Some of you, no doubt, would’ve heard about Microsoft’s latest ban-happy session during Halloween, where it was rumoured that they took out up to 1 million consoles, preventing them from accessing Xbox Live. That in itself is a pretty traumatic event for any alleged pirate - no more XBLA titles, no multiplayer, no title updates. Brutal, eh?

But wait, there’s more.

Microsoft obviously aren’t happy with simply revoking a modded console’s access to their online services, and decided to go the whole hog. Banned consoles will have limited access to the HDD, so games can not be installed onto it. The Windows Media Centre extender has been removed, so you can’t use banned consoles as media boxes. They even went so far as to corrupt the user’s Gamertag and game saves on banned consoles, so if you ever gain any Achievements or save any game progress on a banned console, you won’t be able to use the corrupted hard drive on an unbanned Xbox 360.

MS don’t just ban-hammer, they ban-jack hammer.

Can you really blame them, though? MS need to take a stance and draw the line for activities like this. They’re taking measures to protect their golden revenue stream, just like any other sensible business would do. Carry on, MS. Carry on.

Of course, not everyone fully understands.

Eyy, another rant of mine is up for viewing at the SOGC front page.

It’s good to be able to muck around with gear again. I don’t feel so guilty playing with new toys, now that I have some direction in life

I’ll be leaving for Japan for 3 weeks, which will be so incredibly, amazingly awesome I’ll probably go blind from it.

Without a doubt I’ll be visiting the holy land of Akihabara, amongst other places. I’ll be documenting as much as I can.

In the meantime - if you’re in Sydney and are interested in the LAN scene, you should go visit the SOGC site because it’s been given a fresh lick of paint Be sure to check out the forums as well.

For the international readers out there, you may or may not be aware that the Australian government is planning to introduce an Internet Filter to censor “inappropriate material” from the Internet. There is no opt-out option and a pilot program is in the works to filter 10,000 URLs. Initial tests show that the filtering has an adverse effect on connection speeds relative to the accuracy of the filters and exhibited signs of “overblocking”, where legitimate sites were treated as false positives. Arstechnica has a neat article on the technical side of things.

If this travesty goes ahead, I doubt it’s just going to stop at a simple blacklist. So, hypothetically, I predict I’ll be experiencing the following:

• I won’t be able to use any mIRC commands, since the slash (”/”) key will be filtered out.
• Attempting to fire guns in online games I play will reset my PC, write 0s to my hard drive several times over, and spontaneously combust.
• News will consist of human interest stories about puppies. And nothing else.
• Any websites about “prawnography” will be banned.
• Bomberman will be declared an enemy of the state.
• All Wikipedia entries will be replaced with a single page showing Our Benevolent Overseer, Senator Conroy.
• Cleopatra, aka the “Queen of the Nile”, will be banned due to its gambling-related content.
• The Federal Government’s website will be banned due to its political content.

Anyways, I can’t see it going too far.

I’m currently mucking around with Vista x64 on my spare box, and so far I’m liking what I see. Oh, stop hating.

Can’t wait to fire up some games to see what DX10 looks like (my guess is it won’t look a great deal different, but we all gotta keep up with the Joneses). I’m also surprised that my old 80gb Western Digital is still going strong, even though it sounds like it needs a few drops of oil.

In the meantime, I’m really getting into Gears 2. I’m glad they replaced the old triple-shot gun with the semi-automatic Hammerburst, even though the triple-shot gun was ridiculously overpowered. The Gorgon pistol is a curious addition, since the rate of fire is so slow you may as well just run up and melee between shots. The Flamethrower and Mortar are also great additions - gotta love raining down fire from a distance.

Finally, I’ve got a couple more reviews in the pipeline that need illustrating, and I’ve also got some thoughts on Far Cry 2 on paper. In the meantime, I’ll be coding away listening to the Pulp Fiction OST.

The 4870X2 is not without its fair share of issues, one of them being a strange “flickering” that happens in games.

Through my extensive tests consisting of playing 4 titles (well, 3 if you count Crysis and Crysis: Warhead as one title), my guess is that it’s either ATI’s drivers or my PSU. Awesome in-depth analysis: it’s how I roll.

Anyway, I’ve only been able to fix it in Crysis by switching to / from resolutions. Other games don’t fare so well. As a stop-gap solution, I’ve turned off Catalyst AI, which effectively only uses one core out of the two. Performance takes a bit of a hit, but at least I’m not convulsing in fits of defect-induced epilepsy.

The preferable course of action to take would be to try using someone else’s beefier PSU and see if I get any joy from that. And if that has no effect, then I can either patiently wait for better drivers, or impatiently return it for RMA.

Either way, Fable 2 will probably whisk me away from my worries. It’s already out in the EB’s at Parramatta, at least. JB’s shelves are still showing promo boxes…

This post title looks bad already. What could possibly be hard about owning one of the fastest GPU solutions available on the market? Well, despite being blessed with the power to max out graphics settings, it ain’t all roses.

Allow me to go into detail with the issues.
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