In a totally different direction of my usual gaming news reports (haha! *points and laughs at Sony*), I've just read something very interesting and very awesome on Gateworld.net!

It seems that Dean Devlin, creator of the original 1994 Stargate movie (independent of Stargate SG-1 and Stargate Atlantis, mind you), has successfully penned an agreement with MGM to finish the original idea he had for the movie. It's been well known amongst Stargate fans that the original movie was only the first of a trilogy that MGM never went for. MGM, instead, went and worked with Showtime to start the extremely successful Stargate SG-1. (But, like I said, SG-1 is technically another storyline entirely... based off of, but entirely different from the movie.)

Anyway, MGM was afraid that finishing the original movie trilogy would interfere with the young new series. But, obviously, the series isn't young anymore! (Nor does it seem to be slacking off in viewers, in spite of what I think is a terrible reiteration of the 8 year "false god" story.) MGM, being the publisher they are, now thinks that the movie trilogy could co-exist with the series without any impact. (Meaning... being the money-mongers publishing companies are, it's now safe enough for them to think about doing the trilogy, since it doesn't seem like they'll lose money anymore.)

That's all well and good, I thought. But the actors are 12 years older! (He made mention that the original actors would "absolutely" be involved again. That means Kurt Russell and James Spader, heh.) He answered that question with an interesting bit of news... "Stargate 2" was written to take place 12 years after "Stargate 1", in the first place. It's actually perfect timing that they've waited this long. The actors will have aged exactly as the script required.

In a way, after reading the articles, the Stargate movie seems rather like Uru. It was a movie that nobody wanted to publish. But the writers were able to fund themselves and eventually got MGM to release the movie. After it hit the bigscreen, MGM disagreed with the planned sequels and, instead, released their own version. (Myst 4, anyone?) Some people loved the spin-off series... some people hated it. Nobody else but MGM could make a sequel movie because they owned the rights. But now, after the original creators have been pushed out of the picture for so long, they're finally picked back up because someone thinks it could be successful after all.

Except, in this case, it's still the same publisher... which is both good and bad.

Anyway... Stargate movie sequels!

Hopefully this works! I'm trying to figure out how to embed YouTube videos in WordPress. Apparently, according a development blog post, it has to be put in your posts with a special command, since they don't "allow you to paste in arbitrary code" for security reasons. Not sure I agree with that, but, oh well.

Anyway, here is the Sony E3 Conference summed up in about 60 seconds!

Oh, I forgot to tell you that there was an earwig in the shower lastnight.

An earwig... in the shower.

I mean, really, of all the nerve...

I just completely reworked my home network... again:

Oneill is now retired as a system on the network. A sub-300mhz Celeron with 112MB RAM just wasn't going to make the cut in power for what I'm wanting to experiment with. I'd built a new server (named Sigthermia, credit to Edrick (so he doesn't get mad at me)) for hosting a project of mine (of the same name, credit to Edrick (so he doesn't get mad at me)). It's 1.8ghz of Pentium 4 goodness with 512MB RAM. Now that's a server worth running. Sigthermia is now the acting router, personal webserver, file-sharing master, and soon-to-be caching DNS server. (If TW ever gets around to telling me how!)

I don't have a wireless access point, yet, which is why it's dimmed, but the IP address is reserved, so that's why it's on there. I upgraded to a 16-port switch a while ago, too, so that's been REALLY nice. No chance of running out of room for at least a little bit... maybe a month?

I had a pretty time getting Sigthermia up on it's self-sustaining feet. I installed Apache, Samba, PHP, MySQL, DHCPd, BIND, DHClient, ncurses, and all their dependencies manually, and compiled from source. That was quite an experience, since nothing was set up automatically. Like... configuration files weren't created, and there was no auto-start script. I had to make all those myself. Once again, the opensource community shines forth with absolutely NO useful official documentation. I had to search for hours to get information on where Samba puts it's configuration file, because the main help files assumed you already knew where it went, and/or that it was made automatically. Well, guess what? IT WASN'T!

But now... everything's up and running properly, smoothly, and very swift. It run very quickly, too... and did I mention it's fast? It's very fast! Oneill took at least 2 minutes to boot up, which was becoming unacceptable. When Windows boots faster than Linux, there's a problem. Sigthermia starts in about 30 seconds to a minute. Well enough time to recover and start first in the case of a power failure. (With Oneill, the client computers would start first, and then the router/domain controller would come online LAST and screw everything up.)

Speaking of O'neill, I got my first shipment of Stargates today! SG-1 seasons 2, 3 and 5, and Atlantis Season 1, and MacGyver Season 5. I've just cleared 35 gigabytes off my harddrive... I'm very pleased! (Enough room to defragment now!)

Tada! Told you I'd make one!

Let's see... I read Jurassic Park yesterday. All day. Finished it in less than 12 hours. Was it good? You bet it was good. It has it's (un)healthy portion of Evolution propaganda, but it was very, very good, as all Michael Crichton novels are. It was so incredibly different than the movie. Of course there were some similarities (well, like the name!), but, on the whole, it wasn't anything like the movie. The cerodactyl cage from Jurassic Park 3? That's in the first book... An opening scene from Lost World movie where the girl is munched on by Compys? That's in the first book. Dinosaurs on a cargo ship? That's in the first book. Lex is an annoying little brat in the book, Tim is the older computery kid. Hammond turned out to be an evil powermonger who only cares about money, in the end. Alan Grant is big, bearded, and likes kids. Ellie Sattler is young and is Grant's student, and they are NOT romantically involved. Nedry actually has a motive in which I could understand why he betrayed InGen. The lawyer was actually a rather likeable guy (to me, at least) compared to the sniveling moron in the movie who gets eaten off the toilet. The final fate of the park was NOT completely the fault of Nedry's betrayal... and there were many other shocking moments that I won't mention here. You should go read it! Now. If you don't mind reading violence, heh.

You may have noticed that I haven't posted for a while. Welp, that's because TW's server was broken!! At first, I thought it was some RSS feeds in the administration pages of WordPress, and it turns out they were the symptom, not the problem. It seems that in TW's setting up a DNS for himself, the server inadvertantly saved some parameters that weren't supposed to be saved. The webpage server took that information to heart, so when the DNS problem was corrected, Apache was still affected. After a couple days of troubleshooting (at least on MY part... not sure what TW was doing, the slacker (okay, he's sick... so I'll let him off the hook)), we found a webpage that discussed a similar problem, and told us to stop and start Apache. Not restart. Stop and start. ...and it worked! So now it doesn't take a whole 60 seconds for my pages to appear, and I can make posts again! Yey!

Guess what!! I bought Stargate. All of them. I already have SG-1 Season 8, so I bought Seasons 1 through 7 and then Atlantis Season 1... along with MacGyver Season 5. Set me back a nice amount, but I figured that I should legalize my all-time favorite television series and erase the videos I downloaded. That way, I can free up about 60 gigs of space and not have to buy a new harddrive! Also, Stargate has started to air new episodes! Atlantis rocks, as always... and SG-1 is still stuck in that horrid "oh noez, more false gods" rut with a twist of pseudo-Christianity. Wolfie is not impressed. Not impressed at all. However, I still watch it to keep up with the storyline in case something cool DOES happen, which I doubt.

Also, I'll be gone every weekend for the remainder of this month. This weekend I'm going to grandparents' house while Mom hosts a college reunion here are home. I'll be without broadband and internet access on this computer... so hopefully I'll survive. The next weekend, I think I'm going to my friend's house in Kentucky. I believe that's the opening weekend for Lady in the Water, so we're planning on seeing that while we're down there.

Well, my paws hurt from typing so much... I'm'a gonna take a break and go do somethin' else. See ya!

I've got more Sony news! Surprise-surprise! I promise I'll make an honest lifey post after this!

First off, reported by Kotaku, it seems not even Sony, as a whole, knows exactly what the PS3 is supposed to be! (Digg) Apparently, someone is blaming Kutaragi (creator of the Playstation, and usually seen as very arrogant) of being very obsessed with the latest technology, and doesn't care about the market. Seems he wants the biggest, baddest piece of electronics and he doesn't make it to make customers happy! Anyway, Sony doesn't know what to think of it's own device. Is it a gaming platform? Is it a media platform? Parts of Sony are worrying that the Playstation is blurring the lines between the two, and people want one OR the other... not both.

About.com is reporting on what I, and many others, have been saying all along. High Definition television is too new (Digg), too expensive, and there isn't much incentive to buy into it, yet. They say that by forcing people to buy into HiDef, Sony might very well kill themselves. Nintendo has the uncanny knack for being behind the times in the public's eyes. With the Gamecube, they didn't offer internet multiplayer capability like everyone else did, and everyone was scolding them. (Well, they did add it later, but it wasn't enough to talk about.) With the Wii, they're not offering High Definition video, and everyone was scolding them. But now it seems people are slowly starting to wake up to the fact that... not everyone wants HiDef, yet. Sony forcing Blu-Ray with the PS3 is a very risky, ultimately stupid thing to do, and the fact that they're having nothing but trouble with building it is sealing the deal.

Now for a real "Sony Says"! Joystiq interviewed Phil Harrison (Digg) real quick at a developers conference. They asked him very to the point questions for which they're being chided about, but it's still interesting. Harrison of course claims that he doesn't think Sony is arrogant, but the interesting thing to me was how he said quotes could be taken out of context. He was referring to when Kaz Hirai said Microsoft was copying Sony. Remember that? It was very apparent that Hirai said Microsoft was copying them! How could it possibly have been taken out of context? He said, and I quote:

"Every time we go down a path, we look behind and they're [Microsoft] right there - we just can't shake these guys. I wish that they would come up with some strategies of their own..."

How can that possibly mean anything but "Microsoft copies us... I wish they'd go do their own stuff." It seems that, as of late, there are different parts of Sony saying very different things, and other parts then say something else that contradicts what someone else said. It doesn't at all seem like they're on the same page.

A big article from Electronic News carries an interview (Digg) with a IBM's Vice-President of Semiconductor and Technology Services (Wow, almost as bad as Sony Entertainment's VP title...) about a few things. One thing that stands out, though, is how he talks about the Cell processor. You know... big honkin' CPU that's supposed to be the heart of the PS3? The one that's incredibly difficult to program for? Well, apparently, it's incredibly difficult to even build. To quote the article:

Electronic News: What’s the defining factor that makes some chips better than others?
Reeves: Defects. It becomes a bigger problem the bigger the chip is. With chips that are one-by-one and silicon germanium, we can get yields of 95 percent. With a chip like the Cell processor, you’re lucky to get 10 or 20 percent. If you put logic redundancy on it, you can double that. It’s a great strategy, and I’m not sure anyone other than IBM is doing that with logic. Everybody does it with DRAM. There are always extra bits in there for memory. People have not yet moved to logic block redundancy, though.

Reeves, the VP, says most chips get 95% yield. That means, out of 100 chips made, 5 will be thrown out due to various circuit failure. The Cell processor has a 10 to 20 percent yield. Out of 100 chips built, 80 to 90 are thrown out! Sony is putting, in their "industry killing machine", untested-in-the-field chips that are far from reaching mass production due to flaws in the creation process.

You can read the article for yourself, but the VP goes on to say that they design the Cell processor with eight "mini-cores" (so to speak), and that the PS3 will only ever use seven cores. This seems to be good for Playstation owners, because if one of the seven cores fails after you've purchased it, then the spare eighth core will kick on and take it's place. (Giving you the illusion that your system is fine.) It's a nice touch to include a sort of self-healing chip, and it would be an awesome idea if it didn't seem like they'd be using the spare core right out of the box!

IMDB, Kotaku, DigiTimes (Digg), as well as other places, are carrying summaries of an article from China's Commercial Times which talks about how Blu-Ray player will be delayed (again) due to the fact that there aren't enough laser assemblies. Those things that slide back and forth inside the disc drive to read the data off the disc. Actually, see, it's technically the little laser diode itself that's in shortage, so they can't even make assemblies. The little glass-looking thing that MAKES the laser. Anyway, they say that not only will this delay Blu-Ray players, but it could also affect production of the PS3. (But it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure this out, since Sony has been blaring the fact that the PS3 uses Blu-Ray from the very beginning.)

See, Sony? This is why using expensive, cutting-edge technology is a horrible idea. It's expensive for you, it's expensive for the customer, it doesn't work and everyone loses money. Have you learned your lesson, yet? I would say "better luck next time", but I really don't see a next time for your gaming department. In fact, I don't see how this will bode well for the rest of the corporation. The entire company was in some trouble before this... they're in serious trouble now.

Let me close with an article translated from a Japanese entertainment magazine. You know Famitsu, right? Well, it appears that they've polled their readers on which system looks more attractive to them.

Gamers: 73.6% for Wii, 16.7% for PS3
Retailers: 65.9% for Wii, 18.8% for PS3
Developers: 69.7% for Wii, 27.3% for PS3

The article says analysts say Sony will win wth their names and available games. (What? Sony still has either one?) The magazine also polled female users. (Prime example of non-gamers, heheh.) Results?

Students: 37.5% for PS3, 12.5% for Wii
(not surprising... Playstation is somehow "cool" in a teen's eyes)

Business: 36.4% for Wii, 33.3% for PS3
(aha, a little better! Nintendo's targeted older audience, too)

Housewives: 42.9% for Wii, 9.5% for PS3
(...and the icing on the cake!)

Nintendo is effectively reaching their goal of catering to non-gamers. Bye-bye, Sony!