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Classic Conquer 2.0 Back as of 11/18/09…. <--- Not really, to sum it up....it is still way too easy to buy your way to the top.

We were disapointed to see that the new oldschool release was was a big let-down.
I for one was'nt expecting to see a ninja class and the ability to still purchase CP'S and Dragon Balls to buy your toons way to the top.
So the TechRaffle team is honored to announce that we created our very own Conquer Classic - private server, without the ninja class. HardcoreCo is still under construction but functional.
Accounts will initially be created and activated for any Media Blog member that applies for a private server account through the support@techraffle.com email, on a first come first serve basis, just include your Media blog username, your desired HardcoreCo username – no passwords – you create a pass on intial log-in and include your verifiable email address, We will then create an account for you and email you the login instructions within 24 hours.
HardcoreCO server ID – HardcoreCO will be launched Jan/04/2010. The HardcoreCO project aims to bring back the original Conquer Online to veterans who are missing the good old days. With certain features removed to return the game to its original roots.

The TQ team is honored to announce that the 1st Classical CO server – Liberty will be launched after the server maintenance at 17:40, November 18 PST. The Classic CO project aims to bring back the original taste of Conquer Online to veterans who are missing the good old days. Based on the community’s suggestions, Classic CO will be run with the updated 2.0 style of graphics and features but with certain features removed to return the game to its original roots. The most critical change is that there will be NO Shopping Mall and Battle Power System in the new Classic CO.

The Liberty server is hosted in America.

Conquer 2.0 Has Returned

The moment you’ve all been waiting for…
PvP! Guild PvP! War! I’ve played this game before, and to those of you out there that like the original CO 2.0, I found that you’re usually all about the PvP. And Conquer doesn’t disappoint, players are free to attack other players in the world of Conquer at whim. Although, this could get you into some trouble. Whenever you kill another player, you will receive a certain number of PvP Points depending on the kill – 10 points for another player, and 3 for another player in your guild. If you manage to accumulate 30 points, your name will go red and aside from being attacked on sight by town guards, you will have a chance of losing weapons and items upon death. Rack up 100 points and you will notice that your name is now black, and if killed you will always drop a piece of your equipment, along with being sent to jail. But fear not friends, once a player reaches 1000 points, he will no longer be able to attack players with less than 30. Points will decrease at a rate of 10 per hour, so feel free to pvp kill as many times as you see fit…

Then you have Guilds, which in order to be created requires the leader to be a minimum of level 90, and to fork out 1 Million silvers. Once created a guild will have the option to join the weekly server-wide guild war event, which consist of attacking a pole in the centre of a castle until it is defeated. By inflicting the largest majority of damage to the pole, you will be declared the winner for the week and enjoy the benefits that ensue – however you will be required to defend the castle from any other guilds trying to take it in the following week. Although this all sounds very cool, I know for a fact that other games, also free to play are out there right now, and provide PvP action. But if this sounds like you’re avenue of PvP action, the original Conquer 2.0 without Potency and added expense is back as of 11/18/2009….Enjoy!

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Bing Gaining On Google, Yahoo

All of you webmasters need to get on over to Bing.com

 submit your site and get your webmaster account set up.

Even though Bing (MS Live) is the little guy facing a daunting giant (Google) when it comes to search engines,  we are witnessing the begining of what some may very well see as another greed driven monopoly giant about to be brought to their knees.

Microsoft is a formidable opponent and has the resources,  this time they’re not charging into battle half cocked .  Google would do well to maintain a 20% market share when the dust settles this time,  they have a long battle ahead and will more than likely be de-throned inside of 18 months from today.

Will Google follow a path similar to AOL?

They say ;

1.  find a niche

2.  provide relevant content that people want

3. optimise your site, update frequently,  Acquire quality back-links to your site

4. blah blah blah blah…..

We can go on and on but we are following the great Google of OZ rules here!

And those with high ranking pages and sites in Googles’ engine will be first to argue with you on googles behalf, because like it or not search engines have been monetized and is a multi billion dollar market, so if you were the first guy to build a website around google crap-ola and spend x amount of advertising dollars with google then you are likely to hold a top spot simply because you were first in category and spend ad dollars, this makes it extremely difficult for the little guy on a shoe string budget or the mom and pop e-tailer to compete when The great Google Of OZ says  your site content is already available on many other sites that rank very well on google,  sites which already spend ad dollars, have relevant back links ect.

If you build it they will come…WRONG - no they won’t because Google of OZ has already determined how relevant your site is based on the All mighty Google algorithms…your success or failure lies squarely in the hands of Googles Judgment of your content,  which is skewed by googles greed and leaves no room for the entrepreneur or mom and pop e-tailer.

Sure you may have several sites that rank well in google and that fact alone gives you a hand up in future success simply because of  those sites that already rank in google and of course provide valuable backlinks to each other.

I don’t care how good or functional your site is,  without page rank and several relevant quality backlinks to jump start your site,  you are fighting a losing battle. 

It’s really very simple, this whole process is monetarily driven and if you’re not prepred to spend the ad dollars to compete for a position then you will be left on the outside looking in and not likely to acquire a decent ranking no matter how hard you work on your site optimisation.

Why… because no one is going to link to your site if you have little or no google page rank unless they are paid links.

Google’s consistently losing share (0.59 percent between April and June).  Yahoo’s down from its April levels, too (0.23 percent).  In fact, of the top three search engines, only Microsoft’s offering cornered more market share in the last couple of months.

And although a rise of 1.02 percent doesn’t sound like a lot, if you look at the figure with respect to Microsoft’s starting point of 7.21 percent.

The last thing that Google wants to see is lost market share. Google is all about maximizing every dollar that advertisers put into AdWords.

 A loss of market share corresponds to a loss of marketing dollars, and thus a lower stock price.

While Microsoft is gaining ground, just remember that their products are many and is only based fractionally in search.

 Google is search, so they are getting beat up on their home turf.

Googlers Sundar Pichai and Linus Upson announced that the company was embarking on a new project: the Google Chrome Operating System.What we do know is Google will feed you 10 miles O ‘ crap to convince you that the Google rules are just, but don’t take my word for it…just have a look at some of the sites that you can find around the net that rank well in google.

After the Web browser launched last year, many people anticipated a Google OS as the company’s next move.

Google Chrome OS is open source and is intended for netbooks; however, the system is said to be equipped to power large desktop systems as well. The three main aspects of the operating system are speed, simplicity, and security. Although Google will construct its own windowing system, the new OS will run on top of the kernel from the open source Linux OS.

According to the Google blog post making the announcement, the OS will not be available to consumers until the second half of 2010.

As Google prepares to enter the operating system market, many questions come to mind. First of all, is this a direct attack against Microsoft since Bing appears to be making legitimate progress?

 Will Google’s OS exist as a serious contender to the alternative operating systems? How will consumers and computer manufacturers react? Will Google be hit with more antitrust investigations?

Is this a Google counter attack?

Although there are many unanswered questions associated with this news, one thing that is certain is that Google has just taken on a challenging mission.

I have found many sites with high rank and in the top 10 search results and have less than 100 words of typed content.   So excuse me for not buying in to the whole pile O’ crap “your content” ,   when you see other sites with very little text, content and no alt text in images rank as high as 6 or 7 in google while you struggle with every aspect of SEO including relevant text content, keywords, tags and get a zero page rank while finding other sites with graphics,  little or no content ranking high in google.

So how do you justify high rankings based on a few graphics with no real  text content and rank the next site that has an abundance of relevant text with a rank of zero …. is it the ad dollar revenues that google is harvesting and back- links just one of the many items Google is using to attempt to mask the greedy tactics they have adopted…..hmm is this  just,  equal consideration and do you really believe Google should decide wether or not your content is usefull rather than actual users of the search engine?

To rank in googles’ search engine… Well it’s only a matter of Ad Dollars and how much you can spend to get there!

Conclusion;  It does appear that Googles’ greed,  monetary and unfair search engine inclusion will be it’s un-doing and has already opened the door for Bing (MS Live).  We will have to wait and see how microsoft will manage their bid for your business and if search results will be as monetarily biased as google has proven to be.

Google will ultimately become the biggest looser in this battle, the real question is….will they loose the war entirely?

M. Moore

website;       http://techraffle.com

TechRaffle Blog;     http://techraffle.com/wordpress/

X-Men Origins: Wolverine

Score ( 3 of 5)  * * * 
Seen 6 May 2009

I’m not against giving Wolverine an origin story as some  fans may be.   I think making him mysterious while using  bits of Marvel history reaches a pivotal point.  The story  is kind of disappointing. It goes past most of history as nothing more than a continuous string of wars that Logan & Creed as soldiers fight in, then turns our attention to another story about mutant superheroes fighting mutant villains to protect the mutants.

The part that was promised to be good has about ten minutes of Ryan Reynolds as proto-Deadpool.

Labels: 3-D, animation, Boston Fantastic Film Festival, crime, drama,  sci-fi

By;  M. Moore  -  Sunday  -  May/17/2009

Sunday, May 17, 2009 – Star Trek
I’m no fanboy on the subject of Star Trek – I didn’t care for Voyager but loved Enterprise, the latter brought me back – but this really is the first time Star Trek has felt right in years, if not decades.
Star Trek
Scored (4 of 5) * * * * Seen 10 May 2009
Talking with fellow fans, I thought that a fun thing for Paramount to do for Star Trek’s thirtieth anniversary would be to make a new movie, with new people playing the familiar characters but a modern production. Many people believe that there shouldn’t be any more than that, because The Original Series was by far the best.
They have gone back to the beginning to tell a first chapter which had never appeared on film, and focused on the things that made these worlds appealing in the first place. And as good as those other two movies are, the process is especially revelatory for Star Trek: Batman and James Bond have been kept in an enforced stasis, but Star Trek had allowed forty years of details to accumulate, and it achieved a astounding level of solemnity that was not in the original. Aside from how the sequel series converted ideals into dogma, there is in retrospect, something very wrong about how the features made a show about boldly going forward into aging, death and obsolescence.
Writters and director J.J. Abrams and writers Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman Opened with the moments leading to James T. Kirk’s birth as a Romulan ship emerges from an anomaly with its captain, Nero (Eric Bana), demanding to speak to “Ambassador Spock”. The U.S.S. Kelvin and its first officer George Kirk, hold Nero back. We’re then see scenes of Kirk’s son James and the half-human, half-Vulcan Spock as children and adolesents, taking their paths to the Starfleet Academy, where Kirk makes friends with Dr. Leonard McCoy (Karl Urban). Word of a crisis on Spock’s home planet forces Captain Christopher Pike (Bruce Greenwood) and Commander Spock to crew the newley completed starship Enterprise with junior officers and cadets, including Kirk, McCoy, Helmsman Sulu (John Cho), 17-year-old whiz kid Pavel Chekov (Anton Yelchin), and xenolinguist Uhura (Zoe Saldana). When they arrive they discover that Nero is back and the stakes are high.
At this point they announce that the familiar future history of Star Trek is no longer set in stone. This will definitely annoy some fans, but it gets the franchise back to where it started in the 60’s when Gene Roddenberry and crew were making it up as they went. Abrams and crew restore that sense of recklessness and it pairs a good match to their main character.
Chris Pine captures that part of Kirk. His Kirk isn’t the same as William Shatner’s – but he’s still young and headstrong, overestimating himself, a cocky yet mature man. Whether he’s being cunning or foolhardy Kirk is decisive, but can afford to be because he’s got the brains and charisma. Zachary Quinto’s Spock is the same way, although overt self-examination to him. He does what’s expected, keeping his emotions in check, as the Vulcans favor logic above all else, he also has Spock’s dry sarcasm right (others playing Vulcans have had a hard time with the just short of smug part).
The cast does a good job of recreating the characters. Karl Urban’s McCoy is by far the closest to his predecessor. For all Urban’s McCoy complaining, he’s also excited about his fresh start and the potential for adventure. Yelchin and Saldana perhaps make characters who mainly were seat warmers in the 60’s more memorable this time around, although John Cho seems to have been left in the background. Simon Pegg adds a good late boost as Scotty, and Bruce Greenwood a mentor figure as Pike. Eric Bana is sort of all over the map as Nero and it’s not just that much of his backstory has been off-loaded into a comic book tie-in, but Bana sometimes seems unsure of Nero’s role as fierce or laid-back, a working-class guy thrown into super villainy by circumstance.
The original series star Leonard Nimoy is here, as an aged Spock, lending a little more legitimacy. It’s clear that, although they are aiming for new and modern, the filmmakers are being careful not to mess with the formula too much, which has worked for forty plus years. They keep things moving along at a brisk enough pace.
This is the first bit of Star Trek filmed in my lifetime that feels like the original. It’s fast-paced, sexy, funny, full of excitement and adventure. The various incarnations of Star Trek have some good and bad things, but it’s been a while since it’s been this unpredictable.
Labels: action, sci-fi, Star Trek

The Escapist

Scored (3 of 5) * * *
Seen 27 April 2009

The Escapist takes off running.

The movie starts off with the sound of alarms, as four cons scramble to remove a grate from the floor, while another injured lifer, Frank Perry (Brian Cox), brings up the rear. The film then jumps back in time, showing us how this came about. Perry was no trouble maker, until he hears that his daughter has been hospitalized. Unable to see her, he plans to escape with boxer Lenny Drake (Joseph Fiennes) and near release Brodie (Liam Cunningham), who knows the sewer systems they’ll be navigating. It gets more complicated when Frank gets a new cellmate, Lacey (Dominic Cooper). Sociopath Tony (Steven Mackintosh) has taken a fancy to Lacey, which is bad enough, but Tony’s brother is Rizza (Damian Lewis), a crime kingpin who has a hand in everything that goes on inside. Avoiding his attention means making a deal with Viv Batista (Seu Jorge), an incarcerated chemist who deals in the jail’s drug trade.

Director Rupert Wyatt and co-writer Daniel Hardy spend their time between between the jail and the tunnels. The story being told inside the prison is about Frank confronting his decisions to go along when he could stand, the movie seemed to undergo a big shift midway through. With the two halves of the story standing somewhat separate, the first half does a nice job of hiding just how the second winds up with the set-up it has until the last minute.

By;  M. Moore  -  Sunday -  May 17/2009