01 Dec 2005, 06:11
This, this and this, are some of the latest “horror stories” about retailers trying to abuse and screw their consumers.
Sometimes I think we deserve to be wiped out by a new and cataclismic Ice Age.
29 Nov 2005, 15:39
Due to popular demand (i.e. 3 of the 4 people who read this blog requested it, Trace being the last), I added a RSS 2.0 feed to the site. It can’t be viewed directly as XML in the browser because I don’t know how to make the server output that page typed as XML. Nothing serious I guess. I tested it with RSS Reader but I suppose people will complain that they want support for 0.
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28 Nov 2005, 15:16
Damn, this is bad news! Stainless Steel brought us Empire Earth, Empires, and were working on the absolutely gorgeous Rise and Fall. Although not my personal favourite RTS games, they were very well done and showed all the technical and artistic talent of the SSSI crew. I had the pleasure to meet Rick Goodman a few times, and it was apparent he loved his job and cared for his employees.
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22 Nov 2005, 10:02
Our official Games Industry Clown gets a nice slap in the face. Among other beauties: ‘Judge Moore stated that Thompson’s behaviour in court “suggests that he is unable to conduct himself in a manner befitting practice in this state.’"
Edit: JT didn’t like The Escapist’s take on him. Anything that makes him sad, makes me happy. Rejoice!
13 Nov 2005, 15:22
The recent revelations about “The Warden” (Blizzard’s anti-hack detection system for World of Warcraft) and Sony’s absurd DRM software (and its EULA), are making headlines everywhere. Are users being robbed of their (our) fundamental rights, or are companies simply exerting theirs? Is law really covering the topics, or are lawyers and companies merely abusing the system to build up power?
This article is very interesting. If you ever felt that Intellectual Property is being interpreted by law and the courts in ways that harm your fundamental rights, but you could never really explain why in reasonably formal terms, you’ll find plenty of arguments there.
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12 Nov 2005, 00:34
Microsoft has finally published the list of XBox games that work on the 360. Kudos to the BC team, and of course my brother, who played no small part in it.
Notable absences from that list: the Madden, Splinter Cell and Project Gotham Racing series, as well as Soul Calibur II. Another funny bit, Half Life 2 is on that list despite still being in the works.
08 Nov 2005, 11:23
So I guess I’m not the only one who finds it less than stellar. It’s just a first contact, but it’s been a rough ride: bugs and general slowness in the IDE, bugs in standard user interface elements (I managed to crash the scrollbar in the Output window!?!?!), the whole “security push” making a good chunk of the standard library deprecated by default.
Oh well I’m sure I will find good stuff after using it for some time.
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03 Nov 2005, 16:12
This movie is really disturbing, and many people (myself included) have been caught off-guard by it. It was brought to my attention again because the director is in charge of the film adaptation for Castlevania.
I love horror movies even though I tend to be very critical of them. However, this is now. When I was a kid, I spent 6 months on light medication after being scared to death by trailers for several movies like Alien, Phantasm and The Fog, which were released about the same time.
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01 Nov 2005, 03:01
Every now and then, a small independent movie filmed on a shoestring budget, manages to catch some attention. Primer reportedly cost $7000, and it shows: actors being also technicians, blurry focus, bad sound, you name it. But all that doesn’t matter, the movie tells an incredibly interesting story and has the perfect atmosphere. Guess what, it’s about a group of people who… do something great on a shoestring budget.
The sci-fi topics it deals with can be very hard to follow and understand at times, but don’t worry too much about precise and detailed explanations, just enjoy its twists and turns.
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29 Oct 2005, 03:15
Think about some of the issues they run into. Sure, Windows is bloated, the Win32 API is full of badly-formed interfaces, but… there’s also a lot of crap programmers around using it and preventing the Windows development team from cleaning up the system properly. So, what would YOU do?
– Let old & misbehaving programs crash? Many people wouldn’t upgrade to Vista.
– Leave the old stuff there? Well, this works once or twice, but after 10 years of Windows, the shit tends to accumulate in large piles.
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