I've been thinking of writing this article for a long time and I finally got some time to think properly about it and make it interesting. The ranking is based on personal preference, track history and heritage, the passion is stirs in other people and driving skill required to be successful there.
I'll be starting the countdown from the 10th place to the first:
10. Circuit Paul Ricard
Why did it make the list:
- it was one of the most advanced race tracks at the time of it's opening and it's still hi-tech now;
- the Mistral straight, where in 1987, F1 cars achieved speeds in excess of 320km/h; Why it didn't score higher:
- it hasn't been used for important races in a while, but it's set to be the French Grand Prix organizer for 2013.
9. Ebisu Circuit
Why did it make the list:
- it a premier circuit for a rather new and spectacular form of motorsport: drifting;
- one of the most entertaining and challenging corners in drifting:
Why it didn't score higher:
- relatively new circuit with almost no history;
- besides Drifting competitions it's only used for minor and local cart and motorcycle races.
This will be continued tomorrow and in the following days.
You'll also be able to find the links for the next parts, below.
I've been playing during the past weekend, the amazing new game The Secret World. Although it was only the second beta weekend it still offers a polished feel, that you rarely get from unfinished games.
The story is amazing and captivating, from the start, and it's a fresh breath of air with all those fantasy-based MMOs.
It's set in the near dystopian future, where 3 "societies" fight for the power to decide the future of humanity. This, if they can actually manage to fight away the dark forces that threaten the Earth.
The societies are:
- the "reborn" Templars:
- the greedy Illuminati:
- the secretous Dragon:
The beta only offered the Templars, as your faction, but the story felt tied together, with proper narrative and I didn't actually feel any regret that I couldn't try the other factions.
The game is a mixture of Silent Hill, Grand Theft Auto and Resident Evil, taking the best in these games, adding an amazing plotline to the atmosphere, gameplay and progression of the game. You're less troubled about grinding and leveling up, because you want to follow the story and see where it gets you.
Now, my biggest problem with the game:
IT'S A FREAKING MMO. WHY?
It doesn't make any sense from a creative point of view to make this a MMO. It would make a perfectly fine single-player game franchise, with all the possibilities it you have to expand the story in other regions (you only visit 3 major locations in the game: New England, Egypt and Transylvania). By making it a MMO you lose the crowd that would play the game sporadically and you also miss the console owners. Sure it may get you more money in the short to medium term, but as a MMO it would be too hard to expand it after the first installment and there are lower chances of the sequel to be successful
But, apparently this is the way EA wants to go, having also published another game that would be a lot better as a single player game: Star Wars: The Old Republic.
I know a lot of people that bought it just to play through the quest line, and then left.
So, game developers and publishers, stop making so many mediocre MMOs when you can fit the same storyline in a great Single-Player game. Or at least take the path of Diablo and provide Co-Op modes if you want to ensure re-playability. GET IT RIGHT!
Short introduction:
Romania is known as country with a high degree of knowledge in the IT departments.
From hackers to people that scam eBay buyers, from Microsoft, Apple and Google employees to important Romanian companies everyone recognized us.
But now, it all started going on a downward slope. The call center businesses that used to be outsourced in India, started being outsourced in Romania as well. Not the proudest part of the business but you can still make a honest living.
But yesterday I got the worst IT related job offer I've ever seen: being a gold farmer.
Link is here: http://www.ejobs.ro/user/locuri-de-munca/515580
Translation:
Perfect candidate: We're looking for professional gamers who want to make money from the game testing/gold farming activity.
Work place is in Bucharest.
Requirements: - English language, intermediate level;
- at least one year of experience in online games (optional Xfire account )
- age between 18 and 30
- game experience with at least one game developed by Blizzard(from the series World of Warcraft, Starcraft, Diablo, Warcraft)
- testing on a similar game.
For more details and direct job applications: service@diablo3charms.eu
This is rock bottom. You cannot go any lower. But still 125 people applied for this job.
Would you apply for a similar job?
any process or technique that reduces the chaos in one's life and makes it easier to manage, or more convenient
So this is what a lifehack is, a small trick that can improve your life.
Here are a few recent ones that I ran across, with small explanations for each of them.
Why you will fail to have a great career?
A very, very good TED Talk about how to manage your own expectations, how to manage your career and how not to blame someone else when/if you fail. The speaker is Larry Smith, an Economic professor at the University of Waterloo in Canada.
How to buy a new car?
Simple and effective. It may not seem like a lot but it will make a lot of difference when buying a new car. Also, it won't work in every single part of the world as this dealer system is mostly found in the US. The speaker is Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, Professor of Politics at the New York University.
More info on him and the transcript of the talk, here.
Stop basing everything on stories
Stop thinking in stories. Learn how to get the essential information out of stories and stop being influenced by the bulk of crap, padded in every story fed to you. Presented by Tyler Cowen, a professor of economics at George Mason University.
I see this question posted with some regularity in the personals
section, so I thought I'd take a minute to explain things to the ladies
out there that haven't figured it out.
What happened to all the nice guys?
The answer is simple: you did.
See, if you think back, really hard, you might vaguely remember a
Platonic guy pal who always seemed to want to spend time with you. He'd
tag along with you when you went shopping, stop by your place for a
movie when you were lonely but didn't feel like going out, or even sit
there and hold you while you sobbed and told him about how horribly the
(other) guy that you were fucking treated you.
At the time, you probably joked with your girlfriends about how he was a
little puppy dog, always following you around, trying to do things to
get you to pay attention to him. They probably teased you because they
thought he had a crush on you. Given that his behavior was, admittedly, a
little pathetic, you vehemently denied having any romantic feelings for
him, and buttressed your position by claiming that you were "just
friends." Besides, he totally wasn't your type. I mean, he was a little
too short, or too bald, or too fat, or too poor, or didn't know how to
dress himself, or basically be or do any of the things that your tall,
good-looking, fit, rich, stylish boyfriend at the time pulled off with
such ease.
Eventually, your Platonic buddy drifted away, as your relationship with
the boyfriend got more serious and spending time with this other guy
was, admittedly, a little weird, if you werent dating him. More time
passed, and the boyfriend eventually cheated on you, or became boring,
or you realized that the things that attracted you to him weren't the
kinds of things that make for a good, long-term relationship. So, now,
you're single again, and after having tried the bar scene for several
months having only encountered players and douche bags, you wonder,
"What happened to all the nice guys?"
Well, once again, you did.
You ignored the nice guy. You used him for emotional intimacy without
reciprocating, in kind, with physical intimacy. You laughed at his
consideration and resented his devotion. You valued the aloof boyfriend
more than the attentive "just-a-" friend. Eventually, he took the hint
and moved on with his life. He probably came to realize, one day, that
women aren't really attracted to guys who hold doors open; or make
dinners just because; or buy you a Christmas gift that you mentioned, in
passing, that you really wanted five months ago; or listen when you're
upset; or hold you when you cry. He came to realize that, if he wanted a
woman like you, he'd have to act more like the boyfriend that you had.
He probably cleaned up his look, started making some money, and
generally acted like more of an asshole than he ever wanted to be.
Fact is, now, he's probably getting laid, and in a way, your ultimate
rejection of him is to thank for that. And I'm sorry that it took the
complete absence of "nice guys" in your life for you to realize that you
missed them and wanted them. Most women will only have a handful of
nice guys stumble into their lives, if that.
So, if you're looking for a nice guy, here's what you do:
1.) Build a time machine.
2.) Go back a few years and pull your head out of your ass.
3.) Take a look at what's right in front of you and grab a hold of it.
I suppose the other possibility is that you STILL don't really want a
nice guy, but you feel the social pressure to at least appear to have
matured beyond your infantile taste in men. In which case, you might be
in luck, because the nice guy you claim to want has, in reality, shed
his nice guy mantle and is out there looking to unleash his cynicism and
resentment onto someone just like you.
If you were five years younger.
So, please: either stop misrepresenting what you want, or own up to the
fact that you've fucked yourself over. You're getting older, after all.
It's time to excise the bullshit and deal with reality. You didn't want a
nice guy then, and he certainly doesn't fucking want you, now.
There is this thing that has been bugging me for the past years.
We all like watching movies about hackers, forensic science movies and TV series. But the thing is: every single one of them portrays us, "computer people", differently from what we are and what we do.
Let's take one of the most popular TV series, CSI, and see how much they are wrong.
So to get this straight, they are creating a GUI interface using Visual Basic to track an IP.
Now let's explain the terms for people that are less compute-literate:
- GUI = Graphical User Interface, which is pretty much whatever you see in an application: the design, the windows, etc.
- Visual Basic = a widely used programming language, from Microsoft.
- IP = Internet Protocol address, which is a numerical label attached to all computers in a network that is pretty much used for addressing and identifying a computer.
Sure, you can make an application in Visual Basic, that uses a GUI, and can track an IP. but you can do the same thing from the console using the PING command, which is pretty much what every "computer person" that knows what an IP is, will do.\
Now, analyzing the sentence, we firstly see evidence of RAS Syndrome ( Redundant Acronym Syndrome Syndrome :P) when they use "GUI interface" because the acronym GUI actually contains Interface. The whole sentence is also a malapropism and it made every single person that knows a bit more about computers, laugh their ass off when they saw the scene.
A very good metaphor for it would be: "I will write a letter using a crayon so I can order a pizza". Sure you can do it, but does it make any sense to you? No? Exactly. The original sentence makes the same amount of sense to us as well.
Other movies doing the same kind of errors would be:
- Independence Day: using an old Mac to hack into an alien mothership and infect it with a virus is so out of the ballpark I won't even discuss it. Although, it was a really cool story for how aberrant in was. You can read a very good article about it, here.
- Die Hard: with a very good 3-panel comic from Penny Arcade
Also, two more funny comics about hacking in movies:
First one from XKCD:
and the second one from SMBC:
And one last question I have: if we see problems like these in all computer related scenes, I wonder how doctors look at House M.D, Royal Pains or even E.R., how lawyers look at Boston Legal, Suits and Law & Order. Any doctor or lawyer care to enlighten us?
Keeping in time with all the recent proposed copyright laws( SOPA and ACTA), you have here a funny and interesting take on "copyright mathematics".
It show how much the MPAA/RIAA make up the numbers they show the public, like money and jobs lost. Some of them are actually ridiculous, like having lost 373.000 jobs in the media industry, when they didn't have more than 300.000 jobs in 1998.
Now my take on piracy. I do not agree with it, because people work hard for their creations and deserve being rewarded for that. But not under the terms of the media industry(publishers, record labels, etc). What we do want, is an up-to-date distribution system, with free previews, like it happens in the other types of sales, and a little more respect (stop limiting content to a few regions in the world).
It's the information era, it's really easy to pay over the internet for stuff, wherever you are, so act up and offer better services if you want to receive our money. iTunes is a really nice step forward, but it's still region limited due to the restrictions imposed by the record labels and it could do with some improvements.
I used to pirate stuff (and to be honest I still pirate TV series, just because we can't get from the Netflix where I live and we get them month and sometimes years after they are first on TV) but I started buying pretty much everything I use: games, music and even movies. The are a lot easier to buy, with the help of Gamersgate, Steam, Origin, iTunes, Zonga, Beatport and pretty much every retail company that offers movie DVDs.
1. The official release date for Diablo 3 was announced today, and
it's gonna be in 2 months, on the 15th of May. Also pre-orders are
opened now on Blizzard's website for 59.99 € / 59.99$.
There will also be a retail-exclusive Collector's Edition, packaged with the full game, a
behind-the-scenes Blu-ray/DVD set, a soundtrack CD, an art book, and
full copies of Diablo II and its expansion pack, for $100( or € for us "rich" europeans).
I, being the epitome of impulse buys, just got it earlier.
2. Rift are having a new offer for the 1 year subscription: $99 or 79 €,
which is actually a very large reduction in price (49% from the
month-to-month one). It's a really good buy because judging by the last
year, they offer the proper updates and expansions a AAA MMORPG
deserves. Check out the main content for their next patch (1.8) and judge by yourself if it's worth it or not.
They also have a lite version of the game, if you just want to try it out. Sign-up here (with a referrer link from me).
3. Finally an exciting mainstream development in cloud computing: http://www.gaikai.com They
offer Java streaming of normal PC games, in your browser, on Mac,
Windows, Android, iOS, etc. Sounds like a very good idea and it might
start the trend towards more cloud computing in the consumer market.And
it also has the potential to make the Chrome-books as a viable
lightweight, cheap gaming system. Didn't
manage to test it yet, as it seems that my work internet connection
isn't good enough, but I'll add some updates as soon as I get home and
run a few games in the cloud.
If it was before 2000 and I wouldn't have been writing this article. Why?
Because Dacia was in one of the worst situations a car maker can be:
- no financial backing;
- antiquated production facility;
- a lack of proper and modern cars.
Surely, this should have been the end. But this didn't happen, because Renault bought the company and they started investing heavily in it.
But this is not special in any way. The special part came after that, in the form of marketing campaigns.
My studies are not at all related to marketing or economics, but it doesn't take a MBA to see how effective the strategy was.
Firstly, they started the hype when they announced the Logan. A new and relatively modern car for less than 6000 euros was not heard of before this.
It stirred the waters in the automotive industry and this was the first step towards proper brand awareness and recognition.
Next, they went on and capitalized on the new platform and car, by making the Logan MCV, Logan Van and the Logan Pick-up, all of them using the same philosophy: cheap and modern car.
When they wanted to launch the next car, they made a really inspired ad campaign on the most watched car show in the world: Top Gear. I'm sure every single Top Gear fan remembers the "Great News" gags.
These are not the only marketing campaigns that they started:
- the Logan Cup series (a Dacia Logan only rally competition) which also ran a round on Bucharest Ring during the FIA GT racing weekend.
- raced the Dacia Duster and Lodgy Glace in the Andros Trophy (a winter rally racing series)
- raced the Dacia Duster "No Limit" in the famous Pikes Peak Hill Climb (finishing 3rd after Tajima's Monster and Rhys Millen)
And the result of all this?
Dacia is in the top 10 best selling cars in a lot of important markets:
- Russia (Logan - 6th in February 2012 )
- Romania (Logan - 1st, Duster - 2nd in February 2012)
- Brazil (Sandero - 10th in February 2012)
Good ranking in most european markets as well, with the Duster and the Logan consistently in the top 50, with large increases compared to January.
Also very good results in 2011:
26th : Duster - 141,961 units
64th : Sandero - 71,646 units
89th : Logan - 48,553 units
This amounts to 262,160 cars sold only in Europe (~343,000 worldwide), more than the total sales in every year until to 2009.
Also, only 5,000 units decrease(348,723 units sold in 2010, worldwide) in sales during 2011 is a great performance, considering the whole financial situation of the world.
We're looking forward to see what the new Dacia Logan will look like(as this is the logically, then next car to be revealed by them) and how will the new Lodgy will perform in 2012.
No, I'm not talking about crappy not-even-worth-the-paper-they're-printed-on books.
A few days ago, I've stumbled upon a very interesting post here. It's about what advice you would give to a 10 year older self.
I realize that it won't apply to everyone, but from my point of view, we have some important life tips over here.
Here are my top 3 picks. If you go with them, you'll be more than fine in your life (provided that you don't go crazy before ). #10 – For the most part, what others think doesn’t matter. This is, in my opinion, by far the most important. You cannot live your life expecting to make everyone happy. It cannot be done. Better people have tried it and they failed. You need to set your priorities straight in life, what do you want to do, who do you want to spend the rest of your life with, etc, and then you can know who's opinion really matters. Life is not a closed circle. People enter and exit your affection zone, so try not to waste your attention on those that don't deserve it. And as long as you're happy with yourself, you are on the right road.
#8 – Nobody knows what you’re thinking unless you tell them. Communication. Really, really, really important. You need a raise, you have problems in your relationship, you have a huge crush on really pretty lady? Then go talk to them - your boss, your girlfriend, your crush, whoever -. Keeping it to yourself won't help at all. Nobody can read minds, no matter how much they advertise it. :P
#4 – Invest in yourself. The best investment there is. Learn a new programming language, learn a new skill, learn a foreign language, etc. It will prove it's worth in the long run. New skills are always marketable, whether you're looking for a job or a girlfriend. Advantages in job hunting: - the immediately visible one: the more skills you have, the more chances of finding a job you get. - shows the employer that you can learn new things and that you're open to discover new things - makes you less expendable if you can do more than one thing in the company. Versatility is and will always be a plus.
The rest are also important, and I recommend you to read it all on the original post.
