Duke Nukem 3D to be released in late 2008

It’s hip to remake old games, and Garland-based video game developer, 3D Realms, knows it — as it’s announced that it will be releasing Duke Nukem Forever, in late 2008.

Duke Nukem, the romantic story of a man who just wanted to blow things up, was revolutionary as a 1996 PC game called Duke Nukem 3D. The new game should be available for the Xbox 360, the PS3 and PCs.

Bittorrent Entertainment Network Announced

Much to everyone’s surprise, Bram Cohen (not related to Sasha Cohen of Borat Fame) has accepted restrictions placed by the studios, to move ahead with the bigger deal — the BitTorrent Entertainment Network.

According the New York Times, Hollywood studios like Fox, Paramount, Warner and MGM have signed up with the Bittorrent Entertainment Network (BEN) to distribute over 3000 new and old movies.

Uninstall Flash in IE7 and Reinstall - Fixes Crash Issues

Following up on several complaints from users on GeoExpat.Com and other sites that we run, we followed up with Adobe Support to take a look at what could be causing the problems.

While Adobe remains fairly non-committal about the existence of this problem, we have been able to isolate this issue down a couple of areas, so some of the items posted here are pure speculation, despite the fact that the end result is that the crashes have been reduced.

Keep in mind that this is not the official solution — neither Microsoft or Adobe acknowledge that IE7 crashes under several situations when it comes across a site that uses Flash — like MySpace, YouTube or well, even GeoExpat which has a number of Flash banners.

Flash9 and IE7 - Crash Fest

Looks like Adobe and Microsoft have a potentially huge problem in the making. Turns out, if you have Internet Explorer 7 and or MSN Live Messenger, which was installed in the last few weeks — some how an update from either of those two packages results in Flash 9 being installed on your system.

Microsoft calls this an “essential upgrade” with MSN Live Messenger, if you have animated backgrounds or use some of the smileys or winks that are prepackaged with it.

Windows Vienna Tentatively Slated for 2009

Without giving us any time to continue our mocking of Vista, Microsoft’s corporate vice president for Windows development, Ben Fathi, revealed that Windows Vienna — the successor to Vista — will be launching in 2009. Oh, Vista, we hardly even knew you! If all goes as planned, Vienna will not only fix the problems that still haven’t been fixed by Vista, it’ll also create at least seventeen hundred more of them for your general perusal and frustration. We know, we can’t wait either.

Windows Vista anti-virus programs fail critical tests

Lets face it, Microsoft has been counting on its newly released Vista to shed its image as being the company that is responsible for billions of dollars worth of losses in productivity for both home and corporate users. Windows Vista sheds a fair bit of the legacy code (not all by the way) which allowed virus authors and spyware companies to infect computers with ease.

Sounds good huh? Too good? Perhaps, considering that Microsoft’s own Live OneCare suite has failed the critical VB100 certification tests.

Boosting web server performance

Last year (2006) we figured we had a unique idea — lets podcast the Superbowl Commercials for the expats who live in Hong Kong and other places that we cover through our main site GeoExpat.Com. We had no clue about what would happen next — 40 thousand+ visitors showed up on DevLib.Org and downloaded over 2TB worth of videos in a week. Well, that brought our server down to its knees and along with the hassles of making sure that the videos got uploaded, handling a database crash and dealing with the excess bandwidth, we were not sure if this should be repeated again — specially since the folks over at YouTube had become the destination of choice since last year.

But, common sense did not prevail and we said “what the heck, lets do it again and lets do it with some better technology”.

In this post, we list some of the technologies used and how we optimized our server to handle over 80K visitors and 4TB of downloads in two days.

XGate Security to Protect Children Online

Pedophiles and children beware — there’s a new gadget in town, and it’s meant to restrict both of your freedoms. That’s right, a British company called Global Security One (GSEC1 — something that may appear on the red armband of our future robotic oppressors) has released a security device called the XGate that will allow parents full viewing and control over their child’s internet activities. It also comes with a cage and a water bowl — just in case the child throws a tantrum.

Microsoft Vista Released, Problems Arise

It’s been two days since Windows Vista has hit the market, and in those two days, the OS has managed to live up to everyone’s expectation — a beautifully flawed operating system that, while impressive, fails to fix some of the main problems previous versions have had and even manages to create some of its own — as per usual. And, while we generally don’t mind these faults because it gives us something to write about, we do, as PC users, wish that Microsoft would release at least one product that works as predicted. Still, the question remains, is it worthy of your purchase?

Microsoft Vista Complete, Viruses and Adware Rejoice

Microsoft Corp. has announced that it has finally completed work on its new operating system, Windows Vista, and plans to release it to consumers on January 30th — if it doesn’t crash before then and force another two years of re-programming. The OS is set to begin manufacturing copies early on Wednesday to prepare for not only the consumer release but the November 30th release to big business clients and hackers.

Next Page »