Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune (PS3)
The Good: This game is simply amazing, both in the graphics and the gameplay. We’ll start with the graphics, the lighting, shadow effects, the rendering of the water, plants, badguys, good guys, anything and everything in this game is graphcially amazing in every detail. Now sure it may be nice that the game looks good BUT does it play well? YES! The story plot is quite interesting and the cut scenes are amazing. Along with that the game is filled with a series of new challenges that never leave you bored.
The Bad: The only thing the game was lacking was a true “boss” battle. This could have occured when the when the Golden Idol opened or even a tougher battle at the end. It just seemed like a mini boss battle at the end. However to its credit it did finish off the story nicely.
Rating: 4.5/5
Final Thoughts: I would definetly recommend this to anyone with a PS3. It offers continued playability through all difficulty levels and has long list of rewards to unlock.
Google Summer of Code
Robinton
If you’re not already following Google’s Summer of Code program(SoC), you really should be, and I hope to present you why I love it so much, and reasons to follow it even if you’re not a programmer.
First of all. what is it?
Summer of Code is a Google-sponsored event that allows anyone in college or post-graduate education to submit a proposal to any of the participating open source projects, and if selected, get paid to implement your project over the summer.
Why this is awesome:
Check out the project list at http://code.google.com/soc/2008. Even if you aren’t a Linux user, you’ll still see names on the list you recognize: Firefox, and VLC are some of the bigger names on the Windows platform. If you have a Linux or similar type background, you’ll recognize many of the projects as the best projects of their kind, sometimes on any platform.
So in Summer of Code, these aren’t just tiny projects (which are represented as well) but many of the finest programs the open-source community has to offer.
This offers the student a fabulous opportunity:
You’ll get real-world experience coding on something that matters, and that if you succeed, will be used by a large number of people. You’ll also have a great portfolio piece to show anyone who asks for a sample of your code.
“But I’m not a programmer!”
Summer of Code is an incredible opportunity for the non-coder as well: Many hotly requested features simply don’t happen because of several reasons. not the least of which are little interest, and no bodies. Summer of Code (SoC) presents a solution to this problem: a project simply has to list some desired features as ideas, and chances are someone who is applying will also be a fan of the idea and submit an application. Then all you have to do is wait about ~3 months for the code to be finished (or, if you’re brave, you can always try out the unfinished code), and then once a new release is made, the feature will be ready and waiting for you.
I’m not a recruiter or a hiring manager, but Summer of Code is an awesome opportunity for you as well. The students who enter are a cut above many others, because they take programming more seriously than others; then only the best proposals get invited to participate, and this ensures the individual is capable of writing short proposals that sell themselves and their ideas to total strangers in many cases. The ones who finish the process have shown themselves to be dedicated, self-starters, who can work well without supervision, and can adapt to different coding styles as needed. Their code is also available for anyone to look at, and in nearly every case, the progression of the code from rough patch to polished feature can be seen- an invaluable look at how someone learns from their mistakes and from criticism by other more experienced developers.
Having said all of that, here’s some of my favorite proposals, and why they’re cream of the crop.
Plasma Widgets on the Screensaver
You don’t even need to be familar with KDE 4 or the vision depicted by Aaron Seigo to see just how awesome this concept is: foolproof party mixes, volume controls that can be used by others so that you aren’t stuck listening to their music because they left the room and forgot to turn it off, and a way for your friends to leave you notes while you’re not at the computer, without them having access to any of your stuff.
If you’re familiar with the KDE 4 vision, you’ll realize that this demonstrates the vision better than anything else.
A multi-user networked music sequencer
This is a proposal to have a collaborative music sequencer, so that several people people can work on a piece of music together, without needing to be present in the same room. From the proposal, it’s striving to present a new way of creating electronic music, which is mostly done solo now. Being a fan of electronic music, this looks to be an exciting development.
CSS Fixes and Enhancement for WebKit
With this proposal, Webkit (basis for Safari, and related to Konqueror’s KHTML), would be raising the bar for everyone by getting 100% in the CSS 1 and 2.1 tests. With browsers becoming more and more compliant, pages can use these and other standards, confident that they work in the most popular browsers.
Generic GPU-Accelerated Video Decoding
On Windows, both ATI and Nvidia have cards that are capable of doing hardware-assisted HD video decoding by utilizing the GPU. Under Linux, there is no such luck. So this project aims to let a wide variety of cards help decode video by programming the GPU. Using this approach, a far wider range of cards will be able to provide hardware decoding of video than on Windows, where only some of the newer cards can.
I’m not a Mac user, but I do have some friends that are, and they are extremely happy with VLC since it basically beats the crap out of Quicktime; unfortunately, with the new features added in Leopard, it fell behind Quicktime on support for the new features. This should get VLC back to being the #1 player on the platform.
Vista = dookie
Ambiguic Coherence
As I said to a friend yesterday, a sales person can suggest windows vista to me, but i’d argue them down to quitting their job. Vista is a piece of dookie. (Don’t get this confused with Green Day’s Dookie, because that was a killer album). Vista is dookie. It’s like a pile of dookie stuck in the seat of your pants where it’ll remain till you manage to waddle to a bathroom to scoop it out. Dookie, like dookie dripping down your leg. Uncomfortable? You should be. Why would anyone want something like that.
Let’s all wait till the second half of 09 or even 2010 for windows 7. After all of our complaining, even if Microsoft scraps minwin again (like the crap they pulled with longhorn or vista when it was in alpha), it can’t turn out as bad as vista did. People at Microsoft who are on the front line (PR, or those a couple of steps removed from PR) won’t admit it, but those deeper within the organization have a little more freedom to admit that Vista is tainted much in the same way as Windows Me was tainted. Few people remember ME now-a-days – it came and then it disappeared through the cracks because people listened to the techies. After that learning experience, why wouldn’t they listen to the techies about vista – Shiny stuff. You put shiny stuff in front of today’s technologically aware population, and they think that it must be better some how. Little do they actually know that flashy images don’t overcome the crap code. Any such way, they’re going to spend money on it. Which is the main reason why rogue malware applications spread, and why the storm worm is so great. If it says FREE, promises anything that could be worth while, or gives you a sense of love or hope (like e-cards) you download it. I’m probably going to write something about XSS to follow up my rainbow tables explanation. So to everyone dumb, stop it, you’re dumb.
Are They Nuts?!
Ambiguic Coherence
I worked a long week. I have work to do tonight and tomorrow. None of that matters. The Vole is at it again. June 30th is now the cut off date for XP support. Who remembers the Vista Upgrade Advisor. It didn’t work for upgrades or fresh builds. Eliminate support by next April too. Crazy. That’s what it is. The transistion from 3.x to a start menu in 95 was one thing. It was an essential upgrade. No more boxes on our ‘workspace’. Besides security, usb 2.0, driver support, and fancy features, the progression through 98, 2000, (not ME, ever), and XP was seemless. I don’t want vista. I beta tested it. I don’t care for it. An OS does not need to be that resource intensive. I’m not doing 3D modeling while surfing the internet. I don’t need fancy menu bars to do simple tasks. When it was code named Longhorn, I was alright with it because it gave more organizable features for media and the like. Vista only offers us problems as power users. Security errors and broken updates. One thing was good. One thing – ALSR. I’ll give them that much. If April comes and 7.0 isn’t out, I’m returning to Linux. That’s it.
Pwn2Own – and the Macbook Air Falls
Ambiguic Coherence
I don’t know how many of you follow things like BlackHat, DefCon or even Hope. But besides conferences like those and ethical.hackers, there are things out there like the Thawte contests and the almighty 0Day Pwn2Own. $10,000 prize and the pirates’ booty of the conquered territory. This time around the zero day initiative made a tempting offer (that I truly wish my team was prepared for so I too could have participated) to take down 3 laptops – the Catch? A Macbook Air, A Linux Box, and A Vista Box. All three were up to date laptops.
Day 0, for some of you that’s Day 1, but for the point of it all, rockets launch at the end of the countdown, not on 1. 0Day exploits had to be used. Then the rules differed a bit. Day 1 (day 2), Charlie Miller of ISE (whom I should’ve applied to last summer) took down the macbook air in 2 minutes. Now, for all you mac enthusiasts out there, why the heck would you want one now? Go buy the x300 I was talking about before, it’s better anyway. Back to the current topic- Hacker Glory. Sure, if the week was longer, the linux and the vista laptops would have been exploited too, but that happens on a daily basis (and there probably was lack in preparation for those), hell, I would have just brought stuff to take out the air myself.
I give Charlie Miller props. But I give his coworkers props as well. ISE, the guys who found flaws in the electronic voting machines. I’ve got to hand it to them, though, America won this contest.
I’ll retire and hope that ISE is still around to hire me. – Maryland Represent.
Macs are Unhackable” – 2 minutes. Haha. Glory is the fall of a Mac.
