aphexddb.com

Just in case you missed the internet buzz, it’s offical.

Diablo III will feature old standards such as the quotable Deckard Cain, as well as a new version of Tristram and a fresh class dubbed the Witch Doctor. The jungle-born warrior will use ancient tribal magic to cast disease and mind control spells, in addition to utilizing pets such as locust swarms and mongrels.

The game will also include several control improvements, including full zoom capability and a hotbar to easily access skills. Players will be able to quickswap between skills using the mouse wheel or tab key.

Armor will now be class-specific, designed to provide each character a unique look. Classes themselves are more diverse, as it was noted that there will be female versions of both the Barbarian and Witch Doctor.

In a demo of the Barbarian class, the company noted that less of an emphasis will be placed on potions for health. Instead, red orb-like items will drop that immediately recover health once the player picks them up.

Environmental destruction was also shown off, with a character at one point busting through a solid wall. The environment can also be used to kill enemies, as in the case of objects that fell from a wall, killing a group of monsters.

Enemies were shown to be larger in scale than in past games, with giant evil trees and a massive demon called a Siegebreaker.

via ShackNews

So unbelievably lame! I am paying for the 16 MBit down / 2MBit up internet pipe and for the entire day my internet access is capped at a modem-esque (well not really, but close enough) 200KB/s!

All of a sudden at 10pm, my bandwidth magically improves! The real giveaway is in the Azureus Network Status Monitor which is clearly showing the insane rate of TCP resets which Charter is performing on my connections.

My internet provider sucks, can we have FIOS please?

After a fourth week of nonstop storage vendor selection, discussions of how long to capitalize hardware, and disk array feature sets my brain officially gave up.  Ladies and gentlemen, I humbly present.. the Fail Whale:

Brought to you by Twitter and the Stevenote.

For those who keep asking for the link to the Android platform “augmented reality” app, here is the video and related article.

Apple is going to be hating the competition once everyone has these as an open platform… too bad they are 2 years ahead of everyone else

via Android community

Best fucking article ever. The title says it all: “The Singularity“.

Across cultures, classes, and aeons, people have yearned to transcend death.

Bear that history in mind as you consider the creed of the singularitarians. Many of them fervently believe that in the next several decades we’ll have computers into which you’ll be able to upload your consciousness—the mysterious thing that makes you you. Then, with your consciousness able to go from mechanical body to mechanical body, or virtual paradise to virtual paradise, you’ll never need to face death, illness, bad food, or poor cellphone reception.

Now you know why the singularity has also been called the rapture of the geeks.

The singularity is supposed to begin shortly after engineers build the first computer with greater-than-human intelligence. That achievement will trigger a series of cycles in which superintelligent machines beget even smarter machine progeny, going from generation to generation in weeks or days rather than decades or years. The availability of all that cheap, mass-­produced brilliance will spark explosive economic growth, an unending, hypersonic, tech­no­industrial rampage that by comparison will make the Industrial Revolution look like a bingo game.

Lobster’s, here we come! (a reference to Accelerando by Charles Stross)

via BoingBoing (of course)

For those of who have not seen Wine Library TV, Gary Vaynerchuk is the high energy personality that powers the “thunder show”. His likability, success, and chutzpah stem from his motto:

Be a RAT.

There is a nice writeup on Gary doing a book signing in Austin over at hooversbiz.com. The post has a much better rundown of the RAT philosophy:

His deepest message, though, was about the necessity of being “RAT” — Real, Authentic, and Transparent — which he sees as an absolute necessity in the era of pervasive social media, when secrets are much harder to hide.

Before the event, someone on the Grape Vine Market staff had asked him if he would be disappointed with a thin turnout; he answered that he would have been grateful to have one person show up to talk to him. He calls his approach “Expectation Zero,” and said, “This Expectation Zero game is amazing — you’ll love it” because it removes the likelihood you’ll be disappointed.

That is the essence of social media and crowdsourcing today. People want the real story, from real people, and told in an honest fashion. Essentially this means you will not succeed unless you can operate in this space. The Diggnation video podcasts are a good example of this (Kevin Rose is also a friend of Gary’s) where the owner of Digg runs a show in a totally RAT manner and thus gains a dedicated following, digg.com customers, and a whole lot of social capital as well.

Follow Gary on Twitter: @garyvee

Good little video on net neutrality, oriented more towards the mainstream instead of the usual slashdot / boingboing / digg crowd.

The classic net neutrality diagram for those too lazy to watch:

via iPower

Many people (including my family) are always asking whats the point of Twitter, Friend Feed, BrightKite, social media and all the other cool new stuff  out there. As I have said before I have a grasp on these issues, but communicating to nonbelievers sometimes proves difficult. The good news today is that there is serious money behind web 2.0, blogging 2.0, mashups, etc. Some choice quotes via Twitter today:

Social media and web 2.0 is possibly recession proof (article 1)

Furthermore, James Cooper in his Business Week column points that the Services sector continues to add new jobs while the overall employment rate continue to recede.

All of this is a 4.6 billion market. That’s billion with a capital B. (article 2)

A new study by Forrester forecasts that Enterprise 2.0 solutions to capture an astonishing market share of 4.6 billion by 2013 and Social Networks related technologies are expected to take the lion share of these investments, accounting for approximately $2 billion.

In short, it’s a NEW field here. Enterprise 2.0 they are calling it but its really just another cross-discipline segment of the workforce. Looking around at all the big players in the consulting areas I see nobody, not IBM, Accenture, etc. doing anything specifically in this space. I postulate that the reason for this is a lack of talent in this space. It’s like the computer revolution, almost nobody knows how it works and has experience in this. This will eventually change of course, but in the meantime its time for us to make some loot. Your blogging hobby which you are starting to monetize, your deep interest in social media, your experience building and designing messaging tools are all worth a lot of money right now. This value will decrease over time so lets do something cool today!

@boblozano have another BBQ

Great article on what open source actually means to Microsoft (it’s disruptive) and big business in general that doesn’t subscribe to the open model. The open model allows my startup costs to be zero and I will probably try and monetize the business without selling a a product or a software package. Notice the lack of need for anything Microsoft related whatsoever.

In sum, Microsoft still doesn’t understand the Internet, the ultimate child of the open-source movement. It is the Internet that simultaneously makes Google and open source so brilliantly destructive and disruptive to Microsoft’s future.

via CNET

That ladies and gentlemen, is the surface of mars. The lander touched down minutes before this was taken.

I followed the hair-raising flight, atmospheric breaking, parachuting, and rocket firing landing of the Mars Phoenix Lander today via Twitter.

Science, it works bitches!

images via NASA