dr3w's New Writeups

KaZaA (thing)

2001-07-31T23:33:32Z

Beware if you download and install kazaa, it tries to install something called Ezula or Hottext or some other stupid name, anyway this program grabs keywords out of web pages you download and turns them into yellow links to commerical web sites.

Some examples of words that got turned into links that I saw included "casino" "auction" "win". There was an interesting debate about it on slashdot...

Anyway one of the things they were all oblivious to is that you can uninstall it from the add/remove program dialogue. I figured out it had to be some program that was causing it and looking through my list of processes I noticed something called "eZula" When I killed it the yellow links stopped appearing. I did a search for it on google and found the manufacturer's site which confirmed my suspicion. I didn't know kazaa was the source of it till I saw the slashdot post. Supposedly you can opt to not install it when installing kazaa but I didnt notice anything like that. Try not to suffer my fate.

Diablo II: Lord of Destruction (thing)

2001-07-11T17:11:47Z

It's out now (July11 2K1), And so far I have to say its pretty damn cool. It fixed most all of the bugs that the original had, even though it added a multitude of new ones. But I'm focussing on the new features. Runes, all though their stats are often not amazing, make some very cool items when properly combined into rune words. The elite items are VERY hard to get... Even plain ones. Jewels are especially cool because they can be rare. Some other improvements include rare throwing weapons that can be recharged, charged items that contain skills that anyone can use (eg amulet of teleportation, can you say teleporting baba?), magic only prefix and suffixes, the new char classes, the list goes on. Since the monsters on hell mode are now ilvl 90 max, they are EXTREMELY strong and barbs/amazons/paladins are basically fucked. (not hammerdins) They need really good damage elite weapons to fight in these zones which virtually no one has yet. Since sorceresses don't need much…

Battle.net (thing)

2001-05-27T18:01:09Z

Actually they just don't like it when you try to reverse engineer their games. Chat clients aren't reverse engineered it's something they supplied for the public a way to log in. Just telnet to uswest.battle.net (or any other subdomain) on port 6112 press control C and it gives you a login prompt. Note, I've had trouble getting this to work with other telnet clients but microsoft telnet works fine...

try it: telnet://uswest.battle.net:6112

Diablo 1 has been emulated but the only thing people use it for is logging on 500 bots which makes the server lag a lot more. Then they use these bots for channel and spam warring. If you think blizzard trying to stop that is lame then you must be a proponent of lag.

And despite what everyone is saying they are doing what they can to decrease lag and develope their games faster. They're hiring more game designers and doubling the power of all their servers. As well as upgrading the comps not just adding more.

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