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Say: Thank you Sony. --- Via: Blubrick

Oblivion

Good news everyone! I have just completed the main quest in The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. As many know I am definately not an RPG fan, however I could not stop playing this one. A great mix of music, graphics, storyline, dynamically varied environment and the action make this a worthwhile adventure.

The overall game is very well integrated, with smooth gameplay and very logical environment interactions. Quite surprisingly after completion of the main quest, majority of the map still remains non-revealed. This can mean only one thing: a lot more remains to be explored, with a great potential of prolonged gameplay. It could also indicate my excessive usage of the new Fast Travel features (Morrowind was missing this excellent time saver). ;) Graphics tweaking was a necessary step for my GeForce 6600GT - grass was turned off, and compromises on environmental shadows were made. Other settings were at the maximum.

All-in-all Oblivion manages to be a great game without compromising on either the game play duration or the graphics.

Free Traffic - Victoria

Crossing over your peak quota and getting shaped is no fun. This is where free traffic from participating state peering networks comes in very handy. Basically all the traffic that does not leave the state will remain at your maximum un-shaped xDSL download speed and will not be counted towards your download quota limits (even if you are not already shaped). Gaming has an extra advantage where pings (or the packet latency) will be lowest for peered traffic (due to the number of hops/routers which are in the path to the server).

For Victoria two major peering providers are present: PIPE and VIX. They basically provide a way for participating state ISPs (Lists: 1, 2) to exchange internet traffic for a marginal cost (that is they don't go through their main backbone provider's network at all, which is Telstra Wholesale). This allows them to cut down on the relatively expensive traffic from their backbone provider and allow their customers to exchange traffic for free within the state they are located in.

Here is a compiled list of sites which will allow free traffic downloads, mainly open source software, radio/video streams and gaming servers. If you have any more good links (which I'm sure I'm missing a few) send them over for inclusion to the list.

Check out my compiled list of URLs here.

Notice to Cable users: sorry no free traffic for you :) peering is applicable to xDSL clients only.