I'l agree with you on your first point: I don't trust Microsoft as a company, I think that its policies have been illegal and unethical in the past and, probably, still are right now. It is, of course, a gigantic corporation; it's interests are in making money, not in making the world a better place or even making my life easier. I cast a skeptical eye on just about anything they do because my interests and theirs aren't likely to be aligned.
However, I also use Windows 2000 and am reasonably happy with it. It's stable to the point where my uptime is easily measured in months (and reboots only really happen when I decide to install some new graphics card drivers or new hardware), it runs just about everything I need, and it works well on computers ranging from six or seven years old to brand new. It's a good product for my purposes (PVR, games, Internet).
The reason I use Linux as well is that Linux gives me a much greater degree of transparency in what's going on behind the curtain; I can use it both as a productive working environment and to tinker with settings and configuration files to my heart's content. Linux offers a greater degree of freedom in allowing me to use a computer as I want.
Absolutely. Have a Gmini 400 myself, I really do love it. The only downside is that I find myself watching a good deal more television now in the form of downloaded shows (Doctor Who and Charlie Jade, these days).
Plays anything I want it to, good battery life, great screen, good price - and no DRM. Really can't ask for more than that.
Lexar JumpDrives (I have one with 512 MB capacity) have an encryption utility for Windows that comes on the drive and runs automatically upon the drive being plugged into a USB port on a Windows system. You can encrypt all or only a section of the drive and none of that data can then be accessed without first entering the password. The software is Windows-only, as far as I know, but at the very least that encrypted section remains safe if you plug the drive into a non-Windows system.
Otherwise, the drive is a perfectly standard USB key.
Every previous Archos product I've used or heard of works as a USB Mass Storage, even the ones that play/record video. I have an Archos Gmini 400 that I can plug into a Linux box just as easily as I can on a Windows PC. It possible that Archos is changing their normal behavior for this new product, but it's also possible they just don't want to try supporting the product on Linux computers.
I revised the experiment as per your suggestion; in short, Half-Life 2 still works.
I closed Steam in the manner I mentioned before (right click on the icon in the taskbar, choose "Exit".
_Next_, I physically unplugged my network cable. _Then_ I restarted Windows and logged back in when the login screen appeared. At this point, I have no network connection still, the cable is still unplugged.
I double-clicked on the Half-Life 2 icon on my desk, and first I got a "Connecting to Steam" screen, followed by a screen telling me that Steam can't connect. I was given the option to use Steam in Offline Mode. I clicked on that option and another "Connecting to Steam" screen popped up, closed almost as fast, and was replaced by a "Starting Half-Life 2". A few moments later, Half-Life 2 loaded and I was shortly thereafter presented with the regular menu screen giving me the option to load a game, change settings, etc.
Everything appears to work just fine. Thanks for correcting my testing method, by the way. Now if anyone ever reads this, maybe it'll help them.
I realized this after thinking about it some, and you're right, I'll give this a shot when I get home from work this evening. I have no idea whether anyone reads posts for stories from two days ago, but it never hurts to be thorough.
Re:Online connection is _not_ required
on
Review: Half-Life 2
·
· Score: 4, Informative
The only difference I can see so far is that I specifically exited Steam first, and only then did I double-click the HL2 icon (not the Steam icon, obviously) on the desktop. When I did that, I got the message that Steam was launching, and then the screen asking whether I wanted to play in Offline Mode.
I gather there are two ways to exit Steam, one of which is "Exit" and the other being "Exit and Logoff". From what I've read, if you choose the former you can continue to play games without an internet connection, but if you choose the latter nothing will work again without signing back onto Steam. Don't know why you'd choose to logoff before you exit then, myself.
Also, and I have no idea whether this might apply to you, if you buy a game through Steam (which I did for HL2) it needs to be fully installed (as in the install bar reads 100%) before you can play it offline.
I hope some of this helps. If not, good luck and please post anything you find out back in the thread.
Online connection is _not_ required
on
Review: Half-Life 2
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Since a lot of people seem to be commenting that you have to be online and connected to Steam to start even the single player Half-Life 2, I thought I'd test this. I don't lose internet connection often, but these things do happen once in a great while, and I'd hate not to be able to play when a backhoe in Ohio cuts through a major trunk.
So here's what I did: 1) In the Steam games list, I right-clicked on "Half-Life 2", opened up the options menu and clicked "Add a link to this game to your desktop".
2) I restarted my computer; I have Steam set to automatically start with Windows, but when it started I immediately right-clicked on the taskbar icon and chose "Exit" from the small list that appears.
3) I reached around the back of my computer and physically removed the network cable from the plug on the back panel. I have no wireless network card, therefore this meant my computer no longer had any network connection whatsoever.
4) I then double-clicked on the "Half-Life 2" icon on my desktop.
5) I got a pop-up that said Steam was loading, and then I got a second one that informed me that Steam was unable to connect to an online server, would I like to play Half-Life 2 in "Offline Mode"? I clicked "Yes", the game booted up and I preceded to have the bejeezus scared out of me by the zombies-on-speed in Ravenholm. (For those of you not there yet, do not play this section late at night, and the gravity gun+sawblade is your new best friend. Save your ammo for emergencies, and you will have those aplenty.)
So having no network connection didn't impede me from playing at all. I'm pleased to find this out, personally.
Two more things to note: First, if I go into the Half-Life 2 directory under my Steam install folder and run "hl2.exe" directly, I get an error message and the game does not load. Apparently it does have to go through some local Steam framework even if it doesn't need connectivity, but again this doesn't bother me as long as it doesn't mandate a connection. The desktop link provided through the options menu for Half-Life 2 in Steam does not execute "hl2.exe", but a different executable with a string of operators after the executable.
Second, there is no difference in my load times whether playing with a network connection or without. If, while online, Steam is re-validating the game files or somesuch, it produces no noticeable delay on my computer.
For anyone who cares, my computer is: an Athlon XP Mobile 2500+ (Barton) oc'd to 2200 MHz on a 400 MHz FSB, so equivalent to an Athlon XP 3200+, a half-gig of PC3200, a Radeon 9600 Pro AIW, Windows 2000 SP 4,
I've used the TV-out function on my Gmini 400 quite a bit, actually. The picture quality is fine, nothing to write home about but perfectly capable of replaying TV episodes or movies. The output can be in NTSC or PAL, I use NTSC since I'm in the United States, and the player handles a 640x480 DivX well. No stuttering, no frame drop, nothing to annoy you. Just make sure you encode the file at a higher resolution and bitrate if you'll be planning on outputting to television. If I'm just converting a Simpsons episode for playback on the bus the next morning, I'll encode at a lower bitrate and a 320x240 resolution. That will output fine to a television, but it would look pretty poor compared to me encoding at 640x480 and 1000 kbit.
Re:This is good news, but I would prefer Firefly
on
Farscape Returns Sunday
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
See, I'll disagree with you on that: I think the show started off a little slow (not bad, just getting up to speed), and got better the further it went along. My favorite season was the third, but the fourth was still excellent. I'm a big fan of shows that have serial storylines, as opposed to being more episodic, and Farscape started off episodic and became more serial the longer it went on.
I've actually had good luck with my Archos Jukebox. I have the Version 2 Jukebox Recorder, bought from Amazon this past January with a $50 rebate, so the price in the end was only $150 US for a 20 GB MP3 player with USB 2.0. The Jukebox is reasonably durably built (it's survived a few falls and I accidentally flung it the length of my office once), the audio quality is fine and the USB transfer speeds are good, making it an extremely useful portable backup. Also, there is no requirement for song management software to be installed on the computer used for connection - any files dropped anywhere on the Jukebox's hard drive are accessible through the player's software. I feel this is a major advantage over the mandatory use of song management software with the iPod and a number of other MP3 players.
And while Apple certainly gets the design perfect for the iPod (sadly, my Archos Jukebox V2 is admittedly homely), the build quality is another thing entirely: Apple does not have a good track record with build quality on the iPods (see hereand here, for instance).
I'm consistently seeing good reviews for Archos' new products (Laptop Magazine gave the AV420, a portable PVR/video player, 4.5 out of 5 stars in their latest issue, for one) , and the Gmini 400 itself was very favorably reviewed in a recent Cnet review. I may have to get one for myself, actually.
It does have RCA (composite; the yellow plug for video channel and the red and white plugs for stereo audio) video out. It's listed in the specs at the bottom of the posted mp3newswire.net link. So you can output any video you've got on there to a television at the least. And while the maximum video quality is slightly shy of DVD, it's only by a small amount (640x400 as opposed to 720x480 for an NTSC DVD) and it'll still look very good on a television.
While I will agree with you in some part, a number of the most famous science fiction authors have been serious scientists in their own right; Sir Arthur Clarke is a co-inventor of the orbital satellite, and Asimov had multiple degrees in chemistry and biology.
Science fiction authors also think about this sort of matter on a regular basis, and not as a mere idle notion. Combine that with significant knowledge of the subject matter, and it isn't unreasonable for the government to be asking them what their views on terraforming are.
My father has told me stories of his driver's ed. class in Tulsa, Oklahoma in the 1950's. If your parents were willing to sign a waver, the instructor would take you to a field outside of town, outfit you with a helmet, and let you roll a junker that had been equipped with a roll cage so the roof wouldn't cave in. The point was to give you an idea of what it felt like to roll a car, and what it took to get to that point, so that you would know never to go that far in real circumstances.
Personally, I would have loved to be able to do this when I was learning to drive.
I have to scan and store very high-res black-and-white images for work, and I've found that the best format to save in is TIF with a CCITT Fax 4 compression. It will only work for black-and-white files, but for a full page of text and graphics scanned at 2-color, 600 dpi, you can get a file about 100 kbyte. The image quality is superb, and it's far, far more efficient than PDF.
The program I use to convert to TIF is IrfanView (http://www.irfanview.com/), a generally excellent image viewer. I'ts free, too, so no worries there. It offers a ton of options for compression settings for different formats, so you can try other file formats as needed.
Regarding your comment about the ATI Remote Wonder, I just got the new model (voucher came with my Radeon 9600 AIW). The mouse control is much improved, and the button feel is better too. It's still not as good as a real mouse, but it's a lot better than it used to be.
As much as I'm hesitant to support downloading bootlegs of the series, oroshana does have a point here. If you don't want to watch through the entire series in order to get the gist of things, though, there was a fantastic recap hour that was aired just before the beginning of Season 3. It's on the DVDs, but if you just want that one episode, search your P2P network of choice for "Farscape 3x00 - Farscape Undressed". Nope, not porn (or at least it shouldn't be if it's legit), and it'll give you a very good quick introduction to characters and plotlines. Mind you, two more seasons passed after that, but it's good to start.
I actually do have the entire series; it was released on a much faster timetable in England, and I was able to order them very cheaply from Bensons's World when the US dollar was doing much better against the British pound. So I had the very end of season 4 by early summer 2003.
If you want to go this route (there are other series/discs that are much cheaper in England for some reason, "The Prisoner" being an example), you'll need to make sure you have a DVD player capable of playing discs from multiple regions. I bought my DVD player with that in mind, but if you want to look into it for yourself, best place is on DVDrhelp.com.
I have an old Sony notebook (PCG-F430) that no longer serves for main computing duty, but that I keep around as a Linux box. I've had to replace the processor fan and the keyboard, and both times Sony's parts sales staff has been extremely polite and helpful. I have no idea how well other companies match up to this standard, but it would be hard to beat.
For personal use, I recently used Western Digital's Data Lifeguard software (http://support.wdc.com/download/) to ghost a 40 GB partition onto a new, blank 80 GB drive. The software can be run either off of a boot floppy or through Windows, and it copied a Windows 2000 SP2 install perfectly, without any issues. The new drive became the primary hard drive in my system, and I've been using it for six months without any problems.
The downside is that this isn't for large-scale ghosting; I believe you need to have both drives physically present in the machine in order to perform the operation.
The limitation to this argument is that it defines only biological life that has evolved naturally. An artificial intelligence would, by definition, never fall into this category. And, if we ever get to the point of engineering organisms for higher intelligence, we might end up with living organisms that, for example, would be sterile but would also be intelligent- grown in a lab but sentient. Would they then too not be considered alive?
If a being is intelligent but not life as that to which we are accustomed, I would hope we would still accord it the rights that we ourselves possess.
I own both "Strange Adventures In Infinite Space", by Cheapass Games, and "Moonbase Commander", by Humongous Entertainment/Infogrames.
SAIS is a great, addictive game with short play times- a regular game doesn't last more than ten minutes, but then you just fire up another one immediately. It looks like a little like Star Control 2, with about the same graphic level, but it's different in both implementation and intent. There's a free demo here that will give you a good idea of the game.
Moonbase Commander is an excellent and clever game, even more so in multiplayer over a LAN or the Internet. The website for it is here. Humongous Entertainment is part of Infogrames, so technically not indie, but the game is cheap and not at all like mainstream works.
A major advantage I see with indie games is that they're often fun, generally not overly complicated, and cheap- both of these games are $15, and well worth the prices. They're different than what is already on the market and are a refreshing alternative to, if not as graphically stunning as, mainstream fare.
Safeplaces.net is a beautifully done Flash animation site geared towards kids. Very good graphics and sound and lots of things to interact with on the pages. It isn't exactly educational(other than getting them comfortable with using a mouse and experimenting with an interface), but it is certainly entertaining and completely appropriate for small children.
I got a fantastic education at the University of Chicago, and the Scavenger Hunt was part of it. It teaches you how to be creative and practical, make quick decisions, and work well with a lot of other people. And it's fun.
How in the world can you regard this as a bad thing? Hell, I'll pay more to let my children go to a college that has this sort of event.
Slashdot Mirror
I'l agree with you on your first point: I don't trust Microsoft as a company, I think that its policies have been illegal and unethical in the past and, probably, still are right now. It is, of course, a gigantic corporation; it's interests are in making money, not in making the world a better place or even making my life easier. I cast a skeptical eye on just about anything they do because my interests and theirs aren't likely to be aligned.
However, I also use Windows 2000 and am reasonably happy with it. It's stable to the point where my uptime is easily measured in months (and reboots only really happen when I decide to install some new graphics card drivers or new hardware), it runs just about everything I need, and it works well on computers ranging from six or seven years old to brand new. It's a good product for my purposes (PVR, games, Internet).
The reason I use Linux as well is that Linux gives me a much greater degree of transparency in what's going on behind the curtain; I can use it both as a productive working environment and to tinker with settings and configuration files to my heart's content. Linux offers a greater degree of freedom in allowing me to use a computer as I want.
Absolutely. Have a Gmini 400 myself, I really do love it. The only downside is that I find myself watching a good deal more television now in the form of downloaded shows (Doctor Who and Charlie Jade, these days).
Plays anything I want it to, good battery life, great screen, good price - and no DRM. Really can't ask for more than that.
Lexar JumpDrives (I have one with 512 MB capacity) have an encryption utility for Windows that comes on the drive and runs automatically upon the drive being plugged into a USB port on a Windows system. You can encrypt all or only a section of the drive and none of that data can then be accessed without first entering the password. The software is Windows-only, as far as I know, but at the very least that encrypted section remains safe if you plug the drive into a non-Windows system.
Otherwise, the drive is a perfectly standard USB key.
Every previous Archos product I've used or heard of works as a USB Mass Storage, even the ones that play /record video. I have an Archos Gmini 400 that I can plug into a Linux box just as easily as I can on a Windows PC. It possible that Archos is changing their normal behavior for this new product, but it's also possible they just don't want to try supporting the product on Linux computers.
I revised the experiment as per your suggestion; in short, Half-Life 2 still works.
I closed Steam in the manner I mentioned before (right click on the icon in the taskbar, choose "Exit".
_Next_, I physically unplugged my network cable. _Then_ I restarted Windows and logged back in when the login screen appeared. At this point, I have no network connection still, the cable is still unplugged.
I double-clicked on the Half-Life 2 icon on my desk, and first I got a "Connecting to Steam" screen, followed by a screen telling me that Steam can't connect. I was given the option to use Steam in Offline Mode. I clicked on that option and another "Connecting to Steam" screen popped up, closed almost as fast, and was replaced by a "Starting Half-Life 2". A few moments later, Half-Life 2 loaded and I was shortly thereafter presented with the regular menu screen giving me the option to load a game, change settings, etc.
Everything appears to work just fine. Thanks for correcting my testing method, by the way. Now if anyone ever reads this, maybe it'll help them.
I realized this after thinking about it some, and you're right, I'll give this a shot when I get home from work this evening. I have no idea whether anyone reads posts for stories from two days ago, but it never hurts to be thorough.
The only difference I can see so far is that I specifically exited Steam first, and only then did I double-click the HL2 icon (not the Steam icon, obviously) on the desktop. When I did that, I got the message that Steam was launching, and then the screen asking whether I wanted to play in Offline Mode.
I gather there are two ways to exit Steam, one of which is "Exit" and the other being "Exit and Logoff". From what I've read, if you choose the former you can continue to play games without an internet connection, but if you choose the latter nothing will work again without signing back onto Steam. Don't know why you'd choose to logoff before you exit then, myself.
Also, and I have no idea whether this might apply to you, if you buy a game through Steam (which I did for HL2) it needs to be fully installed (as in the install bar reads 100%) before you can play it offline.
I hope some of this helps. If not, good luck and please post anything you find out back in the thread.
Since a lot of people seem to be commenting that you have to be online and connected to Steam to start even the single player Half-Life 2, I thought I'd test this. I don't lose internet connection often, but these things do happen once in a great while, and I'd hate not to be able to play when a backhoe in Ohio cuts through a major trunk.
So here's what I did:
1) In the Steam games list, I right-clicked on "Half-Life 2", opened up the options menu and clicked "Add a link to this game to your desktop".
2) I restarted my computer; I have Steam set to automatically start with Windows, but when it started I immediately right-clicked on the taskbar icon and chose "Exit" from the small list that appears.
3) I reached around the back of my computer and physically removed the network cable from the plug on the back panel. I have no wireless network card, therefore this meant my computer no longer had any network connection whatsoever.
4) I then double-clicked on the "Half-Life 2" icon on my desktop.
5) I got a pop-up that said Steam was loading, and then I got a second one that informed me that Steam was unable to connect to an online server, would I like to play Half-Life 2 in "Offline Mode"? I clicked "Yes", the game booted up and I preceded to have the bejeezus scared out of me by the zombies-on-speed in Ravenholm. (For those of you not there yet, do not play this section late at night, and the gravity gun+sawblade is your new best friend. Save your ammo for emergencies, and you will have those aplenty.)
So having no network connection didn't impede me from playing at all. I'm pleased to find this out, personally.
Two more things to note: First, if I go into the Half-Life 2 directory under my Steam install folder and run "hl2.exe" directly, I get an error message and the game does not load. Apparently it does have to go through some local Steam framework even if it doesn't need connectivity, but again this doesn't bother me as long as it doesn't mandate a connection. The desktop link provided through the options menu for Half-Life 2 in Steam does not execute "hl2.exe", but a different executable with a string of operators after the executable.
Second, there is no difference in my load times whether playing with a network connection or without. If, while online, Steam is re-validating the game files or somesuch, it produces no noticeable delay on my computer.
For anyone who cares, my computer is:
an Athlon XP Mobile 2500+ (Barton) oc'd to 2200 MHz on a 400 MHz FSB, so equivalent to an Athlon XP 3200+,
a half-gig of PC3200,
a Radeon 9600 Pro AIW,
Windows 2000 SP 4,
so nothing special for game-playing these days.
I've used the TV-out function on my Gmini 400 quite a bit, actually. The picture quality is fine, nothing to write home about but perfectly capable of replaying TV episodes or movies. The output can be in NTSC or PAL, I use NTSC since I'm in the United States, and the player handles a 640x480 DivX well. No stuttering, no frame drop, nothing to annoy you. Just make sure you encode the file at a higher resolution and bitrate if you'll be planning on outputting to television. If I'm just converting a Simpsons episode for playback on the bus the next morning, I'll encode at a lower bitrate and a 320x240 resolution. That will output fine to a television, but it would look pretty poor compared to me encoding at 640x480 and 1000 kbit.
See, I'll disagree with you on that: I think the show started off a little slow (not bad, just getting up to speed), and got better the further it went along. My favorite season was the third, but the fourth was still excellent. I'm a big fan of shows that have serial storylines, as opposed to being more episodic, and Farscape started off episodic and became more serial the longer it went on.
And while Apple certainly gets the design perfect for the iPod (sadly, my Archos Jukebox V2 is admittedly homely), the build quality is another thing entirely: Apple does not have a good track record with build quality on the iPods (see hereand here, for instance).
I'm consistently seeing good reviews for Archos' new products (Laptop Magazine gave the AV420, a portable PVR/video player, 4.5 out of 5 stars in their latest issue, for one) , and the Gmini 400 itself was very favorably reviewed in a recent Cnet review. I may have to get one for myself, actually.
It does have RCA (composite; the yellow plug for video channel and the red and white plugs for stereo audio) video out. It's listed in the specs at the bottom of the posted mp3newswire.net link. So you can output any video you've got on there to a television at the least. And while the maximum video quality is slightly shy of DVD, it's only by a small amount (640x400 as opposed to 720x480 for an NTSC DVD) and it'll still look very good on a television.
While I will agree with you in some part, a number of the most famous science fiction authors have been serious scientists in their own right; Sir Arthur Clarke is a co-inventor of the orbital satellite, and Asimov had multiple degrees in chemistry and biology.
Science fiction authors also think about this sort of matter on a regular basis, and not as a mere idle notion. Combine that with significant knowledge of the subject matter, and it isn't unreasonable for the government to be asking them what their views on terraforming are.
My father has told me stories of his driver's ed. class in Tulsa, Oklahoma in the 1950's. If your parents were willing to sign a waver, the instructor would take you to a field outside of town, outfit you with a helmet, and let you roll a junker that had been equipped with a roll cage so the roof wouldn't cave in. The point was to give you an idea of what it felt like to roll a car, and what it took to get to that point, so that you would know never to go that far in real circumstances.
Personally, I would have loved to be able to do this when I was learning to drive.
I have to scan and store very high-res black-and-white images for work, and I've found that the best format to save in is TIF with a CCITT Fax 4 compression. It will only work for black-and-white files, but for a full page of text and graphics scanned at 2-color, 600 dpi, you can get a file about 100 kbyte. The image quality is superb, and it's far, far more efficient than PDF.
The program I use to convert to TIF is IrfanView (http://www.irfanview.com/), a generally excellent image viewer. I'ts free, too, so no worries there. It offers a ton of options for compression settings for different formats, so you can try other file formats as needed.
Regarding your comment about the ATI Remote Wonder, I just got the new model (voucher came with my Radeon 9600 AIW). The mouse control is much improved, and the button feel is better too. It's still not as good as a real mouse, but it's a lot better than it used to be.
As much as I'm hesitant to support downloading bootlegs of the series, oroshana does have a point here. If you don't want to watch through the entire series in order to get the gist of things, though, there was a fantastic recap hour that was aired just before the beginning of Season 3. It's on the DVDs, but if you just want that one episode, search your P2P network of choice for "Farscape 3x00 - Farscape Undressed". Nope, not porn (or at least it shouldn't be if it's legit), and it'll give you a very good quick introduction to characters and plotlines. Mind you, two more seasons passed after that, but it's good to start.
I actually do have the entire series; it was released on a much faster timetable in England, and I was able to order them very cheaply from Bensons's World when the US dollar was doing much better against the British pound. So I had the very end of season 4 by early summer 2003.
If you want to go this route (there are other series/discs that are much cheaper in England for some reason, "The Prisoner" being an example), you'll need to make sure you have a DVD player capable of playing discs from multiple regions. I bought my DVD player with that in mind, but if you want to look into it for yourself, best place is on DVDrhelp.com.
I have an old Sony notebook (PCG-F430) that no longer serves for main computing duty, but that I keep around as a Linux box. I've had to replace the processor fan and the keyboard, and both times Sony's parts sales staff has been extremely polite and helpful. I have no idea how well other companies match up to this standard, but it would be hard to beat.
For personal use, I recently used Western Digital's Data Lifeguard software (http://support.wdc.com/download/) to ghost a 40 GB partition onto a new, blank 80 GB drive. The software can be run either off of a boot floppy or through Windows, and it copied a Windows 2000 SP2 install perfectly, without any issues. The new drive became the primary hard drive in my system, and I've been using it for six months without any problems.
The downside is that this isn't for large-scale ghosting; I believe you need to have both drives physically present in the machine in order to perform the operation.
The limitation to this argument is that it defines only biological life that has evolved naturally. An artificial intelligence would, by definition, never fall into this category. And, if we ever get to the point of engineering organisms for higher intelligence, we might end up with living organisms that, for example, would be sterile but would also be intelligent- grown in a lab but sentient. Would they then too not be considered alive?
If a being is intelligent but not life as that to which we are accustomed, I would hope we would still accord it the rights that we ourselves possess.
I own both "Strange Adventures In Infinite Space", by Cheapass Games, and "Moonbase Commander", by Humongous Entertainment/Infogrames.
SAIS is a great, addictive game with short play times- a regular game doesn't last more than ten minutes, but then you just fire up another one immediately. It looks like a little like Star Control 2, with about the same graphic level, but it's different in both implementation and intent. There's a free demo here that will give you a good idea of the game.
Moonbase Commander is an excellent and clever game, even more so in multiplayer over a LAN or the Internet. The website for it is here. Humongous Entertainment is part of Infogrames, so technically not indie, but the game is cheap and not at all like mainstream works.
A major advantage I see with indie games is that they're often fun, generally not overly complicated, and cheap- both of these games are $15, and well worth the prices. They're different than what is already on the market and are a refreshing alternative to, if not as graphically stunning as, mainstream fare.
Safeplaces.net is a beautifully done Flash animation site geared towards kids. Very good graphics and sound and lots of things to interact with on the pages. It isn't exactly educational(other than getting them comfortable with using a mouse and experimenting with an interface), but it is certainly entertaining and completely appropriate for small children.
(And now I pray they won't get /'ed for this.)
Don't worry about it. We've caught real flack like this for the ScavHunt before, it's probably made me somewhat twitchy.
I got a fantastic education at the University of Chicago, and the Scavenger Hunt was part of it. It teaches you how to be creative and practical, make quick decisions, and work well with a lot of other people. And it's fun.
How in the world can you regard this as a bad thing? Hell, I'll pay more to let my children go to a college that has this sort of event.