News: So that is what "Reach" is!
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Gabe: Well tomorrow is the 25th and many of you will probably start celebrating tonight. I'd like to believe the midnight parties and festivities are related to my Birthday tomorrow but it's more likely your all excited about Halo 3. I had the chance to play through the entire single player campaign with Tycho and Robert and I can say you probably will not be disappointed. I never really got into the Halo story. I thought it was because there just wasn't much story there to get into. I got this link last week though and I realised that there's actually a really cool story, the problem is the games do a terrible job of telling it. I recommend reading this thread before you tackle Halo 3. It lays out the history of the Halo universe really well. Like any sequel it helps to have played the previous games but in this case I don't even think that's enough. The story in Halo 3 simply doesn't make a lick of fucking sense on it's own and they make zero effort to help players that might be new to the series. I don't mean there isn't a movie at the beginning that's like "previously on teh Haloz!" I mean they just assume you know everything in that thread forwards and back. Honestly though it's Halo. You can play through the thing, shoot a bunch of guys skip all the cut scenes and have a damn good time. It's just sort of sad that there's such a rich universe there that the games aren't conveying.I've got some stuff to say about the Halo 3 advertising as well but I don't want to spoil anything. We can talk about it later this week once you've all had a chance to play it.I wrapped up our eight page Assassin's Creed comic last week. Those of you who purchase the Limited Edition of the game will get a bunch of cool stuff including a copy of our comic. It's a little prequel story that provides some background info on the main character. I think it turned out pretty good and I'm excited for you guys to see it. The game ships in November but I'll go ahead and post the cover now so you can see my take on Altair.  -Gabe out
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A website goes the extra mile to make sure voters aren & rsquo;t confused this Tuesday.  Also: West Virginia organizes the first public supercomputer & hellip;.  FDA keeps its eye on a new pain relief drug & hellip;. and more.
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Tycho:  Sony hasn't been entirely clear regarding what their 1.92 update for the Playstation 3 actually does, suggesting that it "focuses on some PS3 compatibility and playability issues for select titles," but our own experience with the update has been conclusive.  In the Internet's dark places, aggrieved Lair fans are suggesting that this update improves the game's motion controls, and that each media outlet must rescind their previous scores.  I'm fairly certain this is magical thinking - neither Sony or Factor 5 will say with any specificity, and now that both our PS3s are updated it would be impossible to test.  Typically we don't take the traditional holidays off, nor do we take off non-traditional holidays, such at the Feast of St. Motherfucker - a holy day that I've only just now invented.  Gabe's father was around, though, and golf seemed like a good time investment.  Reading greens and choosing clubs for other people is about as far as I get, so for me the social aspects of the game are paramount.  Standing under the awning at the driving range, it's hard not to see where EA's Tiger series could improve.      This year's lobby system is much improved over last year's, but I'm not sure why the lobby itself couldn't be a driving range.  This is how virtually any actual round of golf starts, with every person hitting the bucket they bought and lamenting their performance.  A few of their minigames would work just fine in this context - don't create a custom game to play them, build all of the basic play into a casual, central experience.  From here, modes, courses, and wagers are established.  When new people pull in, carts can be heard.  Links for the 360 wasn't as complete as Tiger, but it had four player modes first - and it had a means to play Speed Golf that Tiger should loot from its fallen enemy.  Essentially, you play the round as normal.  Everyone else plays the round as normal simultaneously, and shots are keyed to a certain color so that the arc of each person's shot is visible to all other players.  They need to steal this - throw the name of each player on there, use the face, whatever.  This needs to be how it works.  You can play an entire course in a quarter of the time.  The RPG metaphor really worked the first few times I bought the product, but it's really lost its currency with me.  There's a point - and it may be with the '08 version of the product - where the number of courses are such that I don't actually want to pay sixty dollars again just to lose all of my character progression every year.  Gabriel's suggestion is to approach it more like a fighting game, which is to say like Mario Golf - with discrete golfer archetypes that have a suite of skills.  I'm wondering if Guild Wars doesn't have the answer - full priced expansions every year, with a perpetually tracked online experience where your prior purchase actually increases the value of the next.  Let all play - online and off - be a part of the core experience, let all play hone your ability.  Don't wall off online play into some purgatory as it is now, untracked, outside of the normal scheme of advancement.    With these thoughts in my head, excited by the sun-dappled future we had envisioned. we sat down to play a round online the next night.  After determining that one of us couldn't play at all or it would crash the game for everyone - a weird kind of crash where you can't play, but you're able to talk to one another about the crash - we were able to play eight holes, at which point it crashed before a victor could be determined.  They've only just made online Photo Game Face available for Tiger, for the first time since launch, but they had to deactivate online features for two other titles to do it.  So, no.  I don't have high hopes.
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A new feature allows users the chance to make the news.
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After long discussions and much opinion being thrown around, Andrei Zmievski points outintegration of namespaces into the upcoming PHP6 release.   Ladies and gentlemen, we have namespaces.   According to the post from  \
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Time for a little nostalgia today in this new post from Philip Olson looking back at a brief history of the PHP acronym - where it came from and how it evolved to mean "PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor".   While reminiscing what PHP was like back in the early early years, I stumbled upon a little historical nugget from the old website. Do you know what the acronym PHP stands for? Many of us do, or think we do. [...] But how was the definition chosen? For fun, here's a look back at the official vote that determined this new meaning way back in 1998. It might be worth mentioning that Rasmus, the father of PHP, did not vote for the eventual winner.   He also includes a few "notable quotes that could be taken out of context" from Rasmus Lerdorf concerning his opinions on the matter of the acronym's meaning as well as some other brief notes on the history of PHP and its name change.
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roundup Plus: Newspaper sites take up paid search ads...Microsoft IPTV to woo Swiss test group...Sony speeds up Memory Stick cards...Real touts one week, 1 million songs.
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Also: Congress OKs private spaceflight bill. [News.com Extra]
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What do you know about "What the #&#36;*! Do We Know!??"
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English-derived neologism bids for world domination God alone knows what Cervantes would have made of it, but the English term "blogosphere" has slithered onto the growing list of neologisms shoehorned into the noble Castillian language, joining chatear, chip, formatear, Internet and mÃ³dem in a burgeoning list of tech and net-based foreign vocab.â¦Learn &amp; Contribute, Live &amp; Online - The Register Debates Green Computing
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Tycho: The recently conducted Xfire chat has now been collated into this easy to digest transcript. In case you wanted to digest it. In addition, the latest page of our insane Prey project has now gone online. Just click the link on the left, for "We Have Visitors."  Also! Your mom is trying to get a hold of you. You should give her a call.(CW)TB
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Tycho:  Rhythm games aren't my forte, but I have a lot of inbuilt experience with meter which helps me fake it until I can build genuine skill.  And, as rhythm elements have crept into the entire medium, Tycho stock has been in a boom phase.  It's understandable, then, that while I soar and illuminate - and Gabriel sputters, bound to earth - tensions related to my prowess have begun to burn red-hot.  That is, until they cool again.  These things have a way of working themselves out in the fullness of time.          There's an incredible article over at Wired this month (and possibly also in the magazine?) about the Bungie's psychological approach to game design.  What a tremendous challenge it must be to retain authorial control in such a case!  As someone whose output is rarely screened by any agency, the whole thing gave me chills.  The right to fail nobly in a creative endeavor (as we sometimes do) is such a powerful luxury.  No such luxury may be extended to them, upon whose toil an entire platform rests.  God keep me from such a fate.          I keep hearing that Metroid Prime 3: Corruption isn't being promoted very well, but the person saying this always seems to know about it, and then when people share this complaint in the thread those people also seem to be "in the know."  It ships on the twenty-seventh of August, if you weren't aware - but since you almost certainly are, we needn't dwell on it.  What we should be dwelling on are the series of teaser vids that Retro has been trickling out.  Metroid's largely mysterious heroine has always been a huge draw for me, and going into deep detail about the character would actually damage the mystique.  But the universe she operates in need not be vague, which is why these clips are such a rich meal:  there's the Aurora Unit trailer that modernizes ancient Metroid canon in a classy way, and there's a treat at the end of the Valhalla trailer that ties it all together.  They both cover a setting that has gotten darker and more sophisticated, tones we don't typically associate with Nintendo.       We like to get kicks in on the post-Harmonix Guitar Hero, partly based on their "wacky" multiplayer concept - which ordinary gamers will probably love - but also out of a sort of tribal loyalty.  This having been established, they've built an authentically heroic tracklist that really has a lot of beef.  Going from the most recent Rock Band announcement out of Leipzig, both versions appear to have Radiohead's "Creep" and the Beastie Boys' "Sabotage," which is something of a comfort.  After seeing different songs on each game from Metallica and The Rolling Stones, I wasn't sure if they were already traveling down the catalogues securing exclusive weaponry.  I hope that the labels in this case see the old wisdom of arming both sides.
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Perhaps we actually can... Also in this week's column:â¦
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BillâGatesâisâonâhisâwayâout.âNowâit's upâtoâRayâOzzieâtoâreviveâthe flaggingâgiant -- andâgetâitâreadyâfor theâpost-desktopâera. By Fred Vogelstein from Wired magazine.
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roundup Plus: ContextWeb nabs $3 million...Macromedia taps into AIM...Hewlett-Packard packages services for blades.
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The Story: What?s in a name? Back in the days of the Gingrich revolution, the nastiest label you could pin on a politician was ?liberal.? And now that open source has become an essential technology, the quickest way to get a rise out of an open source executive (and to get flamed on dozens of blogs) is to say his or her company is ?commercial.?[ Slideshow: 2007's top underreported tech stories ]                                                    No matter what you call them, open source companies have been steadily integrating parts of the hated commercial software subscription model into their business. First it was support, and now it is software access. Say it ain?t so, Linus.MySQL, for example, will charge users of its enterprise edition to use the code, not just for support as has been the traditional open source business model. ?We are looking for ways to extend our offerings in a way that can be monetized,? bluntly says Kaj Arno, the company?s VP for community.Chander Kant, founder of the open source storage software company Zmanda, is likewise frank about the need to drive revenue. Speaking of the open source community as a whole, he says, ?We are not a charity. We need to monetize.?Recognizing that charging to use open source software flies in the face of the original open source premise of freely sharable code open to everyone, Arno is quick to note that the paid version of Workbench has code and features not found in the free version ? and that the free version ?is not crippled.? Arno calls the move an experiment, and acknowledges that MySQL needs to move carefully to avoid upsetting the often quick-tempered open source community.Is this a trend? Red Monk analyst Stephen O?Grady says it is: ?Ultimately when you look at a high-profile firm like MySQL embracing it, it?s difficult to conclude anything else.?InfoWorld blogger (and IBM employee) Savio Rodrigues notes another example. In a recent blog post, he looked at changes to JBoss since it was purchased by Red Hat Software and concluded: ?The Fedora/JBoss subscription is just like the software subscription business model that commercial software vendors have been using for decades.?Does that mean a company that adopts the usage-based pricing model isn?t really open-source? That?s an interesting point, since as Zmanda?s Kant acknowledges, ?the litmus test of open source is control of the code.? Open source software delivered through appliances keeps the access ? and thus control ? away from users, he notes. But code binaries distributed as software remain open to their users ? for now, at least.The Bottom Line: Have MySQL and Red Hat run away from the principles of open source? Who cares. The real point is that the open source business model is evolving away from the ?free? model and toward an alternative development approach for commercial software. If you adopted open source due to its cost, you may not save as much as you thought. If you adopted open source for the access to source code or the community-supported development approach that is supposed to result in better software, it?s not yet clear if the greater commercialization will enhance those aspects or drive away the true believers and make open source no different than the old-fashioned commercial offerings.Complete list of 2007 underreported stories: 1.? Java is becoming the new Cobol 2.? Sun Microsystems is back in the game 3.? Hackers take aim at Mac OS X 4.? There are some threats you can worry less about 5.? Companies may have found a way around H-1B visa limits 6.? Open source?s new commercial strategy 7.? End-to-end Ethernet finally arrives 8.? Blade servers arrive for the masses 9.? BI is dead; long live BI 10. Balance of power shifts to software buyers
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It's not very often that you see something new in News.  News is not exactly new technology, but when personal computers came along, and then widespread networking, it created a whole new playing field for news, that has shaken things up for most of my life. Change comes in fits at starts. First there was the web, then RSS, and now I think we're on the cusp of another bit of change. If you want to see what I think it looks like, check out the home page of nytimesriver.com. But that's not the end of the story. A flat completely chronologic view of news probably isn't enough. And earlier this month at a meeting in NY, two engineers at the NY Times set me off in a new direction, with a very simple bit of advice. They told me to look in the HTML source code of their stories. When I did I saw they had applied a taxonomy to their news flow, and this opened the door to what I would like to show you today -- an outline view of the news.  http://nytimesriver.com/outline/  I believe it's fairly self-explanatory.  The topics are arranged in order of frequency in today's news.  In a previous rendering, the stories were shown in a histogram, but this view I think is much better. You can still see how many pieces relate to the indicated topic, but by clicking on the plus next to each topic, you can actually see the headlines and descriptions, and if you want more you can click through to the full stories. (Initially, the outline was sorted by frequency, with the most frequently occurring keyword appearing first. I changed it, based on feedback, to be alphabetic.) Now, there's still more to do, I showed this to a number of people during the weekend and got some excellent clues on ideas to pursue next, and I will do that. Further, in the process of exploring this, I've been shown the work of other developers who discovered the keywords on their own, and one in particular is very interesting. I'm hoping that these projects will come public so I can show them to you and tell you what I think they mean. This is what I live for, professionally -- the sense of being somewhere with great unexplored potential, a virgin landscape of the intellect. I'm never happier than when I get to play in such a place.  Om Malik: A new way to view news. Please comment on the screen shot page.