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In Memoriam: Warhammer Age of Reckoning, Rest in Bits.
- byPhil H on2nd July, 2009 inOpinions
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Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to mourn the passing of Warhammer: Age of Reckoning. So it goes.
Some might say a funeral for WAR is a bit premature, after all the game still has enough subscribers that you could lose the populations of most MMOs in there, and though it is seeing a reduction in servers there are still some that are actually busy. But I'm going to call this one now. There is more to life in an MMO than simple server status and population, there’s hope, there’s a sense that great things are yet to come. Warhammer does not have these. It has a shrinking population biding their time until something better comes along and forums littered not with just posts about individuals leaving, but of guilds and alliances closing their doors. WAR is a terminal coma patient waiting for the switch to be thrown. It could rattle on for years, but it's no more alive than a steak dinner.
If anything the problems with Warhammer Age of Reckoning are more severe than those that blighted the equally ill-fated Conan MMO. Conan was so relentlessly bad once you got past the first few levels and into the PvP that it pretty much bled out its initial population in a couple of months and could rebuild from scratch, maybe save itself. For all that was wrong with Conan, and it was a lot, there was nothing wrong with it that couldn’t be put right without sweeping changes to class...
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Freelancers Cry Too
- bySpode on1st July, 2009 inOpinions
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I got a press release last week suggesting that freelance journalists were the “backbone of the press”. I know plenty of publications where 60-80% of content is derived from freelancers, so this is obviously quite true. However, whenever I attend events PRs seem much more interested in publications than freelancers. As a freelance it's easy to find yourself out of the loop and frankly, not treated as well. There's something wrong with this picture...
I remember back when I reviewed graphics cards, despite doing pretty much all the graphics cards reviews for a magazine, they would stipulate quite clearly that the invite was for “editors only”. So the editor gets shipped out to some foreign country for a fancy event that involves more drinking than working, while the copy monkeys sit at home. All they are doing is educating someone that will never write anything about the product – an exercise in futility.
And then, finally there is the phrase that “product allocation is one per publication”, which once again stiffs all the freelancers who mostly go home empty handed. Chances are, the sample will go into personal use and they will get a freelancer to review the product – who will have to get in a sample, with delay..
If we're the back bone of the press, why not treat us so? When I was working full time at Trusted Reviews, I was invited to all sorts of foreign, high budget trips. As a freelance, I can't remember the last time I...
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Asus Puts Seashells on Spode's Shore
- bySpode on25th June, 2009 inOpinions
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I've not been going to as many launches as I should be, so today I headed down to South Kensington where Asus had purloined the Lamborghini show room to demonstrate their latest range of products.
The two particular products I was interested in were the T91 and the Seashell – both of which I had an opportunity to have a hands on with.
The Seashell was a really nice device – slim, ergonomic, well designed and aesthetically pleasing. The keyboard was lovely to type on and it would feel cosy in anyone's bag. There wasn't an obvious D-SUB connector until you reach underneath where a panel pulls away to reveal a D-SUB port on a 1” cable that plugs into a port on the side. They showed for the first time some of the newer colours available and the metallic red looks really quite sexy.
It was obvious that they were chasing the Macbook Air market, with the rounded, uniform shape and design. Unfortunately this was also obvious with the lack of removable battery. With only 4-5 hours of battery life, I don't think that's enough to justify being sealed as you'd still need to carry around a power pack or spare battery.
Then of course there is the issue of replacing this battery, for when it eventually fails. Talking to Tim Smalley of Bit-Tech.net – he had already posed this question several times and Asus has tried its best to avoid giving him an answer. The pessimist in me wants...
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Life with Leyio
- bymonsieurledan on11th June, 2009 inOpinions
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I've been carrying the Leyio Personal Sharing Device (PSD) with me pretty much everywhere since writing about it a few of weeks ago. I show it to anyone that I think would be interested. Once I've explained its approach to offline sharing and what I think Leyio aims to add to that experience, I'm often given feedback and a few suggestions as to what might be improved upon.
Empathy with Leyio PSD seems to be quite easily reached, and most people appreciate the big picture - this device has USB incorporated in the best ways possible, and then brings Ultra Wide Band (UWB) to the table for us to start considering as a competitor to Bluetooth and other wireless sharing protocols. UWB would attract more users to the PSD if there were other devices that made use of it. Transfers are so fast and use so little power that this becoming a reality can't be too far off, can it?
Compliments that the Leyio receives include how easy on the eye its curves are, how the fingerprint scanner performs so well at being a quick way of securely gaining entry and then quite intuitive for navigating the menus, and how impressively long the battery lasts. Most of my student friends asked - "Where do you plug in headphones?" - and I think that question speaks volumes (pardon the extremely bad pun). I really hope this technology finds its way into my phone and/or MP3 player, or that future products of Leyio include...
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Google Wave: Next Step on Online Communication?
- bymonsieurledan on9th June, 2009 inOpinions
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Thanks for your thoughts Allan. I actually chose to write about Google Wave on my Telegraph blog this week. I'm waiting to hear about some of the first extensions to be developed by those that were at Google I/O and watched this speech live:
Google's open sourcing of the Wave protocol initially seemed like a mistake to me - I thought that surely there would be no room left for monetisation. After a brief chat with a friend of mine, I was reminded that "this is Google", and just having their brand name attached to it is enough.
Surely Google will run Wave as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) so they can charge a premium for businesses, just like they currently do with Google Apps. Either way, how long until I can drop mail.mled.me and start using wave.mled.me?
Google are leading from the front, demonstrating what can be achieved with HTML5 and showing everyone a better use for a real-time web than FriendFeed. Companies will be free to install and run their own rival platforms, and through open standards and some cunning API usage, Wave is inter-operable with any other hosted instance on outside servers.
Users will communicate as privately as possible and have easier control over privacy during open discussions than available with current mailing lists. Unless directly contacting a Google Wave account, nothing will pass through Google's servers if a discussion involves parties on other Wave servers.
I can see some potential similarities arising with the direction cloud computing is now headed, where both private and...
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