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The wireless industry is probably widely hated by the general technically savvy public because of the tastes of freedom most people get using computers on a daily basis. We don't pay extra money to send messages to people that subscribe to other internet service providers. We don't pay per megabyte to download things (yet). We don't have to use specific equipment with our internet service that is created by and tailored by our ISP to prevent certain software from being run on it. We can choose different software to send and receive files or browse the web if we want.

So to keep things financially manageable we decided to keep the lowest number of minutes on our family plan and we settled on the cheapest text message plan when we resubscribed for service. I made sure to lock down both phones tightly to prevent texting to those 5-digit contest numbers that might add charges without other approval, stop the downloading of new applications, and prohibit purchasing of ring tones to keep hidden costs from surprising us. When both of our phones got $1.99 data charges this month I was unhappy and surprised. Didn't I close off every last way extra fees could seep in?

Should we stop counting how many millions of people have created accounts on Free Realms? They've just announced that 3 million is their latest milestone, which they have hit in under 7 weeks since launch. Another celebratory set of free gifts -- this one oriented towards the in-game pets -- is being dropped in users' accounts that must be claimed by June 19th.

Guinness World Records also recognized them during E3 last week for conducting a concert live and in a virtual space simultaneously. You'd think someone would have done this before.

I haven't played Free Realms since just after I picked up my 2 million member gift. I've still found their upsell pitch to be very aggressive compared to that of Runes of Magic, which opts to let your compatriots kind of sell the paid services for them by parading around in-game with them. Given that nobody else in my household plays Free Realms yet I'm much more likely to put money into Runes of Magic, which I have been playing quite a bit lately while my PlayStation 3 sits untouched at a repair shop.

Seen on Massively.

I've only worked with a handful of small software development companies / software service providers in my few years of dealing with vendors at my day job, and without fail they always seem to forget that they should be pretending that they are big developers. And by pretending to be big developers, I mean adopting their business practices on a smaller scale. This includes effective quality control, tight software testing, and not releasing software at the end of your long and tiring day and assuming nothing will go wrong with it. Thinking like a big software company also includes warning that most important sector of your business -- your users and those that are deputized to train them and calm them down on your behalf -- when there will be system downtime for upgrades. Don't forget to ask ahead of time if you want to change the default behavior of key features in such a way that the users might think your software is broken when it's not. Within the past week alone I've seen irresponsible examples of a vendor breaking just about every rule I've noted above.

That takes me to my second, related attack, and that would be on websites that just decide to pick up a server and walk it somewhere else without telling, oh I don't know, their audience? If your site is one of many competing for eyeballs and advertiser dollars to try and pay the bandwidth bills and make you famous, don't you think downtime and the uncertainty of a page taking forever to finally load to a blank "not found" page or -- even worse, the uncertainty of a forum signature depending on your service being there suddenly shows nothing -- would be the kiss of death? Of course it is.

Remember those Metal Gear Solid 4 trailers where you suddenly saw a young Snake slinking around the war-torn middle-eastern ruins we'd seen Old Snake sneaking about in previous trailers? Remember how they made us all scratch our heads and start guessing about time travel, or clones, or children of Snake, or even that we'd been wrong and that it's a replacement agent? Maybe the guy's after Snake? Maybe he's working with him?

Here we are again on the road to a new Metal Gear Solid title – Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker for PSP – and Kojima's crew is confusing us, exciting us, and having more than a little bit of fun with us like he always does. Look for four, count'em four soldiers that all look like Big Boss – the supposed star of the show since this game is set in the 1970s after Metal Gear Solid 3 – and buckle up because while this one seems just a little strange, I fully expect future trailers to get really out of hand.

With the PSP Go, all-digital download gaming handheld looking like a sure thing with today's rush of leaked information the Universal Media Disc or UMD format is on deathwatch. Yes the PSP-1000, 2000, and 3000 all read it natively, and yes the 3000 will continue to be produced for an unknown but certainly finite amount of time alongside the Go, but the writing is on the wall.

Current PSP owners are right to be miffed that their games won't be playable on the PSP Go, and I am among them. Some folks have talked about getting some kind of hardware to rip UMDs to your own new PSP memory, but they would never allow that simply because you could just rip the same disc for all your friends with impunity.

There's only one realistic way Sony can make folks like me happy and that would be with a conversion service that would work thusly: