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Well it’s been a while since we posted about games, so here is a bit of news for the online WoW game fans, probably sad however. eBay will soon be disallowing virtual game items selling on their site to avoid possible legal actions from companies such as Blizzard. eBay is saying that this is for the for the overall health of the market place.

Not that I encourage the idea, but if the buyer and seller are happy, I think the only logical reason for disallowing it  is really possible lawsuits from game publishers concerned about people using their intellectual property to make profit. Even though if I was in their shoes, I can only see it brining more and more customers. Seller will keep playing to sell more, and buyer will keep playing for what he paid for! Anyways, disallowing virtual items is expected to take place next month.

On a different topic, also in the online games however, online game developer WildTangent is talking about the challenges facing online game developers to get their games working on Windows Vista. Vista seems to be incompatible with many of the downloadable games from Yahoo, RealArcade, AOL, and even the MSN Games as it self as well. I don’t know about you, but for me, if it doesn’t have games, then it’s not good.

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I found about this article from LifeHacker, always a great source for news. A pocket sized ink-free printer is being presented in the Technology Conference Demo ‘07 in California by Zink. The printer has a camera with it to take pictures, and uses heat to print photos without requiring ink. Quite an achievement. I already like it for being ink-free. I have to pay $68 to replace my ink cartridge every now and then. Its silly how the ink have become more expensive than the printers them selves. Right now, don’t wonder if you see a special offer, Buy 2 ink cartridge, get 1 printer FREE!. I heard of someone who buys a new printer every time ink runs out, and after a while, sells all the used printers in group. Reports say printed images are almost as normal photo quality. Let’s cross our fingers and hope so.

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This is a nice article from LifeHacker on how to burn almost any video file type onto a playable DVD using the DVD Flick Open Source. Enjoy.

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The Register have revealed her the mystery behind the shocking same time announcement by Intel & IBM about their new chips. As it seems Intel was ahead of IBM, and leakage from the press went to IBM, and they wanted to spoil the Intel show with a counter attack. Read the whole story here for more details.

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The open source widely adapted database MySQL is about to go public, told the MySQL CEO Martin Mickos to the Computer Business Review. With just below 10,000 paying customers, MySQL plans to join the other few public open source vendors, like Red Hat, Linux, and Caldera. MySQL is well popular and in favor among web developers. Many open source fans tend to look for the well-known as LAMP (Linux, APache, MySQL, Php). So MySQL is becoming more like an indispensable part of web hosting. Light, fast, and FREE. Going public now should drive more money inside and help it grow even further.

Source from Slashdot.

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Google Desktop is one of most amazing things Google have ever came up with. Incredibly fast indexing to all my files, emails, and web history, at a very low memory trade off as well. After using it for a while, I almost never use Windows search, which started to crash every time I run it, and never again I search my mails using outlook. Just simply double click Shift and the search box will come floating at your screen.

But what if the search box doesn’t come up? Could it happen? Well, this is my problem with my PC at home. Every other PC works fine except for this one. I tried many things, kept downloading recent updates in a hope it will fix it with no luck. Eventually I posted the question on Google Groups and they suggested this link for help. Ofcourse it didn’t help because, my problem is that, the Quick Search Box option is not showing in the Preferences Display page. I thought it would be stupid to tell this. How on earth could the option be hidden. But soon someone else replied to the post and said “What if I don’t have the Quick Search Box section in Display? “. Thank God I said, it’s not only me. You can find the Groups post here to verify more. So anyways, I fired an email for Google Desktop team explaining all the problem details, now that I know I am not the only one. However, as I expected, Google Support is trained for the general answers and once you get with them into specific details, they don’t help you much. I never got any reply for my email. First time I ever don’t, so I can take a hint. They are not able to explain it. Does someone else have the same problem? I wonder what it could be related to. Hardware? Software? Other 3rd party? Is it because I am using cordless customized Logitech keyboard? Who knows. Appreciate any feedback on this.

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In the world of developing countries, invention is a foreign word, and technologies are only acquired from the western countries instead. This becomes hard to swallow for many, but we can live with it. The problem gets bigger when they become selective on what is a useful technology and what is a harmful one. Few years back, the Ministry of Transportation arranged with all ISPs in Kuwait to block porn sites and other sites they find harmful. You can expect how many eligible sites got banned on the way. MetaCafe and YouTube got affected recently, and some Kuwaiti Blogs even were blocked. So it seems we are becoming more and more like China. Now they want to ban the VoIP sites that allows people to make international calls, simply because it’s costing them money! To put it in another way, the new technology will save people 20 million KD that the government prefers to keep to it to itself instead. It’s a pretty shame for the people who spent their time and money to make this VoIP dream a reality.

It is worth mentioning however that while we pay around $650 annual 256 kbps DSL registration fees (in advance), and not very rarely the network is extremely slow and you can do nothing about it, you start having to use a Proxy eventually to by pass what government does not like you to see. The proxy ofcourse becomes the bottlenick here, not to mention other possible browsing issues. The government wants to control and protects its people from harmful content, so they blocked porn sites. However down all shops you can find the pirated uncensored film movies for 3 bucks, and even original ones in major store like Virgin. Original DVDs are available there, and no one is doing anything against it. $55 Showtime TV subscription is also available to show all the uncensored movies, but since it’s a business with money in, no one is doing anything about it. Whenever the money might go out, or there is harm without money in, government wants to take action. One of the other great services not available in Kuwait also is PayPal. I am not sure now whether this is from the ministry or not, but it definitely opens the door for some real nice services like Skype and eBay.
Now, instead of investing in upgrading the ISP networks, giving us more stability and faster bandwidth, they would like to monitor and control our browsing more. For the past 4 weeks I have not had two consecutive days with stable connection. Even though I paid for the media, when it is available in good shape, the government wants to restrict my use of that media. Right now, if you are traveling and someone gives you a ring on your roaming phone, you get charged per minute even if you don’t answer it. So a ring is worth $3 sometimes. I saw a full real big bill of missed calls the customer got charged for just the missed calls. If the government wants people to follow what they call the legal ways, they better try to make it in reasonable prices.

You can find a translation of the news article from Al-Watan Newspaper here. Original source for Arabic readers is here.

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