They will be just as in violation of the new law as the CDR drive is. It's beginning to look like the thing to replace CDR's and floppy's will be the SD flash memory cards. SD flash cards support DRM. Somehow I see the cost of the media at about $60 per 128 meg will severly limit it's use for archiving your digital photos. Fair use of your own creation is the collateral damage from this law. Ask your congress critter what he will back up to in the future when floppy's and CDR's are outlawed. How does he intend on protecting the keys and upgrading the hardware without loosing all the saved data. If they understand this will kill their ability to backup and restore to another machine, they may begin to understand the damage this law will create.
It's true. They need to adjust price to market conditions. Older folks remember when videotape first came out. There wasn't any local rental store. Movies were $30 and up each. Blank T120 tapes were $15 each. Pirate tape clubs sprang up to copy tapes. Now that most pre recorded tapes are less than $15 now days, casual copying is still way down even though blank tapes are about $1 each. The record industry just hasn't adjusted to provide percieved bang for the buck yet. Blank media is very cheap and the pre recorded stuff is still very much percieved not a bargan. Even worse it's being delivered "Broken" so you can't Rip Mix Burn. Therefore the value to the consumer is even less.
Get a clue. I won't buy any CD without the Compact Disk Logo! I also don't buy anything over $10. Needless to say, I bought more movies this year than CD's. (15-1) The percieved value is better. With a choice of a $9 used DVD at blockbuster or a CD for $18? Game Over.
Add two Gigs of RAM to your mobo and run ramdrive software
Ever try to boot from RAM after the power was off overnight? Somehow I still see a rotating media device as the boot device.
Just run VMware under Linux Unfortunately this is the gold plated solution.
I can't justify $299 for the download version or $329 for the packaged version just so I can use the $100 map on a Linux box. You still need to install and run Windows (Still gotta buy it) in a virtual machine. I fail to see the value of adding $300 to the price of Windows.
Running Windows as a virtual machine is nice. Running it on a seprate machine (networked of course) for the same price makes more sense. Dual booting saves desk space and money.
Wintel is like the dinosaurs Um please don't group Intel in with Windows. They seem to have the fastest processers out there. Except for a bug delaying shipment, who else has an 3 Gig chip with an 800 Mhz front side buss? Hardly a dinasaur. Besides most distro's of Linux run just fine on it with or without Microsoft OS'es. I also like what they are doing for the wireless movement. I think they are more leading edge than trailing.
What's weird is I just had to do an upgrade from Win 98 to Win 98 SE. I upgraded the hardware (P4 2.4Ghz) and the Motherboard requires 98 SE or above for it's drivers (USB 2.0). It's getting difficult to find legal copies (CD with certificate) of Win 98 nowdays. I'm beginning to think hardware that will run the older OS'es will become harder to find as time goes by. Thank goodness my Linux distro works on the new hardware. Great job to the MB companies for considering Linux with drivers! I still run dual boot as my TOPO maps and GPS software doesn't run on Linux.
What I see is the computer industry making a big fork. One computer (trusted) will be your banking terminal (Paypal,E-Bay,Amazon,etc.) and subscription TV/video game box.
The other computer will be the general use computer for e-mail, web surfing, photo editing, MP3's, P-P, Voice over IP, IM, etc. we all grew up to know and love.
Let's face it, The ATM you use at the bank doesn't trust you. Neither will the ATM on your desktop. Get used to it.
I think it's funny they still haven't tried to find the sweet spot of bang for the buck. They have been out of my league for quite a few years.
I like yards with hot tubs and decks, but I am also doing without that. Like many people, I'm on a budget. I shop for value (quality at low price, not cheap junk). I want quality. I don't buy something just because it's cheap. My test equipment is quality. Many overpriced non-essentials are left on the shelf. Piracy has nothing to do with it. Given the choice of a 1 hour audio recording, or a 2 hour prime movie at the same price, the audio recording lost. The movie industry found the spot the audio industry refused to look for.
Unless you don't need technical CD's for calibration purposes, do some searches. However most Calibration CD's don't compress well. Sweep tones, tone bursts, white/pink noise and calibration sine waves tend to become full artifacts of the compression. Some tracks make true SN/ratio and THD measurements false. Unless you just need left/right phase check and a -20db level cal tone, stick with the real thing. The Dennon Technical CD is an excelent choice for serious equipment setup and certification.
Terms of service? Um, I don't worry about the TOS. I contact the ISP and let them know what I am going to do. I let them tell me what packages are provided for the service desired. I take bids. It levels the playing field quickly. You can get exceptions written into your TOS. When I was on Dial up, I even got permission to have an ocassional dual connection at no extra charge. I told them due to my work schedule, I may be home during the day while the wife is at work. She may check e-mail while at work while I was home surfing the web. No problem. Got it in writing. This doesn't mean sharing the account with all my extended family. That would be a violation of the TOS. It pays to ask for any exceptions you need to the TOS. Your milage is better with small local ISP's and not national mega ISP's. Mega ISP's legal department are too busy to consider the exceptions.
Does anyone have a report where they have actually followed through with the terms and taken someone to court or terminated their connection because of this?
If they claim ownership of the IP, they become instant targets of the RIAA and BSA. They are no longer a communication carrier. This could backfire on them.
If you print a lot of just black and white, look into buying bulk ink. The HP black cartridges are not too much trouble to refill. I get my ink for about $35/pint. It's the color cartridges that have the sponge in them that's very hard to get to work properly after filling.
I've noticed the price of the consumables are much higher for the newer printers. My old HP722C printer uses the 23D color cartridge which can be purchased in a twin pack for about $45. All the newer HP printers including all the multifunction devices use the 78 color cartridge. The half full single cartridge (19mL) is about $35 and the full one (38mL)is about $60. All my printers are on my LAN. (I love stand alone print servers. Many have Linux support!) I restrict the HP950 so it is not used by family members for printing web pages. They know supplies are more than twice as expensive. I use my old printer a lot more than the new one. They made some rediculous claim the new model uses less ink so it prints just as many pages with the half full cartridge. Printing photo proofs has quickly proved that WRONG!. I now get my digital prints done at Costco. They are regular film prints at the same price as film reprints. Printer manufactures are going to have to complete with the local Wal Mart photo section soon when this catches on and competiton makes them widely avaliable and inexpensive. (the pricy Kodack thremal die sublimanation kiosk does not count as economical) You can't make long lasting 8 X 10 photo prints on an inkjet. I've tried using inkjet prints at my desk and they fade noticably in about 6 months. The film prints last years. I finaly found something besides a CDR & computer for displaying my family baby pics. The high cost of printing with the new printer got me to try refilling with bulk ink. The black is easy to refill. Black ink is about $35/pint. I get about 5 refills before I start to notice any change in print quality. (both inkjets use the same black cartridge, very nice!) I've had very mixed results filling the color. The color is almost not worth the hastle now that someone else does my photo prints. Text pages are printed on an old HP Laserjet III. It doesn't have enough memory to do full page graphics, but it makes a great text printer. Bought it used and it's still running with the cartridge it came with. I don't think it was ever targeted as a home printer. Having a choice of printer options is well worth putting in a LAN.
Heat transfer in semiconductors is dominated by lattice vibration transport. Due to the bandgap there is little phonon/electron interaction.
A good example of this is the solid state cooling modules we are familiar with. They contain rods of doped silicone. Half the rods are P type and the other half N type. As the electrical current pass through the rods, it carries heat with it. When more heat is carried, than is generated due to resistance, one end of the rods cools while the other end heats. The hot end has both the heat carried from the cold end and the heat from resistance. It isn't very effecient. I don't know the numbers, but it works like 50 watts in = 20 watts of heat carried away from a CPU, but 70 watts worth of heat needs dissapated in the heatsink. They do work for cooling a CPU, but they burn a lot of energy producing plenty of heat in the process.
I wonder if my favorite silicon crystal grower can perfect the process to "pull" flawless 8 inch and 12 inch diamonds? A few of those on the market would make the sand sized stuff worthless.
Um, TIVO can't play back last month's Junk Yard Wars if you forgot to record it. This service is a tap into the archives. Keep the TIVO to skip the new commercials stuck in your custom archive request.
As an added note... This is not live TV. This is all re-runs from the archive vault. Make note of it. It is NOT the current show and the currently running advertising campaign. It's old shows with the ads replaced with the current ad campaign. The current ads pay for the delivery of the archive program royalties.
Save your bucks. Use the free CD ripper CDeX. You probably already have it. After recording, it'll even compress it to your desired format for you. It does a great job recording. Look under Tools, Record. I discovered this when I thought I had a junk soundcard after using MS sound recorder. (much worse than a very cheap tape recorder) Suprise, the sound card was actualy able to record some decent sound. I've been using it to transfer my old stuff (LP's and pre recorded tapes). I wished I had this earlier to backup this stuff before it degraded as much as it has.
Something I've been waiting for is here. I've been waiting for mainstream priced digital film printing. At Costco, the price of digital prints is the same price as the price of regular film reprints. 19 cents for 4 X 6 prints and a dollar ninty-nine for an 8 X 10. It's a real photographic film print so it doesn't have the fading and dull color problems. I no longer use the inkjet to print photos. I still edit them on the PC, but I leave the printing to the pro's. They will take the prints from any mainstream digital memory card or CD ROM.
All I can say is it's about time. There was a vacuum in the market and it's being filled.
I'm not defending spammers. I think the use of open relays, bogus return addresses, joe job return addresses, and the like show simple laws don't work. In an international community the cover of obscurity provides a great place to hide from proscution. Facing that fact, I don't think a simple law in some single country will ever fix the problem. A technical encumberment could be employed to severly limit the effectiveness of a dictionary attack. Think about it. If you had a mailserver or hundreds with only 5K users each and someone started a dictionary attack, It would be simple to have the server purge all mail to all users that matched most of the body of the mail as well as automaticaly real time blacklisting the source IP. Any bulk mailing with a greater than 50% failure rate could block the incomming mail for say 15 days and purge all matching mail from all inboxes. (the way I view it is too much spam makes the server sick and it then vomits the spam overdose and refuses any more un-tasty morsels) If widely implemented, it would be instant death to dictionary attacks. You would need a serious validated mail list to do anykind of bulk mailing. Subscription lists would have to be regulary purged of stale addresses. Failure to do so would trigger blocks. Most mail lists should be opt in and renewed at least annualy. That would auto purge those who had a troublemaker sign up to a list where you can't unsubscribe.
So, how much money is the wireless carrier loosing when the customers either drop messaging, or drop the service entirely and opt for voice only phone service? UCE to phones with a cost per message would have me think about the service if I had to pay for all my incomming spam. I would look for the carrier that required the sender to use a PIN with the message to have it delivered. A carrier with a wide open e-mail box that gladly accepts spam from anybody and charges me for it would quickly loose my business.
Either the spamming of phones has to be curtailed, or the client will have to be modified to be much less open to anybody. Increasing spam abuse with the current system will kill it as a communications option.
This is the problem large ISP's are having now. They are big enough to attract way too many dictionary attacks. They are being dropped for cheaper local ISP's that are much smaller spam targets. I love a small ISP. I can still use a firstname@domain that I have had for years and my spam level is still much lower than my valid mail. (1-5 spams per week) My dad on a 6 month old MSN with a namenumber@MSN which does not fare nearly as well. He had spam before he sent his first e-mail. They are a dictionary attack target. I think the solution to the dictionary attack is limit the number of e-mail addresses per domain to 5-10,000. Break up all the AOL, MSN, Yahoo, etc mailboxes to other mail domains so dictionary attacks would be very non-productive. MSN mail would then start to look like bobfam246@mailproxy2535msn.com. Having a bunch of small reginal mail domains is the ticket to resisting a dictionary attack.
The really obnoxious stuff is a real turn off. With a full work schedule (I do work for a living) the 2 week trials usualy amount to a one evening test, if that. I just don't have the time to spend getting into the various levels to evaluate software to the point of making a buying decision. Other software with a full working demo is the best way to go. I was looking for a non cussing and gore FPS. Someone recommended Nerf Arena Blast. There was a good working demo (even the networking worked). It had just a couple levels complete from the full game and about half the weapons. I messed with it off and on for about 3 months, then ordered a copy. Now here is the beef portion. The demo did not require the disk in the drive (very important). Unfortunately the full game did. I hate buying pig in a poke software that has a demo that works better than the actual game. (a cheats website fixed the problem.) The game should have run like the demo. The game should have also specificaly mentioned if it could spawn or if a seprate copy needs to be purchased for each player. This is a big point and needs to be known BEFORE purchase. It's really hard to know how many to buy for your LAN party. We played Need for Speed at the LAN party because it could spawn the other players, and Nerf Arena Demo. Too bad we couldn't play the full version. We ordered only one copy. Budget constraints prevented buying another dozen copies. (Legal church group activity, no piracy) If we knew ahead of time the full game did not meet our needs for the LAN party, we wouldn't have even bought the first copy. We felt cheated. It didn't perform as the demo. The diffrence was not advertised. We make sure anything for LAN play can spawn clients for the party, or the game is cheap enough to get a dozen copies. More game software needs to be LAN party friendly.
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They will be just as in violation of the new law as the CDR drive is.
It's beginning to look like the thing to replace CDR's and floppy's will be the SD flash memory cards.
SD flash cards support DRM. Somehow I see the cost of the media at about $60 per 128 meg will severly limit it's use for archiving your digital photos.
Fair use of your own creation is the collateral damage from this law.
Ask your congress critter what he will back up to in the future when floppy's and CDR's are outlawed. How does he intend on protecting the keys and upgrading the hardware without loosing all the saved data. If they understand this will kill their ability to backup and restore to another machine, they may begin to understand the damage this law will create.
It's true. They need to adjust price to market conditions. Older folks remember when videotape first came out. There wasn't any local rental store. Movies were $30 and up each. Blank T120 tapes were $15 each. Pirate tape clubs sprang up to copy tapes. Now that most pre recorded tapes are less than $15 now days, casual copying is still way down even though blank tapes are about $1 each.
The record industry just hasn't adjusted to provide percieved bang for the buck yet. Blank media is very cheap and the pre recorded stuff is still very much percieved not a bargan. Even worse it's being delivered "Broken" so you can't Rip Mix Burn. Therefore the value to the consumer is even less.
Get a clue. I won't buy any CD without the Compact Disk Logo! I also don't buy anything over $10. Needless to say, I bought more movies this year than CD's. (15-1) The percieved value is better. With a choice of a $9 used DVD at blockbuster or a CD for $18? Game Over.
Add two Gigs of RAM to your mobo and run ramdrive software
Ever try to boot from RAM after the power was off overnight?
Somehow I still see a rotating media device as the boot device.
Just run VMware under Linux
Unfortunately this is the gold plated solution.
I can't justify $299 for the download version or $329 for the packaged version just so I can use the $100 map on a Linux box. You still need to install and run Windows (Still gotta buy it) in a virtual machine. I fail to see the value of adding $300 to the price of Windows.
Running Windows as a virtual machine is nice. Running it on a seprate machine (networked of course) for the same price makes more sense. Dual booting saves desk space and money.
Wintel is like the dinosaurs
Um please don't group Intel in with Windows. They seem to have the fastest processers out there. Except for a bug delaying shipment, who else has an 3 Gig chip with an 800 Mhz front side buss? Hardly a dinasaur. Besides most distro's of Linux run just fine on it with or without Microsoft OS'es. I also like what they are doing for the wireless movement. I think they are more leading edge than trailing.
Just my $.02 worth.
What's weird is I just had to do an upgrade from Win 98 to Win 98 SE. I upgraded the hardware (P4 2.4Ghz) and the Motherboard requires 98 SE or above for it's drivers (USB 2.0). It's getting difficult to find legal copies (CD with certificate) of Win 98 nowdays. I'm beginning to think hardware that will run the older OS'es will become harder to find as time goes by. Thank goodness my Linux distro works on the new hardware. Great job to the MB companies for considering Linux with drivers!
I still run dual boot as my TOPO maps and GPS software doesn't run on Linux.
What I see is the computer industry making a big fork. One computer (trusted) will be your banking terminal (Paypal,E-Bay,Amazon,etc.) and subscription TV/video game box.
The other computer will be the general use computer for e-mail, web surfing, photo editing, MP3's, P-P, Voice over IP, IM, etc. we all grew up to know and love.
Let's face it, The ATM you use at the bank doesn't trust you. Neither will the ATM on your desktop. Get used to it.
I think it's funny they still haven't tried to find the sweet spot of bang for the buck. They have been out of my league for quite a few years.
I like yards with hot tubs and decks, but I am also doing without that. Like many people, I'm on a budget. I shop for value (quality at low price, not cheap junk). I want quality. I don't buy something just because it's cheap. My test equipment is quality. Many overpriced non-essentials are left on the shelf. Piracy has nothing to do with it. Given the choice of a 1 hour audio recording, or a 2 hour prime movie at the same price, the audio recording lost. The movie industry found the spot the audio industry refused to look for.
Unless you don't need technical CD's for calibration purposes, do some searches. However most Calibration CD's don't compress well. Sweep tones, tone bursts, white/pink noise and calibration sine waves tend to become full artifacts of the compression. Some tracks make true SN/ratio and THD measurements false. Unless you just need left/right phase check and a -20db level cal tone, stick with the real thing.
The Dennon Technical CD is an excelent choice for serious equipment setup and certification.
Terms of service? Um, I don't worry about the TOS. I contact the ISP and let them know what I am going to do. I let them tell me what packages are provided for the service desired. I take bids. It levels the playing field quickly. You can get exceptions written into your TOS. When I was on Dial up, I even got permission to have an ocassional dual connection at no extra charge. I told them due to my work schedule, I may be home during the day while the wife is at work. She may check e-mail while at work while I was home surfing the web. No problem. Got it in writing. This doesn't mean sharing the account with all my extended family. That would be a violation of the TOS. It pays to ask for any exceptions you need to the TOS. Your milage is better with small local ISP's and not national mega ISP's. Mega ISP's legal department are too busy to consider the exceptions.
Does anyone have a report where they have actually followed through with the terms and taken someone to court or terminated their connection because of this?
Do you mean besides spamming?
If they claim ownership of the IP, they become instant targets of the RIAA and BSA. They are no longer a communication carrier.
This could backfire on them.
If you print a lot of just black and white, look into buying bulk ink. The HP black cartridges are not too much trouble to refill. I get my ink for about $35/pint.
It's the color cartridges that have the sponge in them that's very hard to get to work properly after filling.
I've noticed the price of the consumables are much higher for the newer printers. My old HP722C printer uses the 23D color cartridge which can be purchased in a twin pack for about $45. All the newer HP printers including all the multifunction devices use the 78 color cartridge. The half full single cartridge (19mL) is about $35 and the full one (38mL)is about $60. All my printers are on my LAN. (I love stand alone print servers. Many have Linux support!) I restrict the HP950 so it is not used by family members for printing web pages. They know supplies are more than twice as expensive. I use my old printer a lot more than the new one. They made some rediculous claim the new model uses less ink so it prints just as many pages with the half full cartridge. Printing photo proofs has quickly proved that WRONG!. I now get my digital prints done at Costco. They are regular film prints at the same price as film reprints. Printer manufactures are going to have to complete with the local Wal Mart photo section soon when this catches on and competiton makes them widely avaliable and inexpensive. (the pricy Kodack thremal die sublimanation kiosk does not count as economical) You can't make long lasting 8 X 10 photo prints on an inkjet. I've tried using inkjet prints at my desk and they fade noticably in about 6 months. The film prints last years. I finaly found something besides a CDR & computer for displaying my family baby pics.
The high cost of printing with the new printer got me to try refilling with bulk ink. The black is easy to refill. Black ink is about $35/pint. I get about 5 refills before I start to notice any change in print quality. (both inkjets use the same black cartridge, very nice!) I've had very mixed results filling the color. The color is almost not worth the hastle now that someone else does my photo prints.
Text pages are printed on an old HP Laserjet III. It doesn't have enough memory to do full page graphics, but it makes a great text printer. Bought it used and it's still running with the cartridge it came with. I don't think it was ever targeted as a home printer. Having a choice of printer options is well worth putting in a LAN.
Heat transfer in semiconductors is dominated by lattice vibration transport. Due to the bandgap there is little phonon/electron interaction.
A good example of this is the solid state cooling modules we are familiar with. They contain rods of doped silicone. Half the rods are P type and the other half N type. As the electrical current pass through the rods, it carries heat with it. When more heat is carried, than is generated due to resistance, one end of the rods cools while the other end heats. The hot end has both the heat carried from the cold end and the heat from resistance. It isn't very effecient. I don't know the numbers, but it works like 50 watts in = 20 watts of heat carried away from a CPU, but 70 watts worth of heat needs dissapated in the heatsink. They do work for cooling a CPU, but they burn a lot of energy producing plenty of heat in the process.
I wonder if my favorite silicon crystal grower can perfect the process to "pull" flawless 8 inch and 12 inch diamonds? A few of those on the market would make the sand sized stuff worthless.
Blue Screen of Death in widescreen showing soon in a theatre near you.
Um, TIVO can't play back last month's Junk Yard Wars if you forgot to record it. This service is a tap into the archives.
Keep the TIVO to skip the new commercials stuck in your custom archive request.
As an added note... This is not live TV. This is all re-runs from the archive vault. Make note of it. It is NOT the current show and the currently running advertising campaign. It's old shows with the ads replaced with the current ad campaign. The current ads pay for the delivery of the archive program royalties.
Save your bucks. Use the free CD ripper CDeX. You probably already have it. After recording, it'll even compress it to your desired format for you. It does a great job recording. Look under Tools, Record. I discovered this when I thought I had a junk soundcard after using MS sound recorder. (much worse than a very cheap tape recorder) Suprise, the sound card was actualy able to record some decent sound. I've been using it to transfer my old stuff (LP's and pre recorded tapes). I wished I had this earlier to backup this stuff before it degraded as much as it has.
Something I've been waiting for is here. I've been waiting for mainstream priced digital film printing. At Costco, the price of digital prints is the same price as the price of regular film reprints. 19 cents for 4 X 6 prints and a dollar ninty-nine for an 8 X 10. It's a real photographic film print so it doesn't have the fading and dull color problems. I no longer use the inkjet to print photos. I still edit them on the PC, but I leave the printing to the pro's. They will take the prints from any mainstream digital memory card or CD ROM.
All I can say is it's about time. There was a vacuum in the market and it's being filled.
I'm not defending spammers. I think the use of open relays, bogus return addresses, joe job return addresses, and the like show simple laws don't work. In an international community the cover of obscurity provides a great place to hide from proscution. Facing that fact, I don't think a simple law in some single country will ever fix the problem. A technical encumberment could be employed to severly limit the effectiveness of a dictionary attack. Think about it. If you had a mailserver or hundreds with only 5K users each and someone started a dictionary attack, It would be simple to have the server purge all mail to all users that matched most of the body of the mail as well as automaticaly real time blacklisting the source IP. Any bulk mailing with a greater than 50% failure rate could block the incomming mail for say 15 days and purge all matching mail from all inboxes. (the way I view it is too much spam makes the server sick and it then vomits the spam overdose and refuses any more un-tasty morsels) If widely implemented, it would be instant death to dictionary attacks.
You would need a serious validated mail list to do anykind of bulk mailing. Subscription lists would have to be regulary purged of stale addresses. Failure to do so would trigger blocks. Most mail lists should be opt in and renewed at least annualy. That would auto purge those who had a troublemaker sign up to a list where you can't unsubscribe.
So, how much money is the wireless carrier loosing when the customers either drop messaging, or drop the service entirely and opt for voice only phone service? UCE to phones with a cost per message would have me think about the service if I had to pay for all my incomming spam. I would look for the carrier that required the sender to use a PIN with the message to have it delivered. A carrier with a wide open e-mail box that gladly accepts spam from anybody and charges me for it would quickly loose my business.
Either the spamming of phones has to be curtailed, or the client will have to be modified to be much less open to anybody. Increasing spam abuse with the current system will kill it as a communications option.
This is the problem large ISP's are having now. They are big enough to attract way too many dictionary attacks. They are being dropped for cheaper local ISP's that are much smaller spam targets. I love a small ISP. I can still use a firstname@domain that I have had for years and my spam level is still much lower than my valid mail. (1-5 spams per week) My dad on a 6 month old MSN with a namenumber@MSN which does not fare nearly as well. He had spam before he sent his first e-mail. They are a dictionary attack target. I think the solution to the dictionary attack is limit the number of e-mail addresses per domain to 5-10,000. Break up all the AOL, MSN, Yahoo, etc mailboxes to other mail domains so dictionary attacks would be very non-productive. MSN mail would then start to look like bobfam246@mailproxy2535msn.com. Having a bunch of small reginal mail domains is the ticket to resisting a dictionary attack.
I wonder if LILO or Partition magic can get MS XP Approved for us Dual Boot types.
The really obnoxious stuff is a real turn off. With a full work schedule (I do work for a living) the 2 week trials usualy amount to a one evening test, if that. I just don't have the time to spend getting into the various levels to evaluate software to the point of making a buying decision. Other software with a full working demo is the best way to go. I was looking for a non cussing and gore FPS. Someone recommended Nerf Arena Blast. There was a good working demo (even the networking worked). It had just a couple levels complete from the full game and about half the weapons. I messed with it off and on for about 3 months, then ordered a copy. Now here is the beef portion. The demo did not require the disk in the drive (very important). Unfortunately the full game did. I hate buying pig in a poke software that has a demo that works better than the actual game. (a cheats website fixed the problem.) The game should have run like the demo. The game should have also specificaly mentioned if it could spawn or if a seprate copy needs to be purchased for each player. This is a big point and needs to be known BEFORE purchase. It's really hard to know how many to buy for your LAN party. We played Need for Speed at the LAN party because it could spawn the other players, and Nerf Arena Demo. Too bad we couldn't play the full version. We ordered only one copy. Budget constraints prevented buying another dozen copies. (Legal church group activity, no piracy) If we knew ahead of time the full game did not meet our needs for the LAN party, we wouldn't have even bought the first copy. We felt cheated. It didn't perform as the demo. The diffrence was not advertised. We make sure anything for LAN play can spawn clients for the party, or the game is cheap enough to get a dozen copies. More game software needs to be LAN party friendly.