Four shooters, 2 platformers and a racing game...hm...yeah, that'll get folks excited about XBox.
Throw in the $20 price drop, and the whole thing just shouts "*L*A*M*E*"
Microsoft expects Xbox to live through another holiday season. Assuming it does, I think we'll see Microsoft drop this thing in February/March of 2004.
Considering how badly the XBox is doing against the PS2, I would think that *any* sort of edge would be pounced upon.
I don't know if online gaming is going to truly be the wave of the future, or just a fad that dies out.
Either way, people do agree that online gaming will see an increase over the next few years. Even if it dies out, if Microsoft is the leader in that area, I'm sure they're not going to be too upset...
But right now, all I hear from Microsoft about Xbox is "Yeah! What Sony said, only buy ours instead!"
I see far more PS2 related ads on TV than XBox ones.
The area dedicated to the PS2 at my local store is 3x larger than the area dedicated to XBox.
Let's face it, by now, if you're interested in gaming, you already know about the 3 consoles. Having them push their names in your face isn't going to convince you to buy a console. I don't see guys rushing out to buy Maxipads after one of THEIR ads, do you?
No, Microsoft has to do something to get people's attention, maybe give them that final push to get them off the frence about buying a Xbox instead of a PS2. Dropping their price below that of the PS2 would be a start.
There'll probably be a small spike in PS2s, but not for the reasons listed here...
Sony is releasing a new hardware rev of the PS2 which allows the PS2 to use progressive scan for DVD movie playback. Current models can use progressive scan for games that support it, but cannot play movies in this mode.
This new model, bundled with the broadband adaptor, even at $200, will be attractive enough to get people to buy a PS2, or in some extreme cases, buy this model to replace their older model at home.
As for Xbox... the $20 drop is disappointing since it makes Microsoft look like they're not interested in actually competing with Sony, but just want to play the "me too!" game. *yawn.*
At this point in this generation of consoles, it's clear that the PS2 is the clear winner based on its library. That's not really the point, though.
However, that doesn't meant that Microsoft should just back off altogether, especially if they intend to release XBox2.
This is why just dropping the price $20 isn't enough. As another poster pointed out, if I'm going to spend $180 anyways, going up to $200 isn't a big deal. However, dropping the price to $150 - now that's different. It's a sort of psychological barrier as well, even though it's only a $30 difference between $150 and $180.
Also, the one area where XBox does and will continue to do well in is with online games. Even if you say online gaming isn't for you, and is, at best, a niche in the market that's all Microsoft really needs to be successful. Bundling a 1 year subscription of XBox Live with the Xbox, and maybe an online game, would be a STRONG statement by Microsoft to Sony saying "WE are the console for online play. Follow us if you can!" If Microsoft can end this generation of consoles being able to claim victory in any area of the industry, it'll make their launch of XBox2 that much more viable and interesting.
However, by simply dropping their price $20 to match Sony, they're just following in Sony's footsteps and that's not how you become a leader People point to the billions that Microsoft has overall and how this was going to insure the success of the console. While this is an outrageous statement, it still doesn't explain why Microsoft hasn't been more aggressive with regards to the pricing of their console. Yeah, dropping the price to $0 would incur the wrath of Sony for unfair trade practices, but what's wrong with $150? Heck, if Microsoft wanted to be REALLY agressive, I say they bundle 1 year of XBox Live, the DVD remote (Sony won't be able to claim their's is the only one that plays DVDs 'out of the box'), a cheap online game, in addition to the current XBox bundle for $150.
You don't get noticed if you don't raise the bar, and you certainly don't get ahead playing catch-up and match-up with your competitors. I know that "competition" is a new concept to Microsoft, but they better learn...fast.
Instead of simply matching Sony's price cut, they should either drop to $150, or announce a bundle deal consisting of the DVD remote, a starter kit for XBox Live all for $180. THAT would begin to make XBox competitive.
Right now, Xbox's biggest edge is their online play capability. They have more online titles than PS2, and they should be exploiting this edge!
Well, according to AOL, it costs each subscriber about $2/mo. to make up for the added bandwidth, server and storage needs from spam.
Other studies show spam makes up about 20% of all email, with projections to as much as 47% over the next 5 years.
Oh, and if you're at work and have to hit delete on a spam that you got there, from your employer's point of view, you've just wasted the 1 second needed to click that button. Now multiply that 1 second by the number of employees in your office and multiply that by the number of spams you see each day, week, or year. A small company of 100 employees, each seeing a modest 5 spams a day * 365 days will waste over FIFTY HOURS A YEAR hitting delete.
The lists maintained by SPEWS, SBL, etc. are little more than opinions saying I think the following ISPs are irresponsible and/or are harboring spammers..."
The fact that admins of domains can then use that information to allow their mailserver(s) to allow/reject mail from those domains is a separate matter.
There are then services, like Brightmail, which provide filtered email services to end users or ISPs. Brightmail's website will provide you with details on what they use for filtering, be it SPEWS, SBL, something else, or (most likely) a combination of all of the above.)
At any rate, organizations like SPEWS and SBL only provide the data. They do not implement it. As an ISP, your only legal recourse for being blocked due to a listing would be to go after each individual ISP that is blocking you. Even then, unless you had a contract with that ISP saying they MUST accept all mail from your domain, there's not a whole lot you can do. Laws vary from place to place, but the concept of "private property" seems pretty universal - and that's what every domain, and ISP network is - PRIVATE PROPERTY. No domain anywhere is *required* to accept mail from all of the internet.
Most lists provide documentation on their listing and delisting policies. This is both for admins wishing to use the list (do they agree with the criteria), as well as for admins wondering what happend to get them listed in the first place.
As for your employer's situation, getting onto a list usually occurs for the following reasons:
* Signing up of a spammer who's so infamous, that he and the poor sucker of an ISP that signed him up are immediatly blocked as a preventative measure. (ie. it's not a matter of IF he'll spam...)
* Preceived slack/slowness/cluelessness of your employer's abuse desk. This doesn't mean you have to have your abuse desk write personal responses to each and every person who sends a complaint...just have them do their job, and eliminate your misbehaving customer.
No reasonable person is going to expect instantaneous action, either. I think 2-3 days (TOPS) should be enough to deal with most cases, even with a 1% spammer infestation. Again, most people aren't going to expect a personal reply. Not getting the same spam from your customer is usually good enough. (and will keep you off the lists!)
Finally, you might want to look into proactively discouraging spammers from signing up by creating a new clause in your customers' contracts stating that if the account is terminated due to spam, you will charge the customer a clean up fee (usually $500-$2000.) ISPs that have enacted such a clause see the spam emanating from them drop off quickly - and hey, if someone is STILL stupid enough to spam, use the money to throw a beer bust.:)
Seriously though, if your abuse desk does their job in a timely manner, you shouldn't have any problems with listing services.
Some places do, but that won't catch a lot of spam.
I get a lot of spam (and legit mail) that doesn't include a domain name.
I get a lot of spam from malconfigured mail/proxy servers, or from compromised, unsecured machines elsewhere on the network. In these cases, the IP# really does match the domain that sent the mail, but the content is 100% spam.
I guess you *COULD* configure your mailserver to reject email from IP#s that aren't listed as mailservers for that domain according to their DNS records...but again, domains running malconfigured mailservers (like the country of korea is doing), or those domains that deliberately use fake/munged DNS information will still get their spam through.
In short, there is no single rule to detect spam 100% of the time with no false positives. The best system I've seen is SpamAssasain which can be configured to use the SBL, SPEWS, or other blacklists, and uses a series of configurable rules to assign a "weight" to each message. Even then, you'd be suprised at how legitimate, innocent mail will get such a high weight sometimes.
With E3 this week, you can bet there'll be some announcements of price drops on the consoles.
Even without it, with a bit of shopping you can find store-specific deals that'll give you a console plus a game (sometimes of your choice) for free.
Combine that with Half.com or your local used game store, and the only problem I see is having the *TIME* to play all those games.
Yeah, yeah, PS3, GC2, XBox2 are definitely in the works, but who cares? Knowing that the video card in you bought for your system will look pathetic and sad 18-24 months from now didn't stop you from buying one, did it?
Also, as you point out, consoles tend to remain useful even after they've left the marketplace.
And for the price of a 120GB HD, I can buy a PS1 and a handful of games.
Yeah, yeah, this is more of a "Gee whiz, that's nifty" type of thing but after trying to get BLEEM to run on my PC, I have to wonder at the amount of effort folks are going through here...
Heck, don't even change the dialog - just subtitle it. It'll be cheaper, and anyways, have you listend to English voice-overs in most games? Ugh! And people think dubbed anime is bad!
My biggest problem is that Enterprise *STARTED OUT* with a trick Voyager used to boost their ratings - TIME TRAVEL.
The whole temporal cold war thing has given the writers carte blanche to bascially do whatever they want to now. Ferengi aren't supposed to that close to Earth, but hey! Maybe some time traveler gave them warp travel centuries before they would have gotten it before!
Assuming they're using the 'Back to the future' model of time travel, a full blown time travel "war" would have devastating effects on the participants' "present" (which is Enterprise's future.) The past would dissolve into a muddled mass of travellers trying to change something, which would cause others to try to counter, and still more to counter the counter, and so on...
Also, given how fickle fate is, most alterations wouldn't even involve killing anyone. It might be just as simple as going back, posing as a high school counselor, and convincing Einstein to become a house painter, for instance.
This would then have the other side-effect of creating people from the other timeline who share the past up to a certain point. At this point, who's to say which timeline is the "correct" one?
And these are issues I've just thought of in the few minutes it's taken me to type this reply. Of course, none of this will ever be dealt with in the show because as Berman illustrated with Voyager - he's not about dealing with consequences. Each show is separate, and usually includes "The magic reset button" to insure that nothing from one episode will have any bearing whatso ever on another.
Oh, and having Enterprise meet the Ferengi and the Borg isn't going to mess things up?
Having the Klingon homeworld only 3-5 days away at Enterprise's warp 5 isn't going to mess things up?
If you believe in a Federation with some dark aspects, it would be quite possible for Starfleet to simply mark reports about, say, Q as "need to know." Perhaps Picard wasn't the only one visited by Q in TNG, leading to the information about Q becoming more available.
But this only works because Q isn't a threat to mankind (if anything, they're just observing and cheering us on...) The Borg, on the other hand...
Maybe Starfleet's headquarters get nuked in the first war, and they don't have backups, and so they lose information about early contact with the Ferengi, Borg, etc...
Of course this all pivots on whether the writers actually care about creating a world/universe that has consistancy. So far, they've shown none.
Animal Crossing is sort of a mix between "Sim Village" (you're not building a city here), The Sims, and Harvest Moon.
If you don't like those games, you probably won't like Animal Crossing either.
As for eatting a whole memory card...yes, Animal Crossing uses up an entire small memory card, however one is provided with the game, so you don't even need to buy one separately (besides, most folks buy the larger capacity card, which holds 4x the small one that comes with Animal Crossing.)
A used cartridge based system would be one thing - it either works, or it don't. If it works, it'll continue working (no moving parts.)
A used disc based system, meanwhile, will eventually break down. Early model PS2s, for instance, seem to have problems with dust getting trapped around the drive mechanism, knocking the lasers out of alignment.
Whitelists are very useful for a list of your known friends and others you regularly interact with, but suck for casual messages or businesses trying to communicate with customers.
Think about it, would YOU put up with jumping hoops to get onto someone's whitelist to ask them a single question about their website? Or to get their company's sales brochure?
Plus, how do I "click here" with my text based mail program? (Pine)
Like most real world problems, there is no single silver bullet to solve spam.
Given the number of AOL subscribers, if they did take the $2/subscriber and put that towards putting contracts on spammers' heads, the spam problem would diminish sharply within a few months.
Sorry, I meant to say Verizon hosts many spammers, and doesn't do anything to stop them.
Day 1: get spam from verizon customer, send complaint, get auto-ack that means, well, nothing.
Day 2: get same spam from same verizon customer (identical headers, content - except for timestamp) send complaint, get auto-ack.
Day 3: get same spam from verizon again...
Think to myself "Hmm...maybe verizon is a bit slow to deal with spammers..."
Day 10: get same spam from verizon again. Blacklist the IP#.
Day 20: wipe out 10 days worth of spam from that same IP# of verizon's.
Day 21: get that same spam from Verizon - but from a different IP#!
My experiences are hardly unique, nor is verizon the only ISP guilty of having an abuse desk that ignores/helps/supports spammers. Try plugging random large ISP domains into SPEWS.org and see what you get. If I recall, Verizon has a nice large file, as does UUNet/MCI/Worldcom, Sprint, AT&T, Exodus, Excite, Rackspace...
Most ISPs list spam as one of the things you are not allowed to do. Break the rules, lose your account. Don't like it? Go somewhere else.
Unfortunatly, too many providers don't actually ENFORCE their rules... I can think of over a dozen such ISPs in the US easily. Most of them are bell and cable companies. Some are government owned/operated, others are private.
Think of it this way. One of the neighbor kids breaks your windows. You call the parents to complain, but they just smile and nod. The next day, the same kid smashes your mailbox. Now then...would you invite said family over to your next BBQ? I certainly wouldn't.
Same thing here. If the ISP is unable/unwilling to curb their users' destructive behavior, that ISP (yes, the *WHOLE* ISP) isn't going to be allowed access to others' networks.
If anything, I think we should have laws that make the ISP liable for users' behavior. If a user spams, the ISP doesn't boot him after getting complaints and the same user spams again, then the ISP should be liable for the millions in damages as well as the spammer himself. A few such cases ought to convince these stupid ISPs that harboring spammers is neither a wise nor profitable business practice.
Slashdot Mirror
Four shooters, 2 platformers and a racing game...hm...yeah, that'll get folks excited about XBox.
Throw in the $20 price drop, and the whole thing just shouts "*L*A*M*E*"
Microsoft expects Xbox to live through another holiday season. Assuming it does, I think we'll see Microsoft drop this thing in February/March of 2004.
Considering how badly the XBox is doing against the PS2, I would think that *any* sort of edge would be pounced upon.
I don't know if online gaming is going to truly be the wave of the future, or just a fad that dies out.
Either way, people do agree that online gaming will see an increase over the next few years. Even if it dies out, if Microsoft is the leader in that area, I'm sure they're not going to be too upset...
But right now, all I hear from Microsoft about Xbox is "Yeah! What Sony said, only buy ours instead!"
Marketting only goes so far.
I see far more PS2 related ads on TV than XBox ones.
The area dedicated to the PS2 at my local store is 3x larger than the area dedicated to XBox.
Let's face it, by now, if you're interested in gaming, you already know about the 3 consoles. Having them push their names in your face isn't going to convince you to buy a console. I don't see guys rushing out to buy Maxipads after one of THEIR ads, do you?
No, Microsoft has to do something to get people's attention, maybe give them that final push to get them off the frence about buying a Xbox instead of a PS2. Dropping their price below that of the PS2 would be a start.
There'll probably be a small spike in PS2s, but not for the reasons listed here...
Sony is releasing a new hardware rev of the PS2 which allows the PS2 to use progressive scan for DVD movie playback. Current models can use progressive scan for games that support it, but cannot play movies in this mode.
This new model, bundled with the broadband adaptor, even at $200, will be attractive enough to get people to buy a PS2, or in some extreme cases, buy this model to replace their older model at home.
As for Xbox... the $20 drop is disappointing since it makes Microsoft look like they're not interested in actually competing with Sony, but just want to play the "me too!" game. *yawn.*
At this point in this generation of consoles, it's clear that the PS2 is the clear winner based on its library. That's not really the point, though.
However, that doesn't meant that Microsoft should just back off altogether, especially if they intend to release XBox2.
This is why just dropping the price $20 isn't enough. As another poster pointed out, if I'm going to spend $180 anyways, going up to $200 isn't a big deal. However, dropping the price to $150 - now that's different. It's a sort of psychological barrier as well, even though it's only a $30 difference between $150 and $180.
Also, the one area where XBox does and will continue to do well in is with online games. Even if you say online gaming isn't for you, and is, at best, a niche in the market that's all Microsoft really needs to be successful. Bundling a 1 year subscription of XBox Live with the Xbox, and maybe an online game, would be a STRONG statement by Microsoft to Sony saying "WE are the console for online play. Follow us if you can!" If Microsoft can end this generation of consoles being able to claim victory in any area of the industry, it'll make their launch of XBox2 that much more viable and interesting.
However, by simply dropping their price $20 to match Sony, they're just following in Sony's footsteps and that's not how you become a leader People point to the billions that Microsoft has overall and how this was going to insure the success of the console. While this is an outrageous statement, it still doesn't explain why Microsoft hasn't been more aggressive with regards to the pricing of their console. Yeah, dropping the price to $0 would incur the wrath of Sony for unfair trade practices, but what's wrong with $150? Heck, if Microsoft wanted to be REALLY agressive, I say they bundle 1 year of XBox Live, the DVD remote (Sony won't be able to claim their's is the only one that plays DVDs 'out of the box'), a cheap online game, in addition to the current XBox bundle for $150.
You don't get noticed if you don't raise the bar, and you certainly don't get ahead playing catch-up and match-up with your competitors. I know that "competition" is a new concept to Microsoft, but they better learn...fast.
Microsoft isn't being aggressive enough.
Instead of simply matching Sony's price cut, they should either drop to $150, or announce a bundle deal consisting of the DVD remote, a starter kit for XBox Live all for $180. THAT would begin to make XBox competitive.
Right now, Xbox's biggest edge is their online play capability. They have more online titles than PS2, and they should be exploiting this edge!
Well, according to AOL, it costs each subscriber about $2/mo. to make up for the added bandwidth, server and storage needs from spam.
Other studies show spam makes up about 20% of all email, with projections to as much as 47% over the next 5 years.
Oh, and if you're at work and have to hit delete on a spam that you got there, from your employer's point of view, you've just wasted the 1 second needed to click that button. Now multiply that 1 second by the number of employees in your office and multiply that by the number of spams you see each day, week, or year. A small company of 100 employees, each seeing a modest 5 spams a day * 365 days will waste over FIFTY HOURS A YEAR hitting delete.
The lists maintained by SPEWS, SBL, etc. are little more than opinions saying I think the following ISPs are irresponsible and/or are harboring spammers..."
:)
The fact that admins of domains can then use that information to allow their mailserver(s) to allow/reject mail from those domains is a separate matter.
There are then services, like Brightmail, which provide filtered email services to end users or ISPs. Brightmail's website will provide you with details on what they use for filtering, be it SPEWS, SBL, something else, or (most likely) a combination of all of the above.)
At any rate, organizations like SPEWS and SBL only provide the data. They do not implement it. As an ISP, your only legal recourse for being blocked due to a listing would be to go after each individual ISP that is blocking you. Even then, unless you had a contract with that ISP saying they MUST accept all mail from your domain, there's not a whole lot you can do. Laws vary from place to place, but the concept of "private property" seems pretty universal - and that's what every domain, and ISP network is - PRIVATE PROPERTY. No domain anywhere is *required* to accept mail from all of the internet.
Most lists provide documentation on their listing and delisting policies. This is both for admins wishing to use the list (do they agree with the criteria), as well as for admins wondering what happend to get them listed in the first place.
As for your employer's situation, getting onto a list usually occurs for the following reasons:
* Signing up of a spammer who's so infamous, that he and the poor sucker of an ISP that signed him up are immediatly blocked as a preventative measure. (ie. it's not a matter of IF he'll spam...)
* Preceived slack/slowness/cluelessness of your employer's abuse desk. This doesn't mean you have to have your abuse desk write personal responses to each and every person who sends a complaint...just have them do their job, and eliminate your misbehaving customer.
No reasonable person is going to expect instantaneous action, either. I think 2-3 days (TOPS) should be enough to deal with most cases, even with a 1% spammer infestation. Again, most people aren't going to expect a personal reply. Not getting the same spam from your customer is usually good enough. (and will keep you off the lists!)
Finally, you might want to look into proactively discouraging spammers from signing up by creating a new clause in your customers' contracts stating that if the account is terminated due to spam, you will charge the customer a clean up fee (usually $500-$2000.) ISPs that have enacted such a clause see the spam emanating from them drop off quickly - and hey, if someone is STILL stupid enough to spam, use the money to throw a beer bust.
Seriously though, if your abuse desk does their job in a timely manner, you shouldn't have any problems with listing services.
Some places do, but that won't catch a lot of spam.
I get a lot of spam (and legit mail) that doesn't include a domain name.
I get a lot of spam from malconfigured mail/proxy servers, or from compromised, unsecured machines elsewhere on the network. In these cases, the IP# really does match the domain that sent the mail, but the content is 100% spam.
I guess you *COULD* configure your mailserver to reject email from IP#s that aren't listed as mailservers for that domain according to their DNS records...but again, domains running malconfigured mailservers (like the country of korea is doing), or those domains that deliberately use fake/munged DNS information will still get their spam through.
In short, there is no single rule to detect spam 100% of the time with no false positives. The best system I've seen is SpamAssasain which can be configured to use the SBL, SPEWS, or other blacklists, and uses a series of configurable rules to assign a "weight" to each message. Even then, you'd be suprised at how legitimate, innocent mail will get such a high weight sometimes.
Can't decide? Buy all 3.
With E3 this week, you can bet there'll be some announcements of price drops on the consoles.
Even without it, with a bit of shopping you can find store-specific deals that'll give you a console plus a game (sometimes of your choice) for free.
Combine that with Half.com or your local used game store, and the only problem I see is having the *TIME* to play all those games.
Yeah, yeah, PS3, GC2, XBox2 are definitely in the works, but who cares? Knowing that the video card in you bought for your system will look pathetic and sad 18-24 months from now didn't stop you from buying one, did it?
Also, as you point out, consoles tend to remain useful even after they've left the marketplace.
And for the price of a 120GB HD, I can buy a PS1 and a handful of games.
Yeah, yeah, this is more of a "Gee whiz, that's nifty" type of thing but after trying to get BLEEM to run on my PC, I have to wonder at the amount of effort folks are going through here...
Heck, don't even change the dialog - just subtitle it. It'll be cheaper, and anyways, have you listend to English voice-overs in most games? Ugh! And people think dubbed anime is bad!
My biggest problem is that Enterprise *STARTED OUT* with a trick Voyager used to boost their ratings - TIME TRAVEL.
The whole temporal cold war thing has given the writers carte blanche to bascially do whatever they want to now. Ferengi aren't supposed to that close to Earth, but hey! Maybe some time traveler gave them warp travel centuries before they would have gotten it before!
Assuming they're using the 'Back to the future' model of time travel, a full blown time travel "war" would have devastating effects on the participants' "present" (which is Enterprise's future.) The past would dissolve into a muddled mass of travellers trying to change something, which would cause others to try to counter, and still more to counter the counter, and so on...
Also, given how fickle fate is, most alterations wouldn't even involve killing anyone. It might be just as simple as going back, posing as a high school counselor, and convincing Einstein to become a house painter, for instance.
This would then have the other side-effect of creating people from the other timeline who share the past up to a certain point. At this point, who's to say which timeline is the "correct" one?
And these are issues I've just thought of in the few minutes it's taken me to type this reply. Of course, none of this will ever be dealt with in the show because as Berman illustrated with Voyager - he's not about dealing with consequences. Each show is separate, and usually includes "The magic reset button" to insure that nothing from one episode will have any bearing whatso ever on another.
Oh, and having Enterprise meet the Ferengi and the Borg isn't going to mess things up?
Having the Klingon homeworld only 3-5 days away at Enterprise's warp 5 isn't going to mess things up?
If you believe in a Federation with some dark aspects, it would be quite possible for Starfleet to simply mark reports about, say, Q as "need to know." Perhaps Picard wasn't the only one visited by Q in TNG, leading to the information about Q becoming more available.
But this only works because Q isn't a threat to mankind (if anything, they're just observing and cheering us on...) The Borg, on the other hand...
Maybe Starfleet's headquarters get nuked in the first war, and they don't have backups, and so they lose information about early contact with the Ferengi, Borg, etc...
Of course this all pivots on whether the writers actually care about creating a world/universe that has consistancy. So far, they've shown none.
Bounce would certainly be one of the reasons I'd get an Xbox...
I've heard that DOA4 and something called "DOA Chronicles" will be coming out this year as well. Chronicles is supposedly a collection of DOAs 1-3.
I've heard very mixed reviews about the volleyball game in terms of "fun." They all agree that the bounce and skin is over the top though.
And then there's Panzer Dragoon and Halo, of course...
Heck, wait long enough and you can pick the titles up for $15-20. At that price, you'll get your money's worth after just a few hours of play.
Animal Crossing is sort of a mix between "Sim Village" (you're not building a city here), The Sims, and Harvest Moon.
If you don't like those games, you probably won't like Animal Crossing either.
As for eatting a whole memory card...yes, Animal Crossing uses up an entire small memory card, however one is provided with the game, so you don't even need to buy one separately (besides, most folks buy the larger capacity card, which holds 4x the small one that comes with Animal Crossing.)
Too easy to get screwed.
A used cartridge based system would be one thing - it either works, or it don't. If it works, it'll continue working (no moving parts.)
A used disc based system, meanwhile, will eventually break down. Early model PS2s, for instance, seem to have problems with dust getting trapped around the drive mechanism, knocking the lasers out of alignment.
I don't know of anyone who just buys a console and no games - that'd be like buying a CD player and not buying any CDs.
Even shopping frugally, you will eventually spend more on the media (games) than the console.
Even when I picked up a Dreamcast during its firesale, I easily spent $150 on games - even though most were only $5-15.
You can get an adaptor for the GameCube that lets you use Playstation controllers (either the Dualshock 1 or Dualshock 2.)
It's not an offical piece of Nintendo hardware, but...
While SNK made some great games, maybe the reason their carts were so expensive is why they aren't around (at all!) anymore...
Whitelists are very useful for a list of your known friends and others you regularly interact with, but suck for casual messages or businesses trying to communicate with customers.
Think about it, would YOU put up with jumping hoops to get onto someone's whitelist to ask them a single question about their website? Or to get their company's sales brochure?
Plus, how do I "click here" with my text based mail program? (Pine)
Like most real world problems, there is no single silver bullet to solve spam.
(tasteless alert)
Given the number of AOL subscribers, if they did take the $2/subscriber and put that towards putting contracts on spammers' heads, the spam problem would diminish sharply within a few months.
Sorry, I meant to say Verizon hosts many spammers, and doesn't do anything to stop them.
Day 1: get spam from verizon customer, send complaint, get auto-ack that means, well, nothing.
Day 2: get same spam from same verizon customer (identical headers, content - except for timestamp) send complaint, get auto-ack.
Day 3: get same spam from verizon again...
Think to myself "Hmm...maybe verizon is a bit slow to deal with spammers..."
Day 10: get same spam from verizon again. Blacklist the IP#.
Day 20: wipe out 10 days worth of spam from that same IP# of verizon's.
Day 21: get that same spam from Verizon - but from a different IP#!
My experiences are hardly unique, nor is verizon the only ISP guilty of having an abuse desk that ignores/helps/supports spammers. Try plugging random large ISP domains into SPEWS.org and see what you get. If I recall, Verizon has a nice large file, as does UUNet/MCI/Worldcom, Sprint, AT&T, Exodus, Excite, Rackspace...
Hey now...I'm on a few company's email newsletter lists. I knowingly signed up for them, and find the information about their sales useful.
It's just the *unsolicited* advertising that has no legitimacy.
Uh...
Most ISPs list spam as one of the things you are not allowed to do. Break the rules, lose your account. Don't like it? Go somewhere else.
Unfortunatly, too many providers don't actually ENFORCE their rules... I can think of over a dozen such ISPs in the US easily. Most of them are bell and cable companies. Some are government owned/operated, others are private.
Think of it this way. One of the neighbor kids breaks your windows. You call the parents to complain, but they just smile and nod. The next day, the same kid smashes your mailbox. Now then...would you invite said family over to your next BBQ? I certainly wouldn't.
Same thing here. If the ISP is unable/unwilling to curb their users' destructive behavior, that ISP (yes, the *WHOLE* ISP) isn't going to be allowed access to others' networks.
If anything, I think we should have laws that make the ISP liable for users' behavior. If a user spams, the ISP doesn't boot him after getting complaints and the same user spams again, then the ISP should be liable for the millions in damages as well as the spammer himself. A few such cases ought to convince these stupid ISPs that harboring spammers is neither a wise nor profitable business practice.