I think one of the big hurdles is the countable number of states of a digital computer versus the uncountable number for an analog computer (like the brain). We live in the digital era, but this has the side effect that we are blinding ourselves to the limitations of digital technology.
Screen resolution is a good example. The resolution of text on a computer screen is lousy compared to a printed page, but people spend so much time reading text off of their computers that they seem shocked that reading low-rez text is hard on the eyes.
I know, advancements in digital devices can make up most of the gap. You just need pixels slightly smaller than the smallest thing the eye can see. Then the digital display can equal the 'analog display' of real-world objects.
But for intelligence? We need so many states to simulate a human brain that it just isn't feasible. I guess this point isn't lost on AI researchers, who look for shortcuts and such, but it is interesting...
Wait, we were talking about game 'AI'. Game AI is like chatbot AI. It needs to be fun to play with, not necessarily smart, learning, or challenging (although those things can be fun too).
I think it's too bad we'll have to wait until 4.0 to see an improvement in the default setup. Everyone agrees that it's ugly and not very useful, but there's been so little done to change it. If they start the process with 3.5, then they can get some feedback for 4.0.
More than that, the unchangable UI things need some improvement. KDE has really bad right-click menus in almost all cases. The options availible there need to be pruned down, moved into sub-menus, or "hidden" as accelerators attached to clicks.
I'm a big fan of the "hermetic interface", where simple commands are availible from the menus, buttons, and so forth, but really powerful commands are "hidden". They don't clutter the UI, the newbie doesn't care about them, and the old-hands will find out how to use these features.
An example from gnome is the hidden type-in box in the file selector. It's extreme (type-in isn't that ugly a thing to have in a selector!), but once you know you can hit "/" and just enter a path, it is really cool.
Gnome's new "three top-level" menus is also pretty cool, if you've used it. It helps to take the clutter out of the menu.
(Not to say I love everything gnome. The KDE apps are much better in general. Konqueror is more useful than nautilus to me. Konsole is worlds better than gnome-terminal. KDVI is without peer.)
Oh, I should say something nice about 3.5. The changes to konqueror are great! It cuts the fat out of the menus. Technically, it makes sense to make a file-browser and a web-browser use the same code, but the UI should be different in each mode. This is a very positive change for konqueror.
There is a lot of crud in the air when it comes to copyrights. I think it's important to air these things: 1) Artists create in a vacuum. The act of creation is a mystical experience above ordinary humans. 2) Without long copyrights, there would be no incentives for creators to create, leaving us with a dull and lifeless society.
One is at the heart of a lot of publishing group propaganda. Of course, all of us create art. Most of it isn't very good, but we all create, from doodles, to humming, to solid prose and moving music. We are often spurred to create by other art. Art influences art. This doesn't mean just immitations, but also reactions, remixes, rebuttals.
Two is in the head of a lot of artists. At some level, I can't blame them. No one wants their hard work exploited. But I will point out that art was created before copyright legislation. The need to create and share went before the profit. Also, copyright and extensions to copyright have ever been pushed by the publishers, from the Statute of Anne onward. The idea is very mercantilist -- provide a monopoly to encourage production. It isn't terribly modern.
There are modern ways to approach the problem of compensating artists. I think the current roadblock is the publishing industry. They say they serve to both reward good creators and silence bad ones, so as to not choke up the public mide with poor ideas. People are perfectly capable of culling what they like from what they don't, and can use social networking to filter out content they don't want. The internet has made this a solvable problem. As for compensating artists, there are ideas like the Street Busker Protocol, where instead of a publisher, an escrow keeps things honest.
The link I used to have has died, so here's a brief run-down:
For the purpose of this, our artists is a writer, and she has just written a novel. She encrypts the novel and sends it to an escrow. She works out that she wants $200,000 dollars to release the key to the novel so that it can be read. The escrow will take a small cut and will solicit buyers for a set period of time, say 60 days. The writer sets about promoting her new work. She can release teaser chapters, related short stories, go on late night TV, whatever. Meanwhile, the public can offer up contributions online to get the key. The escrow holds all of the money. If, at the end of 60 days, the novel hasn't attracted 200k in contributions, the contributions are returned, and the writer must start again. If the goal is met, the writer is paid as soon as she releases the key.
The lack of atmosphere really changes the way heat flows. Our intuition about hot and cold is shaped by convection, where heat is transfered to gas molecules that bump against us and are then swept away. With no atmosphere, heat transfer slows down. The only heat loss on the moon would occur by conduction into the surface of the moon.
How "cold" is the moon in human terms? I don't have any idea. I'd imagine sunlight would be more important for constant solar power (well, barring eclipses).
As someone who uses a fanless C3 system with the open source unichrome/xxmc drivers, I object to them being called "less than reliable". I've had zero issues with them. In fact, when I was investigaing whether or not to use the VIA solution or the open source one, it came to light that that the via solution didn't work as well:
http://sourceforge.net/docman/display_doc.php?do ci d=25289&group_id=102048
Moreover, VeXP isn't fully functional. It has issues with full screen play, other video codecs, etc. If you want to do something besides watch mpeg2, you need the open source solution.
However, building mplayer, xorg, and unichrome to all play nice and use hardware took me several hours and a lot of curse words. It isn't exactly straightforward. (But maybe it improved from feb 2005.)
The real problem is that true "super bugs" aren't bothered by bleach. They've found strains that can be CULTURED IN CLOROX BLEACH right from the bottle. This is what happens when organisms with short generation times encounter environmental difficulties. See "The Coming Plague" by Laurie Garrett for more interesting stories in this vein.
Regardless, you could just replace the plastic:)
That won't happen, however. Some medical device company will manufacture a keyboard from special plastics without spaces between the keys and charge $500 for it. That's (part of) how health care costs keep going up.
It is funny that you must pay to have an unlisted number in a dead-tree phone book, but online the situation is reversed.
I know, I know, it's because of the cost involved with running a DNS. Phonebooks have ad revenue, DNS's don't (well, maybe verisign:). It's another example of the internet turning truisms from the physical world on their ear. This might sound so 1996, but we're still learning of the interweb effects our lives. None of the "cyber-scholars" who wrote about the "information superhighway" seemed to anticipate the true fallout.
Well, there is a group of people that should have a cellphone shoved up their ---.
And to the other poster: When I'm travelling, I use a device called a "book". It has great battery life, but doesn't deal well with water. On trips over two hours, I bring two.
It starts with a "K", but it's not for KDE. It's windows only. This violates an essential rule of software. If it's called "kfoo", it's for kde, "gfoo" -- gnome, "xfoo" -- graphical cousin to pre-existing "foo" cli application, "yfoo" -- I don't know. Why foo?
This is known in general as "sub-pixel rendering". It's available in Linux and on Macs. Check a control panel / system settings / control center module near you!
Bittorrent did more than get the swapping strategy correct, it fixed the social psychology of p2p. Before, you traded files with other faceless users. This meant you had little investment in the uploads of others. People would join the network and not share files, cap their upload speeds, etc. Generally, this made downloading a slow and painful process. (Not to mention that it was difficult to tell if two similarly named files are the same... there's too much diversity to get a good spread in file sources).
But Bittorrents have organized around websites. These sites typically require registration and monitor the share ratio of users. Users can no longer leach. There's social stigma attached to it. Also, you have some investment in making sure others have a copy of the file. If you liked it enough to d/l it, you probably want to share. Better yet, the action of the users of the site are focused on the same files, so resources are allocated fairly. Generally, it works better all around.
This leaves out the boost in nerd status of those who have large share ratios and upload lots of torrents. That helps with file availability too.
What if they had spent that money on making kids want to go to school? I went to Texas public schools. No, I survived them. The one I attended was divided neatly into honors and regular classes. In the regulars classes, you learned how to take the TAAS (this test was required for graduation and pushed as a part of school accountability under the last federal administration). If you were in honors, you learned how to take the AP exam.
Needless to say, not many people were really turned on to learn. Because nothing of substance was being taught.
Personally, I think that large school reforms are in order. Let's divide students into classes with the type of instruction that suits them best. Let's not teach college prep to everyone, they'll resent it. Few people really connect with the idea of liberal arts anyway (even in college, I was a bit surprised) and it forms the basis for most highschool course requirements. Articles I've seen recently say that boys are doing poorly in American schools. It looks like all girls schools in England do significantly better than comparable coed schools, especially in math and science. Maybe gender segregation would help. Girls seem to be intimidated by boys in these subjects, and boys need more structure and encouragement. There's a lack of adolescent-to-adult ritual in our country. Maybe this could help provide what truant students are missing.
It would be preferable to humiliation like this RFID crap.
My made-on-linux video blog is what? Citzens of slashdot, do not fear. I will tirelessly search for the verb of that sentence. You will be the first to know when I discover it.
Off topic? Did the moderator follow the link? Check out the picture on Creative's site. I thought the selling of the blue back light was just too funny. I mean, what the hell? I'm going to throw out my old yellow backlit device and upgrate to the new blue one. Why? Because I'm mesmerized . If this is Creative's marketing department at their best, this thing won't kill the ipod, it won't even kill dead people.
Oh Debian, I don't know what to think
on
Updates From Debian
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Debian's strategy of rock-solid releases is something that makes the distro unique. It also doesn't make it much fun. If you want modern packages, you often have to hang out with the "unstable" crowd, rather than the "testing" crowd. But this is like being signed up for regular crotch-kicks, since unstable breaks systems on a practically weekly basis. This, plus dependency creep, makes anything but "stable" debian sort of a drag.
Stable Debian, on the other hand, is a nice thing. I've always admired Debian's power structure and community focus, but I've been so much happier with my hobby computer when I switched to a more "I-think-I'm-an-expert-but-really-I'm-an-idiot" distro like gentoo. For binary distros, I think there's a big pack of modern flashy desktop ones that eat Debian's lunch. Debian's idealism might end up side-lining it in the Linux world.
My experince at RPI this summer was very different. There wasn't wireless coverage in the dorm where we were housed. Worse, to get on the wireless network seemed to require some windows-only tool (according to the confrence organizers), so I was SOL with a linux laptop. I didn't much care for the situation as a visitor. I hope it is different for the students.
Then again, some of the measures of how wired the campus is seem a bit stilted. Online registration? Does it matter for small (1000 students) colleges? I'd rather talk with THE registrar personally than have some webform. She can ask me how things are going, suggest alternate courses, and generally keep the system running smoothly.
The Mac will never run Windows, while most Linux boxes are Intel/Athlon. They'd be running Windows if free operating system didn't exist. Mac Office doesn't compete with Windows Office or Windows, for that matter. It just captures another 2% of the market.
I also believe however that Windows is not Microsoft's main focus. I think that the Windows business is secondary to the Secure Computing model, though. That's the long-range money maker. It's like the open source Service business model, but if people stop paying for service, they lose their data too.
Windows is a key stepping stone along the way. The OS will play nice with a DRM'ed system and lock the user out. Linux and other free OS's have a vested interest in cracking such DRM.
Whew! Total safety is so close I can taste it! Thanks, guys. Without your cameras everywhere, we'd all be blown up tomorrow. (Well, I'm not sure the one in my bathroom is necessary, but I do store bleach there and it could be used as a weapon if terrorists break into my house.)
This is a much better boardgame portal. You need to configure it to use english instead of german (if that's your language of choice), but it has a great community and lots and lots of german board games. If you aren't familiar with classic titles like Saint Petersburg, Puerto Rico, and Carcassone, you should really check it out. These games have been beautifly adapted to the java interface, so anyone can play with any OS with java support.
The german style of boardgame is interesting. The games are under an hour, you may be down, but you're never out, and it'll be your turn soon. The are easy to learn but hard to master. Unlike the American designers, the germans don't like direct conflict or random chance. Instead, there's a lot of resource denial and bidding strategy.
Brettspeilwelt has a metagame that advances players in rank. Experienced players have more control over games, and can build game rooms of their own. Generally, playing space, in terms of server resources is optimally allocated this way. There's a lot of prestige in offering the new game and so forth. Also, the Germans are very polite gamers. No cussing or racial slurs, just "good luck and have fun" type comments. If you like boardgames like Settlers, this is the place to be.
The trouble with web "broadcast" is that it isn't a broadcast. You have to spend bandwidth for every lister connecting. The beauty of radio is that you can send one signal to everyone at once. Also, it is difficult to get proper internet connections in moving vehicles for the price of a radio receiver. If there were a similar initiative where I'm at, I'd love to operate a transmitter.
{knocks on door}
Sir, I'm from the microsoft corporation. I was sent to "upgrade" your browsing experience. Plase bend over and drop your shorts.
No, sir, this isn't really necessary. Our geeks are working on a way to use XAML to automatically download and solder metal on to your ass over the internet. Yep, the future is coming.
I rehabed a Dell Inspiron 4100 into a tivo-type unit. It's great in almost all respects: low noise, low power, built-in battery backup, even a built-in ir reciever. I got around the small harddrive by streaming video over 100 mb ethernet from my desktop in the other room. The recording has to be done elsewhere, although the mythTv frontend/backend pieces make this pretty straightforward. It isn't a bad life for a laptop. Most of the integrated hardware is put to work, plus it is nice and small.
Slashdot Mirror
I think one of the big hurdles is the countable number of states of a digital computer versus the uncountable number for an analog computer (like the brain). We live in the digital era, but this has the side effect that we are blinding ourselves to the limitations of digital technology.
Screen resolution is a good example. The resolution of text on a computer screen is lousy compared to a printed page, but people spend so much time reading text off of their computers that they seem shocked that reading low-rez text is hard on the eyes.
I know, advancements in digital devices can make up most of the gap. You just need pixels slightly smaller than the smallest thing the eye can see. Then the digital display can equal the 'analog display' of real-world objects.
But for intelligence? We need so many states to simulate a human brain that it just isn't feasible. I guess this point isn't lost on AI researchers, who look for shortcuts and such, but it is interesting...
Wait, we were talking about game 'AI'. Game AI is like chatbot AI. It needs to be fun to play with, not necessarily smart, learning, or challenging (although those things can be fun too).
I think it's too bad we'll have to wait until 4.0 to see an improvement in the default setup. Everyone agrees that it's ugly and not very useful, but there's been so little done to change it. If they start the process with 3.5, then they can get some feedback for 4.0.
More than that, the unchangable UI things need some improvement. KDE has really bad right-click menus in almost all cases. The options availible there need to be pruned down, moved into sub-menus, or "hidden" as accelerators attached to clicks.
I'm a big fan of the "hermetic interface", where simple commands are availible from the menus, buttons, and so forth, but really powerful commands are "hidden". They don't clutter the UI, the newbie doesn't care about them, and the old-hands will find out how to use these features.
An example from gnome is the hidden type-in box in the file selector. It's extreme (type-in isn't that ugly a thing to have in a selector!), but once you know you can hit "/" and just enter a path, it is really cool.
Gnome's new "three top-level" menus is also pretty cool, if you've used it. It helps to take the clutter out of the menu.
(Not to say I love everything gnome. The KDE apps are much better in general. Konqueror is more useful than nautilus to me. Konsole is worlds better than gnome-terminal. KDVI is without peer.)
Oh, I should say something nice about 3.5. The changes to konqueror are great! It cuts the fat out of the menus. Technically, it makes sense to make a file-browser and a web-browser use the same code, but the UI should be different in each mode. This is a very positive change for konqueror.
There is a lot of crud in the air when it comes to copyrights. I think it's important to air these things:
1) Artists create in a vacuum. The act of creation is a mystical experience above ordinary humans.
2) Without long copyrights, there would be no incentives for creators to create, leaving us with a dull and lifeless society.
One is at the heart of a lot of publishing group propaganda. Of course, all of us create art. Most of it isn't very good, but we all create, from doodles, to humming, to solid prose and moving music. We are often spurred to create by other art. Art influences art. This doesn't mean just immitations, but also reactions, remixes, rebuttals.
Two is in the head of a lot of artists. At some level, I can't blame them. No one wants their hard work exploited. But I will point out that art was created before copyright legislation. The need to create and share went before the profit. Also, copyright and extensions to copyright have ever been pushed by the publishers, from the Statute of Anne onward. The idea is very mercantilist -- provide a monopoly to encourage production. It isn't terribly modern.
There are modern ways to approach the problem of compensating artists. I think the current roadblock is the publishing industry. They say they serve to both reward good creators and silence bad ones, so as to not choke up the public mide with poor ideas. People are perfectly capable of culling what they like from what they don't, and can use social networking to filter out content they don't want. The internet has made this a solvable problem. As for compensating artists, there are ideas like the Street Busker Protocol, where instead of a publisher, an escrow keeps things honest.
The link I used to have has died, so here's a brief run-down:
For the purpose of this, our artists is a writer, and she has just written a novel. She encrypts the novel and sends it to an escrow. She works out that she wants $200,000 dollars to release the key to the novel so that it can be read. The escrow will take a small cut and will solicit buyers for a set period of time, say 60 days. The writer sets about promoting her new work. She can release teaser chapters, related short stories, go on late night TV, whatever. Meanwhile, the public can offer up contributions online to get the key. The escrow holds all of the money. If, at the end of 60 days, the novel hasn't attracted 200k in contributions, the contributions are returned, and the writer must start again. If the goal is met, the writer is paid as soon as she releases the key.
The lack of atmosphere really changes the way heat flows. Our intuition about hot and cold is shaped by convection, where heat is transfered to gas molecules that bump against us and are then swept away. With no atmosphere, heat transfer slows down. The only heat loss on the moon would occur by conduction into the surface of the moon.
How "cold" is the moon in human terms? I don't have any idea. I'd imagine sunlight would be more important for constant solar power (well, barring eclipses).
As someone who uses a fanless C3 system with the open source unichrome /xxmc drivers, I object to them being called "less than reliable". I've had zero issues with them. In fact, when I was investigaing whether or not to use the VIA solution or the open source one, it came to light that that the via solution didn't work as well:
o ci d=25289&group_id=102048
http://sourceforge.net/docman/display_doc.php?d
Moreover, VeXP isn't fully functional. It has issues with full screen play, other video codecs, etc. If you want to do something besides watch mpeg2, you need the open source solution.
However, building mplayer, xorg, and unichrome to all play nice and use hardware took me several hours and a lot of curse words. It isn't exactly straightforward. (But maybe it improved from feb 2005.)
The real problem is that true "super bugs" aren't bothered by bleach. They've found strains that can be CULTURED IN CLOROX BLEACH right from the bottle. This is what happens when organisms with short generation times encounter environmental difficulties. See "The Coming Plague" by Laurie Garrett for more interesting stories in this vein.
:)
Regardless, you could just replace the plastic
That won't happen, however. Some medical device company will manufacture a keyboard from special plastics without spaces between the keys and charge $500 for it. That's (part of) how health care costs keep going up.
It is funny that you must pay to have an unlisted number in a dead-tree phone book, but online the situation is reversed.
:). It's another example of the internet turning truisms from the physical world on their ear. This might sound so 1996, but we're still learning of the interweb effects our lives. None of the "cyber-scholars" who wrote about the "information superhighway" seemed to anticipate the true fallout.
I know, I know, it's because of the cost involved with running a DNS. Phonebooks have ad revenue, DNS's don't (well, maybe verisign
Well, there is a group of people that should have a cellphone shoved up their ---.
And to the other poster: When I'm travelling, I use a device called a "book". It has great battery life, but doesn't deal well with water. On trips over two hours, I bring two.
It starts with a "K", but it's not for KDE. It's windows only. This violates an essential rule of software. If it's called "kfoo", it's for kde, "gfoo" -- gnome, "xfoo" -- graphical cousin to pre-existing "foo" cli application, "yfoo" -- I don't know. Why foo?
This is known in general as "sub-pixel rendering". It's available in Linux and on Macs. Check a control panel / system settings / control center module near you!
Bittorrent did more than get the swapping strategy correct, it fixed the social psychology of p2p. Before, you traded files with other faceless users. This meant you had little investment in the uploads of others. People would join the network and not share files, cap their upload speeds, etc. Generally, this made downloading a slow and painful process. (Not to mention that it was difficult to tell if two similarly named files are the same ... there's too much diversity to get a good spread in file sources).
But Bittorrents have organized around websites. These sites typically require registration and monitor the share ratio of users. Users can no longer leach. There's social stigma attached to it. Also, you have some investment in making sure others have a copy of the file. If you liked it enough to d/l it, you probably want to share. Better yet, the action of the users of the site are focused on the same files, so resources are allocated fairly. Generally, it works better all around.
This leaves out the boost in nerd status of those who have large share ratios and upload lots of torrents. That helps with file availability too.
What if they had spent that money on making kids want to go to school? I went to Texas public schools. No, I survived them. The one I attended was divided neatly into honors and regular classes. In the regulars classes, you learned how to take the TAAS (this test was required for graduation and pushed as a part of school accountability under the last federal administration). If you were in honors, you learned how to take the AP exam.
Needless to say, not many people were really turned on to learn. Because nothing of substance was being taught.
Personally, I think that large school reforms are in order. Let's divide students into classes with the type of instruction that suits them best. Let's not teach college prep to everyone, they'll resent it. Few people really connect with the idea of liberal arts anyway (even in college, I was a bit surprised) and it forms the basis for most highschool course requirements. Articles I've seen recently say that boys are doing poorly in American schools. It looks like all girls schools in England do significantly better than comparable coed schools, especially in math and science. Maybe gender segregation would help. Girls seem to be intimidated by boys in these subjects, and boys need more structure and encouragement. There's a lack of adolescent-to-adult ritual in our country. Maybe this could help provide what truant students are missing.
It would be preferable to humiliation like this RFID crap.
Amazon has a buisness process patent on the whole "IP-Lawyer Protection Racket" idea. They're going to sue the pants of these guys.
Well, not really. But it would be ironic. Mmm, delicious irony...
My made-on-linux video blog.
My made-on-linux video blog is what? Citzens of slashdot, do not fear. I will tirelessly search for the verb of that sentence. You will be the first to know when I discover it.
Now we're safe from aliens too. Take that, ET!
What? They're pointed back at Earth?Off topic? Did the moderator follow the link? Check out the picture on Creative's site. I thought the selling of the blue back light was just too funny. I mean, what the hell? I'm going to throw out my old yellow backlit device and upgrate to the new blue one. Why? Because I'm mesmerized . If this is Creative's marketing department at their best, this thing won't kill the ipod, it won't even kill dead people.
Debian's strategy of rock-solid releases is something that makes the distro unique. It also doesn't make it much fun. If you want modern packages, you often have to hang out with the "unstable" crowd, rather than the "testing" crowd. But this is like being signed up for regular crotch-kicks, since unstable breaks systems on a practically weekly basis. This, plus dependency creep, makes anything but "stable" debian sort of a drag.
Stable Debian, on the other hand, is a nice thing. I've always admired Debian's power structure and community focus, but I've been so much happier with my hobby computer when I switched to a more "I-think-I'm-an-expert-but-really-I'm-an-idiot" distro like gentoo. For binary distros, I think there's a big pack of modern flashy desktop ones that eat Debian's lunch. Debian's idealism might end up side-lining it in the Linux world.
My experince at RPI this summer was very different. There wasn't wireless coverage in the dorm where we were housed. Worse, to get on the wireless network seemed to require some windows-only tool (according to the confrence organizers), so I was SOL with a linux laptop. I didn't much care for the situation as a visitor. I hope it is different for the students.
Then again, some of the measures of how wired the campus is seem a bit stilted. Online registration? Does it matter for small (1000 students) colleges? I'd rather talk with THE registrar personally than have some webform. She can ask me how things are going, suggest alternate courses, and generally keep the system running smoothly.
The Mac will never run Windows, while most Linux boxes are Intel/Athlon. They'd be running Windows if free operating system didn't exist. Mac Office doesn't compete with Windows Office or Windows, for that matter. It just captures another 2% of the market.
I also believe however that Windows is not Microsoft's main focus. I think that the Windows business is secondary to the Secure Computing model, though. That's the long-range money maker. It's like the open source Service business model, but if people stop paying for service, they lose their data too.
Windows is a key stepping stone along the way. The OS will play nice with a DRM'ed system and lock the user out. Linux and other free OS's have a vested interest in cracking such DRM.
Whew! Total safety is so close I can taste it! Thanks, guys. Without your cameras everywhere, we'd all be blown up tomorrow. (Well, I'm not sure the one in my bathroom is necessary, but I do store bleach there and it could be used as a weapon if terrorists break into my house.)
This is a much better boardgame portal. You need to configure it to use english instead of german (if that's your language of choice), but it has a great community and lots and lots of german board games. If you aren't familiar with classic titles like Saint Petersburg, Puerto Rico, and Carcassone, you should really check it out. These games have been beautifly adapted to the java interface, so anyone can play with any OS with java support.
The german style of boardgame is interesting. The games are under an hour, you may be down, but you're never out, and it'll be your turn soon. The are easy to learn but hard to master. Unlike the American designers, the germans don't like direct conflict or random chance. Instead, there's a lot of resource denial and bidding strategy.
Brettspeilwelt has a metagame that advances players in rank. Experienced players have more control over games, and can build game rooms of their own. Generally, playing space, in terms of server resources is optimally allocated this way. There's a lot of prestige in offering the new game and so forth. Also, the Germans are very polite gamers. No cussing or racial slurs, just "good luck and have fun" type comments. If you like boardgames like Settlers, this is the place to be.
The trouble with web "broadcast" is that it isn't a broadcast. You have to spend bandwidth for every lister connecting. The beauty of radio is that you can send one signal to everyone at once. Also, it is difficult to get proper internet connections in moving vehicles for the price of a radio receiver. If there were a similar initiative where I'm at, I'd love to operate a transmitter.
{knocks on door}
Sir, I'm from the microsoft corporation. I was sent to "upgrade" your browsing experience. Plase bend over and drop your shorts.
No, sir, this isn't really necessary. Our geeks are working on a way to use XAML to automatically download and solder metal on to your ass over the internet. Yep, the future is coming.
I rehabed a Dell Inspiron 4100 into a tivo-type unit. It's great in almost all respects: low noise, low power, built-in battery backup, even a built-in ir reciever. I got around the small harddrive by streaming video over 100 mb ethernet from my desktop in the other room. The recording has to be done elsewhere, although the mythTv frontend/backend pieces make this pretty straightforward. It isn't a bad life for a laptop. Most of the integrated hardware is put to work, plus it is nice and small.
Changing your password just got a lot harder :)