The State of the Industry....

While I was reading a funny article over at PCGameWorld I began to realise that this really is what the game industry is shaping up to be if it isn't already. The article while focusing on VU Games and Irrational Games follow-up to the Tribes Series; Tribes:Venegence, hits home on a lot of nessecary points. For the most part it's wrong that a publisher such as VU Games would publish a product and then leave it to dry. I think the publisher, if it chooses to fund and publish a product, should stick behind that product through thick and thin. Whether it be in the form of patches (such as in this case), support, marketing and public relations, etc. With a publisher standing behind a product, what makes you think the consumers will. For instance knowing that bugs won't be fixed and there will be no more patches for Tribes:Venegence why should I run out and buy it, better yet why should I even be wasting my time mentioning it? Why? Because of the simple fact that it seems all products that are losing publishers money are being abonadoned. For instance Jeff Tunnel Co-Founder GarageGames, and former Dynamix founder, did some of the math for VU and Tribes Venegence. You guys can check it out here.

With those be my thoughts on the State of the Industry I also will leave you with some links:

Crunkie-Mobile Phone Mapping Application
The PC Info Dot Com - Find out about your PC
Linksys competitor to AirPort Express?
CutePDF Writer - Free PDF Writer
Email Icon Generator - Stop those Damn Harvesters from Getting Your Email
Link Popularity Check Tool - For All You Web Designers Out There
Dijjer - Free P2P Software that Dramatically Reduces the Bandwidth Needed to Host Large Files
SmashTheTones - Service to Put Free Ringtones and Pictures on Your CellPhone

Updated -- Blog Construction

Well I figured I'd update you all on the canges that will be happening to this Blog VERY soon. First off, I must say that the Yahoo banner will be getting replace (somewhere in the near future, hopefully). TextAmerica's Moblog will be phased out as I will phase in Mafia, an opensource Moblog, to which I will be trying to contribute to. Plus I will be restructing the links on the side. It seems the more I look at the links the more garbage that is being to show up in there. So thi sis priority as well as phases out the old only to be in with the new.

Edit: Ok, what can I say. I said it was going to happen, it just so happens I was a bit amibitous. So almost everyone of those changes are now done, except saying goodbye to TextAmerica and hello to Mafia. it's in the works once Mafia's Recent Picture Code is Stable.

Network Managability and XM to Increase Prices.

Long time no post. That is mainly due to the fact of school, work, and hanging out with my wonderful girlfriend. So whats happened in the past few week? Quite a bit!

First off, I finally got my AT&T 6800G Router to function as a Wireless Access Point. Why and how did I do that? First off, if you look at the pricing for a router and wireless access point, you'll see that access points run about $100-$150 while routers can be bought for $9.99 and up after rebates. So now on to how I did this. First you need to login to your wireless router that you want to become the wireless access point (usually this is done by plugging a LAN cable from the PC's NIC card into a LAN port on the router). After that you need to turn off dhcp (since there can only be one dhcp server on your network, and for me this was my wired linksys router). Then go and change the device's IP to correspond with your existing LANs IP Address (for most routers it's either 192.168.1.1 or 192.168.0.1). For me I had to put the AT&T router on the Linksys' network. So I did and then plugged the lan cable from my Linksys router into a LAN port on the AT&T router. And there ya go, a completely cheap and inexpensive Wireless Access Point.

Also I happened to stumble across a great Network Management Application called Network Magic. It's currently in the Beta Testing stages but it's well worth the free download, at least for now. Will the application eventually be sold? Most likely but for now go to here.

I've also been informed that XM Satellite Radio is uping it current price from $9.99 for basic service to $12.95. The new price will include basic service, free online access, and High Voltage (The Channel featuring Opie and Anthony). The price comes as a bit of a suprise but then again I'm already paying $11.98 for basic service and High Voltage. So another dollar for the online access isn't a big deal to me, especially figuring I've been getting it for free anyways, due to a problem with XM's javascript sessions. You can see the news for yourself here.

Also check out the links of the day:
Known Hole Aided in T-Mobile Breach
More On the Paris Hilton Hacking

Anyways I'm off for now so until next time!