Save the Internet : Fighting for Internet Freedom

Net nutrality is a BIG deal. Think not? Obviously you think so because you play internet games or you wouldn't be here. And obviously you play indie games or you wouldn't be here. And obviously you realize that expanded bandwidth costs for people who actually use the internet for more than surfing and e-mail would put a lot of the businesses you support out of business. And so obviously you are going to rush right over and sign this...right? Good.

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Holy Thermalpaste OC Man!

I haven't overclocked since the days of the Celeron 300A and for that Tom's calls me an older person. I forgive them in this case because they have broken some crazy news. Apparently the little CPU that could has arrived again in the form of the Pentium D 805. This little $130 bad boy can be juiced up to run at 4 Ghz with little effort and a few parts and blows the doors off of every other CPU they've tested including those extreme bad boys running a grand or more.

New 804 processor ... $130
New high end mobo ... $150
Couple gigs of DDR2 ... $200

Kicking the snot out of everyone else at the lan party .... ok, ok that's a whip.

A 4.1 GHz Dual Core at $130 - Can it be True? | Tom's Hardware

Fun with Reports

I've been meaning to start sharing some of the sillier things we get in our .report log everyday. Today, post patch is a great place to start. This one isn't that funny but to me is speaks to the zen of being a producer and dealing with the subscriber base. The best of them appreciate what you do and want it to be better while the worst of them like to remind you that they pay your salary and demand to make it better. What's great is the former usually will happily supply you with the information you need to meet your goals while the later has 4 year old drivers on thier AC'97 and will cuss you out for your ignorance. If anyone tells you that MMOs aren't a service industry you have my permission to punch them in the snout.

2006-05-10 18:01:20  playerName   English 3rd Commandos playerName mission near Moerdijk N51.41.40 E4.39.8 origin: Willemstad
  "low FPS"

2006-05-10 18:02:07  playerNmae     German 17.Infanterie 2.Kampfgruppe 
playerName mission near Wuustwezel N51.25.27 E4.35.7
    "thxs CRS my fps's actually got better"
Is that zen or what. Oh and just so you know I wasn't talking about the above posters when I was talking about the worst of them. I was talking about this guy...

2006-05-10 17:49:23  playerName German 1.Panzer 1 Kampfgruppe playerName mission near Andenne N50.29.43 E5.5.39 origin: Huy
  "after this patch allies shoot more then bevor during walls trees and...and..and.....stand in a house and stand on free field is the same now for axis.....allies see us during all walls and and and...lol...now is enough..i will cancel my subsciption after my payed period...i dont pay money for crap"
I hate to see ya go my friend. Seriously if you'd drop me an email I'd be happy to listen to you vent and I might just be able to make things better. Let's start with those drivers m'kay?

Vanguard Gets a New Pub.

Or loses a kinda new one and goes home to mama, depending on who you ask. Vanguard's leader Brad McQuaid, he of mass EQ design fame has announced he's taking his Virtual World and going home, to SOE, whom he left over creative vision differences, kinda like he just left MS for...

I always got the impression that Vanguard would be the WWIIOL of Elves and Orcs. Detailed, complicated and thus appealing to a very hardcore set of players. I sort of always expected it to be a really amazing world, full of complexity in social interactions and deep economic and trade models. A real academics dream. You know, kinda like what Mr. Koster did with SWG. You know like made it so I wouldn't want to play it. I'm sure a lot of you feel that way about what we've done with WWIIOL and I always kinda liked Brad's answer which has been, Hey, this game is gonna rock and it might not be for you. This is great in a post WoW world where we all finally got our carny ride game that everyone can enjoy but at the same time because not only is it missing my favorite Feature X, it's also missing all of yours! Vanguard was gonna be different. It was gonna be Brad's Feature X's and if we wanted along for the ride the more the merrier. In hindsight it seems natural that MS would bail on that sort of non mass appeal thinking but what really made me smirk is that also in hindsight, it appears to be the kind of games that SOE is making. That Station Pass business is pretty brilliant. Guess that's why the old Playnet crew is so bent because it didn't work for them 6 years ago when they founded a company to do just that.

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AGEIA is a bust.

Ever since AGEIA announced the PhysX Physics Processing Unit some years ago people (including our CEO) have bandied the idea about. Everyone wants this to seem cool right, I mean c'mon more hardware, dedicated to physics even, MUST be a great thing. Some of the braver ones have even bothered to look me in the eye or write a dev question and ask abot the subject. My general reply is to look at them as if they are completely out of their mind, give them a doctor spock-brow and slowly utter the most confusing word they appear to have ever heard. "No."

Occassionally we then go into the details of why a seperate physics card is moronic. Market penetrationg, inability to run actual game play physics on it in a multi-player environment, and the little fact that 2 giant companies already make add in cards for your PC and they are some of the most insane hardware out there and they have more spare processing power than HAL just lying around for things like physics if it was a good idea or when it becomes a good idea and besides, seriously, do you think for a second that Nvidia is gonna let some n00b roll into the playground and muscle in some $200 add on cards. Yah! Uki. kkbye.

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