Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2

Not that much different from the original CoD:MW. The graphics are about the same, multi player's about the same - the major difference was obviously the single player gameplay. Single player's easily clocked in a matter of few hours, cinematics and variety of environments have been somewhat increased. I wonder what the inevitable sequel's going to be like, given we've seen a divergence outside of the CoD series with MW2 (eg. CoD branding being completely dropped at one point in time). So far I'm loving the Stinger lock-in for bringing down anything that flies within multiplayer... All in all a game worth the wait.

Nature adapting to technology

All must answer to the Inquisitor!

The future is here

Who needs to wait for standards to be defined, when the products already on sale...?

Max Payne 3

Max is now bald, has a beard and has moved to sunny Brazil. He's also ditched his outfit for a more temperature tolerant white shirt. No wonder, since the original Finnish team's sold off the game series brand to RockStar, in a venture to make Alan Wake. Also the Max Payne movie wasn't that great either.

Conclusion: Not looking good. This is not the original Max Payne the character, rather it is Max Payne the trade mark

Let's hope Alan Wake's drifting in the right direction... Not many games to look forward to except CoD:MW2 & Mafia 2.

Windows 7...

...it's not that different from Vista internally, but it does indeed run loads better on every PC I've installed the RC on. Its 'backward driver compatibility with Vista' further states how similar the core OS components really are, doubt there was any more than a marketing reason for upping the kernel version all the way to 7...

I'd classify Vista being notorious in the similar fashion Windows Millennium was back in its time. I've personalty dodged Vista any way I could ever since the Beta came out, no wonder the "downgrades" to XP were so popular in the community. 

On the other hand Windows 7 RC's so far behaved like Vista was meant to be initially. There's no constant sluggishness about it and constant HDD I/O. I'd classify Windows 7 as being "the new XP". The new taskbar comes in very handy (seems as if they've pretty much copied the years old dock from MacOS X, same deal with wallpapers changing). 

• Changing resolution's much easier to access compared to Vista
• Resource Monitor's long time coming
• File copy/paste dialogs and functionality are still pathetic (lucky there's Total Commander to fill in the gap)
• System tray's been cleaned up in a workable fashion
• Automatic driver updates are more useful than ever
• ReadyBoots seems to actually work properly this time with an SD card
• Indexing seems not to bring the entire HDD down to it's knees, even with Vista's long overdue HDD I/O priorisation
• No telnet client by default just like in Vista, it's not the telnet client which is unsecure but the server. Telnet's extremely useful for troubleshooting network comms!
• Maximum Performance power setting has somehow got WiFi power savings enabled by default, instead of WiFi maximum performance
• Virtual Hard Disks is a plus which I've only read about so far
• Windows manager mouse gestures are handy, however primitive compared to Linux windows managers which are far more intelligent and functional (eg. proper auto-placement of new windows and ALT+mouse resizing, moving...)

Apple summed it all up quite concisely.

Solaris - Tales from the past

$ uname -s
SunOS
$ grep Copyright `which clear`
#       Copyright (c) 1984, 1986, 1987, 1988, 1989 AT&T
#       Copyright (c) 1987, 1988 Microsoft Corporation

via blubrick

Global Financial Crisis

All I can say, leverage off it!

Gran Torino

"Get off my lawn!!"

Great move, Clint's kept both his directing and acting tempos at his fine levels.