60 Minutes Nails It

The CBS News show 60 Minutes has a 15 minute video up on their website describing the entire sub-prime market crisis. The segment named “House of Cards” is the best summary I’ve seen yet and should serve as a primer for those still wondering what all this noise on the news is about.

I saw this video mentioned on Calculated Risk which is the best way of tracking the day to day news about this clusterf!@#.

Name That Security Feature

Mark Cox from the “Security Response Team” at Red Hat has put up a chart of security features and when they first appeared in the various Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise releases. It gives me motivation for my project at work tomorrow where hopefully I can nuke the last two RHEL 3 systems under my control.

Also he has a brief overview of the security updates released in the first few months of the life of RHEL 5 and how various security features either mitigated or decreased the risk of successful exploitation for many of these issues.

Aion: Tower of Eternity

A game that hasn’t gotten very much attention among North American MMORPG fans but perhaps deserves some is the upcoming game Aion: Tower of Eternity.

A writeup about the game is up on Wikipedia. The game is remarkable in that it has perhaps some of the best graphics and music to exist in an MMORPG so far. It is often referred to as the visual successor to Final Fantasy XI and from the released media so far I would agree with that.

Some high resolution videos released so far:

• General E3 2007 Trailer – Shows off some player models and environment
• E3 2007 Locales Trailer HD – Shows off some great graphics and the city at the end is amazing.
• E3 2007 Combat Trailer HD – Your basic generic combat footage. Some group action shown and I really like the player casted portal way at the end.
• E3 2007 Clothing Trailer HD – Armor and some decent emotes and uhhh… some cheerleading after the final logo…

One problem that North American players often have with Asian produced game is that most games feature forced painful grinding to level, unbalanced unrewarding pvp, and shallow storylines with graphics to match. Lineage 2’s lack of success in the NA market for these reasons is barely worth mentioning.

Blizzard has been quite successful targeting both the North American and Asian markets with World of Warcraft. Squaresoft was less successful with Final Fantasy XI but the game still has enough of a following among the NA market that Squaresoft decided to do a updated port of the game to XBOX 360 for NA players.

NCsoft certainly has shown it gave this game enough of a budget for graphics, music and animation and managed to have an interesting base story. Will it be able to pull off the rest and be able to take a near guaranteed hit in the Asian market and make it successful in the West?