Windows codename “Longhorn” has now officially been officially christened “Windows Vista” by Microsoft. Microsoft has set up a small site for the new project stating that the new operating system will be sold to end users in 2006. Beta 1 will be released to developers and IT professionals on August 3rd but we, the end-users will have to wait till sometime mid-2006 or something. Beta 2 is supposed to have all the “GUI improvements” Microsoft has been promising with this new OS, we’ll see. I bet it’s still not going to be anywhere close to Mac OS X which was first released in 2001. They have a lot of catching up to do with Mac OS X GUI, that’s for sure.
Archive for July, 2005Page 2 of 6
That title sure doesn’t sound too optimistic, I know, but this is my personal opinion on how World War 3 will be brought about. Unfortunately, it seems that a major world war will break out sooner than later and I’ll most probably be quite alive when it happens. I’ve decided to write an essay on what problems we are having nowadays that could bring about a world war and how unless we fix those problems really soon, we might be living in very bad conditions in the near future.
I finished the book. And I must say, it is one of the best books I have ever read. I have no idea how J.K. Rowling ever thought up of such a story. Some interesting things in this book, to me at least, was how there was a lot more romance in the book. A lot of the middle and end of the book deals with the dating relationships of various students. I won’t say who, read the book, but Harry likes someone that I never expected him to like, there that’s all I’ll say as to not spoil the whole story. (That was a very confusing sentence, I know.) If you want it spoiled you can just go on over to Wikipedia and read it, but, trust me, it’d be much better for you to buy the book and read it, now that it costs very little.
I received the book on Monday evening, and I finished it in the afternoon today (Sunday). I got the Bloomsbury edition (the British one), it had 607 pages and 30 chapters.
I would love to write a summary of the book and things I found interesting but I don’t want to spoil it for people who didn’t read it, and it is really hard to describe a Harry Potter book without spoiling a lot of the story, so instead, here are some facts about the book without spoils (from Wikipedia):
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is the sixth novel in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series. Set during Harry Potter’s sixth year at Hogwarts, it prepares the reader for his last battles with Lord Voldemort, whose past is examined in much more detail than previous books in the series, and deals with the dating relationships of various students. When it was released on July 16, 2005, it was the first book in the United Kingdom to have a simultaneous standard print, large print, and Braille edition release.
Within the first twenty-four hours, the book sold 6.9 million copies in the United States alone, roughly moving 250,000 an hour, making it the fastest selling book in history. It generated over $100 million in sales out of the gate, outpacing even the combined take of the top movies at the box office. Bookseller Barnes and Noble reported sales averaging 105 copies per second in the first hour of sales
Michael Heilemann of Binary Bonsai wrote up this article on his site. I read it and I found one part of it very interesting and it relates to me:
GTA: San Andreas, yes, it’s as close as anything has come in a very long while, and I have an immeasurable amount of respect for the game for just that reason. I never actually ‘played’ the game. That is, I never followed the storyline or anything. I simply mooched off of a save game to go driving around the state for no particular reason at all. I spent a handful of hours doing this.
So then I decided to comment with this:
Hey, I do exactly the same thing. I don’t have the game myself so whenever I go over to my friend’s house I also “play” GTA Vice City or San Andreas. The thing is I never actually follow the storyline, I just open up my friend’s end of the game saved game and get into a car and start driving around the city aimlessly. I don’t actually find the missions fun but I find driving around in a sim cool. This is better than Need for Speed and Gran Turismo because in those games you can’t go off road, or get out of your car, or mow down people on the streets (hehe), that’s what makes GTA games fun.
My gaming fantasy is that someone makes a game where you have the whole world in real time (yes, real time!) and you can drive around and walk around and stuff on your computer but without interrupting real life, just a VERY realistic simulator. Wouldn’t that be cool or what, or am I just very geeky? The closest thing to that right now (from what I know) is GTA, even though the actualy cities don’t exist and the game is not real-time or anything it’s still cool to drive around and well, just drive.
