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By making 500 units, Rio is really making a statement.

Unlike the iPod mini, which was so successful it blew away Apple's ability to manufacture to meet demand (hence the production run joke), Rio is taking a wait and see approach by only investing in the production of 500 of these units.

My wild-ass-guess is that they want to project market demand with the first run and if numbers come out the way they want, they will build more. If not, then on to the next iPod mini Burninator.

This may be a good for Rio but bad for the early addopters of the pilot devices who get left with an uncommon Rio unit that may well be unsupported soon.

The iPod mini is a sure thing at the same $249 price point and, oh yeah, it plays Fairplay tracks so you don't have to support the evil that is WMA.

Everybody! Everybody!

If I understand the question properly, then in answer I'd point to places like Homestar Runner, PvP, Penny-Arcade, etc. all of which grew up on free distribution of their art and have become well known both on and off the Internet. If you think they're not cultural icons, I'd offer Homestar Runner's 'Trogdor' character showing up in the Final Episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer or the infamous Cardboard Tube of Penny Arcade appearing in Legacy of Kain 3.

Or do they not count for some reason? :)

How could a discussion about adventure games have missed Peasant's Quest!

... involving a the Pioneer spacecraft.

Is that something like a the cheat?

Does he have the heart of a champion

Blazing high speeds encourage more content. If you could download a movie in five minutes, either the MPAA would have to get off their butts and release movies over the Internet or P2P movie swapping would go mainstream. Either way, more content. If you could host a medium-to-large sized website on your home connection, you could provide more content yourself. Your friends and family could provide more content for you to download (photo, audio, or video blogs instead of text blogs). As it becomes cheaper to host real websites over home connections, more small content projects like Red vs. Blue or Homestar Runner will be able to get started and thrive. The speeds come before the content, but the content does come.

http://www.homestarrunner.com/

Are you some kinda robot? I wish I could reverse MD5 hashes back into data in my head! :P

http://www.homestarrunner.com/sbemail86.html

Seriously, have these businesses considered a no loafing sign?

I think he may be too late on this one, as a far superior Quest has already been released.

Trogdor 3D - Return of the Burninator

you HAVE TO have the flash plugin... how else can you keep up with strong bad's emails!?

Peasant's Quest: http://www.homestarrunner.com/disk4of12.html

But what about Home Star?

Yeah, really. I mean how much space can you take up with 16 wonderous colors?

Clearly you're familiar with old skool gamer's ways to learn typing, including classics like Peasant's Quest.

I have no idea. At least one of the other games they mention in their "from the makers of" section is already a flash game on their site. I particularly enjoyed discovering that if you burninate a peasant and they run back into their hut, the hut catches on fire.

I'm guessing they'll make it, but it will be a flash game that looks like a mid-80s era EGA King's Quest title, except with short pants and burnination.

Whoops! I stand corrrected! Since I looked last, it's already been released!

"Popular Science." No such thing, man. More like, "nerdular nerdance."

I always thought Peasant's Quest sucked even worse than Rabbit Algebra. It only featured 16 colors and 2 bit mono internal PC Speaker sound.

Peasant's Quest

Also, Strongbad reviewed the games he would make if he could. They all sucked too.

SB Emails

I always thought Peasant's Quest sucked even worse than Rabbit Algebra. It only featured 16 colors and 2 bit mono internal PC Speaker sound.

Peasant's Quest

Also, Strongbad reviewed the games he would make if he could. They all sucked too.

SB Emails

Big Brother gets all the attention!

What about lil' Brudder? Doesn't he deserve more?

You just keep scaping along lil' budddy.

*sniff*

Remember to: STICK around...

AFTER the CREDITS....

For a FREE....

PERFORMANCE... by...

LIMOZEEN!

no worries,

gaming will soon be revolutionized by the release of Peasant's Revenge which will probably be free.

This game looks promising.

gotta be the best production quality of any flash animation ever

Almost. Sewiously.

Here it is

They Might Be Giants meets Homesstarrunner http://homestarrunner.com/expfilm.html This music videos tune has been stuck in my head for days.

And why haven't we had any links yet to the ultimate burnination of Strong Bad.

jason

Yep, I'll agree with you on this one... with allowance for a few sites that don't really make sense any other way (e.g., the aforementioned Homestar Runner), of course. But those are definitely the exception rather than the rule.

Might want to watch this: http://www.homestarrunner.com/sbemail37.html.

Yeah man... And it's about as much fun as this. :)

Homestar Runner's 404 page is pretty amusing, too.

Oh, I almost forgot, while slashdot is down, you should check out this homestarrunner "system is down" message.

Trust me.

For those that found the extra interesting exchange "'How would you eat, then?' 'That's my problem.'" to be less than clear, here's a little more context:

How would you eat, then?
That's my problem. Being a musician is an unreasonable idea anyway. The life expectancy of a professional career in music is five or 10 years. That would be a long run.

More interesting really:
Record companies are certainly scared.
They should be scared. They're hemorrhaging dough.

Best thing about TMBG? They're huge Homestarrunner.com fans.
We live in a split world--people who know about Homestar and people who don't... Now we have this "Experimental Film" video out. It's a video directed by [the Homestar character] Strong Sad.

Worst thing?
They're working with MoveOn.org. Oh well, they might be giants, but I guess that doesn't mean they're perfect.

In related news, the gang over at Homestar Runner recently did a video for TMBG's song "Experimental Film." Lots of fun movie references.

... obvious exits are North, South, and Dennis

If you don't know what this post is about, Go here and move your mouse over e-mail.

Right around the corner from my old jerb

Wouldn't that be your old jorb?

##Oooohh...If you want it to be possessive it's just I-T-S but, if it's supposed to be a contraction it's I-T-APOSTROPHE-S ## ... scalawag

ITS Song

Look. Lets drop it. Obiously you people don't even know what a good web page looks like so i'm going to direct you to the tutorial of someone who does. (Warning: This site is flash... it'd have to be wouldn't it) Anyway, armed with the advice of this web guru I'm sure we can all make the internet an even more overcrowded, useless dump of misinformation (W3C be damned). Now lets get bloggin'!!!

But the Litte Ninjai is nice, as is Broken Saints and even Homestar Runner (which you probably already know).

If you are more into design oriented websites (like me), check out the news section on Kaliber 10000, Linkdup and many more.

Regarding that All-your-base comment: Once you Linux people get proper video playback, I will show you a video of Steve Ballmer dancing like crazy. You won't believe it! :-))
(Yes, this is meant as a joke.)

I don't get any jerks, but I still get the out-of-sync problem I used to. (The true test of a new installation libflashplayer.so is, of course, to direct your web browser to Homestar Runner ^_^) And here's a bizarre twist: my old libflashplayer.so (version 6) one day just stopped having the latency problems altogether... and now they're back. Call me crazy, and maybe I'm imagining things, but I'm pretty sure that's what happened!

If there was ever a reason to have flash, it would be Homestar Runner.

Also, some people such as composer Eric Whitacre use it to give the site a "mood" of sorts, and navigation is still decent (my mouse wheel works, and copy/paste have been implemented). Yes, I'd rather be romping about with my tabs but, I'll live.

Why would you want it?

Because I happen to enjoy silly animations and games.

You say that as if there is something wrong with enjoying 'silly animations and games'. I do. So do many other people.
It may also be inaccessible, but every day people enjoy things that aren't globally accessible, from various forms of media and art to sports and recreation. How do you make animation accessible to those with vision difficulties?

One could write a story instead, but then you have something totally different. Hypertext has been around for decades, and text itself for millennia, and they serve their purpose. Animation serves another.

There will always be people who choose a poor method of presenting their content on the web. Even without Flash, it's still possible to have poorly-navigable sites with too many fonts, and garish colours, et cetera.

The way to solve it is not to discourage the use of Flash, as if it were inherently wrong, but to encourage and show examples of good design and presentation when Flash is not called for.

This may be a niche, but I for one am quite happy that such a niche exists, and is available to Linux users. I'd like to think that one day SVG will be a better alternative and we can all switch to that, but for now there's Flash.

If you don't like it, don't install it. But don't expect others to do the same.

God bless Ask Slashdot.

I've noticed the articles aren't very different from the emails Strong Bad receives.

Maybe they just need to go widescreen. "Right side: Waaawwwwwww!"

I switched my optometrist's office from Win to Lin and got lots of free contacts and exams.
I do a lot of work for my neighbor, and he gave me two over-sized Barca-loungers, and is always buying my kids stuff.
I really believe that trading services is a viable alternative to working for $'s.
Now, how do I figure out what IT services my bank needs in exchange for skipping mortgage payments...

- OrbNobz
Oh. Hey yo.

I don't know if it's emphasized clearly enough in the article, but Homestar Runner has commissioned a few homebrew 2600 coders to make their own game... Imagine the precedence that this could set, IMHO, this is along the same lines as the Counterstrike modders getting published by Sierra (err Valve?)..

Imagine... homebrew people getting paid for their hobby... I think that wired magazine's mention of this makes it a little more interesting: homebrew games are becoming available on a grander scale than just for those in the scene.