Interesting links of the day
March 10th, 2010I’ve been reading a lot of stuff lately but haven’t really had much of a discussion with anyone about it lately since they’re either uninterested or too busy to have a discussion… so I’ll post it here and let you guys ramble about it if you wish.
For those of you who didn’t know… Ubisoft’s new DRM for Assassin’s Creed II and Silent Hunter 5 sucks. You have to be constantly connected to the internet to play (ACII is single-player only, by the way) and if you get disconnected, or start losing packets for any strange reason (ISP, router, wireless signal dies, etc.) it will boot you out of the game without letting you save your position (More information at Tom’s Hardware). Well, some people didn’t like this very much and organized an attack on the authentication servers so that those who bought the game legally would be completely unable to play at all (First news, the update). Ubisoft finally got around to fixing the DDoS attack yesterday night, just in time for the official launch of ACII (Login servers were partially reestablished at 10pm CET and fully restored at 1am CET. The attack affected only those trying to login.).
For those interested in RTS or strategy games in general, R.U.S.E.’s open beta started yesterday and will last for roughly a month. (Steam store, Official site).
Windows 7 SP1 could be out as early as the end of this year (Q4 2010). It was originally planned to take around 22 months for SP1 to be finalized and released (TechArp).
“10 Years After: A Look Back at the Dotcom Boom and Bust.” An interesting look at the past 10 years and what’s been hot with the dotcom craze (Wired).
Cisco just announced a new router of theirs that will be on the market shortly, though I seriously doubt anyone would be able to afford it let alone operate it. It starts at $90,000USD and only gets more expensive as you put modules into it, like any piece of Cisco technology. But for that cool 90 grand, it will operate at a theoretical 322Tbit/s. No, that’s not a typo, three hundred and twenty two terabits per second. Cisco gives a good example for how fast that exactly is, “Using a CRS-3, every person in China, which has a population just over 1.3 billion, could participate in a video phone call at the same time. It could transmit the whole printed contents of the Library of Congress in one second and every movie ever made in four minutes.” (Computerworld).
Newegg finally admitted that those Core i7s that were shipped out last weekend were indeed fakes. It’s cut ties with the distributor that supplied them (IPEX for those who want to keep track), and are immediately sending out replacements to everyone who received one of the fakes (PCMag).


