Wait, what?  As reported by a recent CNN article, it appears Microsoft is doing something that will help the customer and at the same time hurt them!

It appears that the beta version of Internet Explorer 8 has a new feature that is getting a lot of attention: InPrivateBlocking (Firefox is planning on releasing something similar…eventually).  The basic idea behind this is to take user invisibility on the web to the next level.  Instead of taking “cleanup” approaching of clearing user’s temporary files and cookies the browser doesn’t allow them to be downloaded in the first place.

The temporary files and cookies are what enable websites to track what sites you visit, what ads you click, how to market to you, and in some cases, allow the installation of spyware and malware - think of them as your internet fingerprints.  Microsoft’s move to give users this option is interesting because Microsoft’s own advertising software uses these internet fingerprints to target ads to you…they are hurting one of their businesses while improving another.

For the users this is a great option.  Internet anamolitity is something that, in the past, we could only dream about.  The idea of no one tracking where you went, what you viewed, and what you bought is refreshing.  What is the down side though?  For one - if this feature becomes popular the ads you see on sites will not be as revelant to what you actually like.  This isn’t the end of the world for the user, who typically ignores the ads anyway, but it could spell disaster for websites’ income.  As a result of lower revenue from ads sites might have to turn back to subscribition services, which I personally hate.

So do you mind sacrificing a little privacy to help make more of the web free or would you rather pay for things (with registration…and lose that privacy anyway) and not see as many ads?  Tough call.

With the slated release date of September 18th, Warhammer Online is fast approaching.  While the hype for this game has certainly matched the level that you would expect from a so-called “WoW Killer,” many folks are still questioning whether WAR will finally be the game that takes down Blizzard’s dominance in the MMO marketplace.

The bigger issue at hand, however, is not if the game succeeds - but rather, what if it fails?  WAR represents the last game “in the queue” for quite some time that could possibly stand a chance at competing with WoW.  If WAR follows in the footsteps of Age of Conan, it stands a chance to quickly fizzle as the critics tear any small problems to bits.  Indeed, if some of the comments coming out of the NDA release from closed beta hold true, it looks like WAR might actually provide some fairly large targets for the critics to hit.

Here’s hoping that Mythic has done their research and realzies what Warhammer Online can do for the MMO industry… and the consequences of an epic failure come launch time.

With Warhammer is scheduled to release these September many people are trying to find way to get into the Beta.  Some of the ways seem to be more work than they are worth: either writting up a lot of lore or creating a professional looking fan art piece.  Personally, I would like to take the easy way: Preodering the game.

By preordering you get the following:

• Invite to the beta.  You are guaranteed a spot.
• Live game head start.  No you don’t keep to keep going with your beta character, but you do get to start playing a few days before everyone else.  If you are a casual gamer this is great because there won’t be 10 million people running around taking your kills, etc.  If you a hardcore gamer these few extra days can give you the edge over the other insane people.
• In game item.  Which item you get is determined by which store you pre-order from.  You can visit this site for more details on what store gives you what items.  Personally, all of the EQJunkies pre-ordered from Amazon:

Does this mean we are giving up EQ2?

• No, not yet.  Landuran brought up a good point: we were going to give Warhammer a shot at some point, so why not give it a shot in the beginning?

After trying multiple times to get MythTV working with Ubuntu 8.04 I kept running into problems.  It seemed that the majority of the problems centered around getting the latest ivtv drivers to compile correctly on the system: I just was not able to get it to work.

I am a very stubborn person, so trust me when I say I tried lots of different ways to compile the driver.  For whatever reason, it just would not work right for me.  I even tried Mythbuntu, which was gave me even more problems with database passwords and such.  That being said, I started to look for alternatives.  The hardcore geek in me turned to Slackware Linux, the stubborn guy said “lets give Ubuntu one more shot”, the adventurous spirit insisted that Gentoo Linux looked like fun, and finally the practical guy said that MythDora seemed like it would just work.

I have had a Slackware install before; it is an awesome distribution with a very cool name & logos.  When I installed it last it seemed all the configuration stuff was done command line style and they kind of just set you loose on the system - I ultimately wasn’t in the mood for this much work.  I couldn’t bring myself to try Ubuntu again - it was obvious it was just becoming a time sink for me.  It seemed that every new way of installing my PVR-150 would just end at a new type of error.  I have only heard good things about Gentoo Linux, including Myclawz compiling it completely from source to get a server working.  Again though, I wasn’t in the mood for that much work.  I know I could have just installed it the easy way, but what is the point of installing Gentoo if you don’t compile for source?  So, if you have been keeping track, you would know that left me with MythDora 5.0.

I had tried MythDora when I believe they were on release 3.0 (maybe).  It installed, but was giving me lots of issues - not something I wanted out of the “easy way”.  It was time to give 5.0 a shot.

I downloaded the DVD ISO and burned it to a disk.  It was at this point that I remembered that the old system I was dealing with only had a CD drive - I had to wait another 20 minutes to download both CD ISOs.  On the first attempted install everything was going smoothly - they even had an option to install the ivtv drivers during the install process…I was impressed and encouraged.  About 50% way through copying the files over my system restarted - I don’t know why exactly, but looking back on it, it was probably because something shorted out (I had the board resting on a book with wires all over the place).  I restarted the install and everything went smoothly.  I didn’t have to enter passwords for the database or anything too special - just a root password.

At the end of the install it had a button to configure MythTV - I just had to tell it I had cable and sign up for a SchedulesDirect account (20/year) so I could get the listings.  After configuring everything it automatically asked me to run mythfilldatabase, which puts all the channel listings in the database.  Once the computer finished doing this, I was off and running.  MythTV worked perfectly with my old PIII 933 on 384 MB of RAM.  The real trick was having a hardware encoder for the TV stream: PVR-150.

I must say I was really impressed with MythDora this time around and would recommend it to anyone.  All I have left to do is to buy a remote and also a video card with a TV out.

Like always, if you have any questions about exactly how I did this just leave a comment.

UPDATE:  I installed the Intel drivers from 6/08 (I had to update them through device manager) and they did not make any change to the game play.

My girlfriend recently moved closer to me and consequently I have been spending a lot of time at her place.  This is great and all, but she does not have a gaming machine.

She does have  a Toshiba Portege M400 Tablet PC.  It sports an Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 950, which is not the best.  She did upgrade the RAM to 3 GB and had been playing WoW on it with no problems - I figured EQ2 was worth a shot.

After transferring EQ2 from an external hard drive I started it up.  The loading screen looked amazing - there was hope.  As soon as I got into the game things were choppy.  I immediately went to the graphic settings and turned everything down (as low as they would go)- it helped a little.

I also went in and turned the wide screen letter box all the way up to max.  This also helped, but by no means was the game playable (or recognizable for that matter).  I didn’t bother to see how many FPS I was getting - I know it was horrible.

Considering her computer has a Core 2 Duo and 3 GB RAM I am force to believe it was the Intel graphics card that killed any hope of getting this to work.  It used shared memory and was able to go up to 128 MB in XP.  After some research I noticed that in Vista it could go up to 256 MB.

She was planning on formatting her computer anyway and just happen to have a copy of Vista Ultimate laying around.  After a little bit of trouble loading the correct raid drivers for her computer, the install went smoothly.  We updated all the drivers and I immediately loaded up EQ2 - the extra memory did not help much.

At best, one would be able to run around and do some harvesting, but I would never trust this computer for play in a group.

EQ2 is a much more demanding game (graphics wise) than WoW is and that was crystal clear after this.

There is still hope though - she just got a MacBook…I will keep you posted.

I have noticed overt the past few weeks that the Wordpress spam filter is going crazy marking everything as spam - even though many of the comments are legit.

I wanted to let everyone know we are aware of this issue and are working to correct it.  If you don’t see your message appear after you submit it, don’t worry - we are hand reviewing them daily until we get this sorted out.

Thank -

EQJ Team