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Tuesday, August 31, 2010

FARMVILLE , a whole new look at it.

FarmVille is a real-time farm simulation game developed by Zynga, available as an application on the social-networking website Facebook and as an App on the Apple iPhone. The game allows members of Facebook to manage a virtual farm by planting, growing and harvesting virtual crops and trees, and raising livestock. Since its launch in June 2009, FarmVille has become the most popular game application on Facebook, with over 82.4 million active users and over 23.9 million Facebook application fans in May 2010. The total FarmVille users are over 20% of the users of Facebook. Despite this, Farmville is still classed by Zynga as being in Beta testing stage, with "all of [their] players ... currently considered Testers." They state that, "Things will go wrong. Bugs will occur."FarmVille started as a clone of the popular Farm Town on Facebook. On February 4, 2010, Microsoft's MSN Games has also launched FarmVille on its website, requiring a Facebook account but not a Windows Live ID in order to play the game. On June 7, 2010, at Apple's WWDC, the CEO of Zynga announced that they were porting FarmVille for the Flash-less iOS platform. It was later released on 23 June 2010 for the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad.

Sunday, August 29, 2010

Anyone else looking forward to the expansion?

What we can expect :

New Skills & Lvl. Raising - each class will get a unique attack skill upon reaching the "transcender" skill rank. Bladers and Force Archers will get some additional skills, which are unkown to me at the momment. The only bit of information i gathered on them is that they will most likely be party buffs.......This leaves Force Blader to be the only class without a party buff, but oh well, we have our own strenghts :) Yes, i play a Force Blader.
New Map (Forte Inferno) - The looks of the new map are awesome, reminds me of the environment in the hit game series "Devil May Cry". We're finally getting new/stronger bosses, which won't drop Force Cores i hope. All in all the map will be a great help in reaching the new level cap -> 180.
Chaos Arena + New skins of Entry Key - Don't know much about this subject, only good thing is that we are getting Chaos Arena 6. I say "finally" and you ask why? Well because Chaos Arena 5 has been there for more than 1,5 years already and its starting to get really really boring.
New Upgrading System - The equipment will now glow when it reaches a certain upgrade level (smells like stealing from other games, but oh well, every game does that). Upgrade cap is raised to +15 and the system of upgrading will get changed also, altho i'm not quite sure how, more to come later.

I didn't include any picture, but not because i'm lazy, but because i've got a video for you. Be sure to check it out and leave comments on what u think about the expansion :)

Saturday, August 28, 2010

A nerd's view on finding the perfect girl.

Why don't I have a girlfriend?

This is a question that practically every male has asked himself at one point or another in his life. Unfortunately, there is rarely a hard and fast answer to the query. Many men try to reason their way through the dilemma nonetheless, often reaching a series of ridiculous explanations, each more self-deprecating than the last: "Is it because I'm too shy, and not aggressive enough? Is it my opening lines? Am I a boring person? Am I too fat or too thin? Or am I simply ugly and completely unattractive to women?" When all other plausible explanations have been discounted, most fall back on the time-honoured conclusion that "there must be Something Wrong™ with me" before resigning themselves to lives of perpetual chastity.[2]
Not the author, though. I, for one, refuse to spend my life brooding over my lack of luck with women. While I'll be the first to admit that my chances of ever entering into a meaningful relationship with someone special are practically non-existent, I staunchly refuse to admit that it has anything to do with some inherent problem with me. Instead, I am convinced that the situation can be readily explained in purely scientific terms, using nothing more than demographics and some elementary statistical calculus.
Lest anyone suspect that my standards for women are too high, let me allay those fears by enumerating in advance my three criteria for the match. First, the potential girlfriend must be approximately my age—let's say 21 plus or minus three or four years. Second, the girl must be beautiful (and I use that term all-encompassingly to refer to both inner and outer beauty). Third, she must also be reasonably intelligent—she doesn't have to be Mensa material, but the ability to carry on a witty, insightful argument would be nice. So there they are—three simple demands, which I'm sure everyone will agree are anything but unreasonable.
That said, I now present my demonstration of why the probability of finding a suitable candidate fulfilling the three above-noted requirements is so small as to be practically impossible—in other words, why I will never have a girlfriend. I shall endeavour to make this proof as rigorous as the available data permits. And I should note, too, that there will be no statistical trickery involved here; I have cited all my sources and provided all relevant calculations[3] in case anyone wishes to conduct their own independent review. Let's now take a look at the figures.

Number of people on Earth (in 1998): 5 592 830 000[4]

We start with the largest demographic in which I am interested—namely, the population of this planet. That is not to say I'm against the idea of interstellar romance, of course; I just don't assess the prospect of finding myself a nice Altairian girl as statistically significant. Now anyway, the latest halfway-reliable figures we have for Earth's population come from the United States Census Bureau's 1999 World Population Profile (WP/98). Due presumably to the time involved in compiling and processing census statistics, said report's data is valid only as of 1998, so later on we'll be making some impromptu adjustments to bring the numbers up to date.

…who are female: 2 941 118 000[5]

I'd've thought that, given the title of this essay, this criterion goes without saying. In case anyone missed it, though, I am looking for exclusively female companionship. Accordingly, roughly half of the Earth's population must be discounted. Sorry, guys.

…in "developed" countries: 605 601 000[5]

We now further restrict the geographical area of interest to so-called "first-world countries". My reasons for doing so are not motivated out of contempt for those who are economically disadvantaged, but rather by simple probability. My chances of meeting a babe from Bhutan or a goddess from Ghana, either in person or on the Internet, are understandably low. In fact, I will most likely spend nearly my entire life living and working in North America, Europe, and Australia, so it is to these types of regions that the numbers have been narrowed.

…currently (in 2000) aged 18 to 25: 65 399 083[4][5]

Being neither a pedophile nor a geriatrophile, I would like to restrict my search for love to those whose age is approximately equal to my own. This is where things get a bit tricky, for two reasons: first, the census data is nearly two years old, and second, the "population by age" tables in WP/98 are not separated into individual ages but are instead quantized into "15–19" (of whom there are 39 560 000) and "20–44" (population 215 073 000). Women aged 15 to 19 in 1998 will be aged 17 to 21 in 2000; in this group, I'm interested in dating those 18 or older, so, assuming the "15–19" girls' ages are uniformly distributed, we have

39\,560\,000 \times \frac{\left| 21 - 18 \right| + 1}{\left| 19 - 15
  \right| + 1} = 31\,648\,000.
Similarly, of 1998's "20–44" category, there are now

215\,073\,000 \times \frac{\left| 25 - 22 \right| + 1}{\left| 44 - 20
  \right| + 1} = 34\,411\,680
females within my chosen age limit. The sum, 66 059 680, represents the total number of females aged 18 to 25 in developed countries in 2000. Unfortunately, roughly 1% of these girls will have died since the census was taken;[6] thus, the true number of so-far eligible bachelorettes is 65 399 083.

…who are beautiful: 1 487 838

Personal attraction, both physically and personality-wise, is an important instigator of any relationship. Of course, beauty is a purely subjective trait whose interpretation may vary from person to person. Luckily it is not necessary for me to define beauty in this essay except to state that for any given beholder, it will probably be normally distributed amongst the population.[7] Without going into the specifics of precisely which traits I admire, I will say that for a girl to be considered really beautiful to me, she should fall at least two standard deviations above the norm. From basic statistics theory, the area to the left of the normal curve at z = 2 is

\frac{1}{2} - \frac{1}{\sqrt{2 \pi}} \cdot \int_{0}^{2}
e^{-\frac{1}{2}z^2} dz~\approx~0.022\,75
and so it is this number with which we multiply our current population pool.

…and intelligent: 236 053

Again, intelligence can mean different things to different people, yet I am once more relieved of making any explanation by noting that it, like most other characteristics, has a notionally normal distribution across the population. Let's assume that I will settle for someone a mere one standard deviation above the normal; in that case, a further

\frac{1}{2} + \frac{1}{\sqrt{2 \pi}} \cdot \int_{0}^{1}
e^{-\frac{1}{2}z^2} dz~\approx~84.1345\%
of the population must be discounted.

…and not already committed: 118 027

I could find no hard statistics on the number of above-noted girls who are already married, engaged, or otherwise committed to a significant other, but informal observation and anecdotal evidence leads me to believe that the proportion is somewhere around 50%. (Fellow unattached males will no doubt have also noticed a preponderance of girls legitimately offering, "Sorry, I already have a boyfriend" as an excuse not to go on a date.) For reasons of morality (and perhaps too self-preservation), I'm not about to start hitting on girls who have husbands and boyfriends. Accordingly, that portion of the female population must also be considered off-limits.

…and also might like me: 18 726

Naturally, finding a suitable girl who I really like is no guarantee that she'll like me back. Assuming, as previously mentioned, that personal attractiveness is normally distributed, there is a mere 50% chance that any given female will consider me even marginally attractive. In practice, however, people are unlikely to consider pursuing a relationship with someone whose looks and personality just barely suffice. Let's make the rather conservative assumption, then, that a girl would go out with someone if and only if they were at least one standard deviation above her idea of average. In that case, referring to our previous calculation, only 15.8655% of females would consider someone with my physical characteristics and personality acceptable as a potential romantic partner.

Conclusion

It is here, at a pool of 18 726 acceptable females, that we end our statistical analysis. At first glance, a datable population of 18 726 may not seem like such a low number, but consider this: assuming I were to go on a blind date with a new girl about my age every week, I would have to date for 3493 weeks before I found one of the 18 726. That's very nearly 67 years. As an European male born in the late 1980s, my life expectancy is probably little more than 70 years, so we can safely say that I will be quite dead before I find the proverbial girl of my dreams. Come to think of it, she'll probably be dead too.

I follow you......you follow me.....not a bad song :)

A thing everyone should read.

Well yea guys, those of you who like life-hack threads and even those who don't should have a look at this website :

CLICK HERE

Anywayz, no point in explaining it, just check it out.

Cabal Online

Dear Korea. Please. It's nothing personal. I know you're big gamers, and that you've no real relation to that shortarsed fruit loop to your North. And I'm glad that your programmers and designers refuse to let the US and Europe control the games market, and that your players have made your MMOs such a success.

By Lord British's ghost, if you can get four million subscribers at a time when EverQuest only had a piffling 500k, it would be arrogant beyond belief for me to tell you that your MMOs are in any way less than godly perfection, even if most of them are as much fun as a pipe-cleaner up the urethra.

It's not that Cabal Online is a bad game... It's just that... well, if you want us to fall in love, and ultimately have many sequels together, there are just a few minor things you might want to keep in mind. Like grinding. It's just not polite to bring up your S&M fantasies on the first date. Can't you woo us, just once? Romance us with your world, inspire us with your system... yes, yes, we'll gather your five rabbits and your fourteen skull fragments, but first let us see that there's more to you than Desert World, Ice World and Jungle World. Oh. We've got to wait for that? Um. OK.

In that case, how about some background music instead of just the whistle of the ambient winds? Maps bursting with mystery and wonder instead of empty plains and instakill monsters?
Sigh. Never mind.

If it helps, we do find that new combat you're wearing somewhat fetching. Big explosive magic attacks, ninjas carving up monsters with dual blades, anime warriors... OK, ultimately it's the same old 'press a key to attack' stuff as ever at the start, but it's more impressive than usual, and scales up with some extra combos and powers as you advance from the outright newbie zones.

But the 'Revolution of Action', as claimed? Not really. The extra powers you get are all very well, but there's so much competition in the market right now - and so many small monsters to have to sacrifice to the gods of levelling - that even slogging to get that far is tiresome.

I want to connect and get into your new game, truly I do, but with Warcraft and EverQuest, and even City of Heroes playfully toying with its bra strap, the little hussy, it's hard to forget just how mindblowingly generic you truly are.

It's not you, it's - wait, on second thoughts, it is you.

I'm sorry. Please don't be mad. It's not even that you did anything particularly horrible, other than being so uninteresting that I had to dig up this whole tortured metaphor to get anyone to read this far into a discussion of your latest game. It's simply that the competition is better to the point where you don't need to exist.

Don't be disheartened. As they say: plenty more fish in the sea. But to my eyes, that still makes games like Cabal mere guppies to World of Warcraft's Jaws. I hope we can still be friends.