Ritlabs puts out an excellent program called The Bat! and a dongle-secured version called, appropriately enough, Secure Bat! I've been using the bat for about two years now, and have found it to be one of the most stable, secure, and generally well-written pieces of e-mail software I've had the pleasure of using. Secure Bat!, from what I've heard, is every bit as stable, though much more expensive and with features more befitting of administration at a large company. If anyone is left bothering to read this thread anymore, it comes highly recommended (to windows users).
Of course, you could also just encrypt your old mail file. How often do you go through mail from 1998 anyway?
I'm glad to see the improvements that IBM has made to their microdrive. I hope that the advances they make there will trickle down into their much more musically relavant line of laptop hard drives. Archos and Sonic Blue (rio) both use Laptop Hard Drives in their players to very good extent. A laptop drive is already low-powered and slim (though not as slim as the microdrive), but has the added bonuses of being low-cost and sturdy enough for a portable. Laptop hard-drives are more power efficient than the Microdrive, and are about 20 times larger for the same cost (a 20 gig jukebox can be found for roughly the same cost as just the microdrive).
People have proven their willingness to buy CD-based MP3 portables, showing that size isn't everything. The ones that still buy the flash-memory sized drives do so for athletic reasons where durability is a must. The Microdrive fills neither of these niches.
I'm sure the microdrive will find a home in the shirt-pockets of photographers everywhere. However, as a storage medium for mass market music goes, it is overpriced and underperforming.
I wasn't referring to an artistic standpoint. FF3/6 stands as one of the greatest games of all times, and will eventually become required reading when gameschools catch on. Call me a fan of Multiple Personality Disorder, but I liked FF7. It wasn't FF3, but it was good. I meant that the 3rd dimension, not to mention CD storage capacity opened up a realm of technical, immersive, and storytelling possibilities that wasn't available before.
Citizen Kane is one of the great works of the 20th century. Watch that, then walk into a theartre playing Harry Potter. You will be amazed (as in deer-in-headlights amazed). LOTR has shown this technology has actual potential uses. So did the 3rd dimension (arguably not actualized until Xenogears). So does Online play.
There are a lot of things wrong with this article.
First, FFXI isn't the first MMPORPG for a console... that honor (as far as I know) goes to Phantasy Star Online. As for the first "En Masse" game? I didn't have a NES modem, so I don't know.
Second, FF VIII is generally reviled as the worst of the series, being essentially a rushed out the door half of the two-sides-of-war tale they wanted to tell.
Third, neither this nor Phantasy Star should be considered a true MMPORPG, as this sounds like only groups can venture forth into the wild together. In Everquest you are likely to stumble across people who washed ashore on the small island in the middle of the ocean, but chance encounters like that are not possible if only groups can quest together.
Online games like this lend themselves to character and community-building gaming, whereas all of the recent Final Fantasies have been story driven. While in theory most MMPORPG have a larger story arch, in practice they are basically a world with which gamers can explore, communicate, and form communities and heirarchies. Squaresoft is famous for jaw-dropping moments of twisting plot, and that amazing feeling of convincing the player that he is the second coming of the Messiah (see "Xenogears"). Neither of these is possible in an online game where basically everyone has an equal role. However, with an online game comes a sense of community, the sort of thing that Final Fantasy games have been known to cause people to abandon.
I'm sure Square will pull this off with flare, albeit bumpy flare. FF7 was quite frankly amazing compared to FF6 (FF3 in the states), and the jump to online gaming gives Square the chance to make another massive jump in gameplay. If they don't just copy what is available, and they don't succumb to profiteering to cover for their atrocious losses on The Spirits Within, then this could very well be the greatest MMPORPG released this year. On the other hand, with one look at Square's release calendar (Snatched, apparently, from Eidos's dead hand), we can expect that next years new Final Fantasy release will be every bit as engrossing too. That is, if we bother to pick that one up.
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Of course, you could also just encrypt your old mail file. How often do you go through mail from 1998 anyway?
I'm glad to see the improvements that IBM has made to their microdrive. I hope that the advances they make there will trickle down into their much more musically relavant line of laptop hard drives. Archos and Sonic Blue (rio) both use Laptop Hard Drives in their players to very good extent. A laptop drive is already low-powered and slim (though not as slim as the microdrive), but has the added bonuses of being low-cost and sturdy enough for a portable. Laptop hard-drives are more power efficient than the Microdrive, and are about 20 times larger for the same cost (a 20 gig jukebox can be found for roughly the same cost as just the microdrive).
People have proven their willingness to buy CD-based MP3 portables, showing that size isn't everything. The ones that still buy the flash-memory sized drives do so for athletic reasons where durability is a must. The Microdrive fills neither of these niches.
I'm sure the microdrive will find a home in the shirt-pockets of photographers everywhere. However, as a storage medium for mass market music goes, it is overpriced and underperforming.
I wasn't referring to an artistic standpoint. FF3/6 stands as one of the greatest games of all times, and will eventually become required reading when gameschools catch on. Call me a fan of Multiple Personality Disorder, but I liked FF7. It wasn't FF3, but it was good. I meant that the 3rd dimension, not to mention CD storage capacity opened up a realm of technical, immersive, and storytelling possibilities that wasn't available before.
Citizen Kane is one of the great works of the 20th century. Watch that, then walk into a theartre playing Harry Potter. You will be amazed (as in deer-in-headlights amazed). LOTR has shown this technology has actual potential uses. So did the 3rd dimension (arguably not actualized until Xenogears). So does Online play.
There are a lot of things wrong with this article.
First, FFXI isn't the first MMPORPG for a console... that honor (as far as I know) goes to Phantasy Star Online. As for the first "En Masse" game? I didn't have a NES modem, so I don't know.
Second, FF VIII is generally reviled as the worst of the series, being essentially a rushed out the door half of the two-sides-of-war tale they wanted to tell.
Third, neither this nor Phantasy Star should be considered a true MMPORPG, as this sounds like only groups can venture forth into the wild together. In Everquest you are likely to stumble across people who washed ashore on the small island in the middle of the ocean, but chance encounters like that are not possible if only groups can quest together.
Online games like this lend themselves to character and community-building gaming, whereas all of the recent Final Fantasies have been story driven. While in theory most MMPORPG have a larger story arch, in practice they are basically a world with which gamers can explore, communicate, and form communities and heirarchies. Squaresoft is famous for jaw-dropping moments of twisting plot, and that amazing feeling of convincing the player that he is the second coming of the Messiah (see "Xenogears"). Neither of these is possible in an online game where basically everyone has an equal role. However, with an online game comes a sense of community, the sort of thing that Final Fantasy games have been known to cause people to abandon.
I'm sure Square will pull this off with flare, albeit bumpy flare. FF7 was quite frankly amazing compared to FF6 (FF3 in the states), and the jump to online gaming gives Square the chance to make another massive jump in gameplay. If they don't just copy what is available, and they don't succumb to profiteering to cover for their atrocious losses on The Spirits Within, then this could very well be the greatest MMPORPG released this year. On the other hand, with one look at Square's release calendar (Snatched, apparently, from Eidos's dead hand), we can expect that next years new Final Fantasy release will be every bit as engrossing too. That is, if we bother to pick that one up.