In an announcement at 1PM today, Globe Telecom closed the deal with Apple to offer the iPhone in the Philippines.

This after several months of speculations. Announcement on the Globe website says:

Manila, 12 May 2008 – Globe, SingTel, Bharti Airtel and Optus today announced that they have signed an agreement with Apple to bring the iPhone to the Philippines, Singapore, India, and Australia later this year.

More information will be released at a later date.

{ source: YugaTech }

Diablo first came out in 1997 which became very popular to PC gamers. Came 2000, the fans saw the released of Diablo II. The game was awarded several accolades including the prestigious Computer Game of the Year. A year after Diablo® II: Lord of Destruction was released and became the fastest selling expansion set in PC game history.

With the news of Blizzard purchasing diablo3.com domain from the guy over at diablofans.com, a community of PC gamers of Diablo, it was mentioned on the site that acquiring the domain should not be considered that Blizzard is really developing Diablo III. The fans has high hopes on this matter and who knows they will be seeing it soon.

After more than 3 years of operating Khan Online in the Philippines, the online gaming company Level Up! has finally shut it down for good.

The license for the game expired last April 30, 2008 and Level Up! didn’t renew the contract. This was primarily due to low gamer usage and new developments in the content of the game.

Khan and its community have seen its fair share of changes and cool events throughout these three years together. Let us recall some of Khan’s glorious history all the way from its humble beginnings:

- A new full 3D MMORPG was launched by NetGames on September 2004 called Khan Online.
- Khan Online went commercial in January 2005
- Touted as one of the MMORPG’s with the best party system.
- Khan has been known to hold some of the most exciting guild wars!
- Very diverse community known to possess the most “angas” factor be it in-game or in real life.
- LU Live BakbaKHAN 2006 -2007

Khan gamers will be migrated to another game, Perfect World:

Migration into PW’s New Server - Serpent on March 31, 2008 will hold compensation for your hard work in Khan and although the loss of Khan is a sad blow, the community can still live on. Hold high the Khanatic spirit as you delve into new adventures amidst the rich and diverse community Perfect World has to offer. To learn more about the Perfect World Migration Package, please click here.

by: Nerbie

Every year IT guys are increasingly convinced that the powerful features of Linux as a server platform is really in the linux package. In terms of hosting and development I’m more on Linux stuff than windows. Although its hard to ignore that in my day to day work both in the office and at home I’m into windows 2000 and 98 respectively. Well, personally speaking windows interface is much better than Linux interface. This poor interface of Linux is frequently criticized specially by hard core MS windows users. I know some of you will agree and some won’t. Its like asking the other big guys “Do you think Linux can improve its poor GUI very soon?” of course on every versions of Linux we’ve seen improvement of its desktop interface but it is still not good enough compare with its competitor.

I would like to name two Linux Environment. Linux has this GNOME - which stands for GNU Network Object Model Environment that has been around for quite sometime and they have been doing good with its GUI development for Linux. You can also visit their site at http://www.gnome.org/. KDE is also here for Linux. hopefully, it will become another Linux up lifter to its desktop GUI. Lets just keep our finger crossed that these GNOME and KDE won’t be like Microsoft and Sun that debates over with each other about their products.

If only Linux interface and its user friendliness are comparable with what MS windows is having right now, maybe we can see lots of typical users that are using Linux as an alternative to windows in their home PC. Hey, I’m not saying Linux cannot penetrate the market of Personal PC. Anyway, lets see what Linux can offer us after this new XP windows has been released.

by : Ryan S.

If there are geeks in my family, that would be me and my brother. But my mom beats all of us hands down in cell phone technology. She’s always the first to own the newest and hippest cellular phones out there. When she gets tired of her phone, which doesn’t take long to happen, she either hands it down to one of us or sells it to somebody else.

It all started three years ago, when I and my sibs decided to buy her a Nokia 3210, her very first mobile phone. Apparently, she got hooked with it because now, she changes phones more often than one should ideally replace a toothbrush. She would know the latest models available, the prices of each, and even the strengths and weaknesses of a particular model. Of course, she turns to me and my brother for enlightenment when it comes to Bluetooth, GPRS, MMS, and all those terms that a mom is not supposed to know about. It is also our responsibility to read the manuals to answer any of her questions about her new phone.

Nonetheless, she still gets to own the coolest phones first! She just recently replaced her still new Nokia 7250 with a Samsung V200 with a rotating camera and a whopping 65000 color TFT LCD display baby!

Anyway, the best part is seeing my mom happy. Sometimes, she’d have doubts and would ask for reassurance from me that she picked a good phone. I, in turn always reply honestly and usually positively. This clears her doubts and restores the sense of contentment that manifests on her face. I adore my mom!

by : yuga

You might be saying that I’ve gone bonkers by comparing two games of entirely different genres. It’s like comparing apples to oranges, one might add. Hold on a bit and read a little more so you’ll understand why I pegged them that way.

WarCraft3 is a strategy game while CounterStrike is RPG. That’s a clear distinction. However, if you’ve played both games adequately you will notice that they have more similarities than differences - one reason why I’m comparing them here.

Both games require good to excellent hand-and-eye coordination (CS requires a little bit more though I think). They need the players to be alert and mindful of their enemies, may it be against the game AI’s or other players over the network or internet. They also have one major objective - killing the enemies and garnering high score stats.

So why am I comparing them, you ask? Well, I have a theory in mind. WarCraft and CounterStrike has an inherit ability to influence psychological and emotional empathy. This emphatic trait is attributed to psychological response of the players towards the game and the character units itself.

Sounds weird? Here’s more. In comparison, males are more responsive to CounterStrike while females are to WarCraft.

Males tend to be more emotionally violent and are more connected to their character or role they are playing. This is exhibited by extreme tactical behaviors in males during encounters. The more hostile or aggressive males tend to relate more with the Terrorist group while the docile players engage in passive and less aggressive tactics under the Counter-Terrorist group. Additionally, males become more vocal where verbal attacks or cursing supplements their tactical scheme. Consequently, players become more coordinated and shows above average support system which brings loyalty and bonding.

On the contrary, females show various unique perceptual affiliation with characters in WarCraft 3. They become more defensive and less confrontational, something the females rarely exhibit in the real social world. Emphatic behavior towards the character units is also strong. This is commonly observed when the units are Human race. Intense passion associated with main characters such as Heroes are also prevalent during battles and confrontation. This results to loss of focus on the entire army which is shifted to a single unit. Escapism (teleporting units back to base) is also predominant on surprise attacks.

These are mere observations only and are not entirely supported by psychological studies or research. To cite some instances, a number of my male friends who tried playing CS found themselves cursing all throughout the game when in fact they rarely curse in their entire life. Likewise, the men tend to throw cuss words to their opponents indiscriminately.

On the contrary, the ladies experience occasional delusions with WarCraft characters. This is coupled with in-fight dreams. One lady player remembers battling Forest Trolls in her dream, glimpsed an Archmage crossing the street while driving and seeing the Brilliance Aura right where I stand. They also have lapses and tend to talk in WarCraft terms. For instance, the girl was asked to accompany a friend to the mall and she mentioned “i-right-click mo” instead of “samahan mo”.

These might be isolated cases but the trend is pretty much comparable. I will not delve into the human psyche any deeper but if you too have any experience of some sort with these games, send me a note.

by: yuga

In the years that have passed, I would say that I saw the birth (well, almost) and growth of the newest and most frequently replaced home appliance - the computer. Why do I refer to is as a home appliance, you would ask? Well, I don’t know about you but I use my PC to watch movies, play CDs of my favorite music, and listen to the radio via internet streaming. I could have even watch TV and listen to local radio stations if I had a TV/FM tuner card installed. Pretty much like your common household appliance, eh?!

First time I saw a computer was at my grandpa’s house in the city. It was a device for playing chess made by Texas Instrument and you can hook it to the phone line to play against an opponent miles away. I forgot what else it could do but it was the size of a keyboard. The year was 1989 and I was just in grade five.

Then two years later my uncle brought back from the states what seemed to be a small green-screen TV that looks like an electric typewriter. It was my very first PC, or so I thought was mine since nobody else knows how to use it. If I remember right, it was an IBM PC clone 80×86 with double 5.25 floppy drives. And yes, it boasts of 640 kilobytes of memory which was, by the way, too much for the current applications at that time. It had MS DOS 3.0 to boot it up. Lasted about another year until I plugged it in a 220V socket and went kaput.

The following year, my same uncle brought home a new one he got from a sale in one of the stores in the states. This one’s much better. It’s an IBM desktop 286 with 2 Megabytes of RAM, a 3.5″ floppy drive and a CGA monitor from Hewllet Packard. What’s more exciting with this PC is that it has a hard drive. Yes, a 40 MB hard drive made by Priam. It also runs on Windows 3.0 and it was ultra cool! It was the first time I learned how to use a mouse too. That was the time I could finish a game of Minesweeper in 7 seconds tops (the beginner level). Too bad the HD broke down after I tinkered with the Stacker program which runs the compression of the drive. Failing to find a replacement hard drive, I settled for a 3.5″ floppy drive and a 5.25″ drive B.

That poor PC went on like that for years. I even brought it here in Manila when I studied for college back in 1995. It didn’t really have that much use since all I could do with it is play games (tons of them!) and do word processing using WordStar. Heck, I can memorize almost all WS keyboard commands and shortcuts then. Alas, the parallel port had already gone bonkers so I have no use for a printer.

Got tired of the thing so I lent it to a roommate who gladly used it to do some spare time programming using Pascal. Well, good for him since he pretty much enjoyed it. He became very good at it too. Now, my problem was how to get a new PC for myself - a better and faster one.

To my surprise and after several months of haggling with my parents, I got a new one. It’s an Acer laptop packed with a Cyrix 486-DX4 100MHz with 8MB RAM and 220MB of drive space. Though it only had Windows 3.1 installed, I later replaced it with Windows 95 after asking help from a friend. Adding MS Plus! didn’t work since an 8MB of RAM couldn’t load them all. I had to save several thousand bucks from my savings in order to buy another 8 MB to satisfy that urge of installing more apps. The LCD wasn’t colored and it didn’t have a CDROM drive but during those times I was more than content. Besides, I could run Warcraft 1 and play against a friend using a data cable thru the printer port. That was enough.

Years later, I got a Pentium II 300 PC and then upgraded it to Pentium 3 450MHz. Now, I’m using a Pentium 4 1.4GHz with 256 MB RDRAM. When I look up a decade ago, this rig was unimaginable. Even Bill Gates once said that we couldn’t use up all the 640KB of RAM even if we loaded all the programs in the world, he was wrong. Processing speed had gone almost 100 times faster now compared to a decade ago. Drive capacity increased 2,000 times. Even the number of transistors that can fit in a square inch of silicon die multiplied from several hundred thousands to hundreds of millions in less than a decade.

It was so fast. Your newly bought PC could be the slowest in 6 months and obsolete in 18 months. Yet, we never got tired of upgrading each time. Maybe except for me, I got tired years ago.

by: Karla Vanessa Redor

A classmate of mine in my second year college introduced me to the world of forums. I started out with the very popular PinoyExchange. Then I joined other forums like PinoyForum, ad Barrio Alimasag. After which, I accidentally discovered Rebelde.Com and has become a member of it. Now, I’m an active member Grabeh.Com and I’m one of the Grabeh Yayas taking care of the Grabeh Babies.

I found joy in posting in the forums and reading what others have to say. In posting, I am able to express myself to the Online Community. I am able to say what my opinions, beliefs are. In addition to that, I’m able to give advices to others. Being of help to other people makes me happy. But then, I sometimes question myself that “Hey, am I forgetting myself?” From reading posts of other members, I am able to learn something. With that, I am able to connect through them since I know what they ought to say and likewise they know what I ought to say.

I have met a lot of friends in the forums especially in the Rebelde and Grabeh community. We may not be seeing each other that often but I am close to some of the members and you know who you are. I even get to chitchat with them through SMS, MSN Messenger and Yahoo Messenger, and send them e-mails as well. I have shared with them my problems and I’m glad that they are there to listen and comfort me. I never thought that I would find such friends here since I have had once the perception that many people online are just joking around.

To the creator of the forums… thank you for making a significant change in my life.

by: Nerbie

IT’S been more than six years since the first time I got hooked into this surfing the world wide web. If I remember it right the first website I was able to visit was talkcity.com. Talkcity offers free homepages to people who want to make a mark on the web. Once you sign-up you can also chat using their servers. With several chat channels on that server you can talk to people around the globe. Wow! That’s been my early reaction when I started to get amazed on how this Internet entertains me.

With the Internet, anyone can easily satisfy his or her hobby. From collecting funny stories, poems, jokes, lyrics, games to downloading pictures of friends, favorite bands, rare collections of celebrity info, mp3 files and a lot more. I didn’t even think that people around the globe would have a chance to meet other people with different cultures, colors, features and way of life in a snap of a modem dial-up.

The most amusing fact why this Internet really makes it as an Entertainment gateway is that the way it has given the gamers a chance to play against with each other, wherever the players might be. Gamers can be cyber heroes by playing it good and hard in bringing the name of their respected country as a great gamers capital. The feeling is good when you beat another gamer in other country. I was also beaten several times in some of my early Internet gaming experience however; the fun is always there. As long you use the Internet wisely and in good manner it is worth to spend some time online.