Re:So the whole world is about to be blown up and.
on
Marvel Goes MMPORG
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· Score: 2, Funny
I can see it now. Spidey, Wolverine, and three different Invisible Girls from the Fantastic Four all standing on the same street, waiting for the bad guy to spawn so they can take turns capturing him. What fun.
I can't help but think that the MMORPG bandwagon is not likely to live into 2005 anyway.
I'm tired of games that just put a new candy-coating on games I played before. Every time a new FPS comes out, my response tends to be "thanks, but I already played Quake." To hook me into a multi-player shooter these days, companies need to be a little more creative.
Likewise with the MMOPRPG's... Simply putting it in a new genre (SW Galaxies, City of Heroes, Lord of the Rings, etc.) is not going to get me to re-play EQ. The act of slapping a first-person view on top of a MUD has been done. If the mechanics of the game don't offer something new and original, I'm not going to pay $60 + $10/month just to look at the new purdy pictures.
It seems that the biggest effect of UO's decision to sell high level players is that they are negating the RP aspect of the game
Actually, it just might have the opposite effect, and kill the power-levelling aspect of the game. After all, if any chump can buy their way to high levels and spiffy toys, where's the glory in such persuits? It seems to me that the large group of people playing MMORPG's have the perception that doing well at the game means getting your character as powerful as you can. Take that aspect away, and all that's left to do is roleplay and have fun, which should have been the whole point from the beginning.
How many people over 40 can tear down a PC and rebuild it from scratch, including the operating system? How many adults realize the internet is more than just the web?
The people who designed those PC's and operating systems, and all the people involved in the creation of the Internet, are currently over 40, kiddo. The Old Guard is not impressed that the Young Turks have learned how to play with the toys they created. On the contrary, they are all wondering if and when you will invent something as important.
And, while "r u going 2 b home l8r" may be quicker to type, it's slower to communicate as the brain has to switch interpretation of symbols. I completely agree.
I've always felt that '1337 sp33k, even in the days before it was called that, is incredibly rude behavior. It does not make communication more efficient, but merely shifts the burden from the speaker to the listener. By saving 5 seconds typing, you are forcing me to spend 10 seconds decrypting what you were trying to say.
The most appalling example of this sort of thing was one I ran into all the time on Everquest (before I burned out on it). People who were begging for favors would finish their request by typing "plz", as if this crude short-hand of "please" somehow completed their social obligation of polite behavior when asking for help, on some minimal level, when all it really did was irritate me. If I'm not worth the trouble of using whole words when speaking to me, then you are not worth going out of my way to help.
I'm often very lazy about standards of spelling, grammar, and even capitalization in settings which I like to call "disposable writing", such as on-line chat and slash sites. However, I always endeavor to make my writing as clear and direct as I can for the benifit of those reading, because anyone nice enough to read what I have to say deserves that respect.
Speak to me in '1337, and I will not take you seriously.
I know a bunch of guys who were "IRL" friends who would log on to EQ every Wednesday night, and had an informal rule among them not to level up the characters they gathered with during off days. It worked out pretty good for them.
Still, if a good on-line game had servers set aside for the "20 hours a week or less" crowd, I would probably use it. Finding other people who game the same way as you can be a trying experience. For example, back when I was playing EQ, I decided to play a serious role-playing character. All of my dialogue, even when speaking to NPC bots, was in character. I scripted verbose greetings and phrases to add color to my conversation. I would occationally meet other people who enjoyed doing likewise, but I kept getting invited into guilds that called themselves "roleplaying" guilds but were actually just the same as everybody else. Things were not much better on the "roleplayers-only" server that EQ had offered.
I once created a character with a code of ethics that was somewhat incompatible with the mechanics of the game. It was a cleric who swore a vow of pacifism (never directly attacked another creature), and considered running to be undignified. (The character was named "Iwalk" and lived on two or three different servers at various times). The only leveling I did was by doing non-violent quests (such as delivering mail for the bards), and grouping with people who didn't mind my slow walking holding them back. I found it endlessly amusing to encounter '1337 kids who would come by and assume my actions were guided by ignorance of the "right" way to play and level quickly. I would calmly say to them, "you are probably right, but that is not the path I have chosen," and they would be utterly baffled why anybody would every play EQ without participating in the materialistic rush for power and wealth. It was the most fun I ever had in that damned game. If I ever log on to an EQ server again, I'll probably do the exact same thing.
Buying a pre-made character is like buying a pre-read book.
I would say it's more like watching Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, after having somebody tell you about the few plot devopments of Star Trek: The Motion Picture. You can enjoy it just as much, and avoid hours of pointless tedium.
Actualy you would expect that the lables would only send pre-release copies to reviewers that had signed some kind of non-redistribution agreement with them, or at least a shrinkwrap agreement break seal only if you agree, call for a pick-up tag if you don't type of a thing.
You would be correct to expect that, becuase that's pretty much what they do. They don't enforce it very much, or at least they didn't in the pre-Napster era, because a few more copies on the used bins wouldn't really impact sales that much.
My point remains that a lot of reviewers and radio people consider access to those demp's to be among the few perks of their otherwise shitty jobs.
Were I reviewer, and received one of these goofy headphone thingies, I would be tempted to not write about the album if it's good, or write a bile-filled screed about how dull it is if it's less than excelent.
Just because the name is different doesn't mean it's not illegal.
Oh. Okay, I'm totally sorry I said it's not illegal, because... hey, wait a minute! I never said that, did I? Let's go read it again... (mumbles while reading)... nope, never said it. Maybe you should read a little more carefully before you go on your little tirade.
Call it what you like, but downloading/sharing music is, in the same way that making copies of movies you rent is, theft.
No, that would be calling it what you like. It is not theft. Theft is taking something away from somebody. Copyright infringement is making unauthroized duplicates of somebody else's data. There is no relationship between the two.
You can make up names for it all day
Nobody is "making up names" here. Copyright infringement is what US Law calls it.
You've noticed, I suspect, that Apple has never marketed an x86 version of any of its operating systems That's because Apple is hardware company, not a software vendor.
Well, you are correct that Apple is a hardware company, but that is not the reason for them not using x86.
Woz himself said that he chose a Motorola clone chip for the Apple ][ because it was the cheapest CPU available at the time. Later, the Motorolla 68k was chosen for the original Macintosh for reasons of cost, performance (at the time), power efficiency, and familiarity (among Apple engineers). The PPC was developped jointly by Apple, IBM, and Motorola and it was easy to build in a compatability layer to the MacOS for running stuff from the old 680x0 chips. The G3 was branched off the very efficient PPC 603 line, and the G4 is essentially a G3 with Motorola's AltiVec system added to enhance vector performance.
If Jobs had a time machine, he very well might want to go back and tell himself to insist on a CPU that handles x86 instructions. There have been a few shining moments when the PPC platform was the fastest chip for home use around, but most of the time that has not been the case.
On the other hand, IBM went the x86 route (and an outsourced OS), and the results were disasterous for their PC division. Once Compaq reverse-engineered their ROM's, the game was over. Everybdoy was buying "IBM Compatable" computers, and no matter how good OS/2 became, there was nothing IBM could do to change the trend.
So, I agree that making the move now would be a bad idea. If Apple were to move to x86, things would be fine as long as they didn't become more than 10% or so of the market. The moment they became a bigger player than that, somebody would consider it worth their while to clone them the way Compaq cloned IBM, and Apple would change from being Dell's strongest rival to just being a very tiny Microsoft, except without an Office suite for income, almost overnight. In other words, it could kill Apple.
Dude, instead of writing that whole screed and posting all those links, couldn't you just post a linke to Low End Mac, which has all of those links and more? (Okay, they don't link to your home page, but whatever.)
The also have lots of the exact same informaiton your are rattling off, along with lots of Mac specs, etc.
Then again, I imagine that nearly everybody reading this thread already knows about them, as well as most of the sites you mentioned.
By your logic, if I download a photograph of the Mona Lisa from somebody that had a camera when they saw it, I have just robbed the Louvre of one of the most valuable paintings in the world!
After all, I am looking at a copy of the painting without going to France. Theft is theft.
Sorry, but you are also a fucking idiot (or a troll... hard to be sure these days). Distributing copies of somebody else's content is not theft. It's copyright infringement.
One problem with this scheme is that magazine journalists (and music reviewers in particular) are very seldom well-paid. One of the few perks of the job: free albums. Take that away, and you create a bitter little reviewer who will go out of his way to savage your album.
I'm with you on that one. Nowhere Man was probably the best-kept secret on TV, and the best espianage drama since The Prisoner.
I would feel a little less bitter about its cancelation if somebody would release the one season that was made as a DVD box set. The season finale was actually a good one to go out on.
Thanks, it's nice to be accused of independent thought once in a while. Most people just assume that I must belong to whatever group I happen to agree with at the moment.
It seems like a common falicy here on/. that nobody ever seems to think that you can arrive at a popular conclusion independently.
That's an outstanding quote... although has there really been that much improvement in RPG systems since the late 19080's? After that, the trading card games started stealing mindshare, and the entire RPG world kind of stagnated, to the point that people started thinking of computer games as "computer RPG's" for no other reason than the fantasy settings.
You would change microclimates, but... I have no idea how you would calculate the real impact.
I suspect we will calculate the real impact the same way we calculated the impact of dams and coal refineries: "Try it and see."
The funny part about that is, if we were to create a windmill farm that covered, oh, say... half the land in South Dakota, and the weather got all screwey, there would probably be those who would blame the strange weather patterns on the effects of global warming, and insist that we shut down even more oil generators in favor of windmills.
I don't think it windmills would cause that much of a weather problem though, and it leads to the same question you always need to ask when hearing news of climate change: "Are you sure it's a bad thing?"
As for slower generators, you are then talking about bigger blades for the same output, so you are still absorbing the same about of energy from the air currents. Putting them on buildings only works if the buildings are designed to handle the load (and let's not even talk about the issues of sway that a windmill generator would create. Holy cow!)
Speaking as a fan of nuclear power, even I must acknowledge that there are huge problems with both of those suggestions.
Launching spent rods into space: great idea, except rockets are not only expensive to launch with even small payloads, but they have a habit of blowing up while still in the atmosphere now and then. When we lost a shuttle, seven people died. If it were a shuttle of nuclear waste, the death toll might have been a smidge higher.
Breeder reactors create residual materials that are even more important to control than ordinary nuclear waste (i.e., weapons-grade plutonium). This means that the current nuclear powers will continue to make agreements to prevent breeder reactors from showing up in the developing world (the places that need cheap, clean power thw most), so that's out, too.
I still think that, until we can manage controlled fusion reactions as a means of power generation, we need to keep improving our means of collecting solar energy (while getting by on oil and nuclear until other ideas are ready for prime time). One environmental scientist pointed out that, with current tech, in order to power the United States alone on solar power exclusively, you would need to completely cover every land-mass on the planet with panels. That's not such an attractive option. A possible better way to go is a space-based collecor farm, which sends the energy as microwave radiation to narrowly-targeted collectors on Earth... that's still on the drawing board, though.
The best idea is the one that we've already been doing for over 50 years: keep making devices that consume less power. My whole house is powered by about the same ammount of juice a single refrigerator would have sucked up when my parents were children. As long as we continue to be rich enough to keep researching power-saving solutions, along with better ways of generating power, things can improve. However, if we were to implement Green Party style draconian measures to cut consumption, raise transportation prices by taxing the hell out of oil, and generally fuck up the entire western world's economy, then you can forget about seeing companies like Reliant spending millions on conservation research... environmental R&D would be the first place they would cut, and we all know it.
I completely agree with you there. The most sensible solution is to do what we are doing now: Burn oil, which is cleaner than coal and is both safer and cleaner to get out of the ground, while developing nuclear and solar technologies so they will be cheap enough to use once oil reserves become too expensive to get at (probably in the next 150 years or so). Also, continue to research space-based power systems and nuclear fusion, keeping in mind that we have one really big, really safe fusion reactor already (hint: we orbit around it).
According to the Kyoto treaty, (as with the most popular suggestions at the recent summit), "what it takes" is for the US to give enormous piles of money to the developing world, so you should not be surprised that the "third world" was so strongly in favor of shouldering the burden of the Kyoto treaty.
"We will clean up the environment, and we don't care how much US money we need to accept to do it! Piles of money coming in is a sacrifice we can live with!"
I thought the same thing as the AC when I saw this post. This sounds like more like a VM issue than a "lack of DMA" issue.
I also recently bought an iBook, and the very first thing I did, before I even booted it up, was drop in a bunch more RAM (and my Airport card, while I was in there). I have not experienced the kind of sluggishness you are talking about during disk reads, so that might be what your actual problem is.
OS X is the best OS experience I've ever had, but it is a memory pig. If you have the default RAM in your iBook (probably 128), you are hitting the VM a lot. It's fine if you don't mind a little sluggishness, but memory is cheap now days, so buying more is money well spent. Even another 128 can make a world of difference.
Re:WotC could lay off because the project is done.
on
Layoffs at WotC
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· Score: 2
Well, that's just the thing. With RPG's the products are rule books, which means the game company is essensially a book publisher. Most book publishers don't keep their novelists, biographers and historians on staff 40 hours a week.
The RPG world is a little different, because creating each rule-book takes a large staff and a heck of a lot of editing and rewrites... but once the books are done, they're done. WotC could keep those people on to write modules, I suppose, but the module-publishing business will probably turn out more profitable for other companies, now that everybody is allowed to write for d20. WotC can go on with a fraction of their former staff and make money just selling the core rulebooks to new customers, while all those TSR vets can leverage their names into lucrative publishing deals with other companies. Everybody wins, even the customer.
There are a lot of things I don't like about d20. I played it with a gaming group that had previously used 2nd Edition, and we found that d20 is Total Munchkin Gaming. We shot up through the levels in a tiny fraction of the time it took in earlier versions of D&D, so fast we could barely keep track of all our characters' new developing powers. (i.e., "Oh yea, I don't take half damage when saving from a fireball anymore, because of that class ability I got two levels ago...") This would be slightly less annoying if the Players Handbook accomodated for characters beyond level 20, but no. After a couple months of weekly gaming sessions, you will need to run out and buy another $25 sourcebook (which is very light on content) just to keep playing the same characters.
Another complaint I have is that it is that it seems to have been an attempt to make D&D a little more GURPSy, but they kind of missed the mark because of the need to keep the old Class system in order for the game to still be D&D. Also, there is a lot of mushiness in the distiction between skills, feats, and class abilities. Tracking, for example is now a feat instead of a skill. Certain other abilities, like Uncanny Dodge and Bardic Songs, which probably would have worked better as class-specific feats, are handled separately.
The biggest disappointment for me is what they did not change: the combat system of AC and HP, which the original designers borrowed from a navy combat game, is still the same old system. Combat in D&D remains almost exactly the same as the Big Red Bar that you see in games like Mortal Kombat, and in the hands of an inexperienced DM who's just following the system, a level 1 wizard can still get killed by dropping a heavy brick on his foot, while ultra-high level warriors can swim in moltel lava.
On the whole, I still think its a modest improvement from earlier versions of the D&D rules.
Slashdot Mirror
I can see it now. Spidey, Wolverine, and three different Invisible Girls from the Fantastic Four all standing on the same street, waiting for the bad guy to spawn so they can take turns capturing him. What fun.
I'm tired of games that just put a new candy-coating on games I played before. Every time a new FPS comes out, my response tends to be "thanks, but I already played Quake." To hook me into a multi-player shooter these days, companies need to be a little more creative.
Likewise with the MMOPRPG's... Simply putting it in a new genre (SW Galaxies, City of Heroes, Lord of the Rings, etc.) is not going to get me to re-play EQ. The act of slapping a first-person view on top of a MUD has been done. If the mechanics of the game don't offer something new and original, I'm not going to pay $60 + $10/month just to look at the new purdy pictures.
Actually, it just might have the opposite effect, and kill the power-levelling aspect of the game. After all, if any chump can buy their way to high levels and spiffy toys, where's the glory in such persuits? It seems to me that the large group of people playing MMORPG's have the perception that doing well at the game means getting your character as powerful as you can. Take that aspect away, and all that's left to do is roleplay and have fun, which should have been the whole point from the beginning.
The people who designed those PC's and operating systems, and all the people involved in the creation of the Internet, are currently over 40, kiddo. The Old Guard is not impressed that the Young Turks have learned how to play with the toys they created. On the contrary, they are all wondering if and when you will invent something as important.
Now shut up and finish your math homework.
I've always felt that '1337 sp33k, even in the days before it was called that, is incredibly rude behavior. It does not make communication more efficient, but merely shifts the burden from the speaker to the listener. By saving 5 seconds typing, you are forcing me to spend 10 seconds decrypting what you were trying to say.
The most appalling example of this sort of thing was one I ran into all the time on Everquest (before I burned out on it). People who were begging for favors would finish their request by typing "plz", as if this crude short-hand of "please" somehow completed their social obligation of polite behavior when asking for help, on some minimal level, when all it really did was irritate me. If I'm not worth the trouble of using whole words when speaking to me, then you are not worth going out of my way to help.
I'm often very lazy about standards of spelling, grammar, and even capitalization in settings which I like to call "disposable writing", such as on-line chat and slash sites. However, I always endeavor to make my writing as clear and direct as I can for the benifit of those reading, because anyone nice enough to read what I have to say deserves that respect.
Speak to me in '1337, and I will not take you seriously.
Still, if a good on-line game had servers set aside for the "20 hours a week or less" crowd, I would probably use it. Finding other people who game the same way as you can be a trying experience. For example, back when I was playing EQ, I decided to play a serious role-playing character. All of my dialogue, even when speaking to NPC bots, was in character. I scripted verbose greetings and phrases to add color to my conversation. I would occationally meet other people who enjoyed doing likewise, but I kept getting invited into guilds that called themselves "roleplaying" guilds but were actually just the same as everybody else. Things were not much better on the "roleplayers-only" server that EQ had offered.
I once created a character with a code of ethics that was somewhat incompatible with the mechanics of the game. It was a cleric who swore a vow of pacifism (never directly attacked another creature), and considered running to be undignified. (The character was named "Iwalk" and lived on two or three different servers at various times). The only leveling I did was by doing non-violent quests (such as delivering mail for the bards), and grouping with people who didn't mind my slow walking holding them back. I found it endlessly amusing to encounter '1337 kids who would come by and assume my actions were guided by ignorance of the "right" way to play and level quickly. I would calmly say to them, "you are probably right, but that is not the path I have chosen," and they would be utterly baffled why anybody would every play EQ without participating in the materialistic rush for power and wealth. It was the most fun I ever had in that damned game. If I ever log on to an EQ server again, I'll probably do the exact same thing.
I would say it's more like watching Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, after having somebody tell you about the few plot devopments of Star Trek: The Motion Picture. You can enjoy it just as much, and avoid hours of pointless tedium.
BTW, The robot's name was actually "Linguo."
It was still a good post anyway. If I had not used up all my mods on the Nokia story, that would have been a +1 Funny for you.
You would be correct to expect that, becuase that's pretty much what they do. They don't enforce it very much, or at least they didn't in the pre-Napster era, because a few more copies on the used bins wouldn't really impact sales that much.
My point remains that a lot of reviewers and radio people consider access to those demp's to be among the few perks of their otherwise shitty jobs.
Were I reviewer, and received one of these goofy headphone thingies, I would be tempted to not write about the album if it's good, or write a bile-filled screed about how dull it is if it's less than excelent.
Oh. Okay, I'm totally sorry I said it's not illegal, because... hey, wait a minute! I never said that, did I? Let's go read it again... (mumbles while reading)... nope, never said it. Maybe you should read a little more carefully before you go on your little tirade.
Call it what you like, but downloading/sharing music is, in the same way that making copies of movies you rent is, theft.
No, that would be calling it what you like. It is not theft. Theft is taking something away from somebody. Copyright infringement is making unauthroized duplicates of somebody else's data. There is no relationship between the two.
You can make up names for it all day
Nobody is "making up names" here. Copyright infringement is what US Law calls it.
Right, because corporate in-fighting never goes on in Cupertino. (That would be sarcasm)
Well, you are correct that Apple is a hardware company, but that is not the reason for them not using x86.
Woz himself said that he chose a Motorola clone chip for the Apple ][ because it was the cheapest CPU available at the time. Later, the Motorolla 68k was chosen for the original Macintosh for reasons of cost, performance (at the time), power efficiency, and familiarity (among Apple engineers). The PPC was developped jointly by Apple, IBM, and Motorola and it was easy to build in a compatability layer to the MacOS for running stuff from the old 680x0 chips. The G3 was branched off the very efficient PPC 603 line, and the G4 is essentially a G3 with Motorola's AltiVec system added to enhance vector performance.
If Jobs had a time machine, he very well might want to go back and tell himself to insist on a CPU that handles x86 instructions. There have been a few shining moments when the PPC platform was the fastest chip for home use around, but most of the time that has not been the case.
On the other hand, IBM went the x86 route (and an outsourced OS), and the results were disasterous for their PC division. Once Compaq reverse-engineered their ROM's, the game was over. Everybdoy was buying "IBM Compatable" computers, and no matter how good OS/2 became, there was nothing IBM could do to change the trend.
So, I agree that making the move now would be a bad idea. If Apple were to move to x86, things would be fine as long as they didn't become more than 10% or so of the market. The moment they became a bigger player than that, somebody would consider it worth their while to clone them the way Compaq cloned IBM, and Apple would change from being Dell's strongest rival to just being a very tiny Microsoft, except without an Office suite for income, almost overnight. In other words, it could kill Apple.
The also have lots of the exact same informaiton your are rattling off, along with lots of Mac specs, etc.
Then again, I imagine that nearly everybody reading this thread already knows about them, as well as most of the sites you mentioned.
After all, I am looking at a copy of the painting without going to France. Theft is theft.
Sorry, but you are also a fucking idiot (or a troll... hard to be sure these days). Distributing copies of somebody else's content is not theft. It's copyright infringement.
One problem with this scheme is that magazine journalists (and music reviewers in particular) are very seldom well-paid. One of the few perks of the job: free albums. Take that away, and you create a bitter little reviewer who will go out of his way to savage your album.
I would feel a little less bitter about its cancelation if somebody would release the one season that was made as a DVD box set. The season finale was actually a good one to go out on.
Oh wait... never mind.
It seems like a common falicy here on /. that nobody ever seems to think that you can arrive at a popular conclusion independently.
That's an outstanding quote... although has there really been that much improvement in RPG systems since the late 19080's? After that, the trading card games started stealing mindshare, and the entire RPG world kind of stagnated, to the point that people started thinking of computer games as "computer RPG's" for no other reason than the fantasy settings.
I suspect we will calculate the real impact the same way we calculated the impact of dams and coal refineries: "Try it and see."
The funny part about that is, if we were to create a windmill farm that covered, oh, say... half the land in South Dakota, and the weather got all screwey, there would probably be those who would blame the strange weather patterns on the effects of global warming, and insist that we shut down even more oil generators in favor of windmills.
I don't think it windmills would cause that much of a weather problem though, and it leads to the same question you always need to ask when hearing news of climate change: "Are you sure it's a bad thing?"
As for slower generators, you are then talking about bigger blades for the same output, so you are still absorbing the same about of energy from the air currents. Putting them on buildings only works if the buildings are designed to handle the load (and let's not even talk about the issues of sway that a windmill generator would create. Holy cow!)
Launching spent rods into space: great idea, except rockets are not only expensive to launch with even small payloads, but they have a habit of blowing up while still in the atmosphere now and then. When we lost a shuttle, seven people died. If it were a shuttle of nuclear waste, the death toll might have been a smidge higher.
Breeder reactors create residual materials that are even more important to control than ordinary nuclear waste (i.e., weapons-grade plutonium). This means that the current nuclear powers will continue to make agreements to prevent breeder reactors from showing up in the developing world (the places that need cheap, clean power thw most), so that's out, too.
I still think that, until we can manage controlled fusion reactions as a means of power generation, we need to keep improving our means of collecting solar energy (while getting by on oil and nuclear until other ideas are ready for prime time). One environmental scientist pointed out that, with current tech, in order to power the United States alone on solar power exclusively, you would need to completely cover every land-mass on the planet with panels. That's not such an attractive option. A possible better way to go is a space-based collecor farm, which sends the energy as microwave radiation to narrowly-targeted collectors on Earth... that's still on the drawing board, though.
The best idea is the one that we've already been doing for over 50 years: keep making devices that consume less power. My whole house is powered by about the same ammount of juice a single refrigerator would have sucked up when my parents were children. As long as we continue to be rich enough to keep researching power-saving solutions, along with better ways of generating power, things can improve. However, if we were to implement Green Party style draconian measures to cut consumption, raise transportation prices by taxing the hell out of oil, and generally fuck up the entire western world's economy, then you can forget about seeing companies like Reliant spending millions on conservation research... environmental R&D would be the first place they would cut, and we all know it.
I completely agree with you there. The most sensible solution is to do what we are doing now: Burn oil, which is cleaner than coal and is both safer and cleaner to get out of the ground, while developing nuclear and solar technologies so they will be cheap enough to use once oil reserves become too expensive to get at (probably in the next 150 years or so). Also, continue to research space-based power systems and nuclear fusion, keeping in mind that we have one really big, really safe fusion reactor already (hint: we orbit around it).
"We will clean up the environment, and we don't care how much US money we need to accept to do it! Piles of money coming in is a sacrifice we can live with!"
I also recently bought an iBook, and the very first thing I did, before I even booted it up, was drop in a bunch more RAM (and my Airport card, while I was in there). I have not experienced the kind of sluggishness you are talking about during disk reads, so that might be what your actual problem is.
OS X is the best OS experience I've ever had, but it is a memory pig. If you have the default RAM in your iBook (probably 128), you are hitting the VM a lot. It's fine if you don't mind a little sluggishness, but memory is cheap now days, so buying more is money well spent. Even another 128 can make a world of difference.
The RPG world is a little different, because creating each rule-book takes a large staff and a heck of a lot of editing and rewrites... but once the books are done, they're done. WotC could keep those people on to write modules, I suppose, but the module-publishing business will probably turn out more profitable for other companies, now that everybody is allowed to write for d20. WotC can go on with a fraction of their former staff and make money just selling the core rulebooks to new customers, while all those TSR vets can leverage their names into lucrative publishing deals with other companies. Everybody wins, even the customer.
There are a lot of things I don't like about d20. I played it with a gaming group that had previously used 2nd Edition, and we found that d20 is Total Munchkin Gaming. We shot up through the levels in a tiny fraction of the time it took in earlier versions of D&D, so fast we could barely keep track of all our characters' new developing powers. (i.e., "Oh yea, I don't take half damage when saving from a fireball anymore, because of that class ability I got two levels ago...") This would be slightly less annoying if the Players Handbook accomodated for characters beyond level 20, but no. After a couple months of weekly gaming sessions, you will need to run out and buy another $25 sourcebook (which is very light on content) just to keep playing the same characters.
Another complaint I have is that it is that it seems to have been an attempt to make D&D a little more GURPSy, but they kind of missed the mark because of the need to keep the old Class system in order for the game to still be D&D. Also, there is a lot of mushiness in the distiction between skills, feats, and class abilities. Tracking, for example is now a feat instead of a skill. Certain other abilities, like Uncanny Dodge and Bardic Songs, which probably would have worked better as class-specific feats, are handled separately.
The biggest disappointment for me is what they did not change: the combat system of AC and HP, which the original designers borrowed from a navy combat game, is still the same old system. Combat in D&D remains almost exactly the same as the Big Red Bar that you see in games like Mortal Kombat, and in the hands of an inexperienced DM who's just following the system, a level 1 wizard can still get killed by dropping a heavy brick on his foot, while ultra-high level warriors can swim in moltel lava.
On the whole, I still think its a modest improvement from earlier versions of the D&D rules.