* In Franta, operatorul Free continua sa vina cu oferte care asigura un mediu concurential benefic consumatorului: (20 euro/luna abonament de telefonie mobila cu: apeluri si SMS nelimitate catre fix si mobil in 40 de state ale lumii + USA, 3Gb de date la viteza 3G, MMS nationale nelimitate, fara perioada de contract obligatorie – iPhone 4S la 1 EUR)
* Romania este (alaturi de Bulgaria) una din cele doua tari din Europa unde operatorii de telefonie mobila continua sa limiteze apelurile in reteaua proprie si sa diferentieze intre apelurile in reteau proprie si cele nationale. Deasemenea, Romania este singura tara din Europa unde operatorii de telefonie mobila continua sa limiteze strict traficul de date (si taxeaza traficul excedentar, in timp ce toti ceilalti doar limiteaza viteza). Deasemenea, operatorii din Romania au cea mai proasta oferta de trafic de date (limite derizorii gen 100Mb la abonamente de peste 10 EUR/luna).

The crazy world we live in is best depicted by the behavior of other consumers. Take Black Friday as an example, where a consumer stampede has been tamed with pepper spray. If you need more, Google is happy to provide with plenty of images and articles glorifying the indiscriminate buyer. Isn’t it amazing? There’s actually no particular corporation to blame! We can’t even single-out particular countries as clashes happened all across Europe!

No so in the case of the new edition of Nike’s Air Jordan basketball shoes. The iconic footwear that proved most popular in the 90′s made a comeback that sparked clashes all across the US. Lafayette saw a mob literally break down the doors of a mall, a woman got arrested for leaving her underage kids unattended in order to buy the shoes, a young man got stabbed in California and his bags stolen because some punks thought he had bought the shoes, in Texas a group of women spent the night in jail for beating the crap out of each other over the shoes, New York queues put Apple Store to shame.

The only thing we can conclude is this: learn your martial arts and learn them now. You might need them next time you go shopping.

Headhunter Dominic Connor forwards all the frustrations a human resources specialist faces when sorting out CVs. Bad spelling and funky colored paper can only scratch the surface. The article goes deeper, towards the significance and relevancy of information, its accuracy and trustworthiness. There’s no need to reiterate what Dominic says, but there is a slight need to dispute and underline some facts.

• I already know you want to leave your current job or else we wouldn’t be talking. So why are you listing the defects of your employer? – I’m not so sure about that myself, save for the fact that in all my interviews in the past 4 or 5 years I’ve been asked why I want(did) to quit my current/former job. So putting it in a CV doesn’t seem so far fetched. Whether it’s defects with the employer or something else, it might be worth mentioning (statistically speaking from my point of view) unless told otherwise.
• Why did you send the file as a Word document? – I know, I prefer PDF myself. However, in more than 80% (counted) of my applications for one job or another, I was asked to resubmit my resume/CV in Word format. Why? Only my current employer bothered to explain: they wanted to edit and translate my CV into an internal format. Aside from that, for online submissions Word is the safe choice. I don’t really agree since Word can mess up a CV in many ways (both from my point of view as well as for the human resource victim dealing with my CV)
• The average HR has to deal with everything from sales droids to accountants as well as thirty different flavours of techie. Do you think she has a deep and informed view of the relative merits of Python and Ruby? – this should be put in large platinum letters at the entrance to every human resources department and every interview room. Yes, human resource specialists are not tech people. This is true whether you go for IT or anything else. They browse and search for the keywords that they were given, do some assessment and the propose the candidate for interview. Technical details and nitpicking of a subject on your CV is out of place. You can do that at the interview.
• It’s my fault and your problem – a golden subsection. Yes, conveying your education and expertise in an efficient way may borderline art. When building a CV you need to account for the fact that it will be read by a human, a human that has faults, prejudices and who is in fact searching for something specific and you need to help them find what they’re looking for with your resume/CV.

Note: Even though I’m not always looking for employment, I do something take up interviews anyway. I do that to keep in touch with market requirements or simply to brush up my interview and people skills. It may not be fair to everyone, but it’s necessary. However, during these endeavors, as I get to discuss my CV a lot, I keep getting a lot of advice from human resource specialists about my CV.

• a Chinese fighter jet dived at an airshow, while the pilot ejected.
• a German biplane crashes into a car. Miraculously, nobody got seriously injured.
• a Korean Airlines Boeing with almost 400 people on board lands on its tail at Tokyo’s Narita International Airport (NRT). Bumpy ride for passengers but the airport still closed for an hour amid fears of an explosion. Again, nobody got hurt.
• in Colombia, a small Cessna flipped over after what appeared to be a fairly normal touchdown. Guess that back wheel simply didn’t want to stay down.

A few years ago Red Hot Chili Peppers as well as U2 experimented successfully with self distribution. Now, a meager stand up comedian made a million in a few days by distributing his latest performance as an unprotected video file.

If a mediocre stand up comedian can sell his performance for $5 and make a million in a few days, just think what a Batman movie could bring if after a theatrical run it would be distributed like this. No more HBO, Sony, Paramount or anyone else, just a quick download, $5 instead of $40. I’d pay a movie ticket and then the download.

This proves once and for all that the issue is not that people simply want everything for free, just that the people hate the middleman that leads to triple prices.

That means, discussing which is the best is a moot point. First reason is the aforementioned: it doesn’t matter which is the best, it only matters who servers your area. Then comes two: even for a given provider, the service quality for a given providers varies greatly even within the same city.

But there is still one thing common to most Romanian ISPs: generous download bandwidth but stingy upload. This stems mainly from the fact that the Romanian language doesn’t use its term for bandwidth for Interned. In fact, in Romanian we just say speed so the difference between bandwidth and speed melts to the point where regular customers can’t tell the difference.

Then comes the marketing: you obviously want download speed, right? After all, what do you do on internet … you download! Sure, but what the ISP gives you is not speed, but bandwidth. Bandwidth refers to throughput, reason why it’s measured in bits and not bytes because while data is indeed divided into bytes, it’s still individual bits transmitted via the communication line. So, 100Mbps means that 100 million bits could move through there every second. Ah, but will they? Generally no, because of several reasons:
- to make use of the 100Mbps pipe, you need networking to match. A top quality ethernet card that supports 100Mbps is required for that. Most do, but not all reach their potential. If routing is used, the router must manage and dispatch traffic efficiently to not cause losses. If you use Wi-Fi, you can’t really benefit from that bandwidth because while the theoretical Wireless-N standard is heaven, in practice it never surpasses a wired connection. With Wi-Fi, a bandwidth of 50Mbps is more than sufficient for your average household.
- the actual speed depends on oh so many factors: from hardware quality to your communication parner’s connection, to the protocol and fire types that you download, to the clients that you use and so on, ad infinitum. If you download a file at 32 (kilo-bytes) per second with your 50Mbps connection, going to 100Mbps connection won’t help. Throughput is like a highway: if you have a speed cap somewhere, adding another 50 Mpbps lane won’t help the existing traffic.
- for small or fragmented traffic (browsing, video streaming) the maximum real speed (whatever it is), it’s never reached. In fact streaming was created to allow media without much bandwidth. Speed snowballs in time as connections are being created for the data transfer, but for small files it never has the time to reach its full potential.

But streaming and browsing also lead us to another aspect: upload speed. In order for your computer to receive data, you must first request it, which is an upload operation. On streaming, upload is as much used as download, for every fragment received, there are checks being made: was the last one received ok, what’s the next one, etc. Requests are being made in other directions too as for browsing you don’t just request the particular page you are loading but also all the javascript files, stylesheets, external URLs (advertising, stat counters, etc), each meaning more upload. For browsing, online gaming and streaming, upload counts for nearly 50% of the traffic, thus it is equally needed.

It’s only for the actual download activity (torrents, big file downloads via http/ftp) that upload speed doesn’t matter too much. For torrents, where several connections are opened to many peers, upload is also a fairly important factor. Its importance varies with respect to the number of peers and the size and number of the fragments.

Generally, you can only profit from a high download rate if you download single big files from a single source, otherwise a good upload is also imperative.
A 1Mbps pipe for upload on a less than optimal local network is not nearly enough for one user. YouTube clips, NetTV, Voice over IP, they will eat up and spit out your upload pipe to the point where even for download you will not be able to reliably create new connections needed for continuous torrent download (for example).

100Mpbs = about 11MBps (mega-bytes) in the case of an optimum full speed constant transfer.

World of Warcraft manage to overcome this by simply ignoring the issue. There’s no real story to follow in WOW, but leaves the making of the world in the hands of the players, by giving them the means to live the game in a complex way. Its system (or lack thereof) proved successful and became a legendary success to the point where it sent its creation into ubiquity. ATL + Z is a standard of hiding an interface (much like what Windows did for CTRL + C/CTRL + V), an in-game public transit system, instances and many others, have spilled from WOW.

Bioware’s Star Wars: The Old Republic comes to build on that formula, having a legacy string of amazing single-player RPGs that includes basically everything worthwhile. Baldur’s Gate, Icewind Dale, Neverwinter Nights but also the signature Star Wars series Knights of the Old Republic. Their trademark is a deep and immersive storyline complemented by great voice acting and well-designed worlds. Why were they missing out on the MMORPG buzz?

Well, they were busy building Star Wars: The Old Republic.

Having the chance to participate in a week-end beta-test, I can say the wait pays off. What did I like?

• the gameplay: you get your own starship, you also get AI companions, great visual effects, balanced mechanics that offer each class their own “resource” (energy for troopers, the force for Jedi)
• the storyline: deep and amazing, spiced up by balanced quests, offers you the possibility to go Dark or Light side regardless of the chosen faction (Republic or Sith)
• the visuals: they are epic – an evolution from the immersive world of KOTOR (no wonder the game weighs in – 30Gb)
• builds on WOW: takes all the strengths of WOW (the aforementioned ubiquitous elements) and throws away the garbage (senseless grinding of defenseless creatures, slow advancement, no story). Every instance means more bits of a captivating story and most of them can be played alone (up to a level).

The beta still yields plenty of bugs, but The Old Republic promises to be everything that was promised and more. But quite like the Google+ vs Facebook war, the outcome of a Star Wars vs Warcraft is difficult to predict. Star Wars: The Old Republic has on its side the legacy of an epic saga, possibly the best. It is technologically and visually superior to World of Warcraft in every aspect (no more anime-ish creatures). But is that enough?

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