Daughter Card Top

Alienware, or whoever produced the board for them [MacroVision? I have seen that mentioned in the AlienFX software], probably feel very proprietary about this design, and so whatever solution arises to have lighting needs to steer clear of any intellectual property. I don’t want to hack the ELC daughter card, write a driver for it, or replace it, since all those avenues will probably violate someone’s idea of intellectual property.

However, the PATA headers cannot be claimed to be proprietary in any way, they are just connectors to LEDs in the case. While there may be patents on the case lighting in general, powering the LEDs in the case with some independently built system will only be seen as a violation in some far reaches of lawyers minds.

Alternatives to get Lights

I see a couple of alternatives to getting my lights back.

1. Reverse Engineer the wires and just turn on the lights. If a stupid ELC motherboard is produced that drives the LEDs to light them up, then constant light is available. I sure would like this since my case sits under my desk and it is hard to even insert a DVD without lights.
2. In addition to 1, add a PIC or other simple controller to allow the case lights to be changed, either just to change the colors statically, or more in keeping with the original support, allow the lights to change dynamically. There may even be a way to talk to the PIC controller with a USB driver, or serial line via the USB.

Call to Action

Do other folks have this problem with their Alienware P2, circa 2006-2008 cases?

Has someone else come up with a solution?

Don’t you want your case lights back?

What should we do?

- windy

I heard about Spokeo and I’m passing the word. I’ve removed myself and here’s why.

To remove yourself, for free, go to their Privacy Page, and follow the simple instructions.

Spokeo claims their information is available from public sources. However, do we really know that? Do we know that they have not made relationships with database companies that folks would have to pay dearly to join to get my information, for example. They don’t say that, at least not in the large print that I could read.

To edit my information on Spokeo, I have to join, which costs money: $35.40/ year or more. And I have no idea whether I can actually edit my own information for that price. I have a large problem with having to pay to keep my information private, or at least not have my information collected on their easy to access and cheap site. If I’m a stalker, then Spokeo is cheap. If I’m trying to protect myself, then it sounds expensive. They want me to join Spokeo, or the even more expensive Reputation Defender – which they say is a Partner – and costs $8/ mo not $3/mo. Is Reputation Defender a separate company, or the other half of a business plan.

I don’t know what these folks are doing, but let me float you a business plan for a new hypothetical company and see what you think.

1. First I get a few cheap offshore web developers and
2. a little cash and join up with some not-so-private services and enter into agreements to republish their data. Sure it may be “public” but not that easy to get because as a private person, you have to pay big bucks to join each one, like $100 / year or more. But my new company will make a deal with each one to feed them a portion of my profits from my members.
3. Then the offshore workers build a big database and a spiffy site and folks find me and do phone number / address etc searches for free, so that shows everyone that I have data on them.
4. But I might or might not have a lot more data on them, and of course they won’t be able to tell that I have nothing of interest unless they pay me. Not for a month, but for a whole year. So they can’t find out they have nothing for $3, they have to pay $35. Or maybe as little as $15 if you pay for 3 months.
5. And they get to see their own detailed information, and the data of everybody else.
6. Then I offer a “premium” service that looks like it comes from another company, say “Privacy Assurance” or even scarier, “Reputation Defender” (say this is in a loud ominous voice). And this service costs more than twice what the basic service costs. But the premium service can’t really protect or defend anything since the deep databases are run by lots of other companies, for which there is no privacy laws and no guarantee of anybody’s right to remove or edit their data. Sure the Privacy Assurance company can defend you from My Company. No problem. But beyond that it is powerless. Remember that whatever my “Privacy Assurance” company says they can do, is probably not true since these source database companies make money from lots of folks like Banks, Credit Agencies, Private Detectives and Skip Tracers to have the data that they have. So my new Privacy Assurance company will not be able to edit their data. That sounds like a lot of nonsense if that’s what they are claiming.

Does this sound like a business plan that I could sell to a venture capitalist? Maybe not, but it only takes a few thousand dollars to start such a business, especially if I get the programming done offshore, so I don’t really need a lot of funding to get started.

So, it appears to me that these folks are only one notch up the scale from the company that Claims your computer has a virus, then when you ask for more information and a scan, downloads a program to encrypt your hard drive and then charges you to get your data back. These folks are extortionists. What is Spokeo?

Am I wrong?

- windy

PhotoResizerQt

SiteProbeQt

These folks actually did a simple video tutorial showing the installation and use, although they didn’t do a view of the log file.

We’ll see if there is much confusion because they don’t point folks to SourceForge to get updates. I have tried to remember to update the About boxes with the URLs on SourceForge so folks can check for updates.

- windy

Character Selection Page

Iris is an anime styled game with beautiful graphics and apparently a detailed storyline. But the game has problems that make it tedious to play.

Font Sizes

The font sizes are too small. The windows are apparently designed to play on small screens rather than modern screens that are 1600×900 or 1920×1200. Especially on a laptop screen with 1920×1200 resolution, the fonts are too small to see. The system magnifier does not work on Vista, but it does work on Windows 7. So on Windows 7 one could play the game using the magnifier on a large screen. Of course you could always play your game in Full Screen at reduced resolution like 1280×780.

Navigation

Quest Log

In other MMOs, once sees Auto Route or another way to navigate to an NPC or to Monsters or other items to satisfy a quest. Usually you can click on items in the quest log directly to go to a destination related to the quest. But not in Iris. In Iris you need to click on the map only. Not the mini-map, but the larger map only. This means that you need to open and close the main map too frequently.

Mini-Map

Mini-Map

The Mini-map, like the rest of the user interface, is very small and not clickable to navigate. But at least there is a mini-map, unlike Allods which only has a compass.

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The Inventory is Very Small

Inventory

There are very few slots in the inventory.

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Interesting Things Are Very Dear

Your first mount to purchase will cost you 1,200,000G. That’s right, 1.2M Gold. That gives you some idea about how much gold you are going to be collecting to accomplish anything worthwhile. You will need to be level 30 to purchase that mount.

Bottom Line

Iris seems like a lot of work to play. I’m not sure if it’s the developers that gPotato chooses or the game philosophy of gPotato that causes both of these games to be a chore to play. I think I’ll go back to my Perfect World games like Ether Saga or Jade Dynasty. These never feel like a chore to play.

- Windy

Character Creation Screen

Creating a Character

The Character Creation page has a lot of options to create your character from any of the many races of both League or Imperial forces. The first screen has you clicking on the artwork, which is actually a menu to allow you to choose your “Faction”.

There seem to be a lot of choices in faces and hair color and styles, but most of the choices show little imagination. I created a Warden because I wanted a pet. The choices for her face were uninspired and lacked any real emotion. Jade Dynasty faces are fewer, but show a real difference in their styles.

Names Are Impossible to Pronounce

Allods was written by a Russian team, so I’m sure the names make perfect sense to them. But for we English speakers, the names of the factions and races and other items in the game are confusing and impossible to pronounce.
Getting Started

System Menu

As you start out the world begins to crumble around you and you do a few quests before getting to the town where things calm down. Part way though this series, there is a quest that has you finding the “elixer if immortality”. The Elixer is in a chest, but unless you know that you are searching all over the room. That’s ok, but if at this time, you need to do something else and decide to Exit the program, you lose all of your accumulated experience and start again from the beginning. That’s fairly annoying and I’ve never had that happen with an MMO before.

First Impressions

There are a number of issues that I tripped across right away that I found confusing or annoying.

• There is no way to orbit the camera around your character to see your own face. All the MMOs that I’ve seen before have some way to orbit the camera to see your own character from all sides. The most common way to do this is to use R-Mouse-Hold and move the mouse to orbit the camera. Allods orbits the camera with R-Mouse-Hold, but the character is not static while you do this. The character moves around to face in the direction of the camera, so you can never see your own face. Very annoying. How are you going to get screen shots – which I do all the time in games – with the characters face, and new weapons and armor when you cannot orbit the character. The only way to take such a photo is to go back to the log-in screen, where oddly enough, the mouse works correctly to allow you to orbit the character.
• There is no Auto-Attack. Almost all the MMOs that I’ve played have auto-target [usually tab] and attack [sometimes space or click] and the character continues to attack once the target is selected. Guild Wars does not have auto attack since all attacks are skills. Allods skills have long cool-down times so it becomes very tedious to select and attack items.
• Also this lack of auto-attack is the old-school since many new MMOs actually perform auto grinding. Ether Saga has an object that is a Bot that drives the character. This bot must be purchased, or obtained with a quest since it “wears out” after a time of use, usually 1, or 7 days. Jade Dynasty has an Esper device which is sort of a pet that never wears out although it requires energy crystals, which are obtained from an NPC when they wear out. The Esper drives your skills, heals you, recovers you mana, all from pots that you obtain from quests, collect as loot or purchase from NPCs.
• The quest text is horrendously long. Getting each quest is like reading a five page tome. MMOs are supposed to be about action and motion and interaction with an environment. Don’t make me read a long confusing page of text before I can get on with my life. Boooooorrrrrrrrrrinnnnnnggggggg…

My first impression is that the Russians didn’t play very many games before they wrote one. So far I don’t see new ideas here and the tried and true design elements that make a game engaging and draw you in are not followed.
Skills, Talents and Stats

Stats

The skills are called Talents, for no good reason. We all know about skills and calling them talents adds nothing but confusion.

There are way too many “stats”, which are called stats at least and not something else.

Some games make it a chore to update your stats, and some games just make you assign your skill points. Here you apparently have to do both and there is a too-long list of stats to worry about. It seems that they didn’t really have a good design when the stats points start out at 22 or higher in the game when you start out. With only one stat point per level, it’s going to take a long time to make any substantive changes and of course they take the path of only allowing you to increase your stats points. Guild Wars is unique in allowing you to adjust your stat points up and down to hone your build to the mission and skills that you want to use in the upcoming quest.

Pets are a Little Strange

Pets

Pets are a little strange, at least at first glance. The pets help fight, but to restore their energy, they are sent into the astral plane by using a Dismiss command. It’s not clear at first that to get the pet back, you just use a pet attack skill. Odd. that’s about all I know about pets at this point in my career.

No Mini-Map to Find Your Way

Map Compass

All the MMOs that I’ve used had a Mini-map in the upper right corner. This map is essential to finding your way to the next quest or NPC. But Allods has no mini-map, only a compass, so if you don’t know which way to your destination, then you need to open the full map and remember a direction. How lame is that?

Picking up Loot is a Chore

Just the act of picking up loot is a chore in Allods. It’s a two step process.

1. After killing the monster a loot icon appears on the ground, then you click on the loot icon.
2. Then you click on the menu that appears to pick up the loot that you found in the list. There might be more than one item. Or you click on a button to pick up all the loot items.

What a pain!!

Picking up Loot

All other MMOs that I’ve played have a one step process. Hit Space, or another key, or click on the item with the mouse and it goes in your bag. End of story. If there is more then one item dropped, then there is more then one item laying on the ground. Click on each one. Each one shows what it is, so if you don’t want it, then don’t click on it.

Esper in Jade Dynasty, and the Processor in Ether Saga have settings to collect items based on their name or type as they automatically run. If you have a game that requires grinding, then an auto-grinder sure is nice.

Bottom Line

Allods looks nice and combining SciFi and Medieval concepts is an exciting possiblity, but this game is too much like a chore rather than fun.

- windy

The Website Building Problem

As a consultant, I am continually looking for modern tools to help my clients build websites. Recently several web site builders have appeared that combine Hosting and Website construction in a single place and for a single small fee.

In the past few years I have come across more and more clients who have been held hostage to the old way of doing websites. The old way uses off-line tools like FrontPage, DreamWeaver or other tools that run on a desktop computer and then upload the website pages to the hosting service. Clients run into several problems when these tools are used.

• These off-line site building tools are expensive [ several hundred dollars], require special training and must be upgraded over time.
• Often the clients can’t find the person who built their site, or it costs too much or that person has lost vita information about the site because it has been months or years since they made any changes.
• The hosting service may be going out of business or changing it’s terms and so the site expert needs to be contacted to move the site to a new hosting service. The client may not have the credentials or expertise to sign into the site to back it up to migrate to another hosting service.

Modern sites utilize a CMS or Content Management System. There are many out there, but only in the past couple of years have they started to appear that work for the novice user. A CMS separates the “content” of the site from its “Look”. The text and pictures are stored separately from the “Theme” which directs how the page is laid out on the browser page. Also sites using CMS’s are not built on your local computer and then uploaded. Rather they are built on the site itself, using the browser and software running on the site. So there are no expensive and separate tools to buy or learn to use.
The first CMS’s to appear were Forums like phpBB and SMF, and Blogging software like TypePad, and WordPress. These platforms provide simple interfaces to make entry of new content as easy as writing an email. But they are highly structured, fora and blogs in different ways, and so a small business site may not fit their defined structure.

There are more complicated CMS’s available like Joomla, Drupal and phpNuke which have a very flexible structure which would allow them to support a large business or a large community portal site. But these are truly daunting for a novice to administer. If a client requires a very flexible layout with many features and have more than a half dozen contributors to the site then one of these might make sense. They allow log-in and sign-up of members and allow multiple roles to be assigned to members to allow them to only read, or comment, or contribute whole articles and otherwise manage the site.

In the past I have built sites for clients using a free blogging platform called WordPress. While WordPress is a blogging platform, it can easily be adapted to provide a simple website for a small company.

WordPress

My goal for my clients has been to build a site and then leave it in their hands to make changes. WordPress does allow a client to make changes almost as easily as editing an email message. Additional complexity arises when dealing with:

1. Understanding the different types of content: Pages vs Posts.
2. Embedding images, videos, or music samples.
3. Advanced formatting such as multiple columns or tables of any kind.
4. Adding forms to collect information.
5. Doing any kind of e-commerce to sell items.
6. Updating the WordPress software, which is a frequent requirement to plug the all too frequent security issues that are found.

WordPress requires constant management to upgrade it and upgrade the several plugins that you will need to manage your site. Any site requires a few plugins since OOTB [out of the box] WordPress doesn’t do some of the things required to have a site. At a minimum about five or six plugins are required and they go through constant updates.

Future Site Building Requirements

While I still use WordPress for my own site. I will no longer be recommending it for clients. I want to find a single solution with the following qualities:

• Hosting and website building combined in one site.
• A simple robust and full featured browser interface to create all content and to change the theme of the site.
• Customizable themes to allow sites to be “Branded” by my clients for their businesses.
• Automatic updates and backups. This means that the client will never need to back up the site or perform updates to fix problems.
• Some knowledge of SEO [search engine options] to allow the clients to set up tags etc for the search engines. [ I use Google Site maps plugin for WordPress.]
• WYSIWYG editing of the content preferably with styles.

All the features to build a simple business site. These include:

• Individual pages like the home page, about, contacts etc.
• Knowledge of map pages and other such special pages is nice too.
• Blog management.
• Photo galleries, or the ability to make them. With pictures and text and the ability to adjust the layout.
• Forums for some of the clients, but not most of the clients.
• Integration with e-commerce so that clients can sell items from the site.
• Forms to take contact information and ask questions via email.

Some advanced features include:

• Import pages or information from other sites. SquareSpace can import some blogs for example. So far I have not seen a site builder that will import a normal website.
• Export pages to allow the content to be moved to another site. It would be good to not be trapped on a site builder with no easy way to take the site elsewhere should the company go out of business or their terms become unreasonable for a client.
• The ability to embed other more complex services in the site such as databases.

There is a list of many of the website hosting / building companies on this page. It looks like this fellow used Yola to build his site.

SquareSpace

I’ve heard much about SquareSpace and I took a look at it. But while they say that you can have a site for $12/mo, such a site only has 10 pages, which is too small for any of my clients. To have a reasonable site with Squarespace requires $20 / mo. This is pretty steep for many clients. As a comparison, the cost for a hosting site from many of the hosting suppliers is about $5 / mo and any of the various CMSs such as WordPress, Coppermine [photo gallery] and SMF [forum] are all free.

But SquareSpace has the right idea. The site is backed up, and updated automatically and they have all the features above. For clients that are not scared off by the $20/mo price, it looks like it will work for them. But their free trial is limited so it is harder to evaluate it in depth.

LunarPages Quicksite

LunarPages hosting, which I recommend as an excellent, high performance and affordable hosting service, has a service called QuickSite. At $12.95 / mo it is reasonable. There is a demo, but without a full trial time I was not really able to evaluate the service.

Using the demo I was able to see that the page builder is not fully WYSIWYG. Also Quicksite does not appear to have templates for blogs and photo-galleries, so all the pages will have to be built manually.

Virb
I’ll be taking a look at Virb too. They seem like they have the right idea, but they don’t make it that easy to get going because their free trial has a time limit.

Yola
Now I’m looking at Yola and it appears to have all the features above as well with only a few little glitches so far. I’ll post my detailed thoughts about Yola in another post. This unlimited trial site is just what I need to make sure that it will work for my clients. You can find my test site at Yola here.

After an afternoon building a site, Yola to be a robust and functional service. At $49.95 / year it is very affordable.

The Yola builder is almost completely WYSIWYG, so building pages is much more intuitive. There is a blog template which makes it easy to have a blog on the site along with the other pages. Since the Publish function is controlled by the user, a number of pages can be changed before any of them are published. When linking to pages in the site, you select the pages by page name rather than using http style addresses. I’ll do a more in depth report of Yola in a separate post.

I will be studying how to build themes for Yola to customize sites for my clients.

Other Types of Sites

There are two other types of site organizations that we have not discussed. These site formats are not suitable for a general small business site, but they may have their uses for some clients.

Forum

A forum is a discussion site which work well for discussions where an archive of previous discussions and organization. There are several different sites out there that allow you to build fora. One that I have looked at is Lefora.

Wikis

A wiki is a community site similar to a forum, but rather than discussions, a wiki is designed to capture information created by a community of users. The best example of a wiki is the wikipedia that we all use almost every day.

Wikis are easy to manage, but their community contributor nature makes them unsuitable for a personal or business website, unless you want everyone who stops by to potentially make changes to your site.

Recently I built a simple wiki here to understand how wikis operate and the content creation process to build and maintain a wiki.

Summary

There are a few new companies that are combining website building and hosting into a single service. These services are not yet mature, but a few of them are useful enough to work for some clients. I will continue to evaluate new sites to suggest to my clients.

- windy

I recently wrote a program to test my new computer. I wanted to test the wattage range and cooling of the new processor so needed a program that would keep all the cores of the processor busy. The Core i7-950 is a 4 core processor with Hyper-Threading which means that there are a max of 8 threads. Since AMD provides server processors with up to 12 threads so the program has a maximum number threads of 32. I use the HWMonitor program to monitor temperatures and wattage if your processor supports it.

The program is written using the Qt toolkit, which allows it to be easily ported to Windows and Linux.

Program Dialog

To use the program:

• Select the computation type: Integer, Real, Both.
• Select the number of threads.
• Select the array size. The arrays will be this size x 1024 x 1024.
• Use Start to start the threads.
• Use Stop to stop the threads.
• Use Task Manager to see the size of the process grow when the threads are started.
• Use Task Manager to see how many cores / threads are busy on your processor when the program is running.
• Use the HWMonitor program to check the case, processor temperatures and wattages [if supported] as the program runs.

The program is licensed under GPL 3.

Downloads are on Source Forge.

We can discuss any issues you have with the program in the Source Forge Project Forums.

The link might change. If that does not work, try this: CoreHeaterQt project

MFC Version

An MFC version, with sources, also available under GPL 3 is here:

CoreHeater_MFC_V1

CoreHeater_MFC_V1_Src

- Windy

I’ve been looking for a source control solution for some time. I used to use QVCS, but it costs money and you have to get the Enterprise version to get client/ server. At this point I have three, or four, development systems and they include both Windows and Linux.

I considered Bazaar, but after a couple of days I came up with more questions than I had answers. My reasons for not using Bazaar are here.

While there were a few glitches I was able to get going with Surround SCM in a single day. Surround SCM is easy to use, and supports client / server across Windows, Mac and Linux.

Surround SCM provides support for all the common systems.

• Server packages for Windows x86 and 64bit as well as Mac and Linux.
• Clients for Windows, Mac, and some Linux distros.

Here is the time-line for my testing over the course of a single day.

• Installed the Win x64 Server on a Windows 7 system.
• Configured the license manager with a single user license, but there is a known problem and after a helpful and short support call I was able to get going with an eval license until the maintenance release comes out to allow my single user license to work correctly. Of course a License Manager would not be present in an Open Source system, but Surround SCM license manager is clearly laid out and easy to use.
• Installed the Win client without the JRE, since there is a JRE on the system that comes with Open Office. That worked just fine.
• There was some initial confusion about users. It turns out that you need to create users, or import them from the license manager, before you can log in. It was not initially clear that the License manager users are administrators and not coders, although they can be both. The administrator logs into the GUI client to create users with access to the code repositories.
• A Win client installed on another system could not connect to the server. This was tracked down to a Windows Firewall configuration problem on the server system. After the installation the local client worked fine, but remote clients could not connect. There were incorrect entries in the server Windows firewall. The ports were wrong. Adding the SCM server as a permitted application allowed the system to work correctly.
• The client is easy to understand and use. I have used GUI interfaces for Source Control since 1994 including PVCS, Source Safe, QVCS and others. The overall presentation and GUI model of Surround SCM is familiar after having used these other tools. Finding the answers to all my requirements were easy to find in the interface with no reference to the documentation. But if I come up with problems, there is a 200+ user manual to refer to as well as an installation guide and other documentation.
• I have been able to use Surround SCM to check in both a Visual Studio C++ project as well as a Open Office calc script project. As I originally developed that project I did not have an SCM solution and so needed to name the files with incrementing file names.
• I was able to check in text files and JPG images. Viewing a JPG image showed the file in a viewer.
• Surround SCM holds its repositories in a database, by default Postgres, but other systems are supported including Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle. This should allow me to control web projects such as WordPress or Joomla themes as well as code projects. In the past I have done theme projects and had no SCM solution for these projects.
• One problem that I have yet to work out is the problem of backing up the Surround SCM database. I will be investigating that in the next few days. I use Carbonite as a backup solution so if I can cause Surround to emit a backup data file – possibly in SQL – then I can have carbonite save those backups.

Here are some screen shots from my short work with Surround SCM.

Main Window

Client Window with modified files

The main window is familiar and easy to use.

Revision Differences

Difference between revisions

There is a nice java based difference program. You can launch this from the main window or from the history window.

Graphical Revision Map

Graphical Revision Tree

There is a graphical revision tree. This will be very useful when there are many branches and many revisions.

Get a Previous Revision

Get a Previous Version

I will need to test removing a file in a revision, leaving it out of a revision and then get it back in a future revision.

Mainline Branches

There is a choice to be made about how many Mainline Branches to create. At first I thought perhaps I should make a Mainline Branch for all the programs that I want to control, but that didn’t seem right, because it is after all a Branch. I decided that each program should be a separate branch, except for programs which share common code. For example, most of my OpenGL programs share a common class to construct the OpenGL window. It seems best to have all the OpenGL programs share a Mainline Branch so that they can have the OpenGL shared class in the same Mainline Branch.

Select a MainBranch Repository

Conclusions

My experience so far with Surround SCM has been very positive. Not only does the software work well, and is easy to understand, but the sales and support staff are very helpful. While I will be using their free single user license, I’ll be encouraging my clients who need source control to consider Seapine’s fine product.

- Windy

I need a personal source control system for my development.

As a big believer in Open Source solutions I took a careful look at Bazaar. But alas, I could not get started with Bazaar.

My requirements are:

1. Client / Server with both Windows and Linux clients.
2. A GUI interface. I’m not interested in dealing with a command line interface. I want to look at a window and instantly know which files have been changed and need to be checked in.
3. Avoid IDE integration because I’ll be using several different IDEs.
4. Simple to add new projects. I don’t want to spend a lot of time dealing with Source Control.
5. Low – read zero – cost.
6. Open Source would be nice, but not required.

After looking around and doing a lot googling I found Bazaar.

Bazaar is an Open Source solution brought to us by the folks that built Ubuntu.

There is some documentation, but the walk-though to get started doesn’t really go far enough to get going.

I posted a couple of questions to the Launchpad forum.

• One on a creation bug that is known.
• One on questions for how to get going to just use Bazaar.

I still don’t know how to use Bazaar. Here are the issues that I have.

• While client/ server obviously works since lots of folks out there use it. It is complicated to set up a server. You apparently need a web server, and python and then you can install Bazaar.
• The GUI client is confusing to use. Even if you Collocate your repository, which is OK for a single system development, the GUI layout does not look like you might expect, so you have to figure out a new paradigm for using it. Instead of being designed based on the often used model of showing a tree of the checked in files, the dialogs waste a lot of space with lists that don’t help you get the job done.
• The GUI client apparently does not support all the functions that you need. If, for example, you want to get a file from a previous revision, the function is not easily found where you might expect. Perhaps the function is available, but it’s not easy to find.
• Bazaar looks as if the GUI is an after thought and the primary usage model is a command line interface.

If you can’t get going in a few hours, then, in my view, Bazaar fails as a viable SCM solution.

- windy

One of the Many Starbucks Memes

Meme metal allows the phone to take on shapes and behaviors based on the application that is currently running. In addition, the phone continues in any of its base capabilities – Phone, Music, Video, Credit and Game.Working with our clients and sponsors has allowed us to adapt the phone to your locality and intentions. So as you enter Starbucks, the phone senses your approach to the order desk and, if you don’t have a container, the phone becomes the container for your beverage as you order it.

A Popular Dutch Brothers Meme

Of course your phone continues to deliver active phone, inet or video experience through your audio and video implants as it pays for your beverage and is queued to be filled by the auto-barista. Since all disposable containers were banned five years ago to minimize landfill use, this phone avoids any embarrassments when you arrive at your destination without a container.

Bike Phone Meme

When you are ready to travel to your next destination, the phone can act as navigator to lead you to the next public transport, drive your bike or interface with your auto-drive of your car to get you there quickly and safely. There’s an app for that. Turn-by-turn is a thing of the past since the entire trip is managed by OpenStreetMap.org servers in a tight feedback loop with your phone.

GP 30 is available from VerSprint and AT&G with their normal plans providing 1Gbps rates and 1Petabyte per month without additional charges. Of course with the new meme features you are unlikely to be happy with only one phone. While the GP can provide many functions at the same time, if you need two memes at the same time you will want to be carrying two phones. Any of the VerSprint or AT&G plans allow the simultaneous use of up to five phones.

Recently there are unconfirmed reports of these phones crashing. We are sure that this video taken from another phone is faked, but we are looking into these reports.

Waterproof HD Camera

Hurray!!

Now I can take a camera on a hike to the beach and not get sand in it. Now I can take a camcorder out in the storm and take pictures without ruining it in the rain.

Details

This is going to be a great break through! And it’s affordable at $200. You need to purchase a 32GB or other SD card for it. These are available for $50 – $80 depending on the brand you buy.

The video is 720p, not 1080p. But who cares based on the fact that I can take it out without risking it.

It has a 30x zoom, so you can get the surfer from the beach or the shorebird up close.

Controls

Both photos, or series of photos, as well as videos. Photos up to 1600 x 1200 and videos at 720p. Video format is MP4, so it’s compatible with most places you want to send them.

Colors

Fashion statement. You can choose your color.

Another Model

VPC-CA102YL Waterproof Full HD

There is another model. This model has been out for a while and is Waterproof, and Full HD. But it has a strange zoom lens and doesn’t provide a 30x zoom. The zoom is only 12x. Also this model is more expensive at about $350.

- Windy

All pictures are copyright Sanyo.

Meetup is an interesting idea. It’s a social site based around groups of folks with common interests that want to schedule meetings. Of course the meetings could be face2face or online.

Example Meetup Group

Click for full size.

Pros:

Site has all the features that you want, probably.

It looks like facebook in a lot of ways, except that there are no advertisers, and no games to waste your time. The template is customizable to some extent with many styles to choose from and some customization beyond that.

Cons:

Way too expensive. 3 months for $45 or 6 months for $60. I pay $70/year for my unlimited/unlimited hosting service.

Competition:

Ning is as little as $2.95 a month / $20/year for essentially the same service.

These sites are different from blogs and facebook since they allow members to self-sign up, and then contribute to the group discussion. Facebook is more about shared individual discussions. Facebook is apparently doing something they call groups, but it’s not clear that they segregate group content. Ning and Meetup segregate content based on your interest in a particular topic.

Just my opinion,

ww