Here are some screenshots:

Developing for a single console is quicker and easier – especially important for a game that will probably have more updates than the average game.

There are suggestions that one or both of Sony and Microsoft aren’t happy about cross-platform multiplayer games.

Since the idea of the game (a console FPS interacting with a PC MMO) is quite revolutionary they could get a lot of support (both financially and in terms of marketing and other benefits) from the console manufacturer, but only if it’s exclusive.

That being said, it may not be the end for the Xbox 360 and DUST.  Sony have suffered recently and definitely have lower consumer confidence (will players have to give Sony any personal information to play DUST?) and this decision will have been made long before Sony’s hacking problems. If sales are lower than CCP hope they may rethink the plan. And remember, “exclusive” in the games industry can be a vague and rarely lasts for ever.

The game is scheduled for a Spring release so at least 360-only owners have a while to decided if they want to get a PS3 just for this game…

I stand by most of what I said my initial post, but with a little specificity. It’s not ASP.net that’s the problem but Webforms. Unfortunately at the time Webforms was all you ever saw. There are alternatives around today (and may have been back then but none were especially high profile and none were by Microsoft).

These days of course Webforms are very much out of fashion. Following on from the success of Rails (and then many) Microsoft realised that Webforms weren’t an idea that could keep up with modern web development. A quick glance at the ASP.net home page today shows four out of five articles talking solely about ASP.net MVC and one article talking about both MVC and Webforms (of course that will vary by day I but I doubt the result will be very different).

So taking into account a minor title change (ASP.net Webforms suck!) I’d say my original point stands…

XBMC have announced a new partership with Sony. It will include the assimilation of the XBMC team into Sony’s Home Theatre and Console division and the closing of the XBMC source.

Presumably a PS3 port will be forthcoming…

So if anyone needs web hosting, consider Site5.

I’d been considering the move for a while and a new feature (well I’m not sure how new it is but I only just noticed it) is a new smaller instance type. The virtual servers Amazon offer used to come in three sizes, small medium and large starting at $0.10*. Pretty quickly they added some bigger sizes (going all the way up to $2.00 per hour for quadruple extra large) as well as some more specialized types like GPU clusters. But it still meant the minimum price per month for a server always on was about $74/month which is expensive for simple web hosting.

Now however, their new micro instances are available at a pretty cool $0.02/hour (about $15 a month). For the performance you’re likely to get it’s still probably not the most cost effective solution for plain web hosting, but for having complete access to a server with high availability (and the extra features hosting on Amazon’s infrastructure provides like being able to clone a whole server with one click) it’s pretty good.

One final note is to remember that these numbers are not the final costs you’ll have to pay. You still pay for storage and data transfer which in my case look like they’ll be about an extra 10% extra.

* Since then the price of the small instance has come down to $0.085/hour or about $63/month.

Buy Minecraft

Minecraft is a clever indie game that has developed something of a cult following of late. It’s an odd sandbox game of building random stuff and surviving attacks by skeletons. Or something. To be honest I’m not really sure (except for the building) since I haven’t actually played it. The reason I bought it (and would like you to buy it) is largely unrelated to the game itself.

Apparently a group of self righteous players are unhappy with the progress the game has made recently and have issued an ultimatum that they will launch a DDoS attack at the games servers until there are signs that development is continuing at a speed more to their liking. The assumption is that with the game down the developer will have a lower income and no choice to give in to their demands.

A few blogs (and even the Escapist) have a more detailed account of the situation:

Living Worlds – Don’t Let Terrorists Win
Tradeskill Perspectives – Gamer Entitlement Going Too Far
Escapist – Minecraft Brought Down by DDoS Attack

There is a small part of me that is worried that this is a clever conspiracy to gain attention and sympathy, but since the game is only 10€ anyway I figured it was worth the risk.

For a page to be eligible all you need to do is add a few meta tags to it specifying it’s  name and type (film, book, actor, product, game etc.). To actually do anything useful, you then add a Facebook “like” button. Once some people have liked it, it appears in their Facebook news feed like any other item (with the data you added in the meta tags). One of the optional meta tags you can add specifies user IDs of Facebook users who can administrate the page. If you do, you can get access to the same sort of admin page you get with any traditional Facebook page.

Conveniently I just developed a use for this sort of thing so I added support to my blog. A few edits to the theme and cunning use of WordPress’s custom fields and now any page or post on my site can support Open Graph. Currently the only support is on the Gravitas page.