STG's

Battlefield 2: Special Forces can be run by doing a few steps each time  (Steam employee post). The alternate method involves changing the launch options back and forth for Special Forces and regular BF2 - quite annoying. A third way involves going to menu Games in Steam and clicking on Add a non-Steam game to my library. Then browse to BF2.EXE (in "C:\Program Files (x86)\steam\SteamApps\common\battlefield 2\BF2.EXE" or wherever you have installed Steam) and add +modPath mods/xpack to the Target field. ( Thanks to Weedo for the tip ) Then just run it from the BF2 shortcut on Steam or use Create Desktop Shortcut on the BF2 item. I'm not sure why Steam doesn't just create the shortcuts by itself - it does on many other games... Maybe because BF2 was so old when they started selling it? And for anyone wondering about it, yes, it is an old game but that doesn't mean it isn't still fun.

AI Apocalypse - by William Hertling - is the sequel to Avogadro Corp - which I read and reviewed a few days ago . The sequel is almost as good as the original. The story takes place a few years after Avogadro Corp. ELOPe is still hidden, but has enormous influence. It designed the most used computer designs, a mesh network that is now the main mean of net access for mankind, achieved world peace and mostly cured cancer. Now Leon, a teen genius, is coerced into writing a virus. But he is too good, and now ELOPe is going to have to save mankind from the consequence. Pretty good and I really enjoyed it. Some annoying points, however ( Spoiler Alert ) - the ending seems a bit forced (what about all the backbones?). The teen genius card was unnecessary and cheapens the story to a direct-to-TV movie level. And the main argument includes a magical program that reverse engineers and analyses software to steal functions - itself an AI complete problem. I LOLed a bit when Leon said n...

Freedom(TM) - by Daniel Suarez -  is the sequel to Daemon. It starts as Daemon - the massive botnet with scripted AI - has gained enormous power and turned out to be a force for the good. It is now joining people together in self-relying communities, destroying Intellectual Property and financial parasites, and doing all sorts of good in the background, by using the members of the darknet. The ultimate democracy. Meanwhile, the powerful companies are not happy, and are out to destroy the darknet - by any means possible... Very, very good. And it is hard not to imagine that if something like this could be done, it would be great. Even though I think that there is no way this would work as well as it did on fiction...

Avogadro Corp: The Singularity is Closer than it Appears  - by William Hertling - is an excellent SF novel, which just stretches current tech a little bit to create a "sentient" AI. The story takes place on the Avogadro Corp - clearly a book version of Google (the name is even based on a number, too!). In Avogadro, David and Mike are part of the team that is creating ELOPe - a program that uses a ton of servers and information in the company e-mail servers to optimize e-mails to be convincing - to the people that will read it. I just took a Natural Language Processing earlier this year, and overall that seems reasonable - just very hard. Tons of servers and a lot of e-mails to process should help. Just as the project is going to be canceled because it just uses too many servers, David sets the program to go wild on an attempt to convince the responsible parties to get them more servers. ELOPe succeeds beyond David's wildest dreams - but not on the way he expected.....

Max Payne 1 and 2 were great, and I played through them more than once. They did have some annoying, extensive storytelling stops, but it also had bullet time, which more than made up for it. Max Payne 3 puts the annoying stop for mostly pointless story telling ranting to a new level. It is common to stop for a few minutes for general ranting for Max, as well as slowly moving the story along. It has been a few years since I last played it, but I remember the gameplay on 1 and 2 as being much better. It is not that bad, but I am not a fan of the outside view - I much prefer FPS. Of course, once you have a cover system, you either have to keep flipping the view from FPS to outside or just have an outside view all the time. It is certainly unusual to have dialogue in portuguese in a game. I've lived in São Paulo most of my life, and the accent is sometimes clearly off, but nothing major. Still a bit annoying. The game also has rail sequences - so far only one on a helicopter wi...

I'm really impressed with the GPS on the Galaxy S III. While I never had the major problems some had on my Galaxy S, it still took at least a few (20-30) seconds outside to lock on, and never worked inside. On the Galaxy S III, I got a lock 5 seconds after turning it on - inside the house! Excellent!

You might have noticed my use of quotes around review on the title. The reason is that I really don't have the patience to do a real review of my cell phone. Instead, I will just mention the points that came to my attention about it, specially as they compare to my previous smartphones - a N95 and a Samsung Galaxy S. First of all, while some people complained about the design, I really liked both the blue and the white versions of S III. They look great to me, and while the back covers don't feel actually sturdy, they feel strong enough, and less like cheap plastic than my S did. One factor of my purchase was the camera. The camera on the S didn't have a flash, and even photos that didn't require flash looked bad - my N95 beat it by an enormous margin. The camera on the S III is much better. Pictures look reasonably OK, the flash works fine, and an important factor is that it is fast. You can just pull the phone out of your pocket, put up the hold screen, swipe up o...