Online Again…
Well its been a while since I bothered having and using a blog, but I thought I should update and use wordpress rather than trying to maintain my own type.
I have ported over about 65% of the old posts/articles that I had on the old site, however all comments have been lost 
and all images will have moved, so it will just be text only stuff in the old posts.
I will try and port the rest of them over later!
ISP Police
First of all before I start ranting, i only know what i have read on the net about all of this, so i may be spouting utter rubbish. However im going to start spouting anyway...
Im sure you have been reading the recent articles scattered around the net about the Film/Music bigwigs telling ISPs that they need to disconnect their users if they catch them doing P2P downloading, and im finding it a bit silly.
The big wigs are all scared because too many people are basically stealing their products online using Peer 2 Peer software, which is completely understandable, however as they cant find a good way to stop this happening it looks like they are turning to the ISPs and making them do the leg work for them. Now this wouldnt be too bad if there was some incentive for the ISPs to do this, so they can make their money back from disconnecting problem users or if the big wigs invested some money to help the firms update their connections etc. However they dont seem to be doing squat except for constantly telling everyone that they are losing money.
Now i understand it costs money to make this music and things, and they are people with jobs who need to get paid at the end of the day but most of the income gets distributed amongst the fat cats of the relevent industry, which means the people who are making the films/music probably dont lose out on that much money from all this downloading. Now i could be wrong, and im sure there are alot of artists who have lost out money down to people stealing their music, but did they really deserve ALL that money in the first place? Now if someone went from making £1,000,000 from a single then only made £900,000 due to masses of people downloading, is that really such a massive loss? To people like you and me £100,000 is loads of money and could afford a small house, but to people who are already making a mint from it all then its not that much really.
Most of the artists who dont make as much from music and films etc really need the income, but chances are there wont be that many people sharing or downloading their product as they are not as mainstream. So looking at it from this angle its only really the MASSIVELY overpaid artists and studios who lose out a sizable amount, and its not going to make or break them really.
So after reading the above if it is almost all correct then you can see the situation as the following...
Bigwigs are wanting ISPs to save them £1,000,000's in lost sales by making them lose £1,000,000's in customers.
So does that seem right? not really... and this problem hasn't suddenly appeared overnight, its been around for decades, since VCRs were used to copy tapes and the like, so they are always going to have losses due to people copying and stealing their stuff, its the same with people who get burgled every day, and shops that have shoplifters steal from them.
Anyway i think im going off topic and just ranting for the sake of it, but i dont see why they should automatically assume that ISPs should pick up the torch, which will no doubt cost them alot of money in lost sales and increased hardware costs to improve the way they track users online...
On a more gaming related note, im currently re-playing Mass Effect with Mez as well as Fallout 3 with Jode. After talking to Arnie for a while i thought Bioware should re-release a slightly updated version of Baldurs Gate on the DS, it would fit perfectly and they had an unreleased PSX version which shows that the hardware could handle it fine. Screen may be a bit of a squeeze with all the text but they could easily find some way round that... Also if they used the DS wifi for allowing mutliplayer on it they would be onto a winner. The R/D into it and development changes would be a small snip for the amount of income they would make from the sales, as they already have the content and storyline etc, so most of the content is done and just needs porting... get on it Bioware... and give Dragon Age multiplayer while you are there...
Not much to report
I havent really done much recently, so not much point in me making any major updates...
Ive spent alot of time at work recently having to make sure their project hits its deadline.
Spent the other spare time ive had working on the Php game, as we are working on an alternative front end...
Death Note & Days Of Ruin
If you have more than one brain cell and like Anime then chances are you have heard of Death Note...
Its a masterpiece, I REALLY enjoyed watching it but its only now that i think back to how engrossing it was that i can really appreciate it. If by any chance you have not heard of it...
It's about a student who comes across a notebook that can kill people by writing down their name in it. Now i know that may not seem like the best series ever, however the main characters in it are SOOOOOO god damn intelligent that their turds are possibly more intelligent than most people...
Even though its over i keep noticing IGN giving updates on where the US are up to with it, as it believe they are currently watching dubbed versions or something, and i keep wishing that the series didnt end after the 30 odd episodes. Its not often that i wish a series didn't end, im usually quite happy for most tripe to end after 20 episodes or so, however Death Note kept me engrossed for about 95% of the episodes, and i watched them all back to back for about a week straight after work.
Even if you are not a MASSIVE anime fan i HIGHLY recommend taking a look at this series if you can appreciate intelligent series.
On another note i also picked up Days of Ruin the other day when i was on the way to Flint to pass the time while Jen was driving. Anyway its quite a decent game, and im not usually impressed by games in general these days. It starts off well and kept the pace going while still keeping to the simple Turn Based Strategy playstyle. Well worth a look at if you have a DS, its even got online so you can play on Nintendo WFC or against friends... i will give it a bit more of a go later...
Incase you forgot... go watch Death Note... oh and possibly Bleach, although it only REALLY gets good after episode 5.
OH NOES, ILLEGAL DOWNLOADERS ARE NOT SAFE!!
After the news article the other day about them discussing implementing a system to stop people illegally downloading i couldn't help but laugh quite a bit.
For those of you who ain't heard its basically a case of ISPs would monitor if you are downloading illegal material, such as movies and mp3s and then they would send you an email telling you off. Then if you carried on doing it they would just disconnect your internet.
Now to most people who dont know too much about the internet but still scour for MP3s and other things, they may be crapping themselves right now, which is the desired effect. However for those people who are quite familier with the internet and computers in general know that this is a pile of crap.
To start with if they *did* implement this system within the first day their email servers would probably crash out due to all the emails it would have to send, as lets face it we all know LOTS of people who use the internet to get the odd MP3. Also one other thing that would happen is alot of ISPs would lose out on LOTS of money, as there are a few ISPs who are based around P2P downloading and they offer LOTS of speed and LOTS of usage, however if most of their customer base gets taken away they wont be too happy.
Before i go any further, they *could* implement this system, which they possibly will do in the future. However chances are it will be heavily relient upon checking where your data is coming from and what it contains. Thats all well and good if you are downloading from www.illegalmp3s.com, however most of the P2P applications that are used these days can make use of encryption on the data meaning they cant see what you are downloading anyway. So as far as the ISPs know you are just downloading lots of little things from other people, that will tell them you are P2P downloading. However P2P downloading ISNT ILLEGAL, its meant for sharing legal files, Blizzard uses bittorrent to allow people to share their patches and im sure lots of other companies do, to keep their bandwidth down.
So with this in mind if P2P apps just encrypt the data they send you are still in the clear.
Does anyone other than me notice that they are always pointing the fingers at P2P downloading and illegal sites, which to be fair are widely used for illegal downloading. However they never seem to point the finger at newsgroups, who to the experienced internet user is like the greatest library for illegal downloads known to man. This is quite funny really as for most decent news groups you have to pay, I know someone who paid £20 for a month of unrestricted downloading from newsgroups, which im sure was great for them, however where does that £20 go?
If you have £10-20 from each user and you have a few thousand users thats about £15,000 you would be taking in per month, and i doubt its ALL going on server costs. So why are the record and movie people screaming their lungs out about ISPs/P2P/illegal sites making so much money from illegal downloaders when they infact must make a pitance. I heard some bigwig on the radio complaining about how they are losing out on SOOOOO much money due to illegal downloading, and they want to make sure that the money goes to the artists and other bigwigs.
Now legally thats great, they put in the work and they should get the rewards, however its a joke really.
Do you ever see ANY poor mainstream artists or film companies?
Nope didn't think so, they make MORE than enough money, and thats even after the big wigs have taken their MASSIVE share. So i dont really see anything wrong with them losing some cash on illegal downloading as long as they make a reasonable amount on the legit sales. Im not condoning illegal downloading nor am i saying i agree with it, however the other end of the coin is siding with the big wigs, and i would never really want to do that as they are just greedy bastards.
SO! to summarise, if you are worrying, dont bother... if you are not worrying good job, if you are downloading illegal stuff, stop it...
Xbox Live
So we went to have an xbox live 48 hour freebie last weekend, in the hope that we could team up on stuff like Gears of War and other split screen games.
However Xbox being the bastards they are required 2 Xbox Live accounts to play online split screen. Only game i know that lets you just play the way you want is Halo. Unfortunatly Halo in my eyes is as much fun as playing UT 2003 on a NES pad. That being said we still had a quick go on Halo 3, although the maps we were given were crap, no vehicles and only some pistols and rifles...
Mez then decided that he was going to get a months free trial on Xbox live. AWESOME we could play GoW online together then, unfortunatly it was fairly dull... I remember playing it with Jode and it was a right laugh, although this time the maps were dull, i couldnt tell who was who and everyone had sniper rifles who could 1 shot me, and i didnt even know where the other weapons were.
After getting bored of that we spent the rest of the day taking turns on Rainbow Six : Vegas, and Battlefield Modern War. We also tried Kane and Lynch, although we couldnt remember what the controls were, and ended up just getting killed constantly.
Although i wasnt overly impressed by the many FPS titles we had to play on Xbox live, i still think its the best online system associated with a console to date. I dislike the fact that even though you shell out £35+ for a game you still have to pay £35+ to play online with your friends, its not an MMO, although to be fair i guess microsoft needs some income to support live even if they do have a field of money trees already.
The Man, The Myth, The Legend...User bars
Got bored the other day and decided to make some user bars for the Php game, however I then got quite into it and started making some other user bars.
Suikoden
Breath of Fire:
Samurai Champloo
Partying Powered By Shed Beats
So on friday after work TheDruidKing was telling us all about this crazy party near Bangor, and as i haven't been out for a drink since the days of University... or the last Christmas Party... I thought WHY NOT!
It started out as Alex and myself wandering round Bangor drinking random stuff and playing pool, as well as laughing at a stupid gambling machine... After the first couple of hours had flown by and we had drunk a significant amount it was off to ShedBeats to see some live music and talk to some friends...
This then turned out to be a surreal night where I became an Aristocrat and told everyone "I like the cut of your jib". After the initial hour there i had befriended the first band The Thingumajigs. I also stole their hat for a while to become an OFFICIAL aristocrat, then stole the DJs hat...
After another hour or so of wandering round and drinking more we met up with some more work collegues and went and crashed some 18th Birthday Party a few rooms down. Although they didn't seem to understand what an aristocrat is and why i would hire them because i liked the cut of their jib... I missed the 2nd set, which was some other band but ran inside again for the last set after seeing TheDruidKing for another few mins as he devoured half a pint of baileys and ran back inside.
The Screaming Citizens were the last set and Sir Alan recorded a quick movie on his phone. After that madness has ended we hopped into the Alanmobile and drove to TheDruidKings house and crashed, apparently it didnt all end here though as someone has a movie of us playing the guitar and drums although i cant play the guitar and dont remember this...
Was a good night out followed by a day on the beach with a Barbecue where i got sunburned and stumbled home afterwards...
Mexican Jeff Presents…
Well as we haven't bothered posting any of our culonary creations on here in a while i thought it would be a nice time to add our own Firecracker Tacos to the site... Im not entirely sure if they were Tacos or just something alltogether different...
[Images No Longer On Host]
Sorry for the crappy quality i was taking the pictures with my phone, anyway we chowed down on those bad boys and were quite impressed with ourselves for making something that didnt look like vomit... We also had a tragic game of Wii Golf where Jode emerged on top by some bizzare turn of events. Needless to say Mexican Jeff was in tears at losing his hard earned skill points.
We then finished off by playing the classic 1990s Turtles arcade game on the Xbox, i could have sworn that Donatello was the best character, but he was pants... After about 30 mins of playing it 3 player we realised it wasnt worth the £4 or so that we paid for it...
For those of you who still play WoW out there, we all seemed to create Paladin characters a couple of weeks ago for a laugh... i mean who doesnt want wings on their character! I've managed to get mine up to about level 50 now and i must say that they are not too bad with the combat revamp from TBC!