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Sluggy Freelance Probably the best online comic.. Read the whole archive :)
Megatokyo Rather good as well, a mix of gaming and anime
Winter A new one, started this monday, looks promising.
Exploitation Now Chicks. Violence. R-Rated stuff. Read it :)
Penny Arcade Duh.
Dilbert Classics are good too..

I've been reading Sluggy for a while now, it really is a good comic. Though lately I haven't been reading it as much. Instead I've been reading alot of Flem! Penny Arcade! and Sinfest. I'm sure most of us have heard of Penny arcade, and possibly Sinfest. Flem however is a little more unkown and uncommon. It's good though. I really do enjoy it, heh.

Here are some links.
http://flem.dhs.org/comic/new.html Flem!
http://www.sinfest.net Sinfest
http://www.penny-arcade.com Penny-Arcade

If this could be made to work reliably, consider what it would do for sites like Penny Arcade or Something Awful. Sites like these are expensive to run because of the cost of bandwidth. If you decentralize the distribution, you could spread the bandwidth cost between all the users. Since most users pay a flat rate for their internet connection, in most cases the distributed cost would be $0. And since he's no longer paying for hosting, Lowtax could afford a better haircut.

Hmmm.. Terabyte...

1,000 gigs
1,000,000 mb
Average 3.5 minute Mp3 @ decent quality = 4.25mb
1,000,000 / 4.25 ~= 235,294 mp3's
Thats approx: 17,000 Full albums
For a grand total of:
823529 Minutes, or
13725 Hours, or
571 Days or
1.56 YEARS of continuous, non-repeating music
Now that's what I call a good deal ;) Owning your own radio station for $5000


--Kleenx aka Mike



OOoooh yeah, now say something about gigs
I, umm... I like Gigs?...
So you're that kind of girl, eh? Naughty
View it

Juz kiddin', folks. But seriously, this whole mess is inexcusable. I mean, I can almost kinda sorta understand (if not excuse) single-player games that are pushed out the door by half-wit marketeers. After all, basic economics deem that there is a point where you'll sell less copies if you wait (say, past the holiday season) and fix everything than if you release a piece of crap immediately. For someone with no real love or respect for the video game industry, it's almost a no-brainer, issues with customer trust and sales of future games aside.

However, this is an online game! And a pay-for-play one at that! They knew they'd have to deal with these customers day in and day out for months, and that these poor souls would be especially angry since they're charging over time. They knew the financial success of the title hung from the continued good graces of monthly billed gamers. Did nobody sit the top brass down and discuss the whole plan with them? Somewhere, somehow, someone who sincerely needed the "hard, cold bitch-slap of truth" was neglected.

Ah, well, live and learn. On the bright side, really makes Diablo's launch look good, no? ^_^

One last side note: Take that "something awful" site with a grain of salt; IIRC, they only give bad reviews.
---

Finally decided to get a PayPal account. Went to the site, jumped through the hoops, gave them my credit card number. Waited 3 weeks for next credit card bill so I could give them the verification number. Get bill, with PayPal transaction, but no verification number. Emailed PayPal. They tell me to fax them my credit card bill. I don't have a fax. Fuck this.

A pop-up window with an ad worth clicking.

Generally, when something pops up, it's gonna be:
a) pr0n (stupid pay site, of course)
b) credit cards
c) geoshitties/turdpod/analfire/etc
or
d) video cameras

None of which I want or need.
There will always be free content to peruse, simply because people like creating.

That said, there are some sites I would pay a small fee to read, provided I could view the site completely ad-free.

C-X C-S

Upon viewing this comic, I knew that Gabe had his head screwed on right. Perhaps he was involved with the training of these spy gerbils.

Peace,
Teslakid

Upon viewing this comic, I knew that Gabe had his head screwed on right. Perhaps he was involved with the training of these spy gerbils.

Peace,
Teslakid

"Numerous companies have jumped ship because of that single fact."
-One company jumped ship. They had never done a 3d title before. Their reason is also dubious as this Penny Arcade comic so nicely points out.

Companies have been all over debunking the 'hard to develop for' FUD such as in this article.

Some more quotes:
Hideo Kojima - "It will take three years for games to make complete use of the total potential of the PS2. What's key is where to use those capabilities and what to make stand out. After some trial and error, titles with new ways of expressing things will appear. However, this is not going to happen right away."

John Riccitiello (President of EA) - "It's drop dead sexy."

George Lucas - "It's mind-boggling. What they've accomplished is just beyond comprehension, if you know anything about computers."

Trip Hawkins (President of 3D0) - "It's historic, a mass market appliance that fundamentally changes society in the same way the printing press did."

Jeronimo Barrera (Rockster Video Games) - "What usually happens with new hardware is, the people who are having a lot of trouble are the ones who are talking a lot of sh-t."

Most developer house already have created their own toolsets, some are even licensing them out to other developers, the 'hard' to program issue is a dead-issue and has been for several months now.

Vermifax

Call me sappy, but I'm happy that Tycho and Scott came to an understanding. It's always irritating to me when two creative people that I respect start squabbling.

I'm sorry that Mr. McCloud took it so hard, though. Tycho has a habit of flying off the handle and then calming down and talking rationally afterwards. Remember when he blew up at Scott Kurtz? Everyone ended up friends in the end. I think we could all take a lesson from this, though. Watch what you say in anger. The damage can't always be repaired.

Welcome to the first day of the end of your free time. Yeah, I know. It's off topic. But I haven't seen a proper welcome wagon...

Smart tags wouldn't be so bad if they were actually smart. I'm not interested in having every instance of the word Microsoft link to www.microsoft.com, but can't we think of some useful implementations of Smart Tags? Just because it's from Microsoft doesn't mean the idea is completely without merit.

For instance, I might like to be able to click on a word, any word, and have it open up a window with a definition from dict.org. Not sure what LXHTMRAM is? The definition is just a click away.

Or maybe be able to pop up a quick Google search on the word (or words) you choose. In fact, multiple Smart Tags could co-exist. Just right-click and choose which one to implement.

I don't think it should underline keywords on a page, as it would screw with the graphical style. And of course it should never be activated by a simple (accidental) left-click, but those are two simple design issues.

Don't think MS would release useful smart tag packages? Well, you do realize that anyone can develop their own. My company, for instance, is developing a smart tag pack (for Office XP though) that'll let people grab flight data from their online database whenever someone types in a flight number. In the same vein, I'm sure that two minutes after the release, everyone would be developing their own smart tag packs for other people to download, providing useful links to dictionary definitions, image searches, or even relevant comic strips.

Hey, while I'm dreaming, it'd be nice if webmasters could specifically enable (or disable) certain smart-tag packages, instead of just disabling smart tags altogether. Oh, and third party browsers (Mozilla) could be developed to use the same smart tags. And MS could GPL Internet Explorer, and...

Sorry if I got out of hand. I just like the idea customizing my web browsing experience to add functionality. That's all.

Okay, so I was wrong. He has an update there, which pretty much amounts to an apology.

Your responses were deft and had the weight of punishment, and I feel as though I have been taught a valuable lesson by a bloom of aluminum baseball bats. At the root of it, I misjudged the man.

I don't believe Tycho would write that rant again if he had it to do over. (But probably he would go ahead and do the parody comic again... it was extremely funny!)

That one I got exactly right.

If I had it to do over again, I would have let the strip speak for itself - and then switched quickly to something innocuous, like wool. There is more than a reasonable chance that my news approach will be much softened, at least in the short term.

Read the whole thing here.

steveha

Gotta give it to Gabe... He's always one step ahead of tha' game...

Well, according to Bill Gates, the GPL is like Pacman. If this is true, I would certainly hope that Gabe from Penny Arcade doesn't get to it any time soon.

Well, according to Bill Gates, the GPL is like Pacman. If this is true, I would certainly hope that Gabe from Penny Arcade doesn't get to it any time soon.

you can spend less and have more fun with a GameBoy Advance. Just make sure you buy a light for it. You'll get tired of a PDA after a while, but with a GBA you can have endless hours of fun.

Documentation is communication from one person to many. (Yeah, yeah, sometimes several people have to add pages to the doc; but still, one teacher per meme, many learners per meme.)

Re: PS2 disc changing, that's by design. Many games require you to switch discs and preserve state across the change. A auto-reset would trash that. Presumably, the correct action would be to expose a valid_disc_in_set API to determine when to reset, but whether the current behavior is a feature or a misfeature, it is there by design rather than coding flaws. So I wouldn't call it a 'crash'.

In regards to working at Lucas Arts, I think you might like to see penny arcade's solution to a similar problem.

Acutally, it's much much much worse than this.. it would be more like: Intel sues ME for using AMD, Microsoft Sues YOU for using Linux, Marvel sues Fargo for reading Penny Arcade instead of Marvel comics, etc. These guys aren't suing the competition, they are suing a customer because the customer choose the competition.. It's truely frightening...

Acutally, it's much much much worse than this.. it would be more like: Intel sues ME for using AMD, Microsoft Sues YOU for using Linux, Marvel sues Fargo for reading Penny Arcade instead of Marvel comics, etc. These guys aren't suing the competition, they are suing a customer because the customer choose the competition.. It's truely frightening...

When I first started, it was a little painful, but I figured it had to be better than being painfully little. I was only hanging fishing weights from my wang, but I quickly increased the load (and needed higher chairs!).

Now I've had a special seat hung by thick steel cables between the Petronas Towers, from which I hang an oil tanker just inches from the ground. I'm doing it right now; I've got internet and everything up here. It feels wang-tastic.

It is a little-known fact that properly conditioned wang is the strongest material known to man, surpassing even carbon nanotubes.

Once day, I will be the first astronaut to double as a space elevator.

(this post is dedicated to Penny Arcade)

--

PA had some funny Daily Radar toons. A snippet from Tycho & Gabe's trip to the Daily Radar:

Part Three: Ha Ha Ha

Funny shit. www.penny-arcade.com for more.

PA had some funny Daily Radar toons. A snippet from Tycho & Gabe's trip to the Daily Radar:

Part Three: Ha Ha Ha

Funny shit. www.penny-arcade.com for more.

PA had some funny Daily Radar toons. A snippet from Tycho & Gabe's trip to the Daily Radar:

Part Three: Ha Ha Ha

Funny shit. www.penny-arcade.com for more.

will P.A. have to make fun of? What a shame.... ;)

http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php3?date=2000-10 -09

I always thought it would be cool if someone would create a funny-page service. You pay X cents per month or whatever, and they make you a customized web page that simple displays all of the comics you specify for thay day. Then I wouldn't have to load tons of megs worth of pages just to get my ozy and millie and penny arcade fix.

Looks like a lot of the stuff that went bad was in some way fan-related. Too many fans are almost as bad as not enough. If you get enough suction going, you'll end up pulling air through any available orifice, say, a floppy drive slot. And that will tend to make the slot (floppy drive, in this case) go bad as well. Those "disk coolers" are infamous for doing that. If you are going to be sucking a lot of air, best to leave some card slots open for the air to enter/exit through. On another note, the thing about a lot of fans is that, unless they're very expensive, they won't last. Their bearings are cheap and will give out in a year or so. Also, I won't say anything about Western Digital that would get me in trouble, other than that I've seen about six WD Caviars go bad, from 340MB-10GB.

Oh well, i had to put SOMETHING in this article that was remotely Linux-based.

Yep, all that content, and yet when there's a slow day at work I can still run out of interesting stuff to look at on the internet.

little gamers, penny arcade, goats (not goatse), and badtech: online comics. It'll take a while to browse the entire archive.

everything 2: nearly half a million writeups on topics from aardvarks to zzyzx.

www.penny-arcade.com

--

Maybe he was having some kind of /. seizure.

Well, it's worth maybe ... 25 bucks a year. If PA were a monthly magazine, with everything it has in it, I would probably subscribe for that much. On the other hand, it works so much better as a web site.
PA introduced me to CounterStrike. Though this has largely been regarded as a poor move in my wife's mind, my friends and I are pretty happy about it. Not to mention Bejeweled! And this great comic, which still elicits laughter.
Heck, I used to pay 30 bucks a year for PC Gamer, and it sucked. And it was chock full of ads. At PA, there are no ads. It's just great content, seemingly tailor-made for my consumption.

Should PA be their full time job?

Why shouldn't it be? If they're good enough at what they do, and the economy can support them, why not?

Tim's flame on Penny Arcade's forums (long long thread)

r. ghaffari
(25/M/Baltimore, MD)

Sometimes it's not the Sysadmin's fault, either. I'm a Sysadmin for a major company, and I was horrified to learn that most of our production servers are running SP4.

"This needs to be fixed!" I cried. "Let me do this right away!"

"Sorry, but these are our production servers," they replied. "They're running the in-house applications that the engineers wrote. Upgrading the service packs will break their code. We've told them that there's a huge security hole, but they refuse to recode, and the executives refuse to make them."

Anybody who thinks NT sysadmins live in a vacuum and don't have to deal with PHBs every single day "has been eating stupid sandwiches".

I disagree completely and wholeheartedly.

I see banner ads as an assault on my psyche, trying to extract from me things ($$$) which I want to keep.

IF banner ads work, then I am paying to look at free sites one way or another (TANSTAAFL, and all that). I would rather be subjected to an earnest plea to support the site than I would subject myself to the creations of people whose very job is to subtly manipulate my psyche in the favor of their company.

A number of the online comics I frequently read have shifted in the direction of a PBS model - if you like it, send us a few bucks. If we get enough bucks we'll run some kind of special feature (not too unlike the Street Performer Protocol). It is not anywhere near as obtrusive as your example - one of the reasons at least Penny-Arcade shifted to this model is that ad banners were too obtrusive and disruped their site. (their network kept sneaking popups in, plus just vibrating windows and stuff)

I totally agree with this critique. The ad system has to be compelling enough that we turn the junkbuster off to take part in the network. The ads need to have value to us as readers, not just value to 'you' as advertisers.

Penny-arcade.com is breaking the mold, maybe the OSDN can too.

this one:
http://www.penny-arcade.com/images/2001/20010221l. gif

You see a Metroid(tm)

>shoot metroid

You shoot the Metroid(tm)
You see another Metroid(tm)

For example, the Super Nintendo classic, Metroid.

If these sorts of people can just bung a "virtual tip jar" onto their site with little or no other modification then it makes it a lot more attractive -- at least until they're a little larger. And they do work -- Penny Arcade has recently signed onto Amazon's new "honor system" and they're already 30% of the way to their US$10,000/month target -- although it's slowing rapidly and still needs a lot of support.

--

I agree this is a problem, but I disagree that it's a fatal flaw. People could, for example set up local automated scripts(or download bots from TUCOWS) to take care of the pop ups behind the scenes (e.g. they authorize sites X Y and Z automatically). They still have to deal with new sites, but there are still schemes yet to be discovered to deal with these situations with a minimal amount of hassle.

Don't you think that would be highly annoying? I doubt techincally illiterate people will be willing to do this. So, maybe it'll get integrated into MSIE 7. But just like with cookies, the default will probably be "Yes, to everything", and that leaves annoying pop-up window attacks still possible (also, consider the attack of hidden frames: have half the website devoted to frames that look like background, yet charge the user seperately. This is less obivous than popping up windows all over the place.)

And let's look at what we get in return, quality websites. The days of great sites like this arrising from ad revenue are numbered.

This is probably true. Ads are clearly not the way to make money on the internet. They don't work, as Jakob Neilsein is fond of pointing out. I'm just saying that micropayments, at least in their current form are also not the way to do it. Personally, I don't mind this. There are very few "content" sites that I actually like. Salon.com is about the only one. The rest...well, I'd be happy to see them go, and see the internet move back into a more person-to-person communication medium. Yet, as you point out, even this has costs. Maybe FreeNet will help with this, because it distributes the bandwidth across the whole network. We'll see. In the meantime, Clay Shirky suggests three options in his article:

1. Aggregation -- bundle a large number of low-value things together
2. Subscription -- pay for the site. I'm not sure if this will work (see: Slate.com), but maybe it would for a network of related sites (see: pr0n)
3. Subsidy -- Shirky points out that most real-world art centers (museums, operas, etc) are funded this way. This is what Amazon's Honor System is (not a micropayment as is often claimed). Goats and Penny Arcade are now trying this with PayPal and Amazon. Online comics are well suited for this type of system, I think, because they take a lot of work and skill to do right, and have a strong network of fans. It will be interesting to see if it works.

As for flat fees, your point only applies to the United States. I've heard that in other countries Internet access fees are generally per hour. As much as we like to think we're the only part of the world that matters, we're not :)

But remember that Europeans HATE this!

The micropayment system is a type of honor system. Some think of it as a type of "tip-cup" system. If you find site xyz.com's content super-helpful, funny, etc. Or you visit daily, etc, etc, why not pay $.50 a month, or maybe a whole dollar!

For example, I really like PA's content, thus, I'm willing to chuck a dollar their way every month. With their volume, if even a third of their viewers did this, they'd have more than enough cash to stay afloat! I'd pay a buck a month for /. too. Why not? For all of their bandwidth I use, they might as well have a dollar of mine!

As far as current methods of micropaying, Amazon.com has their Honor System, and there's always PayPal. I don't really like Amazon's though, because they take a cut, but I suppose they have to cover costs. But dang, you can't go wrong with PayPal.

in favour of the Honour System. Visitors get the chance to donate an arbitary amount of money.

Penny Arcade are doing this, and are seeing quite a substantial sum donated. Don't know how this compares to banner ads... did anyone ever click on them anyway?

Time will tell whether the honour system actually works well enough for people to make a living off of it.

Henry

It seems as though most of you are missing. You wont be forced to make micropayments.. the information is free as always there is no place on PA that tells you to make the donation because thats what it is A DONATION, just like your local museum its open to the public people put a buck or two in the plexiglass bin and look at the art others walk past it, some even walk up to the desk and offer gobs of money. point is those places and this structure has been around long before the 'net came about. it seems to provide enough dough to keep the (super expensive) art coming it could probably provide a better subsistance to websites than banners ever would. if you need more proof PA has been running their "honor system" for about 5 days now and they have already raised this much. i think the honor system is a great idea and as soon as i get a credit card i will be supporting my homies, gabe and tycho and help them to pay the bills, just like a buck in the plexiglass, a few clicks and i help out something awesome

The guys over at online comic strip Penny Arcade have collected over $2,000 in a few weeks through Amazon's Honor System.

Seems to me a much better way to subsidize good online content without obnoxious ads, etc.
--
OliverWillis.Com

But whether it works or not is a different matter. Might be worth keeping track of Penny Arcade to see how they fare

If it meant that I got to choose who the money went to - that is, that it went to the content creator and not an agent, distributor, middleman, or some other breed of fuckwit five-percenter - then yes, yes, a thousand times YES!

I don't think the problem is that - as one poster put it - that the 'Net will become one giant pay site - content creators should get paid for good work. The problem will be keeping scumbag content-control freaks (Sony, RIAA, MPAA, the U.S. Congress) from mucking it up and taking a cut.

I think it would be the ideal way, though, to pay for good independent content like Penny Arcade, Sinfest, and even Jennicam - and all the other content-based sites I like, but for whom I'm not willing to enter into an expensive revolving subscription agreement.

We'll see if it actually happens...

OK,
- B
--

*sniff sniff* Still, I feel a great sense of loss and sadness. Nobody seems to have mentioned Bill Waterson, hero of every hyperactive child of the 80's and early 90's. *sniff* Calvin and Hobbes is missed, indeed.

-------
CAIMLAS

Well... The main reason that syndication doesn't happen much to web comics is either because the syndicates want things to be very 'public oriented' which PA and other comics, such as Sinfest, sorta aren't. Everyone likes them, but no one really wants their kids reading them. The other thing would just be that the comics don't want to censor themselves to make money. Most people have another job (take Piro over at Megatokyo, he has a day job and draws the comic every monday wednesday and friday.) The webcomic-folk (for the most part) do the whole shpiel because they like doing it, not because they want to make loads and loads of money from it. Heh.... Well, you've found one of the other readers from before keenspace... Me. Yeah, we always have trouble getting ian to update and such, but often college gets in the way a bit. We're moving to Machall.com soon, with much better scripts and such than what we've got a keenspace, so things should run smoother. So Matt actually got a camera and was able to get the Crocodile Hunter there to annoy your brother? ;) -MuShoo (Mac Hall Webmaster)