Wired News: Game Year in Review: 2010

Hehe, bravo! The guys and girls at Wired.com wrote an excellent article on what gaming in the year 2010 could possibly be like. There are some really classic quotes in there… Click the link above to read it.

[ via joystiq.com ]

Wage Slaves – 1UP.com

“Sack” is the only name I’m given for the person I’m supposed to contact. He lives in the Fujian province of China, but his place of business is online – he plays Lineage II. He’s paid about 56 cents an hour to work in a videogame “sweatshop.”

I knew that this kind of thing was happening, but this is quite shocking.
For two reasons. Firstly there are these people that exploit online MMO games to get in-game items and gold to sell…
Secondly, there are these people that actually buy the in-game items and gold, for real money.
*sigh* It should be allowed, but there’s not much that can be done about it. One game character drops an item, another one picks it up. The circumstances around this ‘transaction’ is completely immaterial to the actual game. Great way to make money though, if you have the time, and apparently, an aircraft hanger or two…

Tags: 1UP, sweatshop, MMO

It’s the holiday season, time to pick up gifts for family and friends. We bring you the best stuff year-round, but often quality is in short supply this time of year. For you last-minute shoppers, here’s my annual list of the ten worst products of the year—as scored and reviewed by PC Magazine Labs. These may all look shiny and sharp on the shelves, but each one is fundamentally flawed. You’ve been warned!

Column from PC Magazine: Ten to Avoid—the Worst Products of 2005

Fortunately, none of these products have seen the shelves here in South-Africa, not that I’ve seen anyway…

Stories related to the one above are What not to buy in 2005, and What you should buy in 2005.  Some good reads, even *if* they have “Madden NFL ’06” as “Best Console Game“.  Tsk-tsk.

technorati tags: gadgets, gift guide

Informit.com has a shortish article about AJAX (Asynchronous Javascript and XML), explaining what it is, how and when to use it. In short, using AJAX allows you to make calls to your webserver, sending and/or retrieving information (any file type will do, but XML is generally preferred as it’s structured and allows for good parsing on the client side) from the server, and update the browser page with having to actually reload the whole page.

Not having to reload the complete page makes for a nice seamless user experience, with the user not having to wait for too long. One very popular site that makes heavy use of AJAX is Google‘s Gmail. There are some downsides to using AJAX though. One being that the functionality of the browser’s back button becomes a bit redundant, and may in fact actually break the navigation of your site if the user had to use it…

Confused as to when it’s a good idea to use AJAX? Read the article at Informit, it should clear things up.

Tags: AJAX, Javascript, XML