Agreed. I just recently set up a Debian box, belatedly realized I forgot to install a GUI... and then set up PuTTY and SFTP on my WinXP machines and suddenly didn't care anymore.
Linux machines right now are too split because everyone has fourteen different opinions on how to do the same damn thing. A Windows machine is a Windows machine is a Windows machine. You can sit down at any Windows computer on the face of the planet and guarantee you're seeing (more or less) the same interface as every other Windows machine (barring any weird Explorer replacements like, say, LainOS or something-- and yes, I know LainOS isn't a Windows project yet). The Mac interface hasn't undergone any massive changes in the twenty years we've been using it (the OS X Dock doesn't really count as an interface change). With Linux, you have to deal with KDE, Gnome, miscellaney X variants... it's too much for an average user.
The one company to take the Linux kernel, craft it into an easy-to-install and clue-challenged-friendly graphical windowing environment, and provide support for and be supported by third-party vendors, will be the company that will bring Linux into the mainstream (except that by that point it won't be called Linux by the gen.pop.; it'll be something like, oh, I dunno, Linspire, maybe?).
Version 1.1, May 16, 2004-- Major bugfix to grpahics display options. "/. Troll" command no longer shows sexually explicit ASCII 'art'.
1.15, May 18, 2004-- "/. Troll" command now filters obscenity.
1.2, May 19, 2004-- "/. Troll" command now includes disclaimer. Disclaimer reads as follows: "WARNING: Do not try this at home. Trolling can be hazardous to your karma. --CmdrTaco, Slashdot.org (please visit my site though)"
1.3 May 23, 2004-- "/. Troll" command reduced in power; trolling now provides 3 Happiness instead of 30.
1.5 May 26, 2004-- Fixed bug in "/. Troll" command that didn't penalize trolling. Trolling now provides 3 Happiness and -10 Social.
1.7 May 29, 2004-- Reports of real-life suicides has prompted us to remove the "/. Troll" command from Real Lives 2004. This command will not be reinstated in any further patch.
The spammers don't care about the laws of the U.S. when they can just spoof the headers into thinking they came from outside the U.S.; and the U.S., despite whatever delusions my duly elected officials may be believing right now, can't enforce something like this on spam originating outside the States.
An issue like spam-- or any 'regulation' of the internet-- cannot be done piecemeal, on a country-by-country basis. Internet laws, in order to be effective, must be issued, interpreted, and enforced by an international body; otherwise the offender can simply research the laws of other countries and find somewhere where his action is either implicitly legal or not explicitly illegal. The U.N. does not count in this regard, as it was not created to be an international police agency. Either a new agency must be created, an existing group like Interpol must take responsibility, or the world needs to collectively shut up and take it.
Re:Fight back!
on
Paid To Spam
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Sadly, an easy way to prevent decent folks like you and me from screwing over the bad guys would be to seed several addresses into the listing that go back to the master spammer. If the master spammer never receives the email-- which conveniently has a tracking number to identify the machine that sent it-- the sender never gets a dime.
I'm unimpressed, but wait till someone codes this into a trojan with his spam-sender-id-thingy on it. He'll easily make thousands an hour without ever sullying his own machine, and at no risk to his ISP account because hey-- he's not sending the spam, the zillions of clueless users he infected are.
I'd make a joke about how he swings his magic wand off and on the field, but he's a pitcher.
(Note for those of you who don't follow baseball/are humor-impaired/aren't from the U.S.: the Boston Red Sox are an American League team, and thus the pitcher does not bat. Contrast this to a National League team like the Pittsburgh Pirates, where the pitcher does bat.)
I hardly think calling him an idiot is justified when you yourself have a gaping flaw in your argument. Witness:
At least where I live, penalties for drunk driving have been steadily rising, the age limits on drivers liscenses have increased by a good margin, and the driving tests have gotten enormously harder. Also, safety standards in cars have been steadily increasing.
All these wonderful controls are just super-dee-duper, until you realize that you mention nothing about enforcing these mandates. Come to think of it, that's what the entire problem is-- enforcement. We can have all the laws we want, we can make sure nobody crosses a doorframe without being duly notarized, fingerprinted, and RFID-tagged, but unless we have high-integrity, resistant-to-corruption, rock-solid officials to enforce the laws (I'm looking at you, ladies with the metal-detector wands, and you, air marshals who read porno instead of keeping your eyes open for trouble), it's all for nothing.
When I was in high school (just a few years ago, believe it or not), the driver's ed teacher was arrested for drunk driving. Twice. In the same summer. It was pretty ridiculous, and eventually he lost his license... but the fact of the matter is, he should never have had it after the first DWI conviction. (I wonder how he's doing now-- I was sort of friends with his daughter, and after I went off to college I lost contact with them...)
Nintendo would have had to have suffered massive brain trauma in 80% of its executives to NOT approve a big-ticket title like Enter the Matrix, shitty game or not. I'm all for quality in games, mind you, but with the hype that EtM received pre-release no company would have wanted to be in the position of "everybody else has this really great game but us", the fact that it eventually did suck notwithstanding. For more examples of how NOT to do multi-platform, see Sega and EA Sports, Capcom/Virgin Interactive and Aladdin (SNES/Genesis), and pretty much the entirety of games released for the Saturn and Playstation, but not the N64.
Like it's that hard to throw in a window saying "Do you want to install this?"
No, that's actually the easy part. The hard part is getting the window to show up AFTER the spyware's already been installed, and rigging it so that clicking "no" destroys the ability to uninstall it.
God dammit, I'd better shut up before some jackhole actually implements this...
You know what I'd like to see? The heads of the US divisions of the big Japanese game companies (ie Nintendo, Sega, Konami, Capcom, etc) all just simultaneously quit their jobs, pool their money, and open up a studio devoted to localizing strange Japanese games with niche markets. They could make a killing with that idea.
This differs from Eidos' "Fresh Games" (ugh) label in that Eidos started it shortly before their entire company went to pot (around the time of the Tomb Raider movie, 'coincidentally') and then blamed it for the decline in revenue (also 'coincidentally'). I don't think there were more than four games released under the "Fresh" label (Mr. Mosquito, Mad Maestro, Legaia 2, and something just recently that didn't register in my brain).
I agree with you, but we would be remiss to leave out these other examples:
Aerith Gainsborough (Final Fantasy VII)-- please, for the love of God, don't make me spell this one out. Shion Uzuki (Xenosaga)-- She's not oversexualized, she's a smart and capable character, and through the entire game the only real reference to her gender is the address "Miss Vector". Aribeth (Neverwinter Nights)-- a female rising to supreme commander of a military force, plus she has an actual backstory as opposed to being a one-dimensional "commanding officer" stereotype. Cecilia Adlehyde, Lilka Eleniak, Virginia Maxwell (Wild ARMs series)-- strong female leads without overblown costumes or weak reasons for adventuring. On an off-note, Wild ARMs and Phantasy Star are two of the very few series that really get characterization dead-on.
There are others in games I haven't played (Valkyrie Profile, Suikoden III's Chris, etc.) but you get the idea. I suppose a better sweepingly false overgeneralization would be to say that "Game Designers Who Don't Make RPGs Don't Portray Women Realistically".
I believe if an American lived in Sweden for a while (a country with one of the highest mobile phone penetration rates), they would quickly get used to hearing phones ringing and people talking on them all the time, without feeling necessarily annoyed. It's the constant reinforcement by others in US society that mobile phones are in fact extremely annoying that maintains this perception.
Agreed. I was without a cell phone for a while when I was working for the cable company in a particularly out-of-the-way Pennsylvania (U.S.) village, where cell phone coverage was so poor that almost nobody had them. When I would go back to civilization (read: anywhere but that village), I noticed myself getting irritated at the people talking on their phones. However, once I got my current job (a month ago) and started up a new service contract, cell phone usage by anyone and everyone was just something I kinda brushed off as a fact of life, just like I did when I had had my previous phone.
Did you ever notice that the people most pissed off about cell phones are typically the ones who don't have them? It could be the other way around (they don't have them because they hate them), but I think it's more based in envy.
For the record, I a) move to someplace isolated when I talk on the phone, but answer before I get there; b) dislike SMS texting because it's unusable when communicating with non-tech-savvy folks; c) love my ringtones (3G Upload kicks ass) and have a unique one; and d) turn down/off the ringer when appropriate (movie theater, meeting) and not when it's merely convenient (I don't want to be bothered).
Seriously, I was never that big of a fan of Tribes, despite my roommate's repeated installs of it on my machine without permission... It seemed like an interesting game, but I just didn't get into it. I might pick the magazine up just for the servers... y'know, in case we get really bored at a LAN party or something.
Then again, some people swear by the series. Not trying to troll here (even though the tone of this post really resembles a troll), but what's the advantage of Tribes over something like Unreal Tournament (the first one-- let's be fair here)? When I played Tribes it was a tedious exercise in jumping across huge, wide-open tracts of empty land only to get shot in the eye by a sniper halfway across it. I like UT's CTF maps a lot better; they're more inventive and offer genuine strategy (ie a sniper is at a lot more risk because the positions only allow him to shoot in a small area and not the entire field-- OK, so not all the maps followed this, but enough did). UT2K4 is good, but is there a reason I should really consider picking Tribes up again?
I never knew it was for copyright protection. The way I always reasoned it out was as follows: Remember the old days of the NES, when you would put a cartridge in and it might work, but it might not? And you had to jiggle the cartridge or blow on it? Nintendo saw this bug and put the "Nintendo" logo in the Game Boy's boot sequence in order to provide a checksum for the cartridge data. The SNES and N64 probably had similar setups (which were invisible to the user), but with the advent of disc-based consoles the booting screen existed both to allow access to memory card functions and to cover up the game's initial loading. With the GBA, it's there both for compatibility and also to allow access to the network-boot capability.
[...]but the Wonderswan ports of FF1 and FF2 did find their way to the US as Final Fantasy Origins... Maybe if the FF3 port had been completed, we'd have that game as well[.]
All things considered, it still might. Assuming S/E decides to bring this over (and let's be totally honest here, they'd be insane not to), it's very likely that any hopes for a US localization of FF3 will hinge on sales of FF1&2.
I bought Origins when it came out, played through it sporadically for a while until I finished FF1, and then sold it because I had no intentions of going through FF2 on my PS2. The games' repetitive nature (read: combat every fifteen seconds) makes them very well-suited to the GBA, and once the cart is released here, I'll be starting FF2. Personally, I'm surprised this wasn't S/E's first title on the Game Boy.
I haven't read the article yet-- will do so when I get home-- but the idea of using the MP system just feels so alien to me. Sure, I played through FF1 on Easy Mode, but it was far more challenging than some other RPGs I've played because you actually had to think about your magic use rather than use the time-honored tradition (snicker) of "use Ultima on all enemies, chug Ether, repeat until final boss is crispy".
I was looking into Debian, actually-- I'd managed to install knoppix on the machine while I was between jobs, but that seems to be lacking, well, a lot of stuff a standard install would have. I'll probably start up BT tonight and get the latest ISOs. Thanks for the input.
Yes, it is. An MP3 server doesn't need to have the monitor on for more than maybe ten minutes per bootup, which saves quite a bit of electricity.
On a related note, this is something I've wanted to do for a while (I have an old P2 with a 10gig HD not doing anything). Can anyone show me an easy-to-setup MP3 streamer for Linux? I was able to cobble together a solution under Win98, but I want to use the machine as a combination PHP development box/MP3 jukebox. Open to suggestions, here.
I was a North American Fall Webworm in my past life. Those were the good old days... What were you in your former life? That reminds me, I saw Gubayama the other day in Shibomnigee. He said to give you his best. Raiden, something happened to me last Thursday when I was driving home. I had a couple of miles to go -- I looked up and saw a glowing orange object in the sky, to the east! It was moving very irregularly... suddenly there was intense light all around me -- and when I came to, I was home. What do you think happened to me? I hear it's amazing when the famous purple stuffed worm in flap-jaw space with the tuning fork does a raw blink on Hara-Kiri Rock. I need scissors! 61!
This doesn't really seem to apply since you're not using actual real-world currency. I'm not an accountant or tax lawyer, but I don't think a government can tax trade not being done in its native currency (i.e. the U.S. can't charge tax at time of sale if I were to go to Toronto and buy a bottle of soda; on larger purchases, like a computer, they might be able to at the border/Customs, but I'm not sure).
I play Final Fantasy XI, and so far I have yet to see any real advantage to spending cash money to buy gil or other items in the game. To my understanding, the game's economies are structured to not take this sort of thing into account. Besides, in FFXI, gil is abundant if you just work a little for it (selling crystals, farming items at the AH, heck, even making some good deals at the AH/Bazaar).
I'm not saying people shouldn't be allowed to do it-- hey, it's their money-- but to me, at least, it defeats the purpose of playing the game. "I spent $500 on the best sword evar and now I'm a L1 Warrior with the Atma Weapon +5", which he can't use until level 70 anyway. It's far more impressive to either a) kill the monster guarding the sword or b) save up enough gil to buy it from another player. Either way, someone gets the fun intended-- and maybe you do too; maybe you like fishing better than fighting, and sell your catches at the AH for ungodly sums. That works too.
The point of all this rambling is that in older games, like UO (which I did play for about a week before I realized it was populated mostly by elitists who'd sooner give me a quick and messy death than the time of day), money was hard to come by and the methods for getting it were somewhat tedious. In newer games there are plenty of occupations that can earn a player money, and they're very diverse. Thus, buying money outside the game in these games could be seen as cheating by those who spend a weekend building up their skills in the hopes of becoming the next virtual millionaire.
Oh yeah, and this of course ignores the subset of MMO games where a primary way to get money is to buy it from the developers. Gunbound comes to mind as a big example.
When the GBA first came out, almost everyone wrote about what games thay'd love to see on the system. The only thing that makes today different from back then is that Square-Enix has made nice with Nintendo. With that in mind, I think the trend here should be for porting not just individual games, but series of classic games on one cart. Phantasy Star Collection was a good start (but it's too bad PS4 still hasn't made it out yet), but Sega has plenty of old franchises they could put together (how about a "Master System Classics" disc for GC?).
Wing Commander wasn't that bad....all right, it wasn't great, either, but at least it was halfway watchable. Besides, WC was made because that series was already practically a movie anyway.
Well, Samus herself is blonde... On the plus side, I really doubt they'd write the suit out of the story. After all, it's practically one of the defining elements of the series; it'd be like making Tomb Raider with [random flat-chested actress].
I just wonder about the trailers and TV spots. How many non-gamers' minds will be blown if the ads never show our beloved butt-kicker out of the suit?
I concur... It would be an interesting thing to see; after all, I can only imagine what my parents felt when they watched the first moon landing. I'm all for another trip to Luna. Some of us have never had humans there in our lifetimes.
I suppose I ought to add "...you insensitive clod" to that, but here it just doesn't seem appropriate.
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I DO NOT WANT a Unix as my desktop system.
Agreed. I just recently set up a Debian box, belatedly realized I forgot to install a GUI... and then set up PuTTY and SFTP on my WinXP machines and suddenly didn't care anymore.
Linux machines right now are too split because everyone has fourteen different opinions on how to do the same damn thing. A Windows machine is a Windows machine is a Windows machine. You can sit down at any Windows computer on the face of the planet and guarantee you're seeing (more or less) the same interface as every other Windows machine (barring any weird Explorer replacements like, say, LainOS or something-- and yes, I know LainOS isn't a Windows project yet). The Mac interface hasn't undergone any massive changes in the twenty years we've been using it (the OS X Dock doesn't really count as an interface change). With Linux, you have to deal with KDE, Gnome, miscellaney X variants... it's too much for an average user.
The one company to take the Linux kernel, craft it into an easy-to-install and clue-challenged-friendly graphical windowing environment, and provide support for and be supported by third-party vendors, will be the company that will bring Linux into the mainstream (except that by that point it won't be called Linux by the gen.pop.; it'll be something like, oh, I dunno, Linspire, maybe?).
Ah, I guess not.
Read the article? Where do you think this is, pal? ^_^
Anyway, I wonder if it will work?
No.
The spammers don't care about the laws of the U.S. when they can just spoof the headers into thinking they came from outside the U.S.; and the U.S., despite whatever delusions my duly elected officials may be believing right now, can't enforce something like this on spam originating outside the States.
An issue like spam-- or any 'regulation' of the internet-- cannot be done piecemeal, on a country-by-country basis. Internet laws, in order to be effective, must be issued, interpreted, and enforced by an international body; otherwise the offender can simply research the laws of other countries and find somewhere where his action is either implicitly legal or not explicitly illegal. The U.N. does not count in this regard, as it was not created to be an international police agency. Either a new agency must be created, an existing group like Interpol must take responsibility, or the world needs to collectively shut up and take it.
Sadly, an easy way to prevent decent folks like you and me from screwing over the bad guys would be to seed several addresses into the listing that go back to the master spammer. If the master spammer never receives the email-- which conveniently has a tracking number to identify the machine that sent it-- the sender never gets a dime.
I'm unimpressed, but wait till someone codes this into a trojan with his spam-sender-id-thingy on it. He'll easily make thousands an hour without ever sullying his own machine, and at no risk to his ISP account because hey-- he's not sending the spam, the zillions of clueless users he infected are.
I'd make a joke about how he swings his magic wand off and on the field, but he's a pitcher.
(Note for those of you who don't follow baseball/are humor-impaired/aren't from the U.S.: the Boston Red Sox are an American League team, and thus the pitcher does not bat. Contrast this to a National League team like the Pittsburgh Pirates, where the pitcher does bat.)
I hardly think calling him an idiot is justified when you yourself have a gaping flaw in your argument. Witness:
At least where I live, penalties for drunk driving have been steadily rising, the age limits on drivers liscenses have increased by a good margin, and the driving tests have gotten enormously harder. Also, safety standards in cars have been steadily increasing.
All these wonderful controls are just super-dee-duper, until you realize that you mention nothing about enforcing these mandates. Come to think of it, that's what the entire problem is-- enforcement. We can have all the laws we want, we can make sure nobody crosses a doorframe without being duly notarized, fingerprinted, and RFID-tagged, but unless we have high-integrity, resistant-to-corruption, rock-solid officials to enforce the laws (I'm looking at you, ladies with the metal-detector wands, and you, air marshals who read porno instead of keeping your eyes open for trouble), it's all for nothing.
When I was in high school (just a few years ago, believe it or not), the driver's ed teacher was arrested for drunk driving. Twice. In the same summer. It was pretty ridiculous, and eventually he lost his license... but the fact of the matter is, he should never have had it after the first DWI conviction. (I wonder how he's doing now-- I was sort of friends with his daughter, and after I went off to college I lost contact with them...)
Nintendo would have had to have suffered massive brain trauma in 80% of its executives to NOT approve a big-ticket title like Enter the Matrix, shitty game or not. I'm all for quality in games, mind you, but with the hype that EtM received pre-release no company would have wanted to be in the position of "everybody else has this really great game but us", the fact that it eventually did suck notwithstanding. For more examples of how NOT to do multi-platform, see Sega and EA Sports, Capcom/Virgin Interactive and Aladdin (SNES/Genesis), and pretty much the entirety of games released for the Saturn and Playstation, but not the N64.
Like it's that hard to throw in a window saying "Do you want to install this?"
No, that's actually the easy part. The hard part is getting the window to show up AFTER the spyware's already been installed, and rigging it so that clicking "no" destroys the ability to uninstall it.
God dammit, I'd better shut up before some jackhole actually implements this...
You know what I'd like to see? The heads of the US divisions of the big Japanese game companies (ie Nintendo, Sega, Konami, Capcom, etc) all just simultaneously quit their jobs, pool their money, and open up a studio devoted to localizing strange Japanese games with niche markets. They could make a killing with that idea.
This differs from Eidos' "Fresh Games" (ugh) label in that Eidos started it shortly before their entire company went to pot (around the time of the Tomb Raider movie, 'coincidentally') and then blamed it for the decline in revenue (also 'coincidentally'). I don't think there were more than four games released under the "Fresh" label (Mr. Mosquito, Mad Maestro, Legaia 2, and something just recently that didn't register in my brain).
I agree with you, but we would be remiss to leave out these other examples:
Aerith Gainsborough (Final Fantasy VII)-- please, for the love of God, don't make me spell this one out.
Shion Uzuki (Xenosaga)-- She's not oversexualized, she's a smart and capable character, and through the entire game the only real reference to her gender is the address "Miss Vector".
Aribeth (Neverwinter Nights)-- a female rising to supreme commander of a military force, plus she has an actual backstory as opposed to being a one-dimensional "commanding officer" stereotype.
Cecilia Adlehyde, Lilka Eleniak, Virginia Maxwell (Wild ARMs series)-- strong female leads without overblown costumes or weak reasons for adventuring. On an off-note, Wild ARMs and Phantasy Star are two of the very few series that really get characterization dead-on.
There are others in games I haven't played (Valkyrie Profile, Suikoden III's Chris, etc.) but you get the idea. I suppose a better sweepingly false overgeneralization would be to say that "Game Designers Who Don't Make RPGs Don't Portray Women Realistically".
I believe if an American lived in Sweden for a while (a country with one of the highest mobile phone penetration rates), they would quickly get used to hearing phones ringing and people talking on them all the time, without feeling necessarily annoyed. It's the constant reinforcement by others in US society that mobile phones are in fact extremely annoying that maintains this perception.
Agreed. I was without a cell phone for a while when I was working for the cable company in a particularly out-of-the-way Pennsylvania (U.S.) village, where cell phone coverage was so poor that almost nobody had them. When I would go back to civilization (read: anywhere but that village), I noticed myself getting irritated at the people talking on their phones. However, once I got my current job (a month ago) and started up a new service contract, cell phone usage by anyone and everyone was just something I kinda brushed off as a fact of life, just like I did when I had had my previous phone.
Did you ever notice that the people most pissed off about cell phones are typically the ones who don't have them? It could be the other way around (they don't have them because they hate them), but I think it's more based in envy.
For the record, I a) move to someplace isolated when I talk on the phone, but answer before I get there; b) dislike SMS texting because it's unusable when communicating with non-tech-savvy folks; c) love my ringtones (3G Upload kicks ass) and have a unique one; and d) turn down/off the ringer when appropriate (movie theater, meeting) and not when it's merely convenient (I don't want to be bothered).
Seriously, I was never that big of a fan of Tribes, despite my roommate's repeated installs of it on my machine without permission... It seemed like an interesting game, but I just didn't get into it. I might pick the magazine up just for the servers... y'know, in case we get really bored at a LAN party or something.
Then again, some people swear by the series. Not trying to troll here (even though the tone of this post really resembles a troll), but what's the advantage of Tribes over something like Unreal Tournament (the first one-- let's be fair here)? When I played Tribes it was a tedious exercise in jumping across huge, wide-open tracts of empty land only to get shot in the eye by a sniper halfway across it. I like UT's CTF maps a lot better; they're more inventive and offer genuine strategy (ie a sniper is at a lot more risk because the positions only allow him to shoot in a small area and not the entire field-- OK, so not all the maps followed this, but enough did). UT2K4 is good, but is there a reason I should really consider picking Tribes up again?
I never knew it was for copyright protection. The way I always reasoned it out was as follows: Remember the old days of the NES, when you would put a cartridge in and it might work, but it might not? And you had to jiggle the cartridge or blow on it? Nintendo saw this bug and put the "Nintendo" logo in the Game Boy's boot sequence in order to provide a checksum for the cartridge data. The SNES and N64 probably had similar setups (which were invisible to the user), but with the advent of disc-based consoles the booting screen existed both to allow access to memory card functions and to cover up the game's initial loading. With the GBA, it's there both for compatibility and also to allow access to the network-boot capability.
[...]but the Wonderswan ports of FF1 and FF2 did find their way to the US as Final Fantasy Origins... Maybe if the FF3 port had been completed, we'd have that game as well[.]
All things considered, it still might. Assuming S/E decides to bring this over (and let's be totally honest here, they'd be insane not to), it's very likely that any hopes for a US localization of FF3 will hinge on sales of FF1&2.
I bought Origins when it came out, played through it sporadically for a while until I finished FF1, and then sold it because I had no intentions of going through FF2 on my PS2. The games' repetitive nature (read: combat every fifteen seconds) makes them very well-suited to the GBA, and once the cart is released here, I'll be starting FF2. Personally, I'm surprised this wasn't S/E's first title on the Game Boy.
I haven't read the article yet-- will do so when I get home-- but the idea of using the MP system just feels so alien to me. Sure, I played through FF1 on Easy Mode, but it was far more challenging than some other RPGs I've played because you actually had to think about your magic use rather than use the time-honored tradition (snicker) of "use Ultima on all enemies, chug Ether, repeat until final boss is crispy".
I was looking into Debian, actually-- I'd managed to install knoppix on the machine while I was between jobs, but that seems to be lacking, well, a lot of stuff a standard install would have. I'll probably start up BT tonight and get the latest ISOs. Thanks for the input.
Yes, it is. An MP3 server doesn't need to have the monitor on for more than maybe ten minutes per bootup, which saves quite a bit of electricity.
On a related note, this is something I've wanted to do for a while (I have an old P2 with a 10gig HD not doing anything). Can anyone show me an easy-to-setup MP3 streamer for Linux? I was able to cobble together a solution under Win98, but I want to use the machine as a combination PHP development box/MP3 jukebox. Open to suggestions, here.
I was a North American Fall Webworm in my past life. Those were the good old days... What were you in your former life? That reminds me, I saw Gubayama the other day in Shibomnigee. He said to give you his best. Raiden, something happened to me last Thursday when I was driving home. I had a couple of miles to go -- I looked up and saw a glowing orange object in the sky, to the east! It was moving very irregularly... suddenly there was intense light all around me -- and when I came to, I was home. What do you think happened to me? I hear it's amazing when the famous purple stuffed worm in flap-jaw space with the tuning fork does a raw blink on Hara-Kiri Rock. I need scissors! 61!
This doesn't really seem to apply since you're not using actual real-world currency. I'm not an accountant or tax lawyer, but I don't think a government can tax trade not being done in its native currency (i.e. the U.S. can't charge tax at time of sale if I were to go to Toronto and buy a bottle of soda; on larger purchases, like a computer, they might be able to at the border/Customs, but I'm not sure).
I play Final Fantasy XI, and so far I have yet to see any real advantage to spending cash money to buy gil or other items in the game. To my understanding, the game's economies are structured to not take this sort of thing into account. Besides, in FFXI, gil is abundant if you just work a little for it (selling crystals, farming items at the AH, heck, even making some good deals at the AH/Bazaar).
I'm not saying people shouldn't be allowed to do it-- hey, it's their money-- but to me, at least, it defeats the purpose of playing the game. "I spent $500 on the best sword evar and now I'm a L1 Warrior with the Atma Weapon +5", which he can't use until level 70 anyway. It's far more impressive to either a) kill the monster guarding the sword or b) save up enough gil to buy it from another player. Either way, someone gets the fun intended-- and maybe you do too; maybe you like fishing better than fighting, and sell your catches at the AH for ungodly sums. That works too.
The point of all this rambling is that in older games, like UO (which I did play for about a week before I realized it was populated mostly by elitists who'd sooner give me a quick and messy death than the time of day), money was hard to come by and the methods for getting it were somewhat tedious. In newer games there are plenty of occupations that can earn a player money, and they're very diverse. Thus, buying money outside the game in these games could be seen as cheating by those who spend a weekend building up their skills in the hopes of becoming the next virtual millionaire.
Oh yeah, and this of course ignores the subset of MMO games where a primary way to get money is to buy it from the developers. Gunbound comes to mind as a big example.
When the GBA first came out, almost everyone wrote about what games thay'd love to see on the system. The only thing that makes today different from back then is that Square-Enix has made nice with Nintendo. With that in mind, I think the trend here should be for porting not just individual games, but series of classic games on one cart. Phantasy Star Collection was a good start (but it's too bad PS4 still hasn't made it out yet), but Sega has plenty of old franchises they could put together (how about a "Master System Classics" disc for GC?).
Wing Commander wasn't that bad. ...all right, it wasn't great, either, but at least it was halfway watchable. Besides, WC was made because that series was already practically a movie anyway.
Well, Samus herself is blonde... On the plus side, I really doubt they'd write the suit out of the story. After all, it's practically one of the defining elements of the series; it'd be like making Tomb Raider with [random flat-chested actress].
I just wonder about the trailers and TV spots. How many non-gamers' minds will be blown if the ads never show our beloved butt-kicker out of the suit?
I'm sold on the idea. I just wonder how he's going to get the doves to fly through space.
I concur... It would be an interesting thing to see; after all, I can only imagine what my parents felt when they watched the first moon landing. I'm all for another trip to Luna. Some of us have never had humans there in our lifetimes.
I suppose I ought to add "...you insensitive clod" to that, but here it just doesn't seem appropriate.