news
Wednesday, August 29th, 2001
Telstra annual profit hits $4billion
Telstra has had record profits this year soaring into over $400,000,000 - despite their lack of popularity with many internet users since a 3gb cap was introduced on BigPond's so called "Freedom ADSL" Plan. Even though Telstra's overall profit has been much higher this year, their share price on the ASX remains about the same, averaging roughly about $5 a share. The Australian Government is rather pleased with the profit however many shareholders are not, today Telstra's index closed at $4.99 - rising only 3cents. The ACCC is supposed to be keeping a close watch on Telstra however they did nothing when Telstra recently raised the monthly home phone line rental.
::T3qN0_H4x0R::
Japanese Satellite
Japan today launched it's new satellite into orbit providing a much needed boost to the Japanese Space economy. Photos of the Earth from the satellite have already been recieved and the satellite is expected to remain in orbit, until 2020.
::T3qN0_H4x0R::
Sport: Goodwill Games
Grant Hackett has won 1st place in the 1500m freestyle at the Goodwill games. Michael Klim took out the 100m freestyle, and in total Australia won 11 out of the 17 events.
::T3qN0_H4x0R::
East Timor
Timor's first democratic election takes place tommorrow, Australian troops are on full alert should riots break out or problems arise.
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Monday, August 20th, 2001
The End of Dynamix...
Dynamix has been officially "closed" after Sierra were forced to lay off staff to cut their loses from their most recent game release "Tribes 2" - the game failed to sell and has only just over 200,000 registered players worldwide. The much anticipated sequel to "Tribes" was severly let down by it's many bugs and quirks, and bad performance even on top end machines.
On top of that Sierra have gone to extensive lengths to stop piracy seeing as the original Tribes was a warez favorite, being a decently small game that you could burn onto shareware CDs and not having any CD-key or authentication servers (as opposed to Half-Life which cannot be played online until your CD-key has been authenticated as VALID and NOT in use by the WON (world-opponent-network) master server. Tribes2 required players to register their CD-key online with a login name and password to recieve access to the in game community features (forums and chat etc) and to even connect to game servers. Also the game is very strict on names and aliases - no two players can have the same alias at any one time because the whole game is all run through the Sierra servers.
Dynamix was the team of coders and game designers who not only created the hit game "Starseige" but also it's highly-popular sequel "Starseige Tribes" - Sierra saw that this game had potential to open up a whole new style of first-person-shooting team-based strategy and poured millions of dollars into the production of Tribes2. Sierra has now officially "axed" Dynamix because of poor game profit. Dynamix was also renouned for creating the Leisure Suit Larry series and many other old games.
::T3qN0_H4x0R:: / Monty