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What happened in the online trial

Forget Q*bert, whatever happened to dig dug??

It's quite sad really. You can read all about it here.

But still, what does it all matter as long as userfriendly.org is still online?

To: Illiad

We respectfully ask you to delete all content hosted at userfriendly.org at your earliest convenience.

What's currently hosted there is, by its astonishing amateurism and outright offensive unfunniness, diluting the "User Friendly" concept currently used by parodies of boring and badly drawn web comics based on the incessant repetition of ancient tech support jokes and stereotypical anti-Microsoft zealotry.

These parodies are facing a bleak future, when there are sites like yours that are honestly intended to be "entertaining" by using even more tired clichés and even worse artwork than the parodies. How are parody authors supposed to survive if the objects of parody suddenly start to express the parodied traits even more extremely than the parodies?

http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php3?date=1999-04 -07
http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php3?date=1999-08 -20&res=l
http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php3?date=2000-04 -17
http://www.somethingawful.com/features/usarfreindl ey/
http://www.somethingawful.com/jeffk/computarfunnys /comic-11.htm
http://www.somethingawful.com/jeffk/computarfunnys /comic-20.htm
http://www.somethingawful.com/jeffk/computarfunnys /comic-27.htm
http://www.somethingawful.com/jeffk/computarfunnys /comic-32.htm
http://www.somethingawful.com/jeffk/computarfunnys /comic-39.htm
http://somethingawful.com/inserts/articlepics/phot oshop/variety3/Eegah_comic.jpg
http://www.themushroom.com/mush0122/unfriendlyuser .html

http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node=user%20fr iendly
http://internettrash.com/users/theepisodes/keenshi t.htm
http://rmitz.org/comics.html
http://www.amk.ca/books/h/User_Friendly.html
http://www.rdrop.com/~half/Creations/Writings/Rant s/ComicStrips.html

Enough already. Stop it.

why is userfriendly.org still on-line?

To: Illiad

We respectfully ask you to delete all content hosted at userfriendly.org at your earliest convenience.

What's currently hosted there is, by its astonishing amateurism and outright offensive unfunniness, diluting the "User Friendly" concept currently used by parodies of boring and badly drawn web comics based on the incessant repetition of ancient tech support jokes and stereotypical anti-Microsoft zealotry.

These parodies are facing a bleak future, when there are sites like yours that are honestly intended to be "entertaining" by using even more tired clichés and even worse artwork than the parodies. How are parody authors supposed to survive if the objects of parody suddenly start to express the parodied traits even more extremely than the parodies?

http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php3?date=1999-04 -07
http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php3?date=1999-08 -20&res=l
http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php3?date=2000-04 -17
http://www.somethingawful.com/features/usarfreindl ey/
http://www.somethingawful.com/jeffk/computarfunnys /comic-11.htm
http://www.somethingawful.com/jeffk/computarfunnys /comic-20.htm
http://www.somethingawful.com/jeffk/computarfunnys /comic-27.htm
http://www.somethingawful.com/jeffk/computarfunnys /comic-32.htm
http://www.somethingawful.com/jeffk/computarfunnys /comic-39.htm
http://somethingawful.com/inserts/articlepics/phot oshop/variety3/Eegah_comic.jpg
http://www.themushroom.com/mush0122/unfriendlyuser .html

http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node=user%20fr iendly
http://internettrash.com/users/theepisodes/keenshi t.htm
http://rmitz.org/comics.html
http://www.amk.ca/books/h/User_Friendly.html
http://www.rdrop.com/~half/Creations/Writings/Rant s/ComicStrips.html

Enough already. Stop it.

Trust me.

They just want to find dates. They figure if it worked for 'everybody's favourite guy'(TM) John Romero it might work for them too! All they need now are chicks who are kinda sorta a little ugly and with all the money they make from the Tomb Rader franchise they can build themselves a new and improved girlfriend too!

I am a Transgaming subscriber, but it's hard to justify paying for one of these games, when I have the Loki version of KIS, Starcraft (still haven't finished it), and Warcraft 3 to keep me busy.

I'm tempted to chip in for one of these games anyway, just to encourage a future port of Kohan II (when it is released next year) as well as due to the outstanding reviews Kohan has received.

More reviews here.

Slashback brings you more words tonight on catching CS cheaters

I was very impressed that the people who cheat at Counterstrike were finally going to be caught! (As opposed to those people who use Punkbuster, where the cheating may only be averted) I figured it's about time since the latest version of Half-Life features Opaque Walls (Finally!).

To think that I was wrong, this was about people cheating the people who wrote the program that caught cheaters! heh ;)

Not anymore: "I don't want to be free," says Information

The basic idea of mass-market busking is that you give stuff away and just ask for donations (and make it convenient for people to do so).

The theory behind it is that groups which pay more will have more buskers trying to please them and get their money, so there is a direct benefit for paying.

It makes the whole process open and honest. You can tell people "I want your money" because the only way you're going to get it is by making something they like well enough to pay for after having tried it. "I want your money" becomes equivalent to "I want to do something which benefits you", because you can't get their money by tricking them into paying for a bad product sight-unseen or slipping in bugs and making them pay for the fixes later.

Paying is effectively saying "I appreciate your work, and I want you to continue with it, but I'm also willing to make similar payments to others who do useful work for me". Instead of hearing about a great company going out of business and thinking "too bad, I wish they could have found some way to force us to pay them the money they needed, I guess they just had a bad revenue model" you can think "hmm, I value their services, how much am I willing to spend to keep them going?".

I think a lot more people will pay if it's okay for them to pay $20 or $5 or $0.50, instead of paying $50 or nothing. I think this article from the mushroom makes my point fairly well. And, of course, it makes sense to pay more than once, depending on how long you use the product.

It is efficient, because there are no middle-men involved. Product goes directly to customers, payment goes directly to producers. Forget advertising costs, the customers seek out worthwhile free stuff and tell their friends about it. No distributors, no salesmen, just programmers, artists, writers, and other creative people. It will probably only cost about a third, and in many cases less, to make and release products of the same quality.

And, of course, it allows you to open-source your product. The users will make it their business to pay only those people who are really responsible for the development, so anyone who puts a stupid little wrapper around your product might get a small amount of payment appropriate to his own effort, but generally won't manage to usurp the rewards for the bulk of the work.

Right now, there are two good services for buskware payments: e-gold and paypal. Paypal is extremely easy to use but only available to Americans; e-gold is less efficient, but internationally available (and, being a gold exchange rather than a dollar exchange, is more suitable for international trade). Both allow all accounts to both give and receive. They are compatible, because you can buy e-gold with paypal, and then send it out of the country, very simply.

Yes, it will probably take some time for everyone to come around, and get used to paying for some future benefit, rather than to access things they would otherwise be cut off from, but somebody's got to start it.

The Mushroom top story: fake wood panels making a comeback in the console market.

Personally, I believe Infogrames is one of the lamest names ever. They make nice games and all, but that name just irritates me.

I thought it was hilarious when The Mushroom ran their "Infogrames Finally Drops 'R' From Name" article.

it's The Mushroom that deals with gaming issues, in the spirit of The Onion.