Gaming 4 Linux

Online gaming has grown from 67 million, in December 2007 to 86 million in 2008. On top of the increase of number of people, the time spent gaming has increased by 42 percent. Does this have anything to do with the recession? I am a firm believer it does.

Lets talk about the cost of gaming compared to the cost of going out. If playing online games from places like http://zone.msn.com/en/root/default.htm, your cost is only the cost of internet, which you probably have already to keep in touch with family. The beauty about the ISP market, is its getting cheaper and faster as time goes on. For a DSL you are looking at starting at 19.99 per month up to 99.99 per month for other ISP services. So paying 19.99 a month for endless hours of entertainment, saves lots of money compared to going to the movies. Do not forget, there are game websites out there for kids that also utilizes learning tools. So spend some time the kids and enjoy your self too.

Now lets talk about other gaming avenues, that still save you LOTS of money compared to going out. One of the biggest online games is World of Warcraft. Right now you can pick up the latest version for $49.99, which includes a free month and then $14.99 each month after that. So if you factor in your ISP cost and the monthly fee you are looking at spending right around $40.00 a month. So if you play 10 hours a week, we all know the average player plays about 25 hours a week, you are paying roughly $1.00 an hour or less to have entertainment.

Lets say the avg couple goes out to a movie twice a month or rents a movie two times that month as well. They will spend $15.00 for movie tickets each time and probably about $12.00 getting popcorn. Renting movies are roughly $3.99 each. Total spent for the month would be $61.98 for roughly 6 hours of entertainment.

So while the recession deepens, keep in mind you can save money by gaming. If you are not gaming, you will probably be out spending much more money. While considering what to cut back, you may want to look else where as Gaming is rather inexpensive entertainment.

The Atom is being used in many low-cost Intel based products including Netbooks. If you are not familiar with what a netbook is, it is a low cost laptop that out performs P4 chips by 236%. Prices for netbooks range from $159 to $400. They are definitely fun to toy with. Once way they keep the cost down is with the Atom processor series CPU and Linux OS.

Intel have announced $234 million profit on sales of $8.2 billion. With a positive outlook on the economy Paul Otellini, President and CEO of Intel has been quoted as saying “The economy and the industry are in the process of re-setting to a new baseline from which to grow.”

I am not 100% sure if he is correct or if he would be for a better economy. Wouldn’t it be better for his low cost chips if people were cutting costs? I have an Intel ATOM sitting next to me. It was fun to use and very responsive. Right now I am trying to figure out how to utilize the DVI, to get rid of my DVD collection.

If anyone has any incite on this, do share. I need to get ready for the Nvidia Ion release.

It’s official. Call of Duty: World at War has sold 40 thousandd more units on the Xbox 360 than Gears of War 2. Keep in mind that GoW2 was released a week prior to COD: WaW.  The numbers were released on Xbox 360 numbers only.  As you all might know, COD is offered on more plateforms then Gears of War 2.  SO the overall sales have dwarved that of GoW 2.  Expect this gap to increase as COD: WaW has conistantly sold nearly 50,000 more copies then GOW2.

Platforms available for Call Of Duty: World at War:

• PC
• PS3
• WII
• Xbox360

Platforms available for Gears of War 2:

• PC
• Xbox360

If you are looking for action packed entertainment, definitely pick up either name.  You will have fun!

There are lots of grumblings floating around about Windows 7.  When asked what the issue is, “its not that user friendly.”  So have they made a new Vista but worse?  How can a company the size of Microsoft continue to succeed off of failures?  LOL Must be nice to be able to sell a turd fora  premium price.

Now I personally have not played with Windows 7, but here are some snippets of whats being said around the net:

“I find it difficult to believe that Windows 7 was created to be easier to use than Vista — if anything, they’ve introduced a number of UI changes that make the system much harder to navigate, particularly if you’ve never used Vista and are going direct to Windows 7 from Windows XP, which is the path that many users will experience.”

Source: http://blogs.zdnet.com/perlow/?p=9360

OH MAN! No command from the run box? Not sure how well things like this will go over with the Windows community. Not only are they making the UI less user friendly, but making tech support harder? Have fun all you cable and dsl call center techs.

Lets keep up the hard work Microsoft!

Every dedicated server customer should have some sort of back up, outside of RAID. We have used R1soft dedicated backup for a few years now. Our staff has seen first hand, how important this little gem is. We accidentally pushed out an update and brought our website to its knees. Less then 30 minutes we had the website restored 100% and functioning.

Restoring was never easier. The tech went into the R1soft control panel and selected back up copies of the files he needed. With out this backup, it would have taken us 5 or so hours to rebuild the files we needed. Will I always use R1soft? Yes and will recommend it to anyone I come across.

I have seen a few hosts around, like Webzooloo.com, that offer R1soft CDP with thier packages.  My questions is, why do more hosts not do this?  Makes sense to me.  If you are looking for a LA dedicated server, make sure and contact them.

Here are some features to the Linux R1soft CDP Backup:

1. Continuous Data Protection
2. Over 100 Recovery Points Per Day
3. Disk Imaging
4. Differential and Incremental Backups (Life SAVER!)
5. Compression
6. End to End Strong Encryption (security!)
7. MUCH MUCH more (link)