I like X-Men Legends 1 & 2 for this sort of thing. My girl only played PC RPGs (Baldur's Gate and its variations, Morrowind, etc.), not liking the controllers or the games on my various consoles. That all changed with Mario Kart Double Dash, in which she would take the attacking and providing speed boosts and I would do the driving, but even though we were playing on a console together, she refused to try to drive.
When I bought X-Men Legends, she showed some interest in playing; the cooperative mode lets you get away with button mashing even as it gently pushes you towards learning combos and powers; these she picked up quickly, and we were able to start getting lots of combos. After many complaints about (and a few pratfalls due to) the Gamecube wires, I acquired two Wavebirds, and all of the sudden, she expects to be playing when the Gamecube is turned on. It's no longer a spectator sport for her. When she gets tired of playing X-Men, she announces she's out and I can return the game to single-player mode on the fly, letting her spectate once more. This means that I can do a lot of the tedious power leveling when she's not around, and because of the linked leveling scheme, her avatar never lags in level.
X-Men Legends 2 is just as good at cooperative play for mixed skill-level couples; my girl is a fan of the X-Men comics since the movies came out, and now she can play as some of her favorite characters. She mostly plays as Magento, while I jump around the other three depending on the situation. These three games (X-Men Legends 1 and 2, and Double Dash), along with the Wavebird, have let her play and enjoy games she normally would have only watched me play; even better, her increase in skill and confidence have let her try playing games solo (mostly Zelda: Windwaker, but some Soul Calibur 2).
Bottom line is that good cooperative games along with an easy to use, tangle-free controller helped increase my girl's skill level and worked as a gateway drug for "harder" games. She's even stooped to traditionally "guy" ploys: who do you think bought me X-Men Legends 2 for Christmas? And gave it to me ten days early to open so that "I" could play it?
As far as I can tell, it was CNET that announced that Google wasn't talking to them. The reporter in the Times article says it's Google that announced it. I'd like to see a link or something corroborating his statement that Google is doing any announcing; otherwise, it's just spin/bullshit intended to make Google look bad (part of the point of the article, of course, but back your claims with evidence).
I had a lot of trouble trying to use any homebrew PHP5 package with Sarge; they all seemed to want Apache 1. I ended up just compiling from source. I wrote a description of the issues I had doing this; it may or may not help.
How do you define "wizard"? Everything I know about running and securing a Linux Apache web server I learned from Slashdot and Google, from partioning to software installation to "hardening", which could mean anything. Does a wizard use mod_security? 'cause I'm pretty much a Linux noob, and I use it to filter stupid automated attacks. I also use it to masquerade my server as running IIS, but again, this seems like a noob trick.
I suppose a wizard would run Apache chrooted; this is something that I'm familiar with, but don't do. What about patches/updates? Well, I'm using Debian, so those are easy for a noob to acquire using aptitude. Since I'm running Apache 2 with PHP 5 and MySQL 4, I probably have various points of failure should a vulnerability arise, but my system feels more secure than IIS just based on IIS's reputation. Certainly, no virus is going to backdoor my system anytime soon, and I didn't need to be a wizard to achieve this protection.
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I like X-Men Legends 1 & 2 for this sort of thing. My girl only played PC RPGs (Baldur's Gate and its variations, Morrowind, etc.), not liking the controllers or the games on my various consoles. That all changed with Mario Kart Double Dash, in which she would take the attacking and providing speed boosts and I would do the driving, but even though we were playing on a console together, she refused to try to drive. When I bought X-Men Legends, she showed some interest in playing; the cooperative mode lets you get away with button mashing even as it gently pushes you towards learning combos and powers; these she picked up quickly, and we were able to start getting lots of combos. After many complaints about (and a few pratfalls due to) the Gamecube wires, I acquired two Wavebirds, and all of the sudden, she expects to be playing when the Gamecube is turned on. It's no longer a spectator sport for her. When she gets tired of playing X-Men, she announces she's out and I can return the game to single-player mode on the fly, letting her spectate once more. This means that I can do a lot of the tedious power leveling when she's not around, and because of the linked leveling scheme, her avatar never lags in level. X-Men Legends 2 is just as good at cooperative play for mixed skill-level couples; my girl is a fan of the X-Men comics since the movies came out, and now she can play as some of her favorite characters. She mostly plays as Magento, while I jump around the other three depending on the situation. These three games (X-Men Legends 1 and 2, and Double Dash), along with the Wavebird, have let her play and enjoy games she normally would have only watched me play; even better, her increase in skill and confidence have let her try playing games solo (mostly Zelda: Windwaker, but some Soul Calibur 2). Bottom line is that good cooperative games along with an easy to use, tangle-free controller helped increase my girl's skill level and worked as a gateway drug for "harder" games. She's even stooped to traditionally "guy" ploys: who do you think bought me X-Men Legends 2 for Christmas? And gave it to me ten days early to open so that "I" could play it?
As far as I can tell, it was CNET that announced that Google wasn't talking to them. The reporter in the Times article says it's Google that announced it. I'd like to see a link or something corroborating his statement that Google is doing any announcing; otherwise, it's just spin/bullshit intended to make Google look bad (part of the point of the article, of course, but back your claims with evidence).
I had a lot of trouble trying to use any homebrew PHP5 package with Sarge; they all seemed to want Apache 1. I ended up just compiling from source. I wrote a description of the issues I had doing this; it may or may not help.
How do you define "wizard"? Everything I know about running and securing a Linux Apache web server I learned from Slashdot and Google, from partioning to software installation to "hardening", which could mean anything. Does a wizard use mod_security? 'cause I'm pretty much a Linux noob, and I use it to filter stupid automated attacks. I also use it to masquerade my server as running IIS, but again, this seems like a noob trick.
I suppose a wizard would run Apache chrooted; this is something that I'm familiar with, but don't do. What about patches/updates? Well, I'm using Debian, so those are easy for a noob to acquire using aptitude. Since I'm running Apache 2 with PHP 5 and MySQL 4, I probably have various points of failure should a vulnerability arise, but my system feels more secure than IIS just based on IIS's reputation. Certainly, no virus is going to backdoor my system anytime soon, and I didn't need to be a wizard to achieve this protection.