If you use Firefox as your web browser - and you should - or you’d like to, then head on over to the official site and download Firefox v1.0.1, which adds some additional anti-phishing security. If you’re a current Firefox user, then you can install v1.0.1 right on top of your current version and it will keep all of your history, cookies, preferences, etc.

Freedom Force was a great tactical superhero game - the reasons it didn’t get a lot more playing time on my computer were a couple of flaws that I felt were unforgivable; despite a FANTASTIC system for creating your own custom superheroes, you could not use those custom heroes as the main characters throughout the single-player campaign. As much as I loved the kitchy Golden Age plot, I just didn’t have fun with the game’s pre-fab heroes. The other thing that killed replayability for me was that multiplayer was very weak, consisting of a single, basic head-to-head mode.

I don’t know about using custom heroes as main characters in the single-player campaign yet, but multiplayer is reportedly an area of focus for the Freedom Force sequel, Freedom Force vs. The Third Reich - including a co-op mode which should be enormous fun.

Want to get an advance look at the game? Download the demo of Freedom Force vs. The Third Reich.

(No, seriously, go download it.)

Something about the ability to order pizza from within a massively multiplayer online role-playing game is just… wrong. However, that didn’t stop Sony’s marketing minds from hammering out a deal with Pizza Hut; when you’re playing a little EverQuest 2 and feeling hungry - for god’s sake, don’t stop playing, just type “/pizza” and order up a pie without logging off! (The picture alone is worth following the link.)

Maybe I’d feel better about it if it was actually good pizza…

What should have been the biggest tech story of yesterday - that a Chinese research team has “broken” the SHA-1 encryption scheme repeatedly and in far fewer attempts than brute force would require - was overshadowed by an announcement of another kind: that Microsoft will release Internet Explorer 7 for WinXP before the next version of Windows ships.

The IE7 announcement link above leads to the official Internet Explorer weblog, on which comments are enabled. As you might expect, the comments for the IE7 announcement are both numerous and, in most cases, inane.

Since no new specific features/capabilities have been announced other than a desire to make web browsing more secure, you’ll find the comment thread littered with begging, pleading, and cajoling to get IE to finally support the things that all other browsers support - the full CSS standard. Alpha PNG support. Support for the application/xhtml+xml MIME type. You know, the usual suspects.

There’s also a great deal of Firefox/Apache/Apple/Open Source vs. Microsoft bickering. There’s plenty of stupidity on both sides of the fence and I’ve been around the block enough to know not to get sucked in by trolls. However, one argument is made by the pro-MS camp with such sincerity that I believe it to be the genuine thinking of Redmond’s loyalists. Unfortunately, it’s so utterly backward, it’s motivated me to write this inordinately long post.

The thinking, to the best of my understanding, goes like this - “standards are for the weak - Microsoft is out front innovating and pioneering the web experience with IE and .Net and if a few standards get mangled or ignored along the way, so be it. I’d rather see ‘gee whiz’ technology coming from MS than every standard from slow, irrelevant standards bodies catered to.”

The problem with this line of thinking (other than the fact that anyone who thinks .Net is a compelling technology compared to Java is mentally ill) is that it has to be motivated by a very, very narrow worldview - I’m thinking the “technology experts” who hold these beliefs do not have any practical experience with large companies and the way that global commerce takes place on a meaningful level. In a small-to-medium sized company, you’re more than likely focused on doing your thing and doing it well - trying to establish yourself as a player. You’ve got to be very focused, because if you don’t develop your differentiators then you can’t get your foot in the door, and if you don’t build relationships based on high-quality interactions with customers and partners, you can’t stay there. In this mode, buying in to low-cost, proprietary software that can be supported by an abundant, cheap labor supply could not only work, it might even make sense - temporarily.

Once you’re in the game, though, there’s only two ways to increase profits - by growing revenue and by decreasing cost. Growing revenue can mean diversifying your product/service line and selling to your existing customer base, doing more of what you’re already doing, getting more customers, or some combination. Revenue growth isn’t easy, but reducing cost can be even harder - it requires innovation. It means finding ways to do the same thing faster and cheaper while maintaining a level of quality that doesn’t sink your relationships. This could be anything from automating tasks with technology to finding more efficient ways to interact with the people you buy from and sell to.

When you’re using technology to reduce cost and implement newer, better, faster business processes, you don’t want one hand tied behind your back. Maybe there’s an open-source piece of software that would be perfect for a new process you want to implement, or there’s a great piece of communications software that’s only available on a commercial Unix. Gosh, it’d be great if you could use the best tool for the job on a process-by-process basis and have all of those tools interoperate. If you’re using standards-based software, then you could… but no, you locked in to a proprietary system way back when - and now you either have to engineer your business processes around your software’s capability (the tail wagging the dog, to be sure, but you’d be stunned to learn how much time/money Microsoft spends on trying to convince companies to do just this), spend a lot of money creating custom interfaces between your tools, or re-engineer everything to phase out your proprietary systems and bring in open standards. None of those options sound particularly nice when the whole point was to think of newer, less expensive ways to do business.

Standards allow business leaders to use the best, most cost-effective tools available to support their business processes while minimizing the cost of integration. Standards are therefore essential within an enterprise for maximum cost efficiency.

Now let’s go one step further. Let’s say that there’s a very large company who wants to become your new biggest customer, and would like you to log in to their supplier extranet that’s powered by an xhtml+xml application. Oh wait, you’re using IE… never mind. Let me re-iterate: Buyers. Sellers. Relationships. There’s a whole commerce ecosystem out there, and the realities of 21st century business require you to acknowledge it. If you run your business in a vacuum, then it will begin to take on vacuum-like qualities - specifically, it will suck.

There are a whole web of partnerships and complex business arrangements among companies today, even more subtle than the Japanese keiretsu (think of it as a corporate street gang - imagine if General Electric, General Motors, IBM, Disney, and Coca-Cola got together and agreed not to compete with each other, cut each other sweetheart deals, and actively undermine each other’s competition - and you’ll get the idea). As loathe as I am to use stupid buzzwords, today’s climate is more like “co-opetition”, where two companies may be close partners (or have a supplier/client relationship) in some areas yet be fierce competitors in others. These seemingly non-sensical relationships are all a part of the constant refinement which fuels global economic growth - the never-ending quest for lower cost and higher benefit. With all of these companies going through the IT and business process optimization mentioned above, global business is itself a system of heterogeneous systems that need to communicate with each other. Throw in governments (which outside the US are increasingly distrustful of proprietary systems) and industries like retail where direct customer interactions are important too, and you have a mind boggling set of different technologies all trying to talk to each other, and the number of technologies that could benefit from interoperability is growing exponentially.

As a result, standards are the only sustainable way to facilitate the most cost-effective technology interactions between the greatest number of enterprises/individuals.

So to all you posters on the IE blog saying, “Just make neat stuff! Screw standards!”, be careful what you wish for. The further Microsoft arrogantly pursues a one-size-fits-all “lock-in” strategy (which not only denies the current or future possibility of business processes that aren’t well-supported by MS software but also turns a blind eye to potential business partners/customers that don’t use MS products), the more their customers will find themselves locked out… and then what would your MCSE be good for?

Haven’t listened to it (crappy speakers on work computer), don’t know if it’s good… but when the first single off of your first album is called “Clint Eastwood”, then why not name the first single off of your second album “Dirty Harry”?

Download “Dirty Harry” (the song, not the movie) now.

A demo of Stalingrad, a WWII RTS, is now available for download. I haven’t even heard about the game, but the description seeming interesting enough to merit a look.

In gaming news, Brothers in Arms - my first “must have” PC game of 2005 - has been pushed a couple of weeks to March 8th. First Ghost Recon 2 for PC, then Raven Shield: Lockdown for PC, now this… Ubisoft, come on guys, it’s not like you’re fighting off a hostile takeover from a company that lost its soul 10 years ago! (Oh, wait…)

And for those of you who aren’t interested in your Xbox power cable from bursting into flames, go check to see if your Xbox power cable is covered by the recall/free replacement program. (There have only been 30 reported cases of fire worldwide, but hey - you never know.)

Extrasonic is now running Wordpress 1.5, with only a few minor problems/irritations…

• For some reason, the names of the link categories on the sidebar are enclosed in h2 tags, and they weren’t in WP1.2. This was undocumented, and therefore a dumb thing to do (although a brief hack of the css fixed it in short order).
• Word/line wrapping is broken, making long lines of text without whitespace bleed out of the columns they should be in. Maybe this was a problem in 1.2 also, but I am just noticing it now. Does anyone (CF?) have a solution to this? I saw some suggestions on the WP support forum but haven’t had time to go through them yet.
• Extrasonic has been in a half-finished state for quite some time (for example - category icons have been missing for 3 months), but what little effort I had made in customizing the comments pages has been lost. Note that I had not customized the wp-comments.php itself, just the stylesheet. I suspect this was due to more undocumented diddling with the tags used on the default comments page, so it’ll take me some time for me to reverse-engineer the new source and get the right tags in place.

I’m hoping that some of the problems I was experiencing with WP1.2 will be fixed - mostly around sending notification that my weblog has been updated and receiving notifications that other weblogs have been updated - and fortunately, when I get some time, the new theme system seems really nice. Now I just have to search ColdForged’s archives to figure out which plugins he’s using that I want to steal…

From the “if something sounds too good to be true…” department, something Jeff over at Gravity Lens would get a kick out of - respected scientist Ray Kurzweil predicts that not only will medical technology advance to the point where humans will be immortal, but that you should take care of yourself now because immortality will be achieved within 20 years.

It does make for an interesting sci-fi plot concept though - what if all your friends and family were going to live forever, but you weren’t going to join them because of your (inevitably lifestyle-induced) health problems that the state-of-the-art couldn’t repair before they were fatal?

Well, it’s been a while since we’ve done a gaming round-up… it’s a slow time of year (plus the fact that PC gaming is being dominated by World of Warcraft). I had to chuckle when I saw that WoW’s chief competitor, Everquest II, is already giving away free trials in an attempt to boost subscription rates while Blizzard had to stop selling WoW for a while in order to build up enough infrastructure to handle the demand. (WoW is still in the top 10 on PC gaming sales charts as recently as last week.)

Anyway, those of you who are not MMORPG-inclined (and you know who you are) can check out the following:

• Half-Life 2 demo (ok, who am I kidding - if you’re interested enough to download the demo, then you probably already own this game)
• Prince of Persia: Warrior Within demo (if you didn’t catch it on a console)
• The Punisher demo (yes, it has the triple-curse of being a comic book license AND a movie license AND the movie was awful, but I hear it’s pretty entertaining anyway)

In sadder news, it seems like the Windows versions of both Ghost Recon 2 and Rainbow Six: Lockdown have been indefinitely delayed (although online retailers at least have a June release date for GR2). Where’s the PC love, Red Storm/Ubisoft?

Also note that for those of us who are fortunate enough to have ATI video cards, there are new Catalyst drivers.

The BBC has a report of 10,000 year-old cave paintings that were discovered in North Somerset.

This is interesting in and of itself, but I’ll risk displaying some zoological ignorance and ask: there were bison in the prehistoric UK?