Dear FolderShare user,

We’re contacting you to let you know what’s next for FolderShare, and to make you aware of some important changes.

In December, we plan to announce a product called Windows Live Sync. You can think of it as FolderShare 2.0. It’s going to look familiar and offer the same great features, plus:

• More folders and files—sync up to 20 folders with 20,000 files each.
• Integration with Windows Live ID—no more extra sign-in stuff to remember.
• Integration with the Recycle Bin—no more separate Trash folder to fiddle with.
• Unicode support—sync files in other languages.

A huge part of Sync’s success story depends on FolderShare users like you. When Sync releases, FolderShare goes into retirement. That means your FolderShare software will stop working and will ask you to upgrade to Sync. Once you do, Sync will automatically rebuild your personal folders. We expect a lot of new users when Sync is released, so if you can’t sign in right away, please give it a little time.

Here’s the part you need to pay attention to: Sync will not be able to rebuild your shared libraries. If you have a lot of shared libraries, you should hop over to the FolderShare website while it’s still available and copy all that information. You’ll need it to rebuild your shared libraries in Sync.

Thanks for being a FolderShare user! We’re excited about delivering an even better file-synchronization experience to customers like you. We hope you’ll come along as we move forward with Windows Live Sync.

Sincerely,

The Windows Live Sync (formerly FolderShare) team

Don’t they have at least one spare developer who could have worked on the migration script? Imagine if, when they went from Hotmail to Live Mail, they had advised that everyone print out their emails because they won’t be migrated?

M$

It wasn’t a great movie. It was very nearly not even good.

Let’s see… what went wrong?

Well: Casino Royale set an impossibly high bar, is the short version.

Casino Royale delivered (for Bond) realism and authenticity in its action sequences, a compelling and mildly complex plot, interesting locations, and again, and above all, the return of some authenticity. If I had to sum up Bond 20, it would be “authentic”. A reboot in the truest sense of the word. Like Batman Begins, care was taken with the details, enough that I wasn’t immediately offended or pissed off while watching it (and having my suspension of disbelief shattered by an unrealistic stunt, or a sequence that was clearly CGI, etc, etc).

Whereas Nolan pulled off The Dark Knight with even more of what made the first movie good, reinvigorated Bond fans got the difficult second album.

Quantum of Solace relies on effects and an incomprehensible set of action-cut-sequences, in which the effects shots stand out. The moment in the boat where Olga strikes at the other man (impossible camera shot, so clearly an effect); the weird part where something got attached to another boat somehow; other impossible camera shots; implausible villain’s lair. It was damn near Roger Moore-era over-the-top-ness.

Put another way, I thought the ad for the Sony thingo at the start, where Daniel Craig was getting stoically blasted by explosions and debris, all the while trying to stare sadly at the camera, was the best action sequence in the movie. (Like the “Mad World” Gears of War ad made you wish the story in the game was actually worth a damn and had just a smidgen of poignance). But no. Yes, there was an action sequence montage to arguably inappropriate music, and while the girlie enjoyed that bit, I’ve seen it done better, and less perfunctorily.

And then, when you think things might be calming down… the MI6 computer system was one of those ridiculous Swordfish-class monstrosities. Surface multiplied with some Designers Republic offcuts. Everything seemed to beep and animate and twirl, but how much of it actually looked functional or useful to anyone? Frustration abounded. Does anyone, ever, really expect computers to be magical any more? Do they need to be?

And I felt tired. Bond being cut loose from MI6 (or was it 5?) again? Really? Is that even a plot twist any more, or did Judi Dench die ten years ago, and they’re just compositing her into the scenes with all the same lines? Maybe computers are magical.

Quantum just didn’t work as well on any level, and I’m going to argue that at the end of the day, it was largely due to the direction. The plot could have used work, but I think the disappointingly vague and overly brusque action sequences made the action less fun, and the movie as a whole felt cheap.

I’m hoping this is a momentary mis-step, and that we’ll see more of the smart, realistic Bond we got from Casino Royale, and less of a return to the special effects and plausibility nightmares of Die Another Day.

So, six out of ten. Charitably, 7, but that’s stretching the friendship. Must Do Better.

I picked it quickly on Public Image Limited’s “live” version of Rise (on one EP or another), and watching the Make Me A Supermodel finale on 7 left me with a similar feeling.

Crowd shots showed happy clappers for the runway segment. But some signature “whooping” was happening for every person. Everyone got the same level of crowd noise. And in none of the shots did it appear that the crowd was as impassioned as the whooping might imply. They might have taken legitimate crowd noise from one segment and dropped it in elsewhere, but it’s cheating. It’s not authentic. And I’m not impressed.

So, Channel 7, shame on you. I reckon it was overdubbed, I reckon it was rorted, and I reckon it’s sad that you did that, assuming I’m right.

1.11 HIGHLIGHTS - MAIN NEW IMPROVEMENTS AND FIXES

• Fixed compatibility issues with Vista x64 platform

• Voice over net and multiplayer related fixes and improvements

• Fixed Out Of Memory problems caused by exhausting 32b virtual address space

• Significant optimizations with large view distances

• AI bridge pathfinding much improved

• Fixed some bugs in the AI target recognition both visually and aurally

• Improved airplane turn dynamics simulation (including improved rudder simulation)

• Fixed clipping issues with 16:9 or TrippleHead displays

 

Performance was pretty good (as in, I haven’t seen it that good before) when I tried it out on Vista X64 just then - and best of all, no need to dual-boot any more just to play it!

Thanks for the beta, back in a few weeks of playtesting.

(I noticed that trying to adjust the Y axis mouse sensitivity slider didn’t really work properly, but the X was OK… just me?)

Sure, you can limit your total memory to <=3GB via BCDEDIT and reboot every single time you want to play the game, but, um, that’s not the best user experience.

A post to the Flashpoint1985 Armed Assault Troubleshooting forum (which seems to get indexed by precisely zero search engines, doesn’t support RSS feeds and is generally a pain in the bum to use) suggests that the upcoming patch (1.12, I think was mentioned somewhere, but whatever; as long as it works (1.09 beta doesn’t)) will fix that.

Now where’s the damn patch!? It’s coming up on a year and a half since release, and still no Vista support. Lift your game, folks!

Formula One - This seems to be a popular question, and it seems many of our fans in Europe are interested in our thoughts about the game license. This one is simple. I am personally a huge fan, having grown up worshipping such great drivers as Graham Hill, Jim Clark, Jackie Stewart and James Hunt. The excitement that Lewis Hamilton has brought to the sport, and its vast global appeal, make it an appealing game license, but as of right now it is not available. Maybe in a few years the situation will change, but until then we fully respect the rights held by our partners at Sony.

Which is a gigantic pain in the arse, after rumours that EA had bought a Lewis Hamilton endorsement for 5 million quid.

Might have to go get a PS3 if the Formula One license is going to linger with them for much longer.

(Guess there’s always RFactor in the meantime - the best $50 I’ve spent on a racing game in a long time).

Here’s how to play along with me:

So, when Kimi:

Plays with the microphone: have a shot

Picks his nose: a double shot;

Picks his nose, inspects the picking, then somehow disposes of it (or returns it): go the triple shot!

Looks like he’s going to pick his nose but ends up rubbing his cheek or pulling his ear: look like you’re going to have a shot, but have another drink instead.

My theory is that the better his result, the drunker you’ll get after a race.

(I always thought it was spelt Raikonnen, but seems I was just drunk at the time)

I wasn’t game to try the early betas, as one of the side effects was mentioned as being a Sprocket reactivation. I’m wary enough of Sprocket without wanting to lose an activation for a weirdo beta patch, so 1.08’s the update I’m going for.

It should bring rough parity to all worldwide versions of ArmA, except where special content was created for a particular publisher. They should all be bug-compatible though!

Details and download links here:

http://community.bistudio.com/wiki/ArmA:_Patch_v.1.08

For me, the Stalker experience has been one of two different games - the first a taut, fearful experience, when saving might actually cause the loss of progress, thus providing a powerful incentive to stay alive at all costs, but at the same time, knowing that you were playing on borrowed time - the longer you lived, the less likely you’d be able to save later.

Let’s call that the “initial minigame”.

Once you’ve patched up to get that wonderful more-than-20-minute feeling, and you adapt to the Stalker model - and it does seem to take a good two to three hours of uninterrupted play to adapt to it - it becomes a different experience. The Zone, as they call Chernobyl’s surrounds, becomes a fascinating and absorbing area, and the game morphs from maddening too-hard shooter into a deliberately-paced role-playing shooter. An RPS, I guess.

Management of the items you’re carrying to keep your fatigue levels low might not sound like fun, but, well, it is. Deus Ex forced you to make tough choices about what you were carrying by volume of stuff; in Stalker, the size of the items probably won’t slow you down too much, but grab one item too many over your 50KG carrying capacity and you quickly become fatigued and unable to run for more than a few steps. Hit 60KG, and you’re unable to move. Time to make some tough choices - the radiation meds, or the artifacts?

Artifacts provide the “buffs” most know and love from regular RPGs or MMOs, and collecting and hoarding artifacts is just flat-out fun. Monsters and bandits do respawn (booo), but I’m not sure about Artifacts - hopefully so.

Most artifacts are useful in some way, but have a tradeoff - as an example, the Soul artifact (they’re all just rock-like things, it’s not someone’s soul. I think) gives you something like +600% healing per second, but reduces your armour’s bulletproofness and rupture-proofness by 10% each. Many of the artifacts swap radiation for effect, meaning that unless you find an anti-radiation artifact your experimentation will be short lived. Like you. Thankfully, radiation-eating Fireballs start popping up after a little exploration - at first, I was indignant and annoyed that I’d have to enable an artifact, then use a precious antiradiation drug and health kit before keeling over.

So, in short, I’m really liking this game. The indoor and underground areas are frequently claustrophobic and genuinely scary (so much so that I physically sigh with relief when I get back out into daylight (or even the bastard twilight that passes for night around these parts) and the countryside has a distinct character and flavour, even though it’s a radioactive wasteland.

SPOILER ALERT, SKIP THIS BIT TO REMAIN VIRGINAL

The most shocking moment so far happened a few minutes ago, through a flashback I wasn’t expecting (they seem pretty sparse so far): I learned that in my past, it seems, I was… a bunny killer. That terrible secret led to me being caught by the bunnies, and my memory being wiped. But now, at the bottom of a dungeon-like laboratory, I know the awful slaughtering truth.

END OF SPOILERS

Perfect? Nup - NPCs aren’t really a believable bunch, but they serve their purpose within the game mechanic. The text seems too large in many areas, and the “PDA” interface is frequently an exercise in frustration and weird design.

The zone is broken into “level”s in the “small maps” sense, and this is possibly the big one - my impression of Stalker from the press to this point was that it was going to be GTA-style free roaming, only with radiation - one big world, seamless, no boundaries, and so on. Just my expectation, no big deal.

Also, I have no idea how it’s meant to look, because I’ve been playing with the shader mod made by one of the Ars.Technica users. I’m considering turning it off and going back to regular shaders, but it always seems to be a case of “next time”… It looks pretty damn sweet anyway.

My verdict: Stalker-that-doesn’t-crash is one of the most compelling experiences I’ve had this year so far.

Four and a half slaughtered radioactive bunnies out of five.