By golly, completely off topic [reply], but thanks for an interesting read. Made me almost spray my G&T all over my computer screen re: template in the language of life.

*sigh* I should try get out more often...

I don't even live in a remote location, but a bustling city (Johannesburg). The problem is, our Internet is just so damn expensive, and most of us have to "cheap out" on the cheapest line rental for the slowest line speed (384kbps) in order to get our dose of the Internet at home. All this for the low low price (converted) of R369 [around $56?] with a 1GB international cap.

So now, to play the single player game, where my connection is already so damn slow, am I going to be booted out of the game every couple of minutes because I can't connect to the servers properly, because latency is an issue, or I have someone else connected to my router at home, trying to browse to a page (and trust me, these big sites take forever to load).

Yeah, on a good day I can consume around 2GB of data - but its all another expense (uncapped at another R200, again for the slowest line speed of 384kbps). So in the end, we already pay ~R568 for a sh*tty 384kbps line.

Definitely something I won't be investing money into (and by that, I don't mean I will pirate it, because I actually do buy games I enjoy).

In other news, I think From Dust is going to have stupid "always online" to play (according to www.impulsedriven.com - and surprisingly enough, not www.steampowered.com), and I just bought that (preorder), so perhaps I'll have a benchmark for this "always online" DRM these publishers are forcing, fist first, down our throats.

I don't think any of their games have been DRM-intensive? At least, I don't remember Morrowind having anything... Nor Oblivion. I just don't think it's something they do?

Yeah, aren't they including more of the research being done on their research labs' Singularity project? Writing a full OS in [mostly] managed code?

Not sure when these kinds of projects will ever really see the light of day, but to say .NET is dead / dying is probably a bit near-sighted...

You have an account name? I'm not on G+, but I would have thought that it's so deeply intertwined with your Google profile, that it would simply just use what-ever-it-already-was.

Then again, I'm no Google fan boy, and am deeply distressed that even though I want no part of Google+, their crappy +1 pages are now everywhere, so I have to constantly browse the Internet using InPrivate / Incognitio (depending on the browser that happens to be open) just to try and forego it showing up with my Google account showing up for the +1 integration.

So, what's changed then?

I got an invite into Google+, was on for a very short time (around 10 minutes I would guess), in which I already had several people "pre-add" me to their lists - for a brand new account (so how exactly have these relationships been formed, or is this some Buzz "feature" where certain people are automatically just linked to my Google+ account?)

I searched around for the privacy settings and was able to (A) first find a location that would remove ALL my Google accounts (but I still use Gmail, so that's not an option), and (B) something that would remove all public account information (and hopefully close the Google+ account). Which it appears to have done.

Didn't really see the need for the service, and my Google Accounts (https://www.google.com/accounts/ManageAccount) seems to indicate that: "You don't yet have a public profile. Learn more
Create a profile or edit your personal info without creating a public profile."

So what does this really mean for me? They're going to be deleting what, exactly?

Agreed.

Plus, that IE8 doesn't seem to have any support for any of the HTML5 or CSS3 web components (or at least my little experiments into HTML5 and CSS3 have failed utterly) means that they guy from Microsoft shouldn't even be going near marketing that IE8 is a good proposition for the business scene anyways (since then businesses are reliant on third party plugins ie Silverlight / Flash etc that introduce a whole host of potential security holes into the corporate work space)...

NWN Forum Server Hacked

"Corporations were paying almost twice as much forty years ago than they do today."

I thought all your US corporations were sending their money to tax havens and are involved in all kinds of tax avoidance schemes? Surely, if your corporations weren't avoiding the payment of tax (and I think it's been discussed a couple times on /.), then there would be more money to go into the good science and technology systems that are useful on a global scale...

assuming you aren't in a country like RSA where our government still manages to mismanage all the money it gets from taxes...

Wow, so many non-positive reviews... I simply love Magicka - and have had it for what, like a month now... I've experienced very few bugs, one or two crashes from the first version I had of the game, and it runs perfectly fine on my machine too!

I will admit that the networking is pooh - who the hell requires you to connect to the Internet to play in LAN mode? Kind of defeats the purpose (and here in RSA we're stuck with poor bandwidth and bad connections - so it makes it difficult to "start" a game - even though its meant to be played in LAN mode)...

But other than that I think it's one of the more classic games I've played. Not too difficult either, and the single player is easy enough to bash out in a couple of hours - its really not that difficult.

Even the DLC has been pretty fun for LAN mode :-)

For the comments - they are usually far more insightful and interesting than the actual stories...

Oh, and did you see the quality of writing in the article? Wow. So. Bad.

Lets just hope we get to keep our purchases on Impulse... I've bought a ton of games from there, but haven't been able to download and archive them all - since bandwidth isn't on the cheap here in South Africa. And sometimes when you do create an Impulse archive from an install it doesn't do it's job properly. It's actually better to just compress the directory yourself and simply "Detect Application" from the Impulse client. I worry about buying stuff and then losing it forever. Long live physical mediums!

Impulse -- Bloaty client? It has an offline installer that ranges in around the 20MB download range... As someone living in South Africa where the broadband is expensive and I rarely connect to the Internet - using Impulse is a dream compared to something like Steam - which from what I gather: A) doesn't have an offline installer (correct me if I'm wrong here - I scoured their site for hours on Friday at work) B) the offline installers I have found seem to be hacked together, and in the range of 700-800MB... (now that is bloat...) Coupled that there is certain functionality that can only be done from within the Steam client (gifting), I'm very unimpressed with Steam. Oh, and that I have to create a separate account for Steam, then one for their forums, and then another one for their support - Stardock at least has it right and when I log in to Impulse Driven, it logs me in across ALL their sites, giving me access to Sins of a Solar Empire / Elemental / any other forum... I'm a very happy Stardock customer (see you are too) and I just wonder how it's going to affect myself here in RSA.