Yes, I scanned that too quickly and attributed the quote to the wrong person. My fault. Is that any reason to call me a stupid jackass? It's not like I attacked Hemos, I just said that he probabably hadn't read the battle.net message base. Now I transfer that opinion to Mr. Hughes.
Your words are unwarranted and reflect poorly on you.
They tend to put out decent games the first time and not have as many huge fixes, just small tweaks.
I guess Hemos hasn't checked out the Battle.net message bases lately. Maybe after he reads his first 500 messages complaining about the endless delay for the upcoming huge patch that will fix the dozens of current bugs he'll alter his position.
And we're not talking about tweaks here. We're talking about bugs that allow certain users (druids and barbarians, I believe) to crash any other user. There's also a nasty bug that allows the stealing of entire accounts, though that won't work on all servers. These bugs have been exploited for weeks and there hasn't been any response from Blizzard. I wish they would issue some small tweaks instead of telling people to wait for the mega-patch.
And then there's the class balance issues. A lot of people think that the expansion set, along with the 1.08 patch for the normal game, have pretty much destroyed all gaming potential of Diablo 2. I don't hold quite as extreme an opinion myself, but then again, I play a sorceress, the class most people think is dramatically overpowered. If I was a warrior, trying to hack my way through hordes of "physically immune" (what a concept, what is this, DC comics?) monsters, I'd probably have a different opinion. In fact, I doubt I'd even bother playing the game.
Gee, if I had a browser that crashed every time it read HTML that the mainstream browsers could handle without any problem, then maybe I'd conclude that it was the browser that was the piece of shit rather than the underlaying OS or the web site in question. Not that the OS isn't shitty too, but these things are relative.
I remember installing Opera once. Can't remember exactly what it was that caused me to uninstall it half an hour later.
Re:Did you expect any differently?
on
$1200 Cheap!
·
· Score: 1
That would be true if they were somehow leveraging their windows monopoly. I don't see any connection between Windows and the X-box, though. Whether or not I use Windows doesn't, as far as I know, impact upon whether or not I use the X-box in any way.
It's not the same as the Netscape/Windows situation, where you could at least form a reasonable argument that people are using IE simply because they already use Windows and are going along the path of least resistance.
I don't buy that particular argument, but it's a fair one. Can you form a similar argument for X-box? Because I use Windows, is there a reason I'd rather buy the X-box than the PlayStation?
Hey, asshole, show me anywhere in that post where I suggested that I was leeching anything. The odds are that I paid more in taxes last year than you did. In your tortured mind, anyone who advocates basic liberties (like, say, not being deported just because you have an opposing political opinion) is a "bloodsucking liberal"? It shows your how tenuous your connection with reality is.
It's not directly due to Bush, but his "leadership" is certainly making the problem worse. This crisis was brought on by greedy Texan energy companies that bought the California companies as soon as they were deregulated and immediately starting bleeding California dry by raising their wholesale rates by criminal amounts.
Before deregulation, wholesale electricity typically cost 3 cents per kilowatt hour. Now it's up to 1.50 during peak periods. Show me another industry where you can get away with raising your prices by 5000% just because you have to opportunity to gouge the public.
In your world view, I suppose the fact that those who run these Texan energy companies are bidness associates and personal friends of Bush the oilman is just a coincidence, isn't it? In reality, if someone else, even a Republican who wasn't a Texan oilman, was in office, this shameful situation wouldn't have proceeded as long as it did.
Don't you mean, "Those with real expertise usually move to the United States where they can work on cooler projects and make about three times as much money as they ever would in Canada."?
That's true. Canadians have a much more casual attitude towards ripping off the government or large corporations than Americans do. It's really just a defensive attitude because they know that no matter what they do, they're going to be ripped off even more by their own government.
I don't buy it. The "freedom" of software under BSD licenses has nothing to do with software being free of charge. Rather, it's the freedom to do whatever you want with the code and not have to worry about being blindsided by lawyers or license nazis.
This freedom represents a very tangible benefit to anyone who is a software contractor and as such is definitely worth paying money for. How much would you pay for a word processor equivalent to Word that gave you the right to freely modify it for any of your clients and never have to forward an additional cent to its writer or have to worry about producing licenses for yourself or your customers?
I don't know about you, but I don't think twice about laying down a wad of cash for such software since it's giving me two very real benefits. One, I can make money from offering customized versions to those who don't have the skills to customize it themselves. Two, I can sleep at night and never worry about my business being destroyed by software lawyers. That's freedom, in my opinion, not a license which says you can do anything with a given piece of software except actually make money with it.
If you want to go all the way back to the dawn of time, you could probably find ancestors in anyone's past that participated in atrocities. But we're talking about 60 years ago, not the dark ages.
Perhaps you should take your trite dismissals of war crimes and argue them before the thousands of "comfort women" the Japanese took from Asia. In case you're not familar with the term, that's when you abduct girls so they can be repeatedly raped by any of your soldiers that feel the urge.
While you're at at, maybe you can argue before some Jews that the war crimes of the Nazis were just the regular sort of hegemonic bugaboos. Happens all the time, nothing to get upset about.
But please, make your case face to face. That way, you could learn a painful lesson about the laws of natural selection you so enjoy spouting off about.
Imperial Japanese were the scum of the earth
on
Review: Pearl Harbor
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· Score: 2
I'd be more interested in seeing the Japanese reaction to Nanking than Hiroshima. You know, that Chinese city where the Japanese let loose their soldiers like a Mongol horde and tried to rape every woman they could find?
I'd also be interested in seeing their reaction to all the bayonetted boys and raped women in the Phillipines, which they labelled the "Southern Resource Area".
If I was a Jew, I'd most fear being occupied by Nazis. If I was from any other group, I'd prefer being conquered by the Nazis to being conquered by the Imperial Japanese.
Thanks to the Jews, we all remember the Nazi's war crimes. But there's no equivalent to the Jews for the Pacific conflict. Certainly Japan has never recognized it's responsibility for the war in the same way that Germany has.
So you won't hear any complaining about Hiroshima from me. After what the Japanese did to civilians all across Asia, they should consider themselves lucky that we only nuked their cities one at a time.
P.S. More people died in the conventional bombings of Tokyo and Dresden than died at Hiroshima. And 10 times more would have died in any conventional invasion of Japan. Remember, we're talking about people that had to be nuked twice to get the point.
You're overlooking the fact that schools also have thousands of parents, and some of those parents would have had the technical sophistication to find such a bug and fix it, free of charge, if the source had been open. At the very least, they could have confirmed that something fishy was indeed going on. And it would have taken a hell of a lot less time than 8 months.
Sure, you can boycott a company. Unless it's some kind of nationally organized boycott, though, it's not going to have any effect on them. How often does that happen?
And as someone else said, there's times when you don't have a choice about boycotts. Many people would like to see the day when they don't have a single piece of MS software in their office, but most people don't really have a choice. And then there's local monopolies like power and phone companies. Can you boycott them?
More importantly, you can't do a thing about the people actually in charge of corporations. Many people would like to see a come-uppance to Bill Gates, Scott McNealy, Larry Ellison, and crowd. But it's just an idle dream.
Contrast that to governments. I'm already counting the days until I can send Dubya looking for a new line of work.
Your point about governments having the potential for greater evil than corporations is absolutely true, but we have the power to avoid that future and it's our responsibility as citizens to do so. As Stan the Man said, "With great power comes great responsibility". We have no such direct weapons against the evils of corporations, especially when they're multinational and hiding behind an unelected plutocracy like the WTO.
And no, I'm not a god damn Naderite. Because I actually care about these issues, I wanted nothing to do with the Green party in the last election.
In order to "do something about it", he has to risk offending his good buddies in the energy business, and that's not going to happen.
Yesterday I was reading about how the state of Texas is willfully gouging the state of California. It seems that the price of natural gas in the pipeline triples the instant it crosses the Texas border. Some fuel barons in Texas are hauling off truckloads of cash taken directly from the pockets of citizens in California. Sort of like the French revolution in reverse.
Here's a situation which should require some "leadership" and "uniting". Don't hold your breath though. I think those marketing words went the same way as "restoring honor and dignity to the white house".
So, in your future, it's a big facist goverment which keeps corperations out of our asses? That's *so* much better..
It's infinitely better. The government must at least follow the pretense of examination by a free press. Ultimately we get a chance to throw them all out if we don't like what we're doing.
Contrast that with corporations, which are accountable only to their shareholders. If you're not one of them, you're shit out of luck.
Government also has to weigh the total good of the people when it makes policy. This includes public health and the environment. A corporation isn't bound to consider any of these things. They'll cheerfully put more mercury in your food if it makes them an extra dollar. You'd really prefer to put your fate in the hands of such people?
If you're one of these "free market is all" people, perhaps you should consider the United States of America as a corporation where we're all shareholders.
I'm not bashing business. It's a businessman's job to maximize profit. But it's the government's job to make sure that the population as a whole isn't screwed by corporations, because the government is the only institution which has the power and resources to stop a corporation which is out of line.
We can argue about the yardstick a government should use when considering intervention in a corporation's affairs if you wish, but don't try to tell me that government shouldn't have the controlling interest here. I'd much rather be ruled by politicians, even ones I despise like George Bush, than be ruled by GE, Ford, Coke, etc.
And the matter gets even worse when you consider multinational corporations. Would you expect a foreign corp to look out for your interests better your own elected representives?
Individuals are answerable to the government, and we call that "the rule of law". Yet when someone says that corporations should answer to the goverment too, people like yourself gleefully throw themselves down the slippery slope and start tossing around words like "fascism". It's tiresome, it's contrary to your own interests, and it sure as hell isn't "insightful".
Re:Hoots mon on the Celtic Fringe...
on
Reviews:Shrek
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· Score: 1
Your belief is a common one among Americans. It's usually shattered rudely once an American lives in Canada for a while. Ironically enough, it's usually because a Canadian assumes the American is Canadian and just starts ripping up Americans to the American's face.
It's FUD based on a truth
on
Shared Source?
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· Score: 1
Unfortunately, I don't have any good ideas as to how we can divert this trend. Maybe suing MS for libel would be a good start.
You'd lose, because truth is an absolute defence. Regardless of whether or not you think the GPL is a good thing, it's obviously viral. That's precisely the right word to use. The GPL is like a grabby child that says "if you play with one of my toys, then I own your toy". No wonder businesses stay away from it.
I'm not slamming the GPL. I think it's a fair deal in many circumstances. As somebody else already said, it's really just a formalized code trade. But there's lots of times when you need to be able to retain control of your original code for business reasons. Or even purely selfish reasons. In those cases, code released under the GPL automatically disqualifies itself from use. Software released under freer licenses like Zope or Squishdot is much more useful because it allows you to retain control over derivative works.
<p>Note that Bush got 25% on his flight aptitude test. This was the minimum allowed at the time, so it was probably bumped upward. Despite this horrible score, he was allowed a "direct appointment" as a second lieutenant. This meant he completely avoided officer school, where he might have actually had to work to get by.
<p>Further, he lost his flight privileges after refusing to take any more medical exams in May 1972. Why? Because the army started adding drug tests to their medical exams in April 1972. Connect the dots, friend.
<p>P.S. I didn't even mention his military desertion, when he was supposed to be in the Alabama reserve but never showed up for a year.
There was a young royal marine
who tried to fart "God Save the Queen".
When he reached the soprano
out came the guano
and his breeches weren't fit to be seen.
You're the one that's confused, buddy. You're saying that if I give you a modified binary without the source, you'll be able to tell all the changes I made because I "gave" it to you. Cute trick, that.
Compare the GPL with something like Zope, which can be freely modified for any business purpose without placing any restrictions on the users. That's true freedom, the freedom to sleep at night and never worry about being blindsided by lawyers. It makes it a tool I truely own, like a hammer, and therefore much more useful than GPL software.
What right of the users to choose? Do most employers give their employees the right to choose whatever software they wish to use? Why would you expect a government to be any different with its own IT practices?
Argue with the choice if you like, but don't tell me a large organization doesn't have the right to standarize its software.
Nader tried to inflict as much damage as he could to Gore by focusing on campaigning in swing states. Contrast this to Pat Buchanan, who spent his money in Democrat states because he didn't want to derail the larger conservative effort. Tell me, do you Naderites still believe there's no difference between Gore and Bush? Or has reality started to intrude on your world view?
There were two compelling reasons to upgrade to 98 for me. One was USB support. The other is the newer taskbar, with the small single-click icons. I know that sounds silly, but I find them to be very useful for my commonly used programs -- much better than stepping through the start menu.
I agree that's there's really no reason to buy ME, though. And I haven't bothered with 2000 on my home machine yet because I like playing games and don't want to have to screw around with any incompatibilities.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, I scanned that too quickly and attributed the quote to the wrong person. My fault. Is that any reason to call me a stupid jackass? It's not like I attacked Hemos, I just said that he probabably hadn't read the battle.net message base. Now I transfer that opinion to Mr. Hughes.
Your words are unwarranted and reflect poorly on you.
They tend to put out decent games the first time and not have as many huge fixes, just small tweaks.
I guess Hemos hasn't checked out the Battle.net message bases lately. Maybe after he reads his first 500 messages complaining about the endless delay for the upcoming huge patch that will fix the dozens of current bugs he'll alter his position.
And we're not talking about tweaks here. We're talking about bugs that allow certain users (druids and barbarians, I believe) to crash any other user. There's also a nasty bug that allows the stealing of entire accounts, though that won't work on all servers. These bugs have been exploited for weeks and there hasn't been any response from Blizzard. I wish they would issue some small tweaks instead of telling people to wait for the mega-patch.
And then there's the class balance issues. A lot of people think that the expansion set, along with the 1.08 patch for the normal game, have pretty much destroyed all gaming potential of Diablo 2. I don't hold quite as extreme an opinion myself, but then again, I play a sorceress, the class most people think is dramatically overpowered. If I was a warrior, trying to hack my way through hordes of "physically immune" (what a concept, what is this, DC comics?) monsters, I'd probably have a different opinion. In fact, I doubt I'd even bother playing the game.
Gee, if I had a browser that crashed every time it read HTML that the mainstream browsers could handle without any problem, then maybe I'd conclude that it was the browser that was the piece of shit rather than the underlaying OS or the web site in question. Not that the OS isn't shitty too, but these things are relative.
I remember installing Opera once. Can't remember exactly what it was that caused me to uninstall it half an hour later.
That would be true if they were somehow leveraging their windows monopoly. I don't see any connection between Windows and the X-box, though. Whether or not I use Windows doesn't, as far as I know, impact upon whether or not I use the X-box in any way.
It's not the same as the Netscape/Windows situation, where you could at least form a reasonable argument that people are using IE simply because they already use Windows and are going along the path of least resistance.
I don't buy that particular argument, but it's a fair one. Can you form a similar argument for X-box? Because I use Windows, is there a reason I'd rather buy the X-box than the PlayStation?
Hey, asshole, show me anywhere in that post where I suggested that I was leeching anything. The odds are that I paid more in taxes last year than you did. In your tortured mind, anyone who advocates basic liberties (like, say, not being deported just because you have an opposing political opinion) is a "bloodsucking liberal"? It shows your how tenuous your connection with reality is.
It's not directly due to Bush, but his "leadership" is certainly making the problem worse. This crisis was brought on by greedy Texan energy companies that bought the California companies as soon as they were deregulated and immediately starting bleeding California dry by raising their wholesale rates by criminal amounts.
Before deregulation, wholesale electricity typically cost 3 cents per kilowatt hour. Now it's up to 1.50 during peak periods. Show me another industry where you can get away with raising your prices by 5000% just because you have to opportunity to gouge the public.
In your world view, I suppose the fact that those who run these Texan energy companies are bidness associates and personal friends of Bush the oilman is just a coincidence, isn't it? In reality, if someone else, even a Republican who wasn't a Texan oilman, was in office, this shameful situation wouldn't have proceeded as long as it did.
Props to Slashdot for giving the correction as much prominence as the original false story. Too bad the mainstream media isn't as ethical.
Don't you mean, "Those with real expertise usually move to the United States where they can work on cooler projects and make about three times as much money as they ever would in Canada."?
That's true. Canadians have a much more casual attitude towards ripping off the government or large corporations than Americans do. It's really just a defensive attitude because they know that no matter what they do, they're going to be ripped off even more by their own government.
I don't buy it. The "freedom" of software under BSD licenses has nothing to do with software being free of charge. Rather, it's the freedom to do whatever you want with the code and not have to worry about being blindsided by lawyers or license nazis.
This freedom represents a very tangible benefit to anyone who is a software contractor and as such is definitely worth paying money for. How much would you pay for a word processor equivalent to Word that gave you the right to freely modify it for any of your clients and never have to forward an additional cent to its writer or have to worry about producing licenses for yourself or your customers?
I don't know about you, but I don't think twice about laying down a wad of cash for such software since it's giving me two very real benefits. One, I can make money from offering customized versions to those who don't have the skills to customize it themselves. Two, I can sleep at night and never worry about my business being destroyed by software lawyers. That's freedom, in my opinion, not a license which says you can do anything with a given piece of software except actually make money with it.
If you want to go all the way back to the dawn of time, you could probably find ancestors in anyone's past that participated in atrocities. But we're talking about 60 years ago, not the dark ages.
Perhaps you should take your trite dismissals of war crimes and argue them before the thousands of "comfort women" the Japanese took from Asia. In case you're not familar with the term, that's when you abduct girls so they can be repeatedly raped by any of your soldiers that feel the urge.
While you're at at, maybe you can argue before some Jews that the war crimes of the Nazis were just the regular sort of hegemonic bugaboos. Happens all the time, nothing to get upset about.
But please, make your case face to face. That way, you could learn a painful lesson about the laws of natural selection you so enjoy spouting off about.
I'd be more interested in seeing the Japanese reaction to Nanking than Hiroshima. You know, that Chinese city where the Japanese let loose their soldiers like a Mongol horde and tried to rape every woman they could find?
I'd also be interested in seeing their reaction to all the bayonetted boys and raped women in the Phillipines, which they labelled the "Southern Resource Area".
If I was a Jew, I'd most fear being occupied by Nazis. If I was from any other group, I'd prefer being conquered by the Nazis to being conquered by the Imperial Japanese.
Thanks to the Jews, we all remember the Nazi's war crimes. But there's no equivalent to the Jews for the Pacific conflict. Certainly Japan has never recognized it's responsibility for the war in the same way that Germany has.
So you won't hear any complaining about Hiroshima from me. After what the Japanese did to civilians all across Asia, they should consider themselves lucky that we only nuked their cities one at a time.
P.S. More people died in the conventional bombings of Tokyo and Dresden than died at Hiroshima. And 10 times more would have died in any conventional invasion of Japan. Remember, we're talking about people that had to be nuked twice to get the point.
You're overlooking the fact that schools also have thousands of parents, and some of those parents would have had the technical sophistication to find such a bug and fix it, free of charge, if the source had been open. At the very least, they could have confirmed that something fishy was indeed going on. And it would have taken a hell of a lot less time than 8 months.
Sure, you can boycott a company. Unless it's some kind of nationally organized boycott, though, it's not going to have any effect on them. How often does that happen?
And as someone else said, there's times when you don't have a choice about boycotts. Many people would like to see the day when they don't have a single piece of MS software in their office, but most people don't really have a choice. And then there's local monopolies like power and phone companies. Can you boycott them?
More importantly, you can't do a thing about the people actually in charge of corporations. Many people would like to see a come-uppance to Bill Gates, Scott McNealy, Larry Ellison, and crowd. But it's just an idle dream.
Contrast that to governments. I'm already counting the days until I can send Dubya looking for a new line of work.
Your point about governments having the potential for greater evil than corporations is absolutely true, but we have the power to avoid that future and it's our responsibility as citizens to do so. As Stan the Man said, "With great power comes great responsibility". We have no such direct weapons against the evils of corporations, especially when they're multinational and hiding behind an unelected plutocracy like the WTO.
And no, I'm not a god damn Naderite. Because I actually care about these issues, I wanted nothing to do with the Green party in the last election.
In order to "do something about it", he has to risk offending his good buddies in the energy business, and that's not going to happen.
Yesterday I was reading about how the state of Texas is willfully gouging the state of California. It seems that the price of natural gas in the pipeline triples the instant it crosses the Texas border. Some fuel barons in Texas are hauling off truckloads of cash taken directly from the pockets of citizens in California. Sort of like the French revolution in reverse.
Here's a situation which should require some "leadership" and "uniting". Don't hold your breath though. I think those marketing words went the same way as "restoring honor and dignity to the white house".
So, in your future, it's a big facist goverment which keeps corperations out of our asses? That's *so* much better..
It's infinitely better. The government must at least follow the pretense of examination by a free press. Ultimately we get a chance to throw them all out if we don't like what we're doing.
Contrast that with corporations, which are accountable only to their shareholders. If you're not one of them, you're shit out of luck.
Government also has to weigh the total good of the people when it makes policy. This includes public health and the environment. A corporation isn't bound to consider any of these things. They'll cheerfully put more mercury in your food if it makes them an extra dollar. You'd really prefer to put your fate in the hands of such people?
If you're one of these "free market is all" people, perhaps you should consider the United States of America as a corporation where we're all shareholders.
I'm not bashing business. It's a businessman's job to maximize profit. But it's the government's job to make sure that the population as a whole isn't screwed by corporations, because the government is the only institution which has the power and resources to stop a corporation which is out of line.
We can argue about the yardstick a government should use when considering intervention in a corporation's affairs if you wish, but don't try to tell me that government shouldn't have the controlling interest here. I'd much rather be ruled by politicians, even ones I despise like George Bush, than be ruled by GE, Ford, Coke, etc.
And the matter gets even worse when you consider multinational corporations. Would you expect a foreign corp to look out for your interests better your own elected representives?
Individuals are answerable to the government, and we call that "the rule of law". Yet when someone says that corporations should answer to the goverment too, people like yourself gleefully throw themselves down the slippery slope and start tossing around words like "fascism". It's tiresome, it's contrary to your own interests, and it sure as hell isn't "insightful".
Your belief is a common one among Americans. It's usually shattered rudely once an American lives in Canada for a while. Ironically enough, it's usually because a Canadian assumes the American is Canadian and just starts ripping up Americans to the American's face.
You'd lose, because truth is an absolute defence. Regardless of whether or not you think the GPL is a good thing, it's obviously viral. That's precisely the right word to use. The GPL is like a grabby child that says "if you play with one of my toys, then I own your toy". No wonder businesses stay away from it.
I'm not slamming the GPL. I think it's a fair deal in many circumstances. As somebody else already said, it's really just a formalized code trade. But there's lots of times when you need to be able to retain control of your original code for business reasons. Or even purely selfish reasons. In those cases, code released under the GPL automatically disqualifies itself from use. Software released under freer licenses like Zope or Squishdot is much more useful because it allows you to retain control over derivative works.
<p>Here's some interesting info on Bush's military effort.
<a href="http://www.realchange.org/bushjr.htm">
http://www.realchange.org/bushjr.htm
</a>
<p>Note that Bush got 25% on his flight aptitude test. This was the minimum allowed at the time, so it was probably bumped upward. Despite this horrible score, he was allowed a "direct appointment" as a second lieutenant. This meant he completely avoided officer school, where he might have actually had to work to get by.
<p>Further, he lost his flight privileges after refusing to take any more medical exams in May 1972. Why? Because the army started adding drug tests to their medical exams in April 1972. Connect the dots, friend.
<p>P.S. I didn't even mention his military desertion, when he was supposed to be in the Alabama reserve but never showed up for a year.
There was a young royal marine
who tried to fart "God Save the Queen".
When he reached the soprano
out came the guano
and his breeches weren't fit to be seen.
You're the one that's confused, buddy. You're saying that if I give you a modified binary without the source, you'll be able to tell all the changes I made because I "gave" it to you. Cute trick, that.
Compare the GPL with something like Zope, which can be freely modified for any business purpose without placing any restrictions on the users. That's true freedom, the freedom to sleep at night and never worry about being blindsided by lawyers. It makes it a tool I truely own, like a hammer, and therefore much more useful than GPL software.
What right of the users to choose? Do most employers give their employees the right to choose whatever software they wish to use? Why would you expect a government to be any different with its own IT practices?
Argue with the choice if you like, but don't tell me a large organization doesn't have the right to standarize its software.
So under the GPL I'd be able to hide my changes only if I never distributed the software. Doesn't sound very "free" to me.
Nader tried to inflict as much damage as he could to Gore by focusing on campaigning in swing states. Contrast this to Pat Buchanan, who spent his money in Democrat states because he didn't want to derail the larger conservative effort. Tell me, do you Naderites still believe there's no difference between Gore and Bush? Or has reality started to intrude on your world view?
There were two compelling reasons to upgrade to 98 for me. One was USB support. The other is the newer taskbar, with the small single-click icons. I know that sounds silly, but I find them to be very useful for my commonly used programs -- much better than stepping through the start menu.
I agree that's there's really no reason to buy ME, though. And I haven't bothered with 2000 on my home machine yet because I like playing games and don't want to have to screw around with any incompatibilities.