Stardock's store, which WinCustomize uses, now supports PayPal orders!

Over the last few years, several hundred people have started using Linux as their primary desktop.  To find out why those users left the herd, a survey was taken.

The results have were quite interesting and tended to be largely for technical or price reasons as opposed to some deep rooted issue with Microsoft.  Check it out.

Level 3 and Cogent have announced a new agreement in which customers of both ISPs will be able to reach sites of the other.  A few weeks ago, Level 3 depeered from Cogent causing users of Level 3 to be unable to reach Cogent based websites (such as WinCustomize.com).

We've updated the screenshots section with some new screenshots based on Beta 4.

In the battle of Okinawa, a small island in the Pacific ocean, over 12,000 Americans died and another 38,000 were seriously wounded.

Mind you, this was to take an island that was tiny and had a population less than part of Baghad. And we're still there today.

Luckily, Americans were a little bit tougher of skin back then.  We didn't shirk or slink away from paying a high price to do things that were important in a larger sense. 

2,000 Americans have died in Iraq over the past 3 years.  That's 1/6th as many people who died -- within the span of a few days -- in a single battle on a single island in World War II. 

Those Americans gave their lives in a cause they believed in.  In a cause that serves our country and even the rest of the world even if much of that world (those ironically many of whom were either our enemies or sat on the side-lines back in World War II) doesn't appreciate it. 

Those Americans were not sent there to find "WMD" or for "oil".  They were sent there to topple an evil, corrupt regime that had twice attacked its neighbors, had used whatever weapons it had at hand in war, was violating the cease fire from the previous war with the coaliation, and quite clearly was working its way through the so-called "Sanctions" to the day when it could restart programs to gain for itself horrific weapons to use or distribute to enemies. 

Those Americans were sent to a country that is literally in the middle of a region that is formenting people who want to exterminate not just every single American but the entire western way of life. 

Those Americans gave their lives to help put in its place a country that we hope will become democratic and representative but at the very least won't harbor terrorists who can plan at their leisure further attacks on this country.

Those Americans gave their lives as a part of a broader war on Islamic terror.  And while some don't see the connection between Iraq and Islamic militarism, the same could be said of not seeing the connection between the attack on Pearl Harbor and the US invasion of French North Africa.

Luckily, the greatest generation of Americans were made of sterner stuff than what today's Americans are apparently made of. They rolled up their sleaves and went to work and made possible the world we have today where we have the luxury to hyper-analyse every combat death that occurs in the name of securing freedom and security both there and at home.

The families and friends of those 2,000 men and women can hopefully take comfort that they gave their lives in a cause that was as noble and true as any cause that warriors have fought and died in.  As an American, I want to express appreciation for their sacrifice that has helped make all of us a bit safer and helped make the world a better place.

We are hoping to sqeeze in the Metaverse support into beta 4.  Originally this was going to go in December but because we have to submit the game for ESRP rating prior to December 1, we had to get this part going sooner. So you may be able to play the game via the Metaverse right off in beta 4.

There is a pretty good chance, however, that Beta 4 will get delayed until this upcoming Tuesday to give us a little more time to tweak things and fix bugs.  There's a lot of new things coming together in this beta and it won't do anyone any good if it's unplayabily buggy.  Most of the issues are very easy to resolve, it's just the typical result of moving in big modules into place and having to deal with how they interact with others.

For instance, this week we've put a lot of time (and continue to) to deal with the computer AI building fleets.  This in turn seems to make the game unstable after awhile since the AI tends to build and eliminate fleets a lot more often than a human would.  So these are the kinds of things we have to resolve prior to beta 4.

Galactic Civilizations I didn't have many hot keys.  This time around, we want to have lots of them.

Here are some of the preliminary ones (and if we have time, we'll make this configurable -- maybe for the bonus pack).

F1 through F4 are different views of the map.

• 1 Ship List
• 2 Planet list
• 3 Research Screen
• 4 Domestic Policy
• 5 Foreign Policy
• 6 Galactic Census
• 7 Ship Design
• TAB Find next ship
• SPACE pass on current ship (give up moves)
• ENTER end turn
• ` Toggle grid lines
• Delete delete current ship
• ' Find your toughest ship
• ; Find your most powerful fleet
• G Open up Goto panel to send ship to a given destination
• X Enter Rallypoint mode
• R Bring up list of Rally Points
• P Bring up most powerful planet in your civilization
• B Build starbase with currently selected constructor
• S Sentry currently selected ship
• G Set current ship to guard
• D Bring up details for currently selected ship or the details screen on selected planet.
• + zoom in
• - zoom out
• Keypad + zoom in on mini map
• Keypad - zoom out on mini map
• Backspace toggle screens that have fold in UIs.
• Esc Options screen
• Ctrl-S Quick Save current game
• Ctrl-1 Bring up negotiation screen with Humans
• Ctrl-2 " with Drengin
• Ctrl-3 through 0 bring up negotiation screen with corresponding player
• Home brings up home planet of currently selected ship. If no ship selected, brings up your capital world.

Any others you can think of?

 

 

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We are doing some server maintainence.  One of our non-TotalGaming.net related servers had problems yesterday so we're going through and cleaning that up.  You may see some "weird" stuff on the site today.

Last night the master database became corrupt and one of the machines had a catastrophic failure.  I kind of "perfect storm" of failure -- two bad things on two seperate servers.  For a few hours, JoeUser ceased to exist. It was the worst case scenario.

However, LUCKILY, we do daily backups on all your blogs. So this incident can at least provide some assurance that all your hard work, your thoughts and written record are being treated with respect and care.

It does mean, however, that everything from yesterday is lost.  Which is ironic since I wrote a number of blogs yesterday.

Update: Most articles from yesterday have been restored thanks to T-man!

Yesterday we had a total melt down of one of the machines and the FULL master database on another machine.  In short, everything was lost. 

Luckily, we do daily back-ups.  Had there been no backup, there'd be no more WinCustomize or forums or JoeUser. It was the most serious system failure we've ever had.  The daily backups of course mean we lost everything that happened yesterday -- orders, posts, skins, you name it. 

It's also another reason why WinCustomize subscriptions are so important.  Thanks to subscribers, we have the extra hardware to do those backups.  If we had even more subscribers, we could do real-time mirroring of these kinds of things and the melt down would not have even lost anything.  But last night, the end of WinCustomize as we knew it came very close. Thank you subscribers for having provided the funds to have the extra hardware for us to be able to do daily backups and be able to quickly bring the site back.

In the meantime, you will find that there are weird errors as some indexes are wrong and that kind of thing. We'll be trying to address that in the coming days.