Chinese GULAG takes over Wintergrasp
June 12, 2011
From the “you can’t make this stuff up” department: China’s labor camp prisoners are forced to play video games to earn credit points and virtual goods that the prison guards later redeem for real money. Now, it may sound like fun to slay goblins and demons while serving your time, it is quite the opposite. You do your “gold farming” at night, and during the daytime you still have to dig tranches, break rocks, and whatever other things are to do in the coal mines. When the prisoners weren’t earning enough money, they were beaten for real, unlike the way a dragon destroys your virtual hero in a game.
So when a Western gamer buys a cool sword in the World of Warcraft, chances are high that she’s buying a result of a prison labor. That’s because there are 100,000 estimated full-time gold farmers in China, with most of them being prisoners. These 100,000 are about 80% of the total WoW gold farmers in the world.
I wonder if they already started making the prisoners play on-line poker or run Nigerian scam schemes?
I wish other companies were like Apple…
October 21, 2010… and declared optical disks dead.
Not that I have anything against optical disks. It’s just that I haven’t used any of the hundreds of DVDs that I have in home for like 2-3 last years. Even if I buy a gadget that comes with an installation CD, most of the time Windows 7 doesn’t need the disc to work with the device. It downloads drivers via internet.
It’s a real bummer that you can’t buy a decent notebook without an optical drive built-in. The only models without optical drive are netbooks and subnotebooks, all under 13.3″ screen. It’s time to start offering some good models without optical drives and see how customers react. That’s what Apple started doing at least a year ago with their Air series.
The difference between a good business and a good investment
July 10, 2010A good business is a company that generates profits. A good investment is the investment that grows significantly better than the market on average. If a company (Apple) exceeds another company (Microsoft) in market capitalization (i.e. it’s a better investment), but their profits don’t catch up, that means that the investment growth is based on faith. The faith that Apple will eventually generate better profits than Microsoft. That might happen or might not. And if that doesn’t happen soon enough, the investors will be disappointed and they will punish Apple’s capitalization. Simple as that.
Despite all the criticism, Microsoft is a very innovative company. They created tablet PCs, ebook readers, and Windows Mobile ten years ago. Too bad these things were too early for that time.
They created this 5 years before iPad:
TechCrunch was just hacked
January 27, 2010As of this exact moment, the TechCrunch site is definitely hacked. There is some offensive messsage at the top of the homepage. I’d post the screenshot, if it hasn’t contained lots of f-bombs. So, “turns out” LAMP isn’t more secure than Windows?
Posted by Oleg Kokorin 

