Atomic blended news goodness

The Atomic blender has stepped into the breach once again on this fine Friday afternoon, to bring you the latest and greatest newsworthy bits and pieces from across the Net.

Microsoft announced recently that its upcoming games console,

The Atomic blender has stepped into the breach once again on this fine Friday afternoon, to bring you the latest and greatest newsworthy bits and pieces from across the Net.

Microsoft announced recently that its upcoming games console, Microsoft XBox, will initially ship with an 8GB hard drive and not the 10GB drive touted in previously released tech spec sheets. Microsoft has refused to give a reason for the downgraded capacity, only citing that it was not due to manufacturing problems.

Ever wanted a game pad for your computer, but never had money spare to buy one specifically for your PC? If you own a Playstation, you're in luck. Alltechbox has an article on how to modify your Playstation control pads to work on your PC. The article goes as far as covering how to get +9V out of your PSU, which you need to enable the DualShock feature

Optus and Dingo Blue have made it clear to their users that neither company has plans to compensate people who lost email due to errors in the Optus email system. The trend of no compensation for ISP mistakes is endemic in the ISP industry. Perhaps users should create their own version of the venerable ISP Acceptable Use Policies, worded so they become legally binding upon the ISP once said ISP enters your details into its computers. We can call them Acceptable Service Provision Agreements, and include clauses such as

• The ISP shall be legally responsible for any and all downtime of my connection caused by problems on their end – including but not limited to DNS outages, email outages, equipment failure (regardless of vendor) and general incompetence. Compensation, in line with the severity of the outage, should be forthcoming in either monetary form, or in the form of 'free access'.
  
  
• If, at any time, the ISP fails to live up to promises made when I the user signed up (including advertising so called 'unlimited access' accounts), I have (and reserve indefinitely) the right to terminate my contract immediately.
  
  
• If, at any time, I the user am subjected to any form of 'due to the newness of the technology' or 'due to the complexity of the problem/network' message in response to my queries about problems with my connection or the network, the ISP responsible for recording said message will be liable to pay me at a rate of $US50 per second that I must endure said feeble excuse.