There was a story today about Microsoft closing down Lik Sang.
I have two thing concerning this subject.
First I know why the chinese government went Microsoft way. If you remember correctly two to three weeks ago Microsoft opened a new plant in China to produce Xbox consoles. Great plan Microsoft, very good. Give jobs in exchange of closing the mod chippers. Everybody is a winner. The chinese have more job created with the Xbox plant than there were people working at Lik Sang. Microsoft have their way and the chinese are still happy. Someone has read Sun-Tzu's Art of War and used it correctly.

The other thing is that I am glad they closed them down. The dreamcast was killed by mod chippers. Not because it allows you to run Linux or watch VCD. Because it allowed the lowest common denominator to download ISOs, burn them and play without paying for them. I am not talking about backups here. Plain and simple unlawful copy. I knew it would be the end of the Dreamcase era when my step sister told me she bought a Dreamcast and was buying games from the store at 5$ each. They weren't legit copies at 5$ each, they were burnt ISOs. Even the store were not buying legit games anymore. My Step sister was a hacker ? No she wasn't a hacker, she wasn't technically advanced. Heck she wasn't even smart. But she bought around 80 games that way.

The Sega Dreamcast was killed by it's own fans. Not by it's enemies (Sony and Nintendo at the time). I'm glad Microsoft closed Lik-Sang, the Xbox does not deserve the same faith. To keep the console alive you need to have games produced on it. Games that don't sell a minimum are not produced at all. Consoles that are easy to copy game are never going to be alive for long. So if you complain you can't read CD-Rs, VCDs and DVD-R on your Xbox it's because it the evil cheaters not because of evil Microsoft.

Good night everybody. Try the veal. I'm here 'till Thursday.
Frankie goes

I'll be travelling to the town of Bayport, Texas at the end of October. And then Lake Charles, Louisiana.
I'll be there because of a report. A year ago we started a very small project to save the data from a report on the SQL server. The little Excel sheet went throught a lot of transformations during that time. Drill down, Graphs, Colors, etc. We made it simple and user friendly for the users. They liked it. They talked about it, even to people in the other plants. Now the managers in the others plants want my Excel sheet to work at their site with their plant informations. So I put an intern on the job to modify the sheet to handle more than one plant. We must replicate databases from my site to all the other sites. I must create a powerpoint presentation. There is a huge amount of work to be done only to have this report working at the other plants. It's the first time I will travel for work. I hope everything will be all right.