It turns out that even obviously lucrative domain names couldn't save Excite@Home from bankruptcy. The company's successor is selling such domain names as Stuff.com, Home.net, and Firstyears.com--at, of course, a tidy premium (shoppingcart.com went for $285,000). Other squatters still have cash.

Permalink | Post a comment

• Read also: Buzz
• Email to a friend | Print this post

A 28-year-old South Korean man played 50 hours of video games without a break and then, er, died of exhaustion at the end of his marathon. Apparently, the man played all 50 hours in an Internet cafe...so it's possible that the sight of the bill alone caused his heart attack. (Inappropriate!)

Permalink | 15 comments

• Read also: Buzz
• Email to a friend | Print this post

Madden NFL 06 launched for consoles yesterday, thrilling some while leaving others slightly underwhelmed. Of course, the good press is just gravy for EA, and the naysayers don't matter, since in either case this is still the only 2006 NFL video game in the world. Who cares if "this year's big additions don't quite live up to the expectations placed upon them"? (That's from GameSpy, who gave the game a 9.0 anyway.) The core football experience remains the same, tacked-on features notwithstanding; stagnant or no, it's pretty good, and for most people "pretty good" is good enough.

I have a point here, and it is this: if you can take even a "pretty good" console game, and make it portable, then you have created magic. And that's what EA Sports has done with Madden NFL 06 for the Sony PSP. This is without question the PSP's first killer app and the fulfillment of all those promises we heard back in March of a "handheld PlayStation 2." The Madden experience that piqued over the last couple years arrives remarkably intact on the PSP; the controls feel right (expected), there's a full franchise mode (incredible), and the graphics are roughly on par with what you'd see playing console Madden on a PSP-size screen (unprecedented). Screenshots really don't do this game justice, because they fail to capture the particular feeling you get when you see a 3D Ronnie Brown burst into the secondary after a lifetime of sprite-based Madden efforts on the GBA.

Longtime fans of the franchise will also be happy to hear that the game's learning curve remains intact; I found the moderate difficulty level fairly challenging, and though I'm no great shakes at Madden, it's nice to see that handheld football has evolved past the point where you can just speed-burst into the end zone on every play. Passing adheres to the same time-honored methods of Maddens past, so you won't have to bother with turning off the newfangled Cone of Vision that so many people seem to hate on consoles. A few of the other console-specific moves are absent as well, due to the PSP's lack of a right analog control; you can still "truck" defenders with the triangle button, but can't do the back-juke that, if deftly executed, would likely allow experienced players to speed-burst into the end zone on every play. So maybe that's a good thing.

There were a couple features I couldn't try out; there was no Wi-Fi at the press event, so my multiplayer options were limited, and I didn't get a chance to sync the PSP with the PS2 version of the game, which would have allowed me to play a week from my season on the go. But EA's PR types assured me that those features worked perfectly well, so you'll be able to log in and manhandle any guy from Chicago who insists on playing as the Bears.

It's the rare game that actually inspires people to buy the platform it comes on, but Madden has the potential to do just that for the PSP. I can almost picture the collective sigh of relief at Sony HQ--you're in bad shape when your console's most exciting title is a Web browser.

Permalink | 3 comments

• Read also: Gaming
• Email to a friend | Print this post

MX Logic, an e-mail security company, today reported that 56 percent of all spam filtered by the company in July 2005 originated from computers hijacked by Trojan horses. These Trojan horses typically reside on high-speed, always-on, DSL-enabled computers with outdated or no antivirus or firewall protection, allowing criminal hackers remote access 24/7 to a compromisd PC. Networks of these compromised or "zombie" PCs are being used as spam relays because they hide the true sender. MX Logix reports that in June 2005 zombie PCs accounted for 65 percent of all spam and in May 2005 the number was 55 percent.

Permalink | 3 comments

• Read also: Software
• Email to a friend | Print this post

File this under the "hungry for attention" category. A Chicago lawyer who founded the Committee to Fight Microsoft back in 1995 is getting some media buzz for his recent press release calling on Microsoft to withhold the upcoming Vista operating system until the company can guarantee that the OS is 100 percent problem-free.

Andy Martin, who claims he is exploring the idea of running for governor of Illinois in 2006, says in his rant, "Bill Gates sells the public defective products, and then expects us to spend years being his guinea pigs, while he corrects the myriad of defects and vulnerabilities in his defective code."

Other sites, including our own News.com, have picked up the story, mostly because Martin comes off as a bit of a crackpot. But his quixotic quest makes for amusing reading, especially in light of the recent batch of security updates for IE, including a glitch in some of the patches themselves.

Permalink | 1 comment

• Read also: Desktops
• Email to a friend | Print this post