Article of the Week about
 (FU) Image: Blizzard Entertainment Players must join together into groups of 5, 10, 25 or even 40 to defeat some of the more difficult encounters found in raids, such as Sapphiron from Naxxramas. World of Warcraft (also commonly abbreviated as WoW) is a Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG) that was released in North America in 2004 by Blizzard Entertainment. It is the fourth full game released by Blizzard Entertainment in the Warcraft series. WoW has seen paramount success, having sold over 11 million copies, and has been a great credit to MMORPG video games, introducing thousands of people to the genre. The game is available to play in several countries, including North America, Europe, China, Korea, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau, and is available in five languages (English, Spanish, French, German, and Russian).
While World of Warcraft was not the first game of its kind, it quickly became the most successful. Within twenty-four hours of launch World of Warcraft had sold over 240,000 copies in North America, setting a new record for launch day sales of a PC game. It was the best-selling PC game of 2005 and 2006, and within the first two years the game had over one million subscribers in North America and over one million subscribers in Europe. DFC Intelligence said that "[t]his, in and of itself, is an astounding feat. No game had been able to top 750,000 subscribers in those territories, let alone one million or two million." As well as this, World of Warcraft had over five million subscribers in China. By 2008 World of Warcraft had over 11.5 million subscribers worldwide. As of 2010 World of Warcraft holds the Guinness World Record for Most Popular MMORPG. (Read more...)
|
New Draft of the Week about
NoSQL refers to a number of non-relational distributed database architectures. NoSQL architectures usually store data as key-value pairs, rather than supporting relations. Some systems eliminate the guarantee of consistency (instead promising eventual consistency) in order to increase scalability. The distributed nature of NoSQL architectures makes such data stores highly scalable and fault-tolerant.
History
The word "NoSQL" (Not Only SQL) was first used by Carlo Strozzi in 1998 referring to a file-based database he was developing, which is actually a relational database without a SQL interface. Some meaningful events during the evolvement of NoSQL include: MultiValue (aka PICK) databases developed in 1965; BerkeleyDB is created in 1996; Mnesia is developed by Ericsson as a soft real-time database to be used in telecom ( it does not use SQL as query language); CouchDB is started in 2005 and provides a document database which moves to the Apache Foundation in 2008; Google BigTable is started in 2004; Tokyo Cabinet is a successor to QDBM by (Mikio Hirabayashi) started in 2006; the research paper on Amazon Dynamo is released in 2007; the document database MongoDB is started in 2007 as a part of an open source cloud computing stack; Facebooks open sources the Cassandra project in 2008; Redis is persistent key-value store started in 2009; Riak is another dynamo-inspired database started in 2009; HBase is a BigTable clone for the Hadoop project while Hypertable is another BigTable type database also from 2009. In 2009, Eric Evans re-used it to describe current surge in non-relational databases. (Read more...)
|
