Rise of Legends. It looks slick, it's graphically nice, but so far it's not playing as nicely as Rise of Nations. I guess all I wanted was a version of Rise of Nations which didn't crash. I'll keep playing it, but so far it's not won me over.
Apparently Titan Quest is supposed to be the new Diablo. A few games want to claim that title. The graphics look pretty nice, but surely you'd want to have some form of Massively multiplayer appeal (even if it's littered with duping and hack scandals) in order to claim that title? Whatever, the game looks nice, but I have low hopes. The demo just finished downloading, if I can be bothered to unpack and install it I might write more about it.
Flicking through a Time magazine, I read an article where they talked about "Web 2.0 companies". Oh dear. Is "Web 2.0" doomed to be a term which is thrown about without thinking about what you're trying to say? You might start a company, and create an application which leverages certain aspects of "Web 2.0", but who the hell goes out there to define themselves as a "Web 2.0 Company" and what does that mean anyway?
Also on Time, I read their recent(ish) "Top 100 People" lists and really didnt recognise a lot of names. Should I feel bad? (I don't, tough luck)
There's nothing like a nice session in a *nix environment to make you feel like a real computer user. To hell with UI, sometimes it's just nice to have no option to use a commandline. Everyone should have a *nix box handy to remind them why mad command line skills are so l33t.
The new Path of Resistance album is listenable, but really, it's just 'more of the same'. Fair enough for a side project band born of tragedy, but it's really indicative of hardcore in general. It's all sounding fairly samey these days (apart from emo, which is just sounding stupid).
Ed Brill posts a reference to an article mentioning Hannover and the plans to include ODF compliant editors. There's some interesting links in there about OpenOffice.org and Stardock, and some thought on open file formats. OpenOffice.org was a good idea, as are all open file formats, however the software was awful and incredibly slow (there's a link discussing it's speed in there somewhere). I think ODF is a pretty good idea, however I also happen to store pretty much all my data as either text or rich text using such formatting as 'bold' and 'underline' and 'thats about all'. It's an interesting point to consider why Microsoft is so against open formats. Surely if Word is such a great editor, people would keep using it regardless of what file format it used? Of course that's exactly the point, most people just use Word because other people use Word. Try working for a couple of years in a shop using anything else (and I've worked in 2 of those - one which used Lotus AmiPro/WordPro, and the other which tried to use OpenOffice.org) and you'll see how important it becomes to be like everyone else. ODF could be interesting, and it could be embraced by the general user public, or it could disappear forever without a trace. Time will tell.
So there you are, Games, vegan straight edge hardcore, Time magazine, and IBM. Try getting that mix of topics anywhere else.