Well, I'd been sitting on this since I got my Tivo2Go update and figured it out in approximately fifteen minutes. It looks like Tivo's screwing all us Mac types now, so I've got no cause to keep it to myself anymore.
Fire up Safari and go to https:// or choose the tivo from your rendezvous/bonjour bar and change it to read https://
User name: tivo Password: your tivo access key that you can get from your Tivo account online
From here, you can download encrypted files off of your Tivo to your Mac via a web interface. From there, it's a matter of scouring a few forums to find the correct command line tools to strip the DRM off of files and leave you with pristine, quicktime playable, Toast burnable.m2v files. In deference to the DMCA, I'll leave the forum scouring as an exercise to the reader. The terms 'tivo' 'demux' 'mac' and 'key' generally appear on the same page.
My family is from the Baltimore area originally, and I can tell you that up until the last time I was in the area (2002ish), $2 bills were still pretty commonplace.
One of the main reasons for that is that they're given out as winnings and change at horse races, which are very popular in that part of the country.
I used to get tons of them as a kid when my family would go to the track (my strategy at the age of 10: don't be greedy, look at the odds and bet to show on every single race. you won't end up rich, but you'll walk out with money for a couple new AD&D books).
Occasionally, I'll still get them in birthday cards from my relatives up that direction. Don't think I've *ever* gotten one as change down here in Florida, though.
For the time being, if you need to copy resource fork info, like, say a cron job to back up one server drive onto another, you can use the ditto command. It's basically cp that's resource-fork aware, and can do other nifty stuff like archive extraction. It's also metadata aware.
I got tired of dealing with the pop-up-blocking arms race several months ago and just decided to start filtering pretty much all advertising, full-stop.
There's a wonderful little extension for Safari called Pith Helmet that does a fair amount of adblock filtering, blacklisted hosts and some other voodoo. I can't remember ever seeing it 'break' a site or the design of a site: even ones using crazy CSS tricks to get revenge on those of us with adblockers. Combined with Safari's built-in popup blocking, I've yet to see the problem everyone has been metioning. There's a possibility that the ad servers responsible are in my blacklist.
PithHelmet is an extended site preferences and ad blocking plugin for Apple's Safari browser. The basic purpose of the plugin is to empower you the user to view the web as you like. You can block ad images, Flash, Shockwave or horrible midi loops - the world is your oyster.
This is just a series of hacks on top of Apple's WebKit framework, but it seems to work rather effectively.
Due to the manner in which PithHelmet blocks ad content, most types of advertising content can be caught in the filter - this includes images, javascript, css, text, iframes, popups and popunders.
At first I felt guilty for blocking all ads, even good-faith, not-horribly-annoying ones like on/. Then I realized than I could relax the filter on sites that I felt weren't doing any harm, and were using not-horribly-sleazy ad placing services, which I've been happily doing ever since.
God help you if you've got Flash, Shockwave or Java ads, though. All I see is a big white hole in the page.
Try holding down the option key when inserting the out of region DVD and you should get raw data by forcing the Mac to read the disc as data, not as DVD Video.
Also, with a little googling you should be able to find some region-free goodness.
Powerbooks are as hacker friendly as is possible, but the term hacker means that you're at least attempting to find the solution yourself...
As a kid (early to mid 80s), I noticed that one of my two cats seemed to be able to see the beams from remote controls and lasertag guns. I used to run them around in circles for hours until they'd just about collapse.
Anyhow, a plain 'ol flashlight works just fine these days. Oddly enough, only one of my two cats reacts to it at all. (shrug)
You'd pay $250 an hour for fixes, but not $99 once a year for a new OS version?
Put down the crackpipe.
You want my fix?
- You pay me $250.
- I buy 10.3 upgrade for $99, and begin the install.
- I pocket $151 and teach you how to run software update once the install is done.
The "my stuff doesn't do everything that 10.x has, so I feel like it's broken, but I refuse to buy 10.x once a year on general principle" argument just makes me fucking angry.
Thanks for illustrating why. Now go install Yellow Dog, or something, so you can have a completely different set of forums to troll.
First off ditto to everyone who's mentioned the HP 4M/MP printer. It was a rock-solid workhorse. I've still got two going strong, although they both reek of ozone when running and have been retired to backup duty.
I think that's where you're getting hung up. If you buy the low-end SOHO stuff, it's not going to handle high duty cycles or too much abuse, period.
If you buy cheap paper, expect it to jam.
Do you have high humidity in your workspace? High humidity means the paper will start to stick together and cause misfeeds / jams.
Of their current offerings, the LaserJet 1320 falls in the lowend & SOHO category, while the 4200TN is the workhorse designed to have the crap beat out of it.
There's a reason for the $1000 price difference between the two.
You joke, but this is exactly the route I took with my friends and family.
I do a nuke-n-pave of XP systems once (for free, almost always spyware/virus problems) and won't touch the same box again.
I give that person a printout of exactly how much that would have cost at $75-125 an hour, then tell them if they want support from me in the future, they'd best get a Mac, where I can fix any problem they've got in a 10 minute phone call.
Almost all of the afforementioned friends and family have since purchased Macs, and my voice mail is blissfully empty now.
The most recent patch (the holiday one) plus the 10.3.7 updates have made my below-recommended-spec Powerbook G4 play the game nearly as well as my 'gaming' PC.
512mb of RAM is a bare minimum, but beyond that, here's the settings that have my PBG4 12"/ 867 (with crap gen-1 video hardware) running smoothly:
Rez: 1024x768 / 60hz Use Ui Scale: on @.64 Terrain distance: Low Environment detail: Medium Terrain texture: Low Texture detail: Low Gamma: middle Enable all shader effects: On Terrain highlights: off Full screen glow: off Death effect: on Vertex animation shaders: off (you guys can probably use 'on' here -- if you have better video hardware -- if parts of your character are missing, turn this off) Smooth shading: off Trilinear: off Vertical sync: off Cinematic subs: on Hardware cursor: on Level of detail: on
With these settings, I'm even getting over 15FPS in front of the auction houses in Ironforge and Orgrimmar: the areas of the game that used to be down to 2-3FPS.
I have noticed that I'm actually getting *better* performance running at the powerbook's native 1024x768 rez than if I downsize to 800x600.
That said, try running at the native rez of the iMac, but then try a 1024x768 non-stretched rez and see if there's an improvement. Keep in mind that if you run at max resolution on the 20" screen, that's an absurd amount of pixels to be refreshing on each cycle. I know a fair amount of recent mid-to-high end PC video hardware that stutters like hell in WoW in trying to push my 20" cinema display, but does just fine if I run the game inset or reduce the resolution.
You can install off the CDs onto multiple machines as you like, or just copy the game over (Mac-Mac or PC-PC) -- you can even download and install the old open beta client and it'll patch up to date once you manage to log in.
The CD key is used via the webpage where you create your account for the game. No key, no account... although you can use a friend's login and password on any install on any machine. The CD key isn't locked to the install.
Other than that, there's no way to get around buying a box to get a CD Key to get an account.
I normally just stand on the prow of the zeppelin, Titanic-style, have a seat, and pan around looking at the (incredible) view.
Side note: a couple months into playing the game, I'm still slackjawed every time I ride a wyvern/griffin/hippogriff/bat or the Zeppelin. Freaking gorgeous.
I've been playing since open beta and launch day, and I have to agree a billion percent with most of your points.
The level of polish in the game, the questing system, the crafting system, the sheer amount of content, the auction houses, almost zero downtime between fights -- it puts all the other games that I've played on the market to shame.
After downloading the latest patch, I was giggling like a kid for hours seeing all the new holiday themed content. I got into snowball fights with alliance members in Ratchet instead of ganking them (Skullcrusher). I ran around hunting for the Greench, and I sat on Great Father Winter's lap. Contrast this to live 'events' in EQ -- you get a spam that a dragon is flying over the zone you're in, and an epic mob is spawned -- vs in WoW: decorations up in every city, new quests, new crafting items -- an absurd amount of effort for temporary content.
Reading the Blizz forums, you'll get a pretty unbalanced picture -- the min/maxers the 'nerf $class!' and '!nerf $class!' people are very vocal and you'd get the impression that the game is falling apart at the seams. It's not. As many, many other have said before: this game was more 'done' during beta that most MMOs are three years after launch. The overwhelming majority of the players are incredibly happy -- and this is the first decent MMO that my Mac-owning friends can play along with me. Suffice it to say there's a lot of WoW boxes under the tree this year. Blizzard has always has a warm, gushy spot in the hearts of Mac gamers because we're treated as equals -- almost always at launch day (Diablo 2 being the notable exception).
One thing I've noticed about the perceived population imbalances: they seem (to me, based on characters I've rolled and servers I've played on) imbalanced based on the name of the servers. Shadow Moon is way imbalanced on the Alliance side, Skullcrusher and Arthas are way imbalanced on the Horde side.
I wonder if the effect of making the new battlegrounds an instance will help alleviate the population problems... ie first 400 players on each side make it into this instance, next 400 into a new instance.
At any rate, I'm having an absurd amount of fun with the PvE aspects of the game right now -- concentrating on getting my stable of characters to high levels, and not really worrying about hardcore PvP just yet. Yeah, I'll go raid Stormwind or Orgrimmar from time to time, but all in good fun (made it to the king once in Stormwind before getting smacked down);-)
There's no doubt in my mind that the PvP system (when introduced) is going to rock my world.
I was there as well too, on the horde side as a lowbie 16ish Orc hunter.
Hella fun, and contrary to the comments I've seen, I was having silky smooth framerates at 1280x960 rez with a hundred or so toons on the screen at times.
Geforce FX5900 256mb that I picked up for $175 in an open box sale a while back.
The graphics engine handles far more without going into shock than DAoC did -- and I used to fight in fairly epic battles with hundreds there.
I'm really looking for the PvP to be fleshed out on the standard servers. As it stands, it's just too easy for people to, for example, spy on enemy lines with their PvP flag turned off, or run amongst PvPers to make it more difficult to click on targets. There also really aren't penalties, rewards or the much talked about honor system in place yet. I'm dying to see them, because if anyone can get it right it's Blizzard.
Apart from the PvP, after playing for the whole open beta, I'm just shocked at how much content the world has and how immersive it is. It's the most fun I've ever had in an MMO, and I've played a lot of them. At no point during playing any of the five characters I made did I feel like I was treadmilling.
My wife and I made it in the open beta last night.
FYI -- whichever installer / torrent you download, the Mac *and* PC versions are included so you don't have to worry about sucking down 2.6 gigs for each platform if you've got both platforms at your disposal.
Initial impressions after about 2 hours on my little undead warlock:
- Incredible amount of polish (except for the whole server being reduced to rubble thing) - Much quicker progression than other MMORPGS -- level and quest design are extremely well thought out - Seems to borrow from the best of other MMOs, and really polish the hell out of the annoying parts (treadmilling, 'where do I go now?'). You've always got a purpose. - Leveling and progression are a little 'odd' right now -- not knowing how to spec, without the massive fansites that Camelot or EQ have make training a little risky. But this promotes a bit of experimentation, and besides -- my toons are gonna get wiped at launch anyhow. I may as well tinker. - I'm curious about the 'endgame' -- in DAoC it's all about (extremely addictive) consentual PvP. In EQ, it's all about camping. Being Warcraft, I'd assume that the first expansions are going to be seriously PvP focused, similar to what DAoC's got. At least that's my hope.
As a guy with a few lvl 50s in DAoC and an original EQ account abandoned way back around Kunark, I was simply blown away by how much fun I was having. And I loved DAoC.
This is the telling part: I didn't even notice the experience bar in the interface, nor go looking for it until the end of my playtime when I started customizing the interface. It just didn't matter because I was simply having too much fun exploring and doing quests. Yep. FedEx, scavenger and kill quests are fun in WoW and really seem like they're adding to the texture of the world.
This seems to finally be the MMO that my casual gaming friends can pick up along side me.
The last time we tried this was buying about 10 copies of Shadowbane for Macs & PCs, and boy did we get burnt. Badly.
Speaking as someone who married a girl geek, I've had to find workarounds for this set of annoying situations already. She's crafty and won't fall for the 'put the stuff in/etc/' trick so that my hypothethical goth and asian schoolgirl porn won't show via a normal search.
Solution?
Save the porn / super personal stuff on an encrypted disk image saved somewhere inconspicuous, and set cronned (or logout) scripts to scrub your various histories and recent items. Make sure that the machine logs you out after no more than 10 minutes of activity.
Slashdot Mirror
Try turning on cookies. Still works here unlenn you've gotten an upgrade that I haven't.
Well, I'd been sitting on this since I got my Tivo2Go update and figured it out in approximately fifteen minutes. It looks like Tivo's screwing all us Mac types now, so I've got no cause to keep it to myself anymore.
.m2v files. In deference to the DMCA, I'll leave the forum scouring as an exercise to the reader. The terms 'tivo' 'demux' 'mac' and 'key' generally appear on the same page.
Fire up Safari and go to https:// or choose the tivo from your rendezvous/bonjour bar and change it to read https://
User name: tivo
Password: your tivo access key that you can get from your Tivo account online
From here, you can download encrypted files off of your Tivo to your Mac via a web interface. From there, it's a matter of scouring a few forums to find the correct command line tools to strip the DRM off of files and leave you with pristine, quicktime playable, Toast burnable
A little birdy told me that they're just pure html, css and javascript.
Simply open the package in the browser and it's liberated.
I'm waiting to see what third party developers end up doing with that tech. It's pretty cool.
My family is from the Baltimore area originally, and I can tell you that up until the last time I was in the area (2002ish), $2 bills were still pretty commonplace.
One of the main reasons for that is that they're given out as winnings and change at horse races, which are very popular in that part of the country.
I used to get tons of them as a kid when my family would go to the track (my strategy at the age of 10: don't be greedy, look at the odds and bet to show on every single race. you won't end up rich, but you'll walk out with money for a couple new AD&D books).
Occasionally, I'll still get them in birthday cards from my relatives up that direction. Don't think I've *ever* gotten one as change down here in Florida, though.
Meh, nothing to see here.
I hacked up this solution to auto-generate 'pretty' page titles for CMS-driven websites *many* years ago. Mine didn't require Javascript.
Course, I didn't give it a spiffy name, apply for a patent and file a press release on discovering the obvious.
Option 1:
Step 1:
Embed font in question in sized Flash title block area, create variable text field named titletext
Step 2:
Embed Flash applet in page, and add titletext=whatever into your embed and object code. Whatever being the current page's title, etc, pulled from CMS.
The cool part about this is that the flash title block is *tiny* and remains in cache.
Option 2 (server-intensive):
Have the server generate ImageMagick-based gif or jpg titles after uploading your fonts to the server.
For the time being, if you need to copy resource fork info, like, say a cron job to back up one server drive onto another, you can use the ditto command. It's basically cp that's resource-fork aware, and can do other nifty stuff like archive extraction. It's also metadata aware.
If memory serves, I believe the entire IGN family of sites try pretty hard to sabotage the site's layout and design if you're using a blocker.
Trekweb.com was absolutely horrendous as well. Add the entire UGO family to that list too, as well as allakhazam.com and several of the MMORPG 'hubs'.
I can't vouch for them now, as I haven't seen a non-text-based ad in ages, and I don't at all mind the Google text ads.
There's a wonderful little extension for Safari called Pith Helmet that does a fair amount of adblock filtering, blacklisted hosts and some other voodoo. I can't remember ever seeing it 'break' a site or the design of a site: even ones using crazy CSS tricks to get revenge on those of us with adblockers. Combined with Safari's built-in popup blocking, I've yet to see the problem everyone has been metioning. There's a possibility that the ad servers responsible are in my blacklist.
At first I felt guilty for blocking all ads, even good-faith, not-horribly-annoying ones like on
God help you if you've got Flash, Shockwave or Java ads, though. All I see is a big white hole in the page.
Try holding down the option key when inserting the out of region DVD and you should get raw data by forcing the Mac to read the disc as data, not as DVD Video.
Also, with a little googling you should be able to find some region-free goodness.
Powerbooks are as hacker friendly as is possible, but the term hacker means that you're at least attempting to find the solution yourself...
Think I've got prior art on this one.
As a kid (early to mid 80s), I noticed that one of my two cats seemed to be able to see the beams from remote controls and lasertag guns. I used to run them around in circles for hours until they'd just about collapse.
Anyhow, a plain 'ol flashlight works just fine these days. Oddly enough, only one of my two cats reacts to it at all. (shrug)
You'd pay $250 an hour for fixes, but not $99 once a year for a new OS version?
Put down the crackpipe.
You want my fix?
- You pay me $250.
- I buy 10.3 upgrade for $99, and begin the install.
- I pocket $151 and teach you how to run software update once the install is done.
The "my stuff doesn't do everything that 10.x has, so I feel like it's broken, but I refuse to buy 10.x once a year on general principle" argument just makes me fucking angry.
Thanks for illustrating why. Now go install Yellow Dog, or something, so you can have a completely different set of forums to troll.
First off ditto to everyone who's mentioned the HP 4M/MP printer. It was a rock-solid workhorse. I've still got two going strong, although they both reek of ozone when running and have been retired to backup duty.
I think that's where you're getting hung up. If you buy the low-end SOHO stuff, it's not going to handle high duty cycles or too much abuse, period.
If you buy cheap paper, expect it to jam.
Do you have high humidity in your workspace? High humidity means the paper will start to stick together and cause misfeeds / jams.
Of their current offerings, the LaserJet 1320 falls in the lowend & SOHO category, while the 4200TN is the workhorse designed to have the crap beat out of it.
There's a reason for the $1000 price difference between the two.
You joke, but this is exactly the route I took with my friends and family.
I do a nuke-n-pave of XP systems once (for free, almost always spyware/virus problems) and won't touch the same box again.
I give that person a printout of exactly how much that would have cost at $75-125 an hour, then tell them if they want support from me in the future, they'd best get a Mac, where I can fix any problem they've got in a 10 minute phone call.
Almost all of the afforementioned friends and family have since purchased Macs, and my voice mail is blissfully empty now.
Actually, it could have been Photoshop. PS7 and CS call on a shared Imageready component when you Save for Web...
Not saying that Apple didn't knock this out out of the park, but...
Am I the only one that realizes that this is just a smaller version of the cube? The cube at least had a debatably upgradable AGP slot, however...
Bring out the comfy chair!
</inquisition>
The most recent patch (the holiday one) plus the 10.3.7 updates have made my below-recommended-spec Powerbook G4 play the game nearly as well as my 'gaming' PC.
.64
512mb of RAM is a bare minimum, but beyond that, here's the settings that have my PBG4 12"/ 867 (with crap gen-1 video hardware) running smoothly:
Rez: 1024x768 / 60hz
Use Ui Scale: on @
Terrain distance: Low
Environment detail: Medium
Terrain texture: Low
Texture detail: Low
Gamma: middle
Enable all shader effects: On
Terrain highlights: off
Full screen glow: off
Death effect: on
Vertex animation shaders: off (you guys can probably use 'on' here -- if you have better video hardware -- if parts of your character are missing, turn this off)
Smooth shading: off
Trilinear: off
Vertical sync: off
Cinematic subs: on
Hardware cursor: on
Level of detail: on
With these settings, I'm even getting over 15FPS in front of the auction houses in Ironforge and Orgrimmar: the areas of the game that used to be down to 2-3FPS.
I have noticed that I'm actually getting *better* performance running at the powerbook's native 1024x768 rez than if I downsize to 800x600.
That said, try running at the native rez of the iMac, but then try a 1024x768 non-stretched rez and see if there's an improvement. Keep in mind that if you run at max resolution on the 20" screen, that's an absurd amount of pixels to be refreshing on each cycle. I know a fair amount of recent mid-to-high end PC video hardware that stutters like hell in WoW in trying to push my 20" cinema display, but does just fine if I run the game inset or reduce the resolution.
Best of luck.
You can install off the CDs onto multiple machines as you like, or just copy the game over (Mac-Mac or PC-PC) -- you can even download and install the old open beta client and it'll patch up to date once you manage to log in.
The CD key is used via the webpage where you create your account for the game. No key, no account... although you can use a friend's login and password on any install on any machine. The CD key isn't locked to the install.
Other than that, there's no way to get around buying a box to get a CD Key to get an account.
Only happened to me once, back in OB.
I normally just stand on the prow of the zeppelin, Titanic-style, have a seat, and pan around looking at the (incredible) view.
Side note: a couple months into playing the game, I'm still slackjawed every time I ride a wyvern/griffin/hippogriff/bat or the Zeppelin. Freaking gorgeous.
Jump on the blimp to Orgrimmar from right outside Undercity.
In front of the auction house in Org is where the majority of Horde holiday quests are starting.
Cheers!
I've been playing since open beta and launch day, and I have to agree a billion percent with most of your points.
;-)
The level of polish in the game, the questing system, the crafting system, the sheer amount of content, the auction houses, almost zero downtime between fights -- it puts all the other games that I've played on the market to shame.
After downloading the latest patch, I was giggling like a kid for hours seeing all the new holiday themed content. I got into snowball fights with alliance members in Ratchet instead of ganking them (Skullcrusher). I ran around hunting for the Greench, and I sat on Great Father Winter's lap. Contrast this to live 'events' in EQ -- you get a spam that a dragon is flying over the zone you're in, and an epic mob is spawned -- vs in WoW: decorations up in every city, new quests, new crafting items -- an absurd amount of effort for temporary content.
Reading the Blizz forums, you'll get a pretty unbalanced picture -- the min/maxers the 'nerf $class!' and '!nerf $class!' people are very vocal and you'd get the impression that the game is falling apart at the seams. It's not. As many, many other have said before: this game was more 'done' during beta that most MMOs are three years after launch. The overwhelming majority of the players are incredibly happy -- and this is the first decent MMO that my Mac-owning friends can play along with me. Suffice it to say there's a lot of WoW boxes under the tree this year. Blizzard has always has a warm, gushy spot in the hearts of Mac gamers because we're treated as equals -- almost always at launch day (Diablo 2 being the notable exception).
One thing I've noticed about the perceived population imbalances: they seem (to me, based on characters I've rolled and servers I've played on) imbalanced based on the name of the servers. Shadow Moon is way imbalanced on the Alliance side, Skullcrusher and Arthas are way imbalanced on the Horde side.
I wonder if the effect of making the new battlegrounds an instance will help alleviate the population problems... ie first 400 players on each side make it into this instance, next 400 into a new instance.
At any rate, I'm having an absurd amount of fun with the PvE aspects of the game right now -- concentrating on getting my stable of characters to high levels, and not really worrying about hardcore PvP just yet. Yeah, I'll go raid Stormwind or Orgrimmar from time to time, but all in good fun (made it to the king once in Stormwind before getting smacked down)
There's no doubt in my mind that the PvP system (when introduced) is going to rock my world.
I was there as well too, on the horde side as a lowbie 16ish Orc hunter.
Hella fun, and contrary to the comments I've seen, I was having silky smooth framerates at 1280x960 rez with a hundred or so toons on the screen at times.
Geforce FX5900 256mb that I picked up for $175 in an open box sale a while back.
The graphics engine handles far more without going into shock than DAoC did -- and I used to fight in fairly epic battles with hundreds there.
I'm really looking for the PvP to be fleshed out on the standard servers. As it stands, it's just too easy for people to, for example, spy on enemy lines with their PvP flag turned off, or run amongst PvPers to make it more difficult to click on targets. There also really aren't penalties, rewards or the much talked about honor system in place yet. I'm dying to see them, because if anyone can get it right it's Blizzard.
Apart from the PvP, after playing for the whole open beta, I'm just shocked at how much content the world has and how immersive it is. It's the most fun I've ever had in an MMO, and I've played a lot of them. At no point during playing any of the five characters I made did I feel like I was treadmilling.
I've determined a hack to make my original 20 gig iPod play holographic content in surround sound with no additional hardware needed!
Four hits of acid and stare really hard. Much more elegant (by orders of magnitude) and less of a brute force approach than TFA.
My wife and I made it in the open beta last night.
FYI -- whichever installer / torrent you download, the Mac *and* PC versions are included so you don't have to worry about sucking down 2.6 gigs for each platform if you've got both platforms at your disposal.
Initial impressions after about 2 hours on my little undead warlock:
- Incredible amount of polish (except for the whole server being reduced to rubble thing)
- Much quicker progression than other MMORPGS -- level and quest design are extremely well thought out
- Seems to borrow from the best of other MMOs, and really polish the hell out of the annoying parts (treadmilling, 'where do I go now?'). You've always got a purpose.
- Leveling and progression are a little 'odd' right now -- not knowing how to spec, without the massive fansites that Camelot or EQ have make training a little risky. But this promotes a bit of experimentation, and besides -- my toons are gonna get wiped at launch anyhow. I may as well tinker.
- I'm curious about the 'endgame' -- in DAoC it's all about (extremely addictive) consentual PvP. In EQ, it's all about camping. Being Warcraft, I'd assume that the first expansions are going to be seriously PvP focused, similar to what DAoC's got. At least that's my hope.
As a guy with a few lvl 50s in DAoC and an original EQ account abandoned way back around Kunark, I was simply blown away by how much fun I was having. And I loved DAoC.
This is the telling part: I didn't even notice the experience bar in the interface, nor go looking for it until the end of my playtime when I started customizing the interface. It just didn't matter because I was simply having too much fun exploring and doing quests. Yep. FedEx, scavenger and kill quests are fun in WoW and really seem like they're adding to the texture of the world.
This seems to finally be the MMO that my casual gaming friends can pick up along side me.
The last time we tried this was buying about 10 copies of Shadowbane for Macs & PCs, and boy did we get burnt. Badly.
Speaking as someone who married a girl geek, I've had to find workarounds for this set of annoying situations already. She's crafty and won't fall for the 'put the stuff in /etc/' trick so that my hypothethical goth and asian schoolgirl porn won't show via a normal search.
Solution?
Save the porn / super personal stuff on an encrypted disk image saved somewhere inconspicuous, and set cronned (or logout) scripts to scrub your various histories and recent items. Make sure that the machine logs you out after no more than 10 minutes of activity.
Hypothetically, that is.
Hi sweety!