Get child porn on your enemy's computer as long as he runs Windows (or whatever else), total deniability because there's so much malware out there. This scares the bejeezus out of me.
Let me repeat the part where I have in my possession and there is available in the wider world more video games for systems where you can't do that (PS2/Xbox/Gamecube/DS/PSP) than I could ever play. Even for the Xbox 360/PS3/Wii there are no current or projected games where that kind of DRM is possible, let alone in practice, unless you're stupid enough to walk down the primrose path of download-only games.
PS4/Xbox1080/NintendoWhatever? Yeah, maybe that kind of situation will occur, but they'll kill themselves off like Atari if they do it, because people aren't going to spend money on it, just like people shouldn't be buying Mass Effect/Spore if the DRM is too onerous for them.
It's called "don't buy at all". The last offline PC game I bought was Quake 4, which I happen to run in Linux (since Linux users get happy-fun SMP compiled in, runs great) and it never needed the CD or any kind of DRM. I've been considering Stardock's games, but I'm just bad at that kind of stuff, no matter how much I like them. My console games are technically DRMed (in the "you need one of the consoles to run it" sense) but of the 80+ I bought in the last year, only 7 were bought new, and the rest were used games I paid no more than $20 for, most of them no more than $10, and the publishers saw none of it.
If they want to think that my low level of new game buying (and nonexistant level of PC game buying) is that I'm pirating games, they can think that all they want. If they make DRM for new console games as bad as they do for PC games, I have no real problem with stopping spending any money at all on consoles too. I don't have to buy any other console to get myself more video games than I can exhaust for decades.
From large companies to small, it's the single biggest problem they all have. Decisions makers don't want to hear the truth, no matter how loudly they protest otherwise. Anyone with intellectual honesty that doesn't have a previously won huge level of trust from a decision-maker is almost invariably thought to be lying. They all want to have their cake and eat it too, and they will throw money at anyone that tells them they can. Even after getting burned by the consequences of their decisions, less than half (in my experience) bother to try and learn from the failure. Most of them blame the honest person (if they did nothing and as a result failure happened) or latch on to the next person willing and able to lie even more convincingly than the last guy.
Back then I just drank vodka and OJ or lemonade. That was pretty much it, didn't touch even beer really. When other people were buying, or I didn't have enough cash to afford better, it was Smirnoff because it was about as low as you could go before getting into plastic bottle vodka, and you'd have to sink pretty low to get there. I drank enough of it to tell, believe me.
Smirnoff is actually liquid stomach solvent. Back when I drank a lot of vodka, I stayed the hell away from Smirnoff and my hangovers were definitely 85% less awful when I did.
Though yes, often you can find great deals in bourbon and other whiskeys, where there's a lot more room for variation in how you prepare, store and age, blend, etc. There are real variations in taste, a huge range in ABV. When I drink these days, I pretty much stick to bourbon, because I found a couple amazing values at ridiculously cheap prices for their taste. I love scotch, but so does everyone else, and while new distilleries do open (or re-open old closed ones) from time to time, the good ones get snapped up and prices jump soon after (Speyside you could get for under $20/bottle when they re-opened the distillery and it's climbed up once people figured out that it was good). Gin you get a lot of variation, but it's flavored and each type has subtle differences, so that helps.
Vodka is a lot more hip these days, and really, it's grain neutral spirit by definition. Unless you're adding things to it (like the various Absolut or Stolichnaya flavorings) it's all down to the quality and efficacy of your distillation process. I've drunk a lot of different kinds of vodka, and with a single exception, anything from Absolut on up the only differences were in the packaging and marketing (my favorite being Thor's Hammer vodka, which came in a bottle shaped like a renfest water bottle, with Viking-esque designs all over it, been looking for it FOREVER and haven't been able to find it, 'cause I lost the bottle). That one exception was a vodka that claimed to be quintuple distilled, called Pearl. Never seen it but once in 2000 in some booze megamarket in Houston, and it was flat out amazing. Other than that, Absolut, Stoli, Belvedere, Chopin, Grey Goose, tried them all. In the end, they weren't much different.
Rum is also a lot of marketing hooey, though some of the heavily spiced rums do have their own taste (Sailor Jerry Navy Rum is great stuff).
EVE Online may be "supported" for Linux, but it's terrible support. I resubscribed to EVE Online because of the Linux and Mac clients, and I had nothing but problems, and stopped the subscription after two months. Less than half the frame rate of the Windows version on the same hardware, and the Mac client was even worse.
After 10 years in the business, dealing with all the machines in the dark corners of innumerable businesses, large and small, I've seen only a very small amount of pirated software.
I'm not sure how you'd know unless you run the BSA's special licensing overwatch software. Unlicensed software, once installed, generally doesn't announce that it's not licensed. In fact, the whole point of using it is that it works just like licensed software, only you didn't pay for it (though of course, sometimes it works better in the case of DRMed games.
Never let a child get away with giving an opinion, or just making a statement on a subject. The proverbial little kid constantly asking "Why?" over and over until the adult blows up and says "BECAUSE, THAT'S WHY!!!" should be flipped around. I was lucky and went to a school where I was forced to give reasons or explanations for ANY position I took, in every class. It was even more rigorous in the humanities than science/math (at least not for me, I did as little math as I had to to get by, painful experience and I'm just not a math guy). Teachers would regularly, unmercifully, and publicly take me (and everyone else in my class) to task for every statement or opinion that wasn't backed up with reasoning, and would beat away mercilessly at any flaws in it. Being merely correct wasn't enough to get it right, you had to show why that was the answer.
This isn't an easy thing, because it takes a LOT of mental work on the adult's part. You have to be on your toes constantly, and kids will look for every possible dodge the can to get out of doing it. I HATED it when I was there, and only after I got out of it did I realize the kind of mental muscles I'd been forced to build up.
I can assure you, there is a very small number of such companies
Don't believe this assurance. The number of companies that do this is NOT small. In fact, it is nearly universal. I deal with the after-effects of a lot of small and medium-sized computer makers and consultants, and every single one of the people I deal with asks if we can "get us a copy" of this or that software like their last guy did. I have lost clients because there came a time after which I just flat out refused to install any software that I knew wasn't legally obtained. I've walked into multiple new clients to reinstall Windows with burned CDs of Office and/or Windows XP, no key on the computer and had to endure plenty of dirty looks when I tell them that I can't reinstall it, and they're going to have to buy a legal copy before I can do anything. One client bought several copies of MS Office which all had the same key when they arrived. Random Internet company, just happened to have a good deal (obviously too good to be true). All the holograms were exact, everything was apparently fine about the packaging, just only one key.
They'll talk a good line, but every single small time computer maker I've ever dealt with will install unlicensed software if you know how/who to ask in the organization.
Our top story today, a brand new MMO has lots of bugs at launch.
In other news, government scientists announce stunning findings, gravity causes objects to collide with the earth, the sun rises in the morning and sets in the evening, and fire hurts you if you put your hand in it.
This brings up something I've been devoting a bit of thought to lately (and has played into my decision-making on whether or not to get an Xbox360). What if the online console ecosystem we're creating is really it's own MMO.
From an interview on gamasutra that was linked here a while back that this article pricked to life out of my memory:
CN: Is that the converse of "The PC market is dead?"
RK: Well, yeah. I'm one of the people who went out there and said, "Single-player gaming is doomed," and I actually used that phrase. An Xbox Live Achievement is a soul-bound item, and Gamerpoints are experience points, and BioShock is a one-man instance dungeon in the Xbox Live MMO. That is the direction that single-player gaming is going, frankly.
I think this is more and more becoming a reality. Even in the nailed-down online component of Mario-Kart Wii, there's the world-wide Time Trial leaderboard where you can download the ghost of the best recorded time on the planet and see if you can beat it, and if you do, upload that score and have worldwide bragging rights.
If you try to get *really good* at Mario Kart and put in that sort of effort, you're going to get disappointed because even a second or so of improvement is negligible against the power of a blue shell.
Depends which version of online competition. I agree, for the normal online race mode, there isn't much point in trying to go for the best raw time (especially when it's more effective to run in 2nd place and let your opponent eat the blue shells until the end). That said, if you want serious high level times, the built-in ability to see the top worldwide times for each track seems like a pretty steep long-term challenge to me.
The problem is that the parameters of your objective analysis are subjectively chosen. At least in the Mario Kart example, the number of people who bought Mario Kart that care about hundredth-of-a-second times in direct online competition is vanishingly small in comparison to the number of people who like to just get online and drive around and have some fun. For that kind of competition there is the world-wide time trial rankings, but "serious" online competition ability just isn't even on the radar screen of people who get online to throw colored shells at other people. It's fun, it isn't serious, no one cares that my Mario Kart ranking is pathetic, and I can crush the hopes and dreams of people with the mighty blue shell because I'm so bad I get it very often. I've never owned any Gran Turismo game, because it would just sit on my shelf forever. Its infinite complexity, customizability, and realism wasted on someone that just doesn't give a crap.
The defining characteristic in the accuracy of a review is point of view intersection between the reviewer and the reader. That's it. That's all that matters. Take the time to know your reviewer and you will never go wrong. I read just about every review I can find for every game I have, and I write lots of reviews (unpublished save for 1 or 2 at gamefaqs) as a writing exercise and because I'm an opinionated SOB (one of these days I'll get around to starting my own review site, or try to get some part time work at an established one). Lots of times I have to wonder whether I am playing the same game as some of these people. I'm sure I am, but it really boils down to the fact that people look for different things in games, and everyone has their red lines, and they're all different to one degree or another.
It is baffling to me how these sort of Cyber-wars can go on and in the meantime countries will continue talking to eachother like nothing's the matter.
The short answer is that they've been too distracted by terrorism/fighting actual shooting wars to deal with what is in comparison a rather ephemeral question. That state of affairs is starting to change as the governments in question are starting to pull back from these engagements, and the Arab terrorism hysteria is starting to subside. More and more of these stories are popping up, and they are not going unnoticed, there have just been bigger fish to fry as far as these governments are concerned. The reaming of the US intelligence infrastructure post-Rumsfeld, the ascendant might of China's economy, and the looming end of Bush's ability to screw things up are getting people to finally wake up, realize that there's more out there than just Iraq and Islamist terrorism, and take these things more seriously.
They're doing it way too slowly, and way too late for my liking, but it's got to start somewhere.
Or Sprint. My father has been desperate for a good excuse to kick Sprint to the curb and buy and iPhone, and this is just about as good an excuse as he's likely to find. I may very well find myself with one of the new iPhones, even though I don't have a lot of use for it, or desire for one.
From the terms of service on the linked Britannica site:
By sending information or material, you automatically grant to Britannica, a royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive license to use, reproduce, modify, publish, edit, translate, distribute, perform, and display it alone or as part of other works in any form, media, or technology whether now known or hereafter developed, and to sublicense such rights through multiple tiers of sublicensees.
Wikipedia may have serious accuracy problems in a lot of areas (not all of coruse, but it's not hard to find them) but at least they aren't using me as unpaid labor to save them from having to hire researchers.
Well, as far as the PSP goes (and I realize that it doesn't go all that far) you're already starting to get releases that are flat out not going to happen in the US. As just one example of a game I'm going to have to import that I never thought I'd have to, Breath of Fire III is released in English in the UK, but not here. I didn't think the PSP was that much bigger there than here, or that the Breath of Fire brand was in such decay in America that no one was going to buy it, but apparently that shift is starting to happen.
...I'd be playing one of them instead of a tabletop RPG that's been warped into playing something like them.
Everything I've seen about this seems like the system is just being loaded down with regressions. My impression from everything I have read of it is that the entire game has shed nearly everything that made it "Advanced" D&D, and now it's just back to plain, vanilla, 1980s D&D (aside from the total combat overhaul). The new alignment system is a direct throwback to the Basic Set era of non-Advanced D&D. The classectomy takes out a lot of the original complicated problem child classes leaving the list far more like the original D&D list of classes (hunt down an original copy of the AD&D 1st Edition rules and take a gander at what used to be required to be a bard, and druids were always a tortured rules situation in the default rules). Even the assumption of miniatures is a total throwback to original D&D (remember, this all started as a fantasy version of a wargame).
I'm just glad I still have my old 2.x Core Rules CD-Rom. That was real Advanced D&D. Yes, there were big problems with it, but the system was impressively modular. You could lop huge chunks of it off, or beat parts you didn't like into a better shape, or attach new rules without needing to rework the entire system. The very first bit of text in the original 2nd Edition PHB was the editor's note telling you, explicitly to get rid of whatever rule in the game that you didn't like, though no one apparently read it, because people acted like the game was a straight-jacket, and bad DMs thought that just because player X bought crazy new supplement Y that it was official, and that they had to allow it in their game, whether it made sense or not.
All they needed to do in 3.x was to make the good changes they did make (get the druid class under control, reform the experience/level system in general, and get rid of racial limits) and explicitly modularize every the system. What they didn't need to do is throw the baby out with the bathwater, but there was such a bad taste in people's mouths from the waning days of pre-WotC D&D, that I guess they felt they needed a wholesale, and obvious change to get people back to the game, and apparently surface regression to 1st edition (bringing back the Barbarian, monk, etc) and making it more super-powery (ie, feats) was the way to do it. Obviously worked well enough, since so many people play 3.x and more power to them. What I don't understand is why they thought a regression to the freaking Basic Set was going to go over well.
I'm just glad I've got my copy of the Core Rules CD-ROM, and some PDFs of the most original RPG campaign settings ever thought up (Planescape, RIP. Dark Sun, why did they revise you? Wither Spelljammer?) and I'll cheerfully ignore all the crappy stuff (remember the "Shaman" supplement anyone?) like people should have done in the first place.
The only Dashboard widgets I ever use are the weather report, and the flight tracker, but that's obviously only when I need to track a flight, which isn't often.
I don't like the way Dashboard works. For using a calculator, I find it much more useful to just put Calculator.app in the dock. If the Dashboard were implemented more in the manner of Gnome/KDE panels, or into the top menu bar (like, click the little flight tracker icon, or calculator icon, or whatever in the menu bar to activate the widget to pop up, kinda like ye olde desk accessories) then I'd certainly make use of it. I haven't seen Plasma, but if they're copying Dashboard in any way I'll probably be avoid that too, if I ever bother with KDE 4.
As an American, it proved that I should never, ever drive if I find myself in England. Couldn't seem to get the hang of not driving straight into oncoming traffic no matter how long I tried.
...as long as it continues in the same vein as Symphony of the Night and its descendents. IMNSHO, it was the best thing that ever happened to Castlevania. The 3d incarnations on PS2/Xbox were crud, not interested at all if they're going back in that direction.
Slashdot Mirror
Too bad you surrendered almost immediately. Buying a $6000 TV is so rebellious.
Get child porn on your enemy's computer as long as he runs Windows (or whatever else), total deniability because there's so much malware out there. This scares the bejeezus out of me.
Let me repeat the part where I have in my possession and there is available in the wider world more video games for systems where you can't do that (PS2/Xbox/Gamecube/DS/PSP) than I could ever play. Even for the Xbox 360/PS3/Wii there are no current or projected games where that kind of DRM is possible, let alone in practice, unless you're stupid enough to walk down the primrose path of download-only games.
PS4/Xbox1080/NintendoWhatever? Yeah, maybe that kind of situation will occur, but they'll kill themselves off like Atari if they do it, because people aren't going to spend money on it, just like people shouldn't be buying Mass Effect/Spore if the DRM is too onerous for them.
It's called "don't buy at all". The last offline PC game I bought was Quake 4, which I happen to run in Linux (since Linux users get happy-fun SMP compiled in, runs great) and it never needed the CD or any kind of DRM. I've been considering Stardock's games, but I'm just bad at that kind of stuff, no matter how much I like them. My console games are technically DRMed (in the "you need one of the consoles to run it" sense) but of the 80+ I bought in the last year, only 7 were bought new, and the rest were used games I paid no more than $20 for, most of them no more than $10, and the publishers saw none of it.
If they want to think that my low level of new game buying (and nonexistant level of PC game buying) is that I'm pirating games, they can think that all they want. If they make DRM for new console games as bad as they do for PC games, I have no real problem with stopping spending any money at all on consoles too. I don't have to buy any other console to get myself more video games than I can exhaust for decades.
From large companies to small, it's the single biggest problem they all have. Decisions makers don't want to hear the truth, no matter how loudly they protest otherwise. Anyone with intellectual honesty that doesn't have a previously won huge level of trust from a decision-maker is almost invariably thought to be lying. They all want to have their cake and eat it too, and they will throw money at anyone that tells them they can. Even after getting burned by the consequences of their decisions, less than half (in my experience) bother to try and learn from the failure. Most of them blame the honest person (if they did nothing and as a result failure happened) or latch on to the next person willing and able to lie even more convincingly than the last guy.
Yeah, and bumper stickers are an obvious sign of someone that has a greater than normal desire to express themselves.
Back then I just drank vodka and OJ or lemonade. That was pretty much it, didn't touch even beer really. When other people were buying, or I didn't have enough cash to afford better, it was Smirnoff because it was about as low as you could go before getting into plastic bottle vodka, and you'd have to sink pretty low to get there. I drank enough of it to tell, believe me.
Smirnoff is actually liquid stomach solvent. Back when I drank a lot of vodka, I stayed the hell away from Smirnoff and my hangovers were definitely 85% less awful when I did.
Though yes, often you can find great deals in bourbon and other whiskeys, where there's a lot more room for variation in how you prepare, store and age, blend, etc. There are real variations in taste, a huge range in ABV. When I drink these days, I pretty much stick to bourbon, because I found a couple amazing values at ridiculously cheap prices for their taste. I love scotch, but so does everyone else, and while new distilleries do open (or re-open old closed ones) from time to time, the good ones get snapped up and prices jump soon after (Speyside you could get for under $20/bottle when they re-opened the distillery and it's climbed up once people figured out that it was good). Gin you get a lot of variation, but it's flavored and each type has subtle differences, so that helps.
Vodka is a lot more hip these days, and really, it's grain neutral spirit by definition. Unless you're adding things to it (like the various Absolut or Stolichnaya flavorings) it's all down to the quality and efficacy of your distillation process. I've drunk a lot of different kinds of vodka, and with a single exception, anything from Absolut on up the only differences were in the packaging and marketing (my favorite being Thor's Hammer vodka, which came in a bottle shaped like a renfest water bottle, with Viking-esque designs all over it, been looking for it FOREVER and haven't been able to find it, 'cause I lost the bottle). That one exception was a vodka that claimed to be quintuple distilled, called Pearl. Never seen it but once in 2000 in some booze megamarket in Houston, and it was flat out amazing. Other than that, Absolut, Stoli, Belvedere, Chopin, Grey Goose, tried them all. In the end, they weren't much different.
Rum is also a lot of marketing hooey, though some of the heavily spiced rums do have their own taste (Sailor Jerry Navy Rum is great stuff).
The first ethernet cable ever with racing stripes.
Someone PLEASE tell me that this is a huge joke.
EVE Online may be "supported" for Linux, but it's terrible support. I resubscribed to EVE Online because of the Linux and Mac clients, and I had nothing but problems, and stopped the subscription after two months. Less than half the frame rate of the Windows version on the same hardware, and the Mac client was even worse.
I'm not sure how you'd know unless you run the BSA's special licensing overwatch software. Unlicensed software, once installed, generally doesn't announce that it's not licensed. In fact, the whole point of using it is that it works just like licensed software, only you didn't pay for it (though of course, sometimes it works better in the case of DRMed games.
Never let a child get away with giving an opinion, or just making a statement on a subject. The proverbial little kid constantly asking "Why?" over and over until the adult blows up and says "BECAUSE, THAT'S WHY!!!" should be flipped around. I was lucky and went to a school where I was forced to give reasons or explanations for ANY position I took, in every class. It was even more rigorous in the humanities than science/math (at least not for me, I did as little math as I had to to get by, painful experience and I'm just not a math guy). Teachers would regularly, unmercifully, and publicly take me (and everyone else in my class) to task for every statement or opinion that wasn't backed up with reasoning, and would beat away mercilessly at any flaws in it. Being merely correct wasn't enough to get it right, you had to show why that was the answer.
This isn't an easy thing, because it takes a LOT of mental work on the adult's part. You have to be on your toes constantly, and kids will look for every possible dodge the can to get out of doing it. I HATED it when I was there, and only after I got out of it did I realize the kind of mental muscles I'd been forced to build up.
Don't believe this assurance. The number of companies that do this is NOT small. In fact, it is nearly universal. I deal with the after-effects of a lot of small and medium-sized computer makers and consultants, and every single one of the people I deal with asks if we can "get us a copy" of this or that software like their last guy did. I have lost clients because there came a time after which I just flat out refused to install any software that I knew wasn't legally obtained. I've walked into multiple new clients to reinstall Windows with burned CDs of Office and/or Windows XP, no key on the computer and had to endure plenty of dirty looks when I tell them that I can't reinstall it, and they're going to have to buy a legal copy before I can do anything. One client bought several copies of MS Office which all had the same key when they arrived. Random Internet company, just happened to have a good deal (obviously too good to be true). All the holograms were exact, everything was apparently fine about the packaging, just only one key.
They'll talk a good line, but every single small time computer maker I've ever dealt with will install unlicensed software if you know how/who to ask in the organization.
Our top story today, a brand new MMO has lots of bugs at launch.
In other news, government scientists announce stunning findings, gravity causes objects to collide with the earth, the sun rises in the morning and sets in the evening, and fire hurts you if you put your hand in it.
From an interview on gamasutra that was linked here a while back that this article pricked to life out of my memory:
I think this is more and more becoming a reality. Even in the nailed-down online component of Mario-Kart Wii, there's the world-wide Time Trial leaderboard where you can download the ghost of the best recorded time on the planet and see if you can beat it, and if you do, upload that score and have worldwide bragging rights.
Depends which version of online competition. I agree, for the normal online race mode, there isn't much point in trying to go for the best raw time (especially when it's more effective to run in 2nd place and let your opponent eat the blue shells until the end). That said, if you want serious high level times, the built-in ability to see the top worldwide times for each track seems like a pretty steep long-term challenge to me.
The problem is that the parameters of your objective analysis are subjectively chosen. At least in the Mario Kart example, the number of people who bought Mario Kart that care about hundredth-of-a-second times in direct online competition is vanishingly small in comparison to the number of people who like to just get online and drive around and have some fun. For that kind of competition there is the world-wide time trial rankings, but "serious" online competition ability just isn't even on the radar screen of people who get online to throw colored shells at other people. It's fun, it isn't serious, no one cares that my Mario Kart ranking is pathetic, and I can crush the hopes and dreams of people with the mighty blue shell because I'm so bad I get it very often. I've never owned any Gran Turismo game, because it would just sit on my shelf forever. Its infinite complexity, customizability, and realism wasted on someone that just doesn't give a crap.
The defining characteristic in the accuracy of a review is point of view intersection between the reviewer and the reader. That's it. That's all that matters. Take the time to know your reviewer and you will never go wrong. I read just about every review I can find for every game I have, and I write lots of reviews (unpublished save for 1 or 2 at gamefaqs) as a writing exercise and because I'm an opinionated SOB (one of these days I'll get around to starting my own review site, or try to get some part time work at an established one). Lots of times I have to wonder whether I am playing the same game as some of these people. I'm sure I am, but it really boils down to the fact that people look for different things in games, and everyone has their red lines, and they're all different to one degree or another.
The short answer is that they've been too distracted by terrorism/fighting actual shooting wars to deal with what is in comparison a rather ephemeral question. That state of affairs is starting to change as the governments in question are starting to pull back from these engagements, and the Arab terrorism hysteria is starting to subside. More and more of these stories are popping up, and they are not going unnoticed, there have just been bigger fish to fry as far as these governments are concerned. The reaming of the US intelligence infrastructure post-Rumsfeld, the ascendant might of China's economy, and the looming end of Bush's ability to screw things up are getting people to finally wake up, realize that there's more out there than just Iraq and Islamist terrorism, and take these things more seriously.
They're doing it way too slowly, and way too late for my liking, but it's got to start somewhere.
Or Sprint. My father has been desperate for a good excuse to kick Sprint to the curb and buy and iPhone, and this is just about as good an excuse as he's likely to find. I may very well find myself with one of the new iPhones, even though I don't have a lot of use for it, or desire for one.
Wikipedia may have serious accuracy problems in a lot of areas (not all of coruse, but it's not hard to find them) but at least they aren't using me as unpaid labor to save them from having to hire researchers.
Well, as far as the PSP goes (and I realize that it doesn't go all that far) you're already starting to get releases that are flat out not going to happen in the US. As just one example of a game I'm going to have to import that I never thought I'd have to, Breath of Fire III is released in English in the UK, but not here. I didn't think the PSP was that much bigger there than here, or that the Breath of Fire brand was in such decay in America that no one was going to buy it, but apparently that shift is starting to happen.
...I'd be playing one of them instead of a tabletop RPG that's been warped into playing something like them.
Everything I've seen about this seems like the system is just being loaded down with regressions. My impression from everything I have read of it is that the entire game has shed nearly everything that made it "Advanced" D&D, and now it's just back to plain, vanilla, 1980s D&D (aside from the total combat overhaul). The new alignment system is a direct throwback to the Basic Set era of non-Advanced D&D. The classectomy takes out a lot of the original complicated problem child classes leaving the list far more like the original D&D list of classes (hunt down an original copy of the AD&D 1st Edition rules and take a gander at what used to be required to be a bard, and druids were always a tortured rules situation in the default rules). Even the assumption of miniatures is a total throwback to original D&D (remember, this all started as a fantasy version of a wargame).
I'm just glad I still have my old 2.x Core Rules CD-Rom. That was real Advanced D&D. Yes, there were big problems with it, but the system was impressively modular. You could lop huge chunks of it off, or beat parts you didn't like into a better shape, or attach new rules without needing to rework the entire system. The very first bit of text in the original 2nd Edition PHB was the editor's note telling you, explicitly to get rid of whatever rule in the game that you didn't like, though no one apparently read it, because people acted like the game was a straight-jacket, and bad DMs thought that just because player X bought crazy new supplement Y that it was official, and that they had to allow it in their game, whether it made sense or not.
All they needed to do in 3.x was to make the good changes they did make (get the druid class under control, reform the experience/level system in general, and get rid of racial limits) and explicitly modularize every the system. What they didn't need to do is throw the baby out with the bathwater, but there was such a bad taste in people's mouths from the waning days of pre-WotC D&D, that I guess they felt they needed a wholesale, and obvious change to get people back to the game, and apparently surface regression to 1st edition (bringing back the Barbarian, monk, etc) and making it more super-powery (ie, feats) was the way to do it. Obviously worked well enough, since so many people play 3.x and more power to them. What I don't understand is why they thought a regression to the freaking Basic Set was going to go over well.
I'm just glad I've got my copy of the Core Rules CD-ROM, and some PDFs of the most original RPG campaign settings ever thought up (Planescape, RIP. Dark Sun, why did they revise you? Wither Spelljammer?) and I'll cheerfully ignore all the crappy stuff (remember the "Shaman" supplement anyone?) like people should have done in the first place.
The only Dashboard widgets I ever use are the weather report, and the flight tracker, but that's obviously only when I need to track a flight, which isn't often.
I don't like the way Dashboard works. For using a calculator, I find it much more useful to just put Calculator.app in the dock. If the Dashboard were implemented more in the manner of Gnome/KDE panels, or into the top menu bar (like, click the little flight tracker icon, or calculator icon, or whatever in the menu bar to activate the widget to pop up, kinda like ye olde desk accessories) then I'd certainly make use of it. I haven't seen Plasma, but if they're copying Dashboard in any way I'll probably be avoid that too, if I ever bother with KDE 4.
As an American, it proved that I should never, ever drive if I find myself in England. Couldn't seem to get the hang of not driving straight into oncoming traffic no matter how long I tried.
...as long as it continues in the same vein as Symphony of the Night and its descendents. IMNSHO, it was the best thing that ever happened to Castlevania. The 3d incarnations on PS2/Xbox were crud, not interested at all if they're going back in that direction.