5-Min Review: The Blackhole that is MMO (The Burning Crusade)

So of course I'm still a semi-social geek right? Is that even a valid term? In any case, The Burning Crusade, the much vaunted expansion pack for the wildly popular World of Warcraft is out and about. That doesn't mean people are getting a whole lot of chances to play it unscathed of course.

TBC brings something back to the fold that WoW was starting to diverge from. The idea of small group content. With the influx of EQ and Raid centric developers to the WoW team it seemed like the entire point of the game was not to have fun with your friends but to amass 40 lemmings and have them Zerg an NPC boss monster and then bitch and moan over who got the rights to the loot.

While I'm glad to see some of the changes, parts of me are still left with a half-crooked neck wondering "why blizzard, why". Server stability as expected of a large launch is less than stellar. With frequent lag spikes and the seemingly unrelenting need for partial rollbacks the entire gaming experience to me is marred by the technical backbone of the game just not meeting demand.

Layer on top of that some of the oddest map designs I've seen and the game isn't always as smooth as I think it could have been. Let's face it when you feel like a Weeble trying not to wobble just going from area to area that's no fun.

I'll hold off from saying TBC is a wash, but I think there's still a good volume of work to be done in patches or future XP's. Huh maybe that's why it's TBC, To Be Continued... *dramatic music*

iPhone... iDunCare

Normally I'm all about the new technology and the things on the horizon, but in a lot of cases I'm also very cautious. Enter the iPhone. Rumors about it have been around for a great long while, but honestly is this 3-way convergence device really going to be the next best thing or just a quirky product? A little of both would be my guess.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070109-8583.html

ArsTechica had a fairly good review of the device. For me however I view the attempts at creating a sexy-new-media-savvy phone a little mixed. My view has often been that convergence devices fall into two categories, consumer and business models. The iPhone looks like a great blend of features for the upper level consumer but in many ways I can see the limited input options as being a hindrance to its adoption in the business side of the house. While some press coverage such as ZDNet's has touted the iPhone as a death knell for companies like MS and RIM, I think that view is exaggerated. Until Apple forges stronger alliances and provides business users the ability to really connect to the home office the product will likely not appeal to the larger corporations out there who are very tied to their MS Exchange/RIM connectivity.

Keep in mind I think there's a lot of good that could come of the iPhone. For younger business users this will be the penetration product of '07. As younger tech-savvy users embrace the iPhone, the expectation will be for their corporate side to follow suit. While the change won't happen overnight, it definitely gives Apple an inroad to big-business that it probably lacked.

I'll hold my real judgment until the 2nd generation of iPhone is released and people have had a chance to do more "Rugged" testing. Let's face it if the face of the pretty iPhone gets scratched up.. is it really still cool to have?

Open Source in 07 and other tech thoughts

So of course with various OSS news being tossed about I thought it a good time to editorialize some of my thoughts on the subject. First up, Red Hat and its future. While i don't think the recent actions by CentOS or Oracle are going to immediately impact the US leader in commercial distributions I do believe they will shape how Red Hat spins their services and how their distro develops.

GPL v3 concerns is next on my list. As the OSS community grows larger I realize that it's harder and harder to get everyone to agree on anything. the GPL changes proposed by Stallman et al are a textbook example of this. While I agree in the intension of the GPL license I am also slightly reserved about early adoption of the v3 GPL license. While the restrictions are meant to protect the coder and in theory keep it firmly away from IP violations, I do wonder if the restrictions are going to turn off some fledgling programmers.

Ongoing security debate. This one galls me often, simply because I don't subscribe to the notion that any computer system is necessarily more secure because it simply "is". Every OS can have flaws, if only because of the fact that both are created by humans and invariably will have defects. No amount of code auditing in the world is going to create 'perfect' code, in the end it depends on how the vendor/system administrator is able to deal with the issue.

So in a nutshell, potential movement in the OSS world, slow growth, and let's get off the security-bashing trend.