That it could be a real pain for me when installing the software after an upgrade and new HD. Also when dealing with multiple machines behind my LAN, but then I think you're supposed to get a license for each anyhow.
One thing I've always found amusing with Norton Registration is that when you install a product, it would set the expiry from the date of install. A nuke-then-reinstall gives you a license to updates for another full year... so I bet this will help solve that issue too.
Aside from the obvious annoying in reinstall with such measures, registration really isn't a huge problem. With Norton, you need to be online for the software to be effective anyhow (updates), so online registration is just a few pieces of info and then everything is good (so long as the given information is used appropriately).
We avoid this problem with a simple rule: Any work for "the techie" for has to be passed by "the techie's boss." Really, for anything not sopmewhat urgently needed, only management-level personnel should be able to assign longterm tasks.
After all, your manager is supposed to, well, manage. And if not him/her, then a project manager of some sort. Any decent sized corp I've worked for had one of those. If you're getting snowballed with lots of work, then at least those above will be aware of it, and more can be done to manage your time.
It can process the switching request, the computations are just low-level compared to what a PC does. I don't think we'd want to use superhigh bandwidth with a single server anyways (could you imagine even remotely how much RAM would be needed to process something in the manner of the terabytes per second).
But as per a node to the larger network... still cool and useful, especially when considering things such as beowulf clusters wherein several machines work as a collective, but could be hampered by perhaps a bogged-down network?
One thing I'm wondering is why they would use mathmeticians at all? I mean, perhaps an alghorythm could be used to match code, but really I still think this is more the realm of programmers than mathmeticians...?
One would think that if they have a device that could route such traffic, then it must have some sort of bus/hardware capable of handling it. Somwhere along the line this traffic has to hit a node-point, right?
Now really, I don't see much point in directing 10Tb ethernet to one machine anyhow. But it would be great for large node-points. I you think about 100Mbps, generally no single machine is going to use that much in a normal network. However, many machines will, and sometimes quite easily in large situations.
For huge networks, or ISP's, 10Tb would be the way to go.
That is, one of the "manufactured" diamonds, no a crap RIAA CD. I would be very interested in hearing how one goes about acquiring a manufactured diamond, as well as the purchase price comparison.
Of course not. Cultural spread isn't nefarious in the minds of the common people. However, if you look at the US gov'ts attempt to circumvent, say, the great firewall of China in order to get its broadcasting through...
There's a difference between passive globalization and active globalization. The US does do a lot just to make sure the world knows that they are there, and in many ways, in control.
And yes, any such event in a peaceful country would have become world news. But not necessarily such a long-remember spectacle as in the USA, and as you mentioned, not for such a quick (and largely unsupported) mass-retaliation and change. Think of all that's transpired both in and outside of US as far as rights and respect for others... and you'll see that the pain and injustice of 9-11 goes far beyond the deaths of those directly involved.
I think they have no choice. In addition the horrid licensing schemes and bad business practices (most of which the common public is not aware of anyways), viruses and hacks are a major bane of MS products. If anything, I think that such problems are one of the major points causing people to look at alternate solutions. Many have pointed out that perhaps this is the point of current viruses such as slammer, to point out what a joke MS "security" is.
Now, push the fast-forward button. Microsoft doesn't improve security, they lose customers. Licensing schemes get worse... they lose customers. In the end, I think that we will see improvements in windows, or we'll see windows dying and linux improving where it once treaded (to make up ground). Personally, I'm not so attached to linux that I wouldn't shell out for MS if they managed to make a decently secure product without an insane license. And there are improvements... just try running an old 95 machine and see how many times it crashes over XP...
America thinks that they are the world. No seriously, this isn't flamebait. How many Americans actually think Canada is a state? How many know a second language, or have even travelled out-of-continent? How many have worked abroad?
Americanization of the world is just furthering this. Almost wherever you go, you find American music, television, culture. This is because the US would much rather impress itself upon the world, than absorb that the rest of the world has something to offer. Unfortunately, such a fundamental lack of understanding in the rest of the world is cumulative.
This isn't to say that Canada is much better (I'm Canadian). I try to follow what happens in other countries (Europe/Australia mostly because I have friends and family there). But for many, events outside of N. America have much less chance of any immediate effect than events in the USA have on the outside world.
Sept 11 was an example of this, as what would have been the response if this had happened in Germany, or perhaps Australia, Canada? Thankfully, the internet - while spreading American culture, is at least allowing for a bit of cultural influence the other way. I truly think that, if we're lucky, 200-400 years from now we may be lucky not to have a real America, or even a Europe, but world in one culturally diverse but understanding community.
Optimism? Surely. But if you watch the direction of world communication-integration, that or some form of large war are likely the only two visible options for the far future.
Sendmail is the devil. Running debian on my servers, I tend to feel reasonably secure. A bit out-of-date to be sure, but reasonably secure nontheless.
I have no illusions that my systems are 100% uber-hacker-proof. In fact, I'm aware of a few ways that a hacker could obtain, say, a user password - but it's a choice between convenience (not necessarily for myself, but for the users) and security.
Redhat is a good distro to get started on, and many of us (including myself) started on it. I wouldn't recommend it on commercial systems, but much of that is personal preferences.
I think my primary beef with RH is that people seem to assume that Linux IS RedHat, with drivers/etc often being only available as RPM's of a closed-source solution. Linux is very much about open source, and in an optimal world drivers would be source-available so that they could be matched to any distro. People have started distro holy wars over less, so I'm not going to get into it, but in my mind RH has always been better as a desktop distro (until I found morphix/knoppix).
But it's all about stepping stones. As an email forwarded to me once stated: You start out with something like RedHat, then you maybe go a bit more trimmed like Deb. Eventually you go to a distro where you make your system from the kernel up. By the time you get to the stage of creating your own distro... you end up realizing that it will be a very very long time before you ever get laid again, if ever!
The worst are not those who screw up, it's those who don't listen to words of wisdom, or learn from their mistakes. You get those no matter what OS/distro you use
I'm not so sure. There are lots of those savvy and knowledgable people on Windows, just as there are lots of "k3wl, I'm so 1337 d00d, because I run Linux and not M$ Winblows" amateurs out there
These same users are the ones who end up configuring their webserver with passwords such as "god" or "admin." A secure O/S is fine and dandy, but it doesn't help all that much against the same general stupidity that afflicts windows and linux users alike. How many servers are defaced because they're either very behind on security, or simply easy to get into?
Not only that, but we have a lot of people who don't know as much about security as we would like. I personally don't know as much as I'd like. How many admins who know how to configure httpd.conf for apache are good at plugging with iptables?
At work, any sensitive online-based sites are restricted to a certain port, and allowed only from local addresses. Yes, by IP-spoofing they could avoid that, but at least it's an extra level of security. How many people bother with this? A lot can be done at the firewalling level, before any attack even gets near your daemons...
Are you using a SCSI drive, or RAID? If so, remember to compile in support for your drive to the kernel (non-modules).
Alternately, check that support for your IDE drive hasn't been acdidentally deselected.
You are likely not receiving viruses so much from spammers as you are receiving them from viruses.
Outlook and OE being the key identifier here, you are likely getting emailed from normal users who have been infected and are this either infecting random users on the net, or users in their address book, or users from the address book of the previous person who infected them.
Spammers wouldn't bother with most viruses, unless they were adware viruses, because most viruses aren't profitable the way (long-term) advertising is. Spammers are evil, but so are virus-writers... you have to distribute the blame a bit between the two of them for your messed-up inbox.
What about the kid who found a dirty magazine (it happens) or even just a mag/book belonging to an older sibling (teen articles being pretty bad nowadays for sexual content, what trash!). It may not happen often, but it would likely in some cases.
Of course, they probably also just lost possible profit from all the/. readers who wanted dolls to read out their playboy in girly voice...
Children raise in the manner you describe almost always form a negative opinion of themself (how could they not), develop a low self-esteem...
...and end up reading slashdot on a constant basis? That parent is correct that children should be more exposed to the facts of life, but he/she severely overstates it. Yes, we should impress upon our children that life is a hard, difficult thing at times. We should teach them that they can fail, will fail, and that sometimes it's alright, it's not their fault. We should teach them that other people will try to trick them and take advantage of them.
And hopefully, we should teach them to think for themselves. That even though sometimes screwing up is inevitable, they can get through it. That there are bad people out there, but also good ones... and how to try and see the difference between a con and somebody who honestly wants to help. If you just pay attention to how many people get viruses, scammed, etc etc just using computers, and just because they are ignorant and too trusting - then you will see this point.
Giving your kids the "life is pointless" talk is obviously stupid (as per the grandparents), but the (life is hard, but believe in yourself and try your best even at times when it sucks) will hopefully help build them into adults who are stronger of character. We have to recognise our failings, but still have hope for the future... which is difficult enough for ourself let alone teaching it to our kids...
Most likely simple because until the advent of "Austin Powers," shag wasn't a very well known word in North America. Now, in context, it was found to be very offensive in Britain and I do believe they actually changed some of the "Spy who sh*gged me" signs to reflex local sensitivities.
And yes, I find calling somebody phalluslicker offensive, but again, the majority of people don't even know what the heck a "phallus" is (saying it in proper tone does get the point across often enough though).
Part of the problem is the image presented by a word. Sex is common enough, defining the interaction between two genders. F*ck, often used in movies or porn, quite often describes torrid or "dirty" sex. In example, do you have sex with (make love to if lucky, but even in a good relationship this doesn't count for 100% of the time), or f*ck your girlfriend. If you're just f*cking her, it implies something cheap and without compassion.
So really, it's not the base action being described by the word, but also the emotion state, and mental visual representation. Using the washroom might visualize somebody sitting on the thone... taking a sh*t can bring an image of the actual defecation process.
Compare this to native English, where "toilet" is one of the crudest possible ways to refer to a restroom
Are we talking British English? I've never heard of toilet being bad, and plenty worse refernces: sh*tter, crap-pot, "the can" being direct references, and many others referring to the actual procedure being done on said porcelain vessel.
"I have to use the toilet" isn't used as often as "use the washroom," but I've never found it to be offensive.
Wherein a grandmother discovers a little girl playing with Barbie and G.I. Joe.
Grandmother asks little girl: "Doesn't barbie come with Ken?"
Little girl replies: No, Barbie comes with G.I. Joe, she only fakes it with Ken!
[insert drumroll sound here]
As an evil older brother (TM), I would have had great fun if talking toys had become more common when my sister was younger. I remember seeing a USB talking barbie and wishing my sister would get one just so I could reprogram it to say shocking things.
Would be almost as much fun as reprogramming an AIBO to go hump a guests leg...
Not the expansion, but the actual game. The "voice" which instructs you on the initial training levels was just purely bad. I remember wondering if the whole game was going to suck so badly.
Throw in some of the odd dialogue, particularly in the expansion (the whole Illadin evil-twin-brother love-triangle thing) sounded like a bad bad soap opera. I had to turn off the sound and just watch the subtitles, less I be embarred by anyone listening in.
I'm going to sue. I'm going to pick up this phone, contact my lawyer, and sue their asses into oblivion. I'm going to hit them so hard that... oh wait, "sexychic49" is online again. Maybe she'll be interested in my +10 long staff of endurance... I'll think about sueing again later.
As per Kevin Smith: We're talking about Fictional Items, Fic-tion-al i-tems am I getting through to you at all?
Some people need to get a life and discover the difference between fantasy and reality. Moreover, I fully expect future games to have grand disclaimers such as:
"Characters and good attained in this game are completely fictional and have no value outside of the game itself. XXX Entertainment Corp is not responsible in any way for any monentary loss due to this game, including the loss of said fictional items/characters, social life, sleep deprivation, or medical/bladder issues arising from continuously playing the game for-frickin-ever.
In summary, we are glad that you enjoy our product, but believe that your increasingly large ass off the chair, get some fresh air and perhaps even bathe at some point in time. And no, your "medallion of +10 sexiness" will not get you laid in real life if you don't shower, no will we be held responsible for such problems.
As it is immediate playabillity, or "hookability" (i.e. the ability of the game to get somebody to pick up a controller, play, and not toss it away in disgust immediately).
Now, in this aspect games have been getting both more complex and more simple. Instruction manuals have often been replaced by increasingly fancy "walkthrough" or "tutorial" modes. At one point we had training missions, now you have a training mission wherein it pretty much points out (and often even dictates audibly) what you are supposed to do.
In games like Starcraft, Warcraft, etc each level was was not only often a ramp-up of skill, but of what you could do. By not overwhelming the player with too many things at once, you allow them to advance along and learn things level-by-level.
This isn't quite the same for FPS games, although it could be. Start with basic pistol shooting, add later levels with neato weapons, items etc, until the player gets used to the controls and past the babysitting stage. In RPG's, it runs both ways: FFX as an examplew with its "Sphere Grid" being a bit complicated, but giving you a step-through example at first that can be onerous to the experienced gamer.
Really, back in the day you'd get kids who player "Street Fighter" and just knew how to jump, punch, and kick. Eventually they graduated to special moves, maybe combos. Quite often people would read the manual looking up moves. How many people do read the manual nowadays? Perhaps the whole idea of just playing a game out-of-the-box is because of a laziness that has perpetrated on the part of the player, or is it because gaming has been infiltrated by a different crowd than the geeks that used to dominate it?
Some form of decent project setup. Not the old behind-screen projection TV's that were known to burn with video games, but a decent overhead. Than perhaps a modified KVM switch to swap between consoles (and a couple nice power bars to allow many of the consoles to be plugged in).
Throw in a nice gamers' couch, and he'd be set. Having a few thousand games isn't much good if all you have is a hard floor and 13" TV to play 'em with .
Just have it send a password in the email body. If you want to be safer, have the password based on some sort of simple alghorythm that changes on a regular basis (if you don't trust unencrypted email from cellular).
That, or if you can get WAP service on your phone (and browse your own pages without paging a huge fee like my cell provider wants to charge) - then just do it via a WAP website.
Slashdot Mirror
That it could be a real pain for me when installing the software after an upgrade and new HD. Also when dealing with multiple machines behind my LAN, but then I think you're supposed to get a license for each anyhow.
One thing I've always found amusing with Norton Registration is that when you install a product, it would set the expiry from the date of install. A nuke-then-reinstall gives you a license to updates for another full year... so I bet this will help solve that issue too.
Aside from the obvious annoying in reinstall with such measures, registration really isn't a huge problem. With Norton, you need to be online for the software to be effective anyhow (updates), so online registration is just a few pieces of info and then everything is good (so long as the given information is used appropriately).
We avoid this problem with a simple rule: Any work for "the techie" for has to be passed by "the techie's boss." Really, for anything not sopmewhat urgently needed, only management-level personnel should be able to assign longterm tasks.
After all, your manager is supposed to, well, manage. And if not him/her, then a project manager of some sort. Any decent sized corp I've worked for had one of those. If you're getting snowballed with lots of work, then at least those above will be aware of it, and more can be done to manage your time.
It can process the switching request, the computations are just low-level compared to what a PC does. I don't think we'd want to use superhigh bandwidth with a single server anyways (could you imagine even remotely how much RAM would be needed to process something in the manner of the terabytes per second).
But as per a node to the larger network... still cool and useful, especially when considering things such as beowulf clusters wherein several machines work as a collective, but could be hampered by perhaps a bogged-down network?
One thing I'm wondering is why they would use mathmeticians at all? I mean, perhaps an alghorythm could be used to match code, but really I still think this is more the realm of programmers than mathmeticians...?
One would think that if they have a device that could route such traffic, then it must have some sort of bus/hardware capable of handling it. Somwhere along the line this traffic has to hit a node-point, right?
Now really, I don't see much point in directing 10Tb ethernet to one machine anyhow. But it would be great for large node-points. I you think about 100Mbps, generally no single machine is going to use that much in a normal network. However, many machines will, and sometimes quite easily in large situations.
For huge networks, or ISP's, 10Tb would be the way to go.
That is, one of the "manufactured" diamonds, no a crap RIAA CD. I would be very interested in hearing how one goes about acquiring a manufactured diamond, as well as the purchase price comparison.
Of course not. Cultural spread isn't nefarious in the minds of the common people. However, if you look at the US gov'ts attempt to circumvent, say, the great firewall of China in order to get its broadcasting through...
There's a difference between passive globalization and active globalization. The US does do a lot just to make sure the world knows that they are there, and in many ways, in control.
And yes, any such event in a peaceful country would have become world news. But not necessarily such a long-remember spectacle as in the USA, and as you mentioned, not for such a quick (and largely unsupported) mass-retaliation and change. Think of all that's transpired both in and outside of US as far as rights and respect for others... and you'll see that the pain and injustice of 9-11 goes far beyond the deaths of those directly involved.
I think they have no choice. In addition the horrid licensing schemes and bad business practices (most of which the common public is not aware of anyways), viruses and hacks are a major bane of MS products. If anything, I think that such problems are one of the major points causing people to look at alternate solutions. Many have pointed out that perhaps this is the point of current viruses such as slammer, to point out what a joke MS "security" is.
Now, push the fast-forward button. Microsoft doesn't improve security, they lose customers. Licensing schemes get worse... they lose customers. In the end, I think that we will see improvements in windows, or we'll see windows dying and linux improving where it once treaded (to make up ground). Personally, I'm not so attached to linux that I wouldn't shell out for MS if they managed to make a decently secure product without an insane license. And there are improvements... just try running an old 95 machine and see how many times it crashes over XP...
America thinks that they are the world. No seriously, this isn't flamebait. How many Americans actually think Canada is a state? How many know a second language, or have even travelled out-of-continent? How many have worked abroad?
Americanization of the world is just furthering this. Almost wherever you go, you find American music, television, culture. This is because the US would much rather impress itself upon the world, than absorb that the rest of the world has something to offer. Unfortunately, such a fundamental lack of understanding in the rest of the world is cumulative.
This isn't to say that Canada is much better (I'm Canadian). I try to follow what happens in other countries (Europe/Australia mostly because I have friends and family there). But for many, events outside of N. America have much less chance of any immediate effect than events in the USA have on the outside world.
Sept 11 was an example of this, as what would have been the response if this had happened in Germany, or perhaps Australia, Canada? Thankfully, the internet - while spreading American culture, is at least allowing for a bit of cultural influence the other way. I truly think that, if we're lucky, 200-400 years from now we may be lucky not to have a real America, or even a Europe, but world in one culturally diverse but understanding community.
Optimism? Surely. But if you watch the direction of world communication-integration, that or some form of large war are likely the only two visible options for the far future.
Sendmail is the devil. Running debian on my servers, I tend to feel reasonably secure. A bit out-of-date to be sure, but reasonably secure nontheless.
I have no illusions that my systems are 100% uber-hacker-proof. In fact, I'm aware of a few ways that a hacker could obtain, say, a user password - but it's a choice between convenience (not necessarily for myself, but for the users) and security.
Redhat is a good distro to get started on, and many of us (including myself) started on it. I wouldn't recommend it on commercial systems, but much of that is personal preferences.
I think my primary beef with RH is that people seem to assume that Linux IS RedHat, with drivers/etc often being only available as RPM's of a closed-source solution. Linux is very much about open source, and in an optimal world drivers would be source-available so that they could be matched to any distro. People have started distro holy wars over less, so I'm not going to get into it, but in my mind RH has always been better as a desktop distro (until I found morphix/knoppix).
But it's all about stepping stones. As an email forwarded to me once stated: You start out with something like RedHat, then you maybe go a bit more trimmed like Deb. Eventually you go to a distro where you make your system from the kernel up. By the time you get to the stage of creating your own distro... you end up realizing that it will be a very very long time before you ever get laid again, if ever!
The worst are not those who screw up, it's those who don't listen to words of wisdom, or learn from their mistakes. You get those no matter what OS/distro you use
I'm not so sure. There are lots of those savvy and knowledgable people on Windows, just as there are lots of "k3wl, I'm so 1337 d00d, because I run Linux and not M$ Winblows" amateurs out there
These same users are the ones who end up configuring their webserver with passwords such as "god" or "admin." A secure O/S is fine and dandy, but it doesn't help all that much against the same general stupidity that afflicts windows and linux users alike. How many servers are defaced because they're either very behind on security, or simply easy to get into?
Not only that, but we have a lot of people who don't know as much about security as we would like. I personally don't know as much as I'd like. How many admins who know how to configure httpd.conf for apache are good at plugging with iptables?
At work, any sensitive online-based sites are restricted to a certain port, and allowed only from local addresses. Yes, by IP-spoofing they could avoid that, but at least it's an extra level of security. How many people bother with this? A lot can be done at the firewalling level, before any attack even gets near your daemons...
Are you using a SCSI drive, or RAID? If so, remember to compile in support for your drive to the kernel (non-modules).
Alternately, check that support for your IDE drive hasn't been acdidentally deselected.
You are likely not receiving viruses so much from spammers as you are receiving them from viruses.
Outlook and OE being the key identifier here, you are likely getting emailed from normal users who have been infected and are this either infecting random users on the net, or users in their address book, or users from the address book of the previous person who infected them.
Spammers wouldn't bother with most viruses, unless they were adware viruses, because most viruses aren't profitable the way (long-term) advertising is. Spammers are evil, but so are virus-writers... you have to distribute the blame a bit between the two of them for your messed-up inbox.
And the correct form being????
I would think that "those" is actually linked to "words." Kind is not considered.
You could use: "We don't say those words" or "We don't use these words
and it would be fine... so I'm missing the grammar/pluralism error here
What about the kid who found a dirty magazine (it happens) or even just a mag/book belonging to an older sibling (teen articles being pretty bad nowadays for sexual content, what trash!). It may not happen often, but it would likely in some cases.
/. readers who wanted dolls to read out their playboy in girly voice...
Of course, they probably also just lost possible profit from all the
Children raise in the manner you describe almost always form a negative opinion of themself (how could they not), develop a low self-esteem...
...and end up reading slashdot on a constant basis? That parent is correct that children should be more exposed to the facts of life, but he/she severely overstates it. Yes, we should impress upon our children that life is a hard, difficult thing at times. We should teach them that they can fail, will fail, and that sometimes it's alright, it's not their fault. We should teach them that other people will try to trick them and take advantage of them.
And hopefully, we should teach them to think for themselves. That even though sometimes screwing up is inevitable, they can get through it. That there are bad people out there, but also good ones... and how to try and see the difference between a con and somebody who honestly wants to help. If you just pay attention to how many people get viruses, scammed, etc etc just using computers, and just because they are ignorant and too trusting - then you will see this point.
Giving your kids the "life is pointless" talk is obviously stupid (as per the grandparents), but the (life is hard, but believe in yourself and try your best even at times when it sucks) will hopefully help build them into adults who are stronger of character. We have to recognise our failings, but still have hope for the future... which is difficult enough for ourself let alone teaching it to our kids...
Most likely simple because until the advent of "Austin Powers," shag wasn't a very well known word in North America. Now, in context, it was found to be very offensive in Britain and I do believe they actually changed some of the "Spy who sh*gged me" signs to reflex local sensitivities.
And yes, I find calling somebody phalluslicker offensive, but again, the majority of people don't even know what the heck a "phallus" is (saying it in proper tone does get the point across often enough though).
Part of the problem is the image presented by a word. Sex is common enough, defining the interaction between two genders. F*ck, often used in movies or porn, quite often describes torrid or "dirty" sex. In example, do you have sex with (make love to if lucky, but even in a good relationship this doesn't count for 100% of the time), or f*ck your girlfriend. If you're just f*cking her, it implies something cheap and without compassion.
So really, it's not the base action being described by the word, but also the emotion state, and mental visual representation. Using the washroom might visualize somebody sitting on the thone... taking a sh*t can bring an image of the actual defecation process.
Compare this to native English, where "toilet" is one of the crudest possible ways to refer to a restroom
Are we talking British English? I've never heard of toilet being bad, and plenty worse refernces: sh*tter, crap-pot, "the can" being direct references, and many others referring to the actual procedure being done on said porcelain vessel.
"I have to use the toilet" isn't used as often as "use the washroom," but I've never found it to be offensive.
Wherein a grandmother discovers a little girl playing with Barbie and G.I. Joe.
Grandmother asks little girl: "Doesn't barbie come with Ken?"
Little girl replies: No, Barbie comes with G.I. Joe, she only fakes it with Ken!
[insert drumroll sound here]
As an evil older brother (TM), I would have had great fun if talking toys had become more common when my sister was younger. I remember seeing a USB talking barbie and wishing my sister would get one just so I could reprogram it to say shocking things.
Would be almost as much fun as reprogramming an AIBO to go hump a guests leg...
Not the expansion, but the actual game. The "voice" which instructs you on the initial training levels was just purely bad. I remember wondering if the whole game was going to suck so badly.
Throw in some of the odd dialogue, particularly in the expansion (the whole Illadin evil-twin-brother love-triangle thing) sounded like a bad bad soap opera. I had to turn off the sound and just watch the subtitles, less I be embarred by anyone listening in.
I'm going to sue. I'm going to pick up this phone, contact my lawyer, and sue their asses into oblivion. I'm going to hit them so hard that... oh wait, "sexychic49" is online again. Maybe she'll be interested in my +10 long staff of endurance... I'll think about sueing again later.
As per Kevin Smith: We're talking about Fictional Items, Fic-tion-al i-tems am I getting through to you at all?
Some people need to get a life and discover the difference between fantasy and reality. Moreover, I fully expect future games to have grand disclaimers such as:
"Characters and good attained in this game are completely fictional and have no value outside of the game itself. XXX Entertainment Corp is not responsible in any way for any monentary loss due to this game, including the loss of said fictional items/characters, social life, sleep deprivation, or medical/bladder issues arising from continuously playing the game for-frickin-ever.
In summary, we are glad that you enjoy our product, but believe that your increasingly large ass off the chair, get some fresh air and perhaps even bathe at some point in time. And no, your "medallion of +10 sexiness" will not get you laid in real life if you don't shower, no will we be held responsible for such problems.
As it is immediate playabillity, or "hookability" (i.e. the ability of the game to get somebody to pick up a controller, play, and not toss it away in disgust immediately).
Now, in this aspect games have been getting both more complex and more simple. Instruction manuals have often been replaced by increasingly fancy "walkthrough" or "tutorial" modes. At one point we had training missions, now you have a training mission wherein it pretty much points out (and often even dictates audibly) what you are supposed to do.
In games like Starcraft, Warcraft, etc each level was was not only often a ramp-up of skill, but of what you could do. By not overwhelming the player with too many things at once, you allow them to advance along and learn things level-by-level.
This isn't quite the same for FPS games, although it could be. Start with basic pistol shooting, add later levels with neato weapons, items etc, until the player gets used to the controls and past the babysitting stage. In RPG's, it runs both ways: FFX as an examplew with its "Sphere Grid" being a bit complicated, but giving you a step-through example at first that can be onerous to the experienced gamer.
Really, back in the day you'd get kids who player "Street Fighter" and just knew how to jump, punch, and kick. Eventually they graduated to special moves, maybe combos. Quite often people would read the manual looking up moves. How many people do read the manual nowadays? Perhaps the whole idea of just playing a game out-of-the-box is because of a laziness that has perpetrated on the part of the player, or is it because gaming has been infiltrated by a different crowd than the geeks that used to dominate it?
Some form of decent project setup. Not the old behind-screen projection TV's that were known to burn with video games, but a decent overhead. Than perhaps a modified KVM switch to swap between consoles (and a couple nice power bars to allow many of the consoles to be plugged in).
Throw in a nice gamers' couch, and he'd be set. Having a few thousand games isn't much good if all you have is a hard floor and 13" TV to play 'em with .
Just have it send a password in the email body. If you want to be safer, have the password based on some sort of simple alghorythm that changes on a regular basis (if you don't trust unencrypted email from cellular).
That, or if you can get WAP service on your phone (and browse your own pages without paging a huge fee like my cell provider wants to charge) - then just do it via a WAP website.