[11/05/2000]
It has to be said

I always remained silent on this specific topic, but after today's events I really have to rant a bit.
I'm talking about Battle.net. Battle.net was introduced with the launch of Diablo and has ever since supported all the games from Blizzard that followed the release. Since the release of Diablo 2, Battle.net does no longer only route info and serves as a "game-finder", now it also checks every movement and every event you and everybody else in any Diablo 2 realm does. It's obvious that this requires a lot of server and bandwidth capacity. Unfortunately it's obviously not obvious enough for the Sirs at Blizzard to provide enough of those resources. Since the first tests began, Battle.net has always performed really bad, with pings often being unplayable, games being unjoinable, disconnections and lag. While the solution to the problem lies at hand, someone inside Blizzard doesn't seem to want to spend some money to provide better support. The Europe realm has one single server that should handle around 10'000 users in rougly 5000 games all the time. The results are pings in the 1000s, and wait-lines in the 100s. Every Saturday and Sunday it gets even worse, when all the people want to play. Server downs and a complete "un-join-ability" are state of the art. It is clear that Blizzard must act soon, or they might lose valuable customers for their upcoming games, that will also be Battle.net based (Warcraft 3 for example). Today neither battle.net nor blizzard.com could be reached with a browser. The game servers where up most of the time, but pings, wait-lines and "failed to join" ratios were horrible.

[11/05/2000]
Mactoolbox is new

MTB today launched its first pages with a new layout and design. It's not quite done yet, but more is coming in. Nice page I think.

[11/05/2000]
Tinkering with the Cube

MacNN has a thread in its forums where a guy plugged two screens into a Cube at once (VGA and ADC) and is now asking for technical details. Instead of that he got a lot of other answers. If you have a Cube, you should read that!

[11/05/2000]
Not again

MacWEEK talks about porting Mac OS X to x86 again. Now they asked some deelopers, who - of course - confirmed that MOX can be ported to Intel or AMD hardware, if... and but....
Whatever you say, this is no solution. If every industry would always turn in the direction of the stongest wind, we'd never arrive anywhere. Switching to x86 now - about 2 years before its definite end - is pointless.