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Here's the linkified version of your post. =)

Before you knock the concept of a game based on mis-behaving in the school yard, I recommend you try http://www.sissyfight.com/sissyfight/home.html. Give it a go and see how addicting reliving one's childhood in a mean-sprited way can be...

Sissyfight!

Sissyfight. The concept is original and intriguing (as are most games from the same shop) but the implementation is really disappointing.

A video game modelling the nasty Machiavellian side of human social interaction? No need to wait for Dmitry, when we've already got SissyFight 2000!!

Then, I went to a LAN party, and saw all the 20/20 people doing Windows at 1600x1200, on 15-inch monitors, and complaining that "It starts to get a little blurry on my monitor when I try that..." Then I tried installing Linux and X-Windows on my own machine, and found that X-Windows was meant to never ever NEVER run in 640x480, because all the applications I found seemed to be designed for 1024x768 -- even though they had 7-pixel-high fonts.

This new era of high-resolution displays struck fear into my heart, that in ten years all computer applications will run at 3000x2000 resolution, with 10-pixel-high fonts. And do you seriously believe that people won't design web pages to be "best viewed at 5000x4000"? Or that they aren't already?

But, in the short term, while a 640x480 or 800x600 large-fonts display is still a realistic option, a display like that might actually be a good thing. See, most LCD screens only work at a certain resolution -- 800x600, 1024x768, etc. If you try to decrease the resolution, you get either a big black border of wasted space, or you get random patterns of thick and thin pixel rows and columns. Either way, it's ugly. But if you start at 3000x2000, it becomes less ugly, because you're not alternating single rows and double rows of pixels anymore; you're alternating quadruple and quintuple rows of pixels. This would be good, not just for me, but for gamers who might want to play different games at different resolutions. Starcraft, for example, still plays only at 640x480 if I'm not mistaken.

Of course, the best option would be if people designed everything to be actually scalable for a change. MS Windows has some support for scalability; you can set 800x600 for "Small Fonts" or "Large Fonts" and it works fine with most, but not all, apps. Other objects change size too, such as icons. Bitmaps, however, will always be bitmaps, and that affects web pages. Have you ever played Sissyfight? A 200-pixel-high window, but 6-pixel-high fonts abound. Or Pixeltime -- only usable because the pics can be zoomed and the text is largely inconsequential. Hopefully, when people think in inches instead of pixels, we'll see fewer sites like those. I just hope the backlash doesn't create pages that say "Optimized for a 22-inch display," though such a thing would better expose the inherent arrogance of such a design choice.

Now, I imagine some of you are drooling over this display for the reason my friends always give for their insanely-high resolution: "Just think of how many more windows I can have open at once!" Of course, after a certain point, it would be easier on the eyes and wallet to just use two displays. Break that down into cost-per-pixel, cost-per-square-inch, etc. Perhaps dual displays might even have organizational advantages: "The 17-inch display is for code, the 15-inch display is for man pages and instant messages."

Of course, none of this applies to desktop publishing, where the situation demands something as close to paper as humanly possible. Or video production, in which having a pixel-perfect HDTV display window would be very useful. But for mortals, well, we'll just see whether we use this power for good or evil.

Because Nyetscape 4.x on Linux crashes within a few pages. (Not that 3.01 is perfectly stable, but it's more stable than 4.x.)

It's obvious that Nyetscape's engineers have neglected stability on UNIX. (This is not just a Linux problem; the IRIX and Digital UNIX versions are just as crash-prone and bug-ridden, only with their own entertaining twists; anyone see the spawn-dozens-of-tiny-windows bug on IRIX?) Then again, they're not alone. Macromedia's Shockwave plug-in for Linux is also extraordinarily sloppy (a plug-in which seizes the audio device when it loads, and locks up your browser if it can't get it, is just not good enough; I don't want to shut down my MP3 player whenever a Flash ad loads on a web site). Which is not to mention the utter lack of a Shockwave plug-in. All in all, browser companies have a beggars-can't-be-choosers attitude to UNIX users.

Had I a faster computer, I'd buy VMWare and run Netscape or IE on Windows under Linux. This would paradoxically be more stable than Nyetscape on Linux, and would also give me access to Shockwave pages like Sissyfight.

It's a sad state of affairs when one has to go to such lengths to get a decent web browsing experience.

A working WINE would be good in that it would allow the running of MSIE, as well as Shockwave and other plug-ins. Then at last one could play SissyFight without shelling out for VMWare and the RAM required to run it.

It might even be more stable than Netscape...