In today’s rocky economic climate, most households are cutting back wherever they can. And with cable and satellite television costing anywhere from $65- $150 a month (more if you count premium movie channels) many people are making their television sets the first part of their homes to get the axe. But what if there was a way to enjoy thousands of television channels, including hard to find international shows and sports programming, and never pay another monthly cable bill again?

Welcome to Satellite Direct- the future of television.

With no subscription services or monthly bills, no hardware to install, and 24/7 unlimited access, is it any wonder that Internet Media Magazine hailed Satellite Direct as “unequivocally the best TV to PC software on the net”? Don’t be fooled by other so called “Great Deals” on satellite television service for your PC that give you only limited access to channels, or have dozens of hidden fees that end up costing you more than your current cable service.

For less than the price of one month’s subscription cable or satellite service, you can enjoy a lifetime of television- over 3,500 channels!- from the convenience of your laptop or desktop. And forget the hassles of waiting for installation, or hours on hold with the cable company. Installing Satellite Direct is as easy as 1, 2, 3.

1. Register – Answer a few simple questions, and our easy registration system will process your ONE TIME payment. That’s right, no monthly bills- ever.

2. Download – Follow the easy, on screen instructions to download our software. No hardware to install, no equipment to buy.

3. Watch and Enjoy – Sit back and enjoy thousands of television channels, from soaps and sports to movies and dramas, any time, day or night.

With crystal clear picture and sound quality, exceptional customer service, and a lifetime of television for less than you’d pay for just one month of cable service, Satellite Direct is the best way to get the most for your TV dollar.

FREE TV Online Info

Batheo is the most popular web-based MMO on the internet today. It is a FREE 3D mixed RPG that can be played directly through your web browser. It is a very good game to pass some time online and to have fun with your friends. There is a ton of great features, multiple servers, online stores, and so much to look at.

Map-based Narrative

Map-based Narrative is one of Batheo’s original designs in which gamers need to accomplish all the challenges from one particular Map before moving to the next. Every map contains an array of legendary NPC heroes that have to be defeated in pre-set orders so that gamers can strengthen their characters during the narrative, and prepare themselves for tougher challenges waiting in subsequent Maps. It also allows gamers to recruit these heroes after defeating them, and offers Laurels as battle rewards which can later be used in upgrading Technology and your hero rank.

Customizable Battle Formations

Batheo offers 8 historical formations (Testudo, Lochoi, Crescent, etc.) for you to choose from with each having its own pros and cons.
Gamers have to strategically deploy troop units taking different roles in a particular formation as ‘massive flesh shield’, damage dealer, inspirationer or healer to optimize its performance in battle. Judge the hour and size up the situation in battles, choose the right formation is the key to victory, especially when you are faced with enemies that outrank your troops.

Team up Your Choice of Hero Combination

As you defeat enemy legions, you may want to recruit heroes from these defeated legions. You can join Zeusian, or Athenian, or Poseidonian upon the defeat of Perseus at the beginning of the game. Thereafter, you can also gain heroes by raising your Prestige. The higher your Prestige, the better heroes you can get.

Attribute Wash

Attribute Wash can improve heroes’ original attributes and thus battle skills. It is accessible to the newly recruited heroes. More Attribute Wash modes will be available for VIPs.

Various Equipments

In Batheo, you can choose your own armors, weapons, horses and troops. You may also arrange them differently to make them most effective. The colors of the equipments, listed as white, blue, green, yellow, red and purple, represent different qualities ranging from average to top quality. In addition, you can enhance your equipments to improve their strengths.

Training Ground

In Training Ground, you can buy more Training Space for your heroes who can be trained offline through different training modes. Having enough Laurels and applying them to activate Fast Track mode will let you save even more time in upgrading your heroes! A VIP can train heroes 24/7 while a regular member does not have such privilege. Furthermore, you can send your heroes to battlefields even when they are still being trained!

Spectacular League Battles for Prestige and Glory

Every night at 7:15PM server time, each league leader can lead his league members to attack or defense those large farmlands located in World Map. Whoever seizes a farmland can collect large amounts of crops for FREE!

Now take your bravest heroes and join the Farmland Wrestle. Don’t worry about being outnumbered as the number of soldiers is not everything when it comes to winning a Farmland Wrestle.

Usually, league leaders will send out the relatively weaker troops to test the strength of the enemies. Don’t feel upset if you are sent out first. Just make sure your blood won’t shed in vain.

You can tip the follow-up troops with the information you gather on the enemies such as types of heroes, size of the troops and the formation of the enemies. Nonetheless, your primary duty is to kill as many enemies as you can!

Sometimes league leaders may send the weaker troops to battle the strongest troops of enemies. After certain successive victories of their strongest troops, they have to leave the battlefield, that’s when our troops defeat the rest leaderless enemies!

Starting April 12, the new 64GB version of the Zune HD will be sold in stores and online for $349.99. Although the price tag is large, you can be sure that this will store your whole music collection plus more. This price is still $50 cheaper than the 64GB iPod Touch that Apple released back in September.

With the release of the 64GB Zune HD, the previous models will get price drops, 32GB cost of $269.99 and the 16GB cost of $199.99.

The new and existing Zunes will also receive a firmware upgrade which will provide more features for users.

You can purchase Zune HDs and accessories through Amazon for great prices if you are looking to save money.

Features :

• 3.3-inch OLED screen with 480 x 272 resolution and 16:9 display
• HD Radio gives you access to many local stations with crystal-clear digital sound at no extra cost
• Watch supported 720p HD movies, TV shows, and videos in high definition
• Buy, stream, and update your music, download free games, and surf the web via a Wi-Fi connection

NASA has released this image, which is one of Saturn’s moons and its surface. As you can see the infrared image that they scanned of the moon, shows a similarity to Pac-Man. Pretty unusual but still very cool looking.

Shown at PAX East was the first footage for Dead Space 2, which is now available on YouTube in HD as seen here. Dead Space 2 will be released in 2011 for Xbox 360, Playstation 3, and Windows PC.

Netflix announced their plans to release streaming movies to Wii consoles back in January, but today they have started to ship out instant-streaming discs to Nintendo Wii owners.

The discs were shipped out to customers who requested them and should be received Friday. This is part of the final steps of the full launch for Netflix. The people who are getting these discs are pretty much the beta testers for the upcoming release because Netflix plans to use their feedback to improve the service.

Netflix, which is already offered on the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3, will now be available on every console. Sounds like they are expanding their business quite well.

An official announcement hasn’t been made yet, but it will be soon. Users who own a Wii will need to sign up for one of the unlimited plans, which start at $8.99 a month. Once complete, they can request a free streaming disc. If you would like to be notified when this is released, check out the official site.

Global Outage (cooling failure and DNS)

Posted by mark @ wikimedia on March 24th, 2010

Due to an overheating problem in our European data center many of our servers turned off to protect themselves. As this impacted all Wikipedia and other projects access from European users, we were forced to move all user traffic to our Florida cluster, for which we have a standard quick failover procedure in place, that changes our DNS entries.

However, shortly after we did this failover switch, it turned out that this failover mechanism was now broken, causing the DNS resolution of Wikimedia sites to stop working globally. This problem was quickly resolved, but unfortunately it may take up to an hour before access is restored for everyone, due to caching effects.

We apologize for the inconvenience this has caused

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Microsoft finally released the Game Room for Xbox 360 consoles, but unfortunately it wasn’t loading games properly.

Microsoft’s Larry Hryb said in a Twitter post “Game Room is available for download, but there appears to be some problems with loading games,” “It’s being investigated.”

The Game Room which is available for download, allows gamers to create their own virtual arcade of classic games. The service is suppose to launch with about 30 titles, including games from Atari, Intellivision, and Konami. Microsoft said to expect five to seven new games each week.

The bug has been said to be fixed by various gamers. No official announcement has been made by Microsoft.

Microsoft has released a newer and larger hard drive for Xbox 360 consoles. This new 250GB drive will allow gamers to store more saved games, music, movies, and all of their goodies!

The new hard drive will cost $129.99 through Microsoft while the previous 120GB model has dropped to $99.99.

If you are looking to upgrade to the 250GB model but want to save a few bucks, Amazon is offering an off brand that is compatible with Xbox 360s and is brand new for only $100. If you are interested in this one, 250GB Hard Drive compatible with Xbox 360 check it out!

SanDisk announced Monday that they were releasing a new 32GB MicroSD card, which is double the maximum capacity of most smartphone memory chips.

The 32GB card will hold roughly 7,000 songs or 10 hours of uncompressed HD video. Can you say “all the music you can eat”? I doubt the chip would taste good, so I don’t actually recommend eating it =P.

SanDisk said that the card will be available to purchase on their website next month and will have a price tag of about $200.