HostBlog - incoherent ramblings of a hosting provider.

I’ve recently discovered a MMRPG (Massive Multiplayer Role Paying Game) browser based and free, very reminiscent of the early sim-city type programs. This wonderful gem is called Travian, and available to play right now

It’s been around for a while, with active forums, comprehensive wiki, clans (alliances) and so forth, but takes a bit of planning and forethought to get into “late in the game” as I have - so here is a shortcut guide to getting your Empire up-and-running as quickly and efficiently as possible …

Get a good initial resource base

field workers need feeding, building staff need feeding, an army marches on it’s stomach … etc
so start by producing more food … and don’t forget buildings use clay, weapons are made from wood and iron … so your “fields” and the resources they produce are your lifeblood. (more…)

In anticipation of the major marketing machine and hype engine gearing up for next years Windows 2008 launch, MickeyMouseSoft
have announced a plethora of versions and licences designed entirely to confuse you …

There will be ELEVEN versions of W2k8-Server

1. Standard 32bit
2. Standard 64bit
3. Standard 64bit with Hyper-V support
4. Enterprise 32bit
5. Enterprise 64bit
6. Enterprise 64bit with Hyper-V support
7. Datacenter 32bit
8. Datacenter 64bit
9. Datacenter 64bit with Hyper-V support
10. Web 32bit
11. Database 64bit

The Hyper-V support is for virtualisation technologies, and is already a confusing area for licencing - to run a few windows VM’s on a Dual-Quadcore server currently needs about £450/month of Win2K3 licences - one per cpu, one per VM per core - so to run 3 VM’s each able to access all 8 cores requires a total of 26 licences @ £15/month each !!!

Microsoft also released the pricing list for the retail box versions, mostly averaging £2,500 a licence - watch out for the TV ads explaining how i’ll cure colonic cancer, be so easy even a feaus will be able to use it, and save you so much money over better open-source solutions that just by queuing up on launch day for 22 hours in he rain outside PC-Grotto, you’ll earn more money Donald Trump has ever seen…

Dialup premium alerter from BT prevents huge phonebills

When you’re connected to the Internet with your dial-up connection, problems can occur if you unknowingly download an Internet ‘dialler’, which changes the way that you connect to the Internet.

This could result in your dial-up number being changed to an international or premium rate number, giving you higher than average phone bills.

BT Privacy Online will help protect your computer from such scams while you are using your dial-up connection. It gives you:

• Modem Protection software to help keep your modem safe from malicious Internet ‘diallers’
• SMS alerts to let you know if there has been any unusual activity on your account

And what’s more it’s FREE.

For more details and to download this very usefull tool if you still use a dial-up modem to connect to the internet visit the BT Modem Protection website.

For a subscription free dial-up account at lo-call rates (0845) visit Value Dial Up.

Skype, the proprietory online communications software authors, based in Luxembourg went into a major flap over the Google Talk beta release.

Skype’s hand was forced into immediately disclosing SkypeNet and SkypeWeb specifications.

(more…)

So, Google.com the ever growing Search Engine, not content with encroaching into your emails with it’s gmail service, is now looking to get hold of you telephone-calls as well.

Cue the very quiet launch of Google Talk at www.google.com/talk

(more…)

The heavyweight showdown starts between Google Earth (the search engines attempt to include geo-positional data and mapping into their ever-expanding range of searches) and Amazon A9 the shopping-sites abortion of a search engine, designed to flog their products through a very thing veil of being usefull…

First a bit of definition…

Google, a one followed by a million zero’s aka a VERY large number - representing the potential size of all the pages that will ever be on the internet, which is at least 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000…… times better more useful than

A9, A for Amazon 9 for how many time you’ll use it before adding it to your banned URLs list as abysmal dross.

Onto the point … (more…)

Having examined in “lab” settings a variety of FAQ, Knowledgebase, LiveSupport, Ticket, Flowchart and Workflow applications, a decision has been reached to implement and roll-out
SupportTrio from ActiveCampaign.

Whilst most of the applications exhaustively brutalised in the selection were good enough to be useable, some very polished indeed, not a single product out of over 30 came out without a number of bugs and some major missing features needed by real-life business.
(more…)

In a suprise move by MickeymouseSoft, the ill-fated and very delayed new version of M$Windoze gets a marketing boost - in the form of a quick product namechange to … Windows Vista.
Obviously closely modelled on the Walt Disney company - aka Buena Vista (Good to See).
(more…)

Microsoft is under pressure to speed up compliance with EU laws.

MS have been forced by the European Commission to rename a new version of its Windows XP software to Windows XP Home Edition N.

The ‘N’ in the new name stands for “not with media player”.
(more…)

Due to a “quirk” in the WordPress upgrade from 1.2 to 1.5 the authors decided taht it would be a great idea to wipe out all our custom templates and style sheets, so the blog’s looking a bit on the wonky side - please bear with us while we beat the server admin around the head with something heavy for using our system as the beta-test environment…