Which makes game reviews totally different from movie or music reviews.
I think one of the things that differentiates movie and music reviews from game reviews is that the craft of reviewing movies and music is predicated on there being something other than stylistic differences to review.
Video games are art, but in most respects the vast majority of video games radically favor style over substance. A FPS game is not making a statement about anything. It has no opinion. It can be stylistically amazing and very exciting to play, but there is no statement that can be reviewed.
Now think about music. You may not like Public Enemy, but they obviously are putting out a message that you can at list critique. Britney Spears is generally panned by critics because she is not really making any artistic statement. She's a prime example of style over substance.
First Person Shooters currently rule the roost in video games. What is the message of Halo 2 or Killzone? In many ways they all share the same message, which is that killing huge numbers of living opponents is a good thing. How much more can you say about the message behind such a game?
I can't wait until embedded device designers take a cue from web designers and start using Flash for navigation
How many web sites do you visit on a regular basis that make use of Flash for navigation? From what I've seen, the majority majority of web development professionals have learned the uses and limitations of Flash. Most of the superfluous Flash I see these days is relegated to entertainment-oriented sites that are trying really hard to impress 18-25 year olds.
of people talking to their computers. Some people aren't bothered by noise pollution, but it drives me crazy. The babble of people on the phone in a crowded space is bad enough. Add to that people talking to their computers constantly, and postal employees won't be the only people going off with AKs.
I'm with you, Coryoth. IBM and Apple are doing fine in their current relationship. Apple uses IBM chips. IBM pushes businesses to realize that Windows isn't the only OS on the block, which benefits Apple.
But IBM and Apple are both smart enough to realize that merging two companies with their own unique cultures is a difficult, sometimes impossible task. Bigger is not always better, as IBM learned during their dark years. A loose alliance based on mutual respect is likely far better for both companies.
Rumors about Apple mating with other companies have been around as long as the Mac has existed. Sun, Disney, Sony, IBM - I wonder who it'll be on the next iteration of the rumor mill.
Michael Powell was a cavalry officer in the Army, then worked for Cheney, then worked at a law firm, then worked at Justice, then became the FCC boss under Bush II. It's all here.
I could care less about comfort level- for me, the ability to critique and O_o and OMFG:O a movie in realtime on IRC while simultaneously getting other things done in the background is comfort enough.
You're missing the big draw of TV, and the reason that it is still hanging in there in spite of the fact that most of what is on TV is crap: TV is a passive medium. Unless you're watching a very creatively done show, or one that is trying to teach you something, it is a passive experience.
Many people sit at their computers all day for work, and the last thing they want to do is sit in front of them for entertainment. I think Steve Jobs is right when he says that when you want to create something, you use your computer, and when you want to passively absorb something, you use the TV.
Physical comfort is not important to you, but my guess is you're not yet old enough that daily aches and pains matter. I'm not ready for the Barcalounger just yet, but there are definitely times when I want to sit down on a sofa and watch something that I know will not be mentally taxing.
Thankfully TiVO allows me to watch what I want, rather than simply whatever happens to be on at a given time.
Do I *prefer* TV to the computer? Absolutely not. In a choice between the two, the Internet wins every time. But not everyone watches TV for six hours a day, and sometimes TV is the most convenient vehicle for relaxation.
Critiquing a movie on IRC while doing other things and somehow watching a movie at the same time is indeed getting more done, but it doesn't seem very relaxing to me. I'm not sure that passively watching a movie (at home on the TV or at the theater) is an evil experience, just because it's not interactive.
I'd say TV is ruinous primarily because some people do watch it for hours on end and do nothing else, and because 95% of what's on is total crap. I'm not sure that the medium itself is inherently evil, though.
Unfortunately, in the Bay Area if you bought one of these you still couldn't use it unless you already owned land. Then of course, it wouldn't pass the housing code. But if you're independently wealthy and have a dozen acres in Marin County, it's awesome for sleepovers!
I suppose at some point IBM will get out of hardware entirely
Well, IBM has poured a ton of money and resources into their chip division, which is finally bearing fruit.
The PC market is rapidly becoming commoditized, and IBM is getting out at a good time. You either invest heavily in R&D like Apple, trying to always push the consumer market forward, or you go with the strength of your distribution model the way Dell does. If you're not able to do either of those things, you've got very little to differentiate on beyond price.
Plus, why be a combatant when you can be an arms merchant? Chips power everything, and IBM is well-positioned to take business from all of the other server chip vendors. They're also pulling in revenue from Apple's G5s, and as adoption of Linux continues in large organizations, IBM won't have the conflict of interest issues that have given Dell, et. al. such fits. If MS has no strings to pull, you can do your own thing.
For the non geek, there are only two web browsers, Microsoft and Netscape.
Until about two months ago, I'd have agreed with you. But the mainstream press has been picking up the Firefox story in a big way. Google shows 104k links to GetFirefox.com (and Google underreports links). Articles on Slate, the BBC, CNN, and countless tech sites, not to mention print articles in newspapers from the Wall Street Journal to USA Today, have been almost universally positive.
I'm also encouraged that people don't necessarily connect Firefox to Netscape. That's a point in Firefox's favor.
More and more Regular Joes are hearing about Firefox, and as legions of geeks switch to Firefox, they're taking their less-informed bretheren with them. Remember that for a time Netscape had a stranglehold on the browser market, and nobody paid any attention to Internet Explorer. This is not an unchanging market, though it has been moribund for a few years.
Remember what happened in the search engine market when Google hit the scene? The barrier to entry isn't as low in the browser market, but Firefox has made it very easy to download, install, and use Firefox. I don't see Firefox taking over the browser market, but I think in 2005 Firefox will see increased name recognition, and more importantly, a continued increase in marketshare.
The rest was supposed to be picked up by your imagination.
So true. One of the reasons my gaming group became so attracted to RuneQuest before Avalon Hill got a hold of it was that the game system was simple, elegant, and lean. It was supposed to be a vehicle for your imagination, not the prop upon which everything rested.
The suppliments released by Chaosium were oritented primarily toward illuminating Glorantha, the "official" world of RuneQuest. The suppliments contained adventures, but their primary appeal was that they provided the GM so many kernels for creation of unique adventures, as well as rich notes about geography, culture, and the denizens of the area. IMHO, the Trollpak and Pavis boxed suppliments were the best pencil and paper game suppliments ever created.
Chaosium had a very "mix and match" attitude toward what was "official' and what wasn't. They didn't really care whether you slavishly followed every word of what Steve Perrin wrote about Glorantha, and they didn't care if you modified the game mechanics to suit your needs. That attitude came out in their books and in the RQ community at large.
It's truly a shame that RuneQuest didn't survive. RQ was a game for roleplayers, and it was very difficult to "game the system" It set the standard for clean, elegant rules and a thoroughly explored yet still wide-open game world.
Dungeons and Dragons is fun, but as we all know, the best don't always win out with the public.
This is an old and tired argument. There is no way you can find a Mac laptop or desktop that *starts* at a price as low as that offered by Dell or some other PC vendor. That's because Apple is not willing to drop below a certain quality point with their hardware.
As you move up the ladder in performance, you'll find plenty of high-end laptops and desktops that exceed their Mac counterparts in price.
Expense also includes a wide variety of other factors, including necessity for hardware and software support, ease and speed of peripheral deployment, time (and money) spent dealing with security and malware issues, and so on.
Comparing a bottom of the barrel PC with the lowest-priced Mac is like comparing a Dell Inspiron to an Alienware Area 51 machine.
but not necessarily good for those Third World folks who will supposedly be receiving these. No matter how you slice it, middlemen (probably two or three layers' worth) will be involved in getting these machines to people outside the Developed World, thereby jacking up the price per unit to well beyond $100.
There's that whole nasty "human interpretation" thing again. It's almost as if people actually aren't machines with binary thought processes. Weird, isn't it?
In 1812, the Massachusetts legislature redrew legislative district lines to favor the Jeffersonian Republican party candidates.
I should have been more specific. I was referring to the computer-assisted bullshit that's been turned into the Devil's own art by party hacks in the last decade. Vote fraud, gerrymandering, and the like has been around since the birth of the republic (in some places it's more enshrined than in others, I suppose). I just find the systematic and technologically-assisted nature of today's fraud particularly repulsive, in that it is widespread and very difficult to combat.
There's a frightening article in the Jan/Feb 2004 issue of The Atlantic (you have to pay to retrieve it from their online archive, so I didn't bother with a link). The gist of it is that the gerrymandering has become so effective that it protects itself. If you do a good enough job locking in the right constituent base through gerrymandering, you can keep your party in control of a region until the next round of gerrymandering, which you will of course control.
The US government currently serves to extract the resources of the entire population and funnel it to dedicated projects of the federal government's choosing. That is EXACTLY the communist model.
That statement is not "exactly" or even remotely correct. Your hostility to the federal government is coloring your interpretation of the facts.
Communism, which btw has never been truly achieved, is based on the concept of collective ownership. No matter how onerous the US federal government's "extraction of resources," private property (physical and intellectual) ownership is at the core of the American system of government.
You berate people for not *understanding* that the Constitution is not a matter open to interpretation, yet you take great liberties with the meaning of the term communism in your effort to paint the US government as a bogeyman.
Maybe you should move to a communist nation so that you can be happy using the feds to siphon everyone else's cash to assuage your penile deficiency.
Hey, how'd you know about my little problem?
Regarding Amendment X: The power to regulate interstate commerce is given to the Federal government.
Regarding Amendment IX: The right to regulate the Internet has not been established as retained by the states or "the people." In fact, the Internet was created by the United States government, so from its birth it has been under Federal mandate.
As for politicians not checking the 9th or 10th since the early 1800s, there's far more to the equation than that, as I'm sure you're aware. Interpretation of the Constitution by politicians (and more importantly by the Supreme Court) is dependent in large part on the will of the people. People wanted a strong Federal government, and they got one. We may not want such a strong Federal government now, but that does not mean that its current size and scope are in violation of the Constitution.
I served on a jury in Washington, DC for a simple marijuana case, and was amazed to find that I was the only white collar professional in the jury. In a city chock full of white collar workers, the jury consisted almost exclusively of retirees and fast food employees. This is not to say that retirees and fast food employees aren't smart, discerning, and able to make competent decisions. But I found it incredible that I was the only person who lived in Northwest DC (where the vast majority of white collar professionals in DC live) and the only one who seemed unconcerned about the length of the trial. These people really didn't care whether they got back to work in an hour, a day, or a week.
Your comments about streamlining the selection process are right on the money in my book. Think of how much time and wrangling we could save by simply drawing members of the community to serve as jurors in their community - plain and simple. Imagine also how much that would cut down on legal fees and save taxpayers money at the same time.
I'm with you on redistricting boards, too. The thing about jerrymandering is that both parties think it serves their needs when they are in power, but they cry foul when they are out of power. Clean, fair districts could really breathe some fresh air into the American political system and give people the feeling that they are not being completely manipulated. It's not often talked about, but in my book systematic gerrymandering is one of the single worst things that has happened to the American political process in the last 50 years.
Talk about a true "clean up government" platform. I think it's time for me to start writing letters to the Governator about redistricting....
Here's an example of an SBC customer horror story experienced by a real person I know intimately (me):
1) Move to new house, sign up for SBC DSL through local ISP. Start receiving bills from SBC three days later.
2) One week after receiving first bill, I call call my ISP. They say there's an issue with SBC provisioning. So I call SBC and on the third attempt make it through their "we designed our phone tree to mimic our corporate structure, not your needs" system. I speak to a real person in the DSL provisioning department who is most helpful. This person determines that my DSL has been ordered but isn't quite ready for provisioning. He's not sure why. But he tells me to call back in three days if my DSL isn't working yet.
3) Four days later (I figured I'd cut them some slack, which they of course richly deserved), I call again. The phone tree somehow doesn't work the same way this time. On my third attempt (hey, at least it didn't take me longer this time), I connect with a human being. She puzzles over why I'm still not provisioned. She sends me to someone in another department, but (shock!) somehow the PHONE COMPANY drops my call and I'm back to square one.
4) Not having another 45 minutes to devote to this nonsense, I try again the following day, early in the morning (in a fit of optimism, I figure this will somehow help). After three transfers to different people in the SBC hall of mirrors, I talk to a guy who really knows his shit. This guy is good. I want to hug this guy. He's on top of it. He tells me the problem is that while the billing department knows I have an account, the provisioning department doesn't know that I have an account, because somehow the billing department's computer didn't pass the word to the provisioning department's computer. Unfortunately this is not easily fixed. In fact, they have a specialist for these sort of problems (right about now I'm seeing good ol' Robert DeNiro creeping around in Brazil. My good buddy at SBC informs me that it will take three days at the most for this elite SBC commando to remedy the situation and contact me. I even get her name and a direct line.
5) You can tell where this is going, can't you? After three days, I call her. Oh, how strange. The number is INCORRECT. Of course, I have no way to find this woman, because the last thing SBC wants is for me to actually talk to the one person who is uniquely trained, qualified, and psychologically prepared to deal with the situation. By now I am.. well... rather disappointed and a bit PUT OUT by SBC.
6 - 11) More painful, annoying, frustrating bullshit.
12) SIX WEEKS after ordering my DSL service (which I was assured would be activated within a week - and no, this didn't happen in the early days of their California rollout - this was in 1993), it was finally activated.
Did I mention that at the time I worked from home and was heavily dependent on high bandwidth Internet access? Yes, cable would have been better. No, it was not available in my area.
SBC and MS. Two partners that truly deserve each other.
Slashdot Mirror
I think one of the things that differentiates movie and music reviews from game reviews is that the craft of reviewing movies and music is predicated on there being something other than stylistic differences to review.
Video games are art, but in most respects the vast majority of video games radically favor style over substance. A FPS game is not making a statement about anything. It has no opinion. It can be stylistically amazing and very exciting to play, but there is no statement that can be reviewed.
Now think about music. You may not like Public Enemy, but they obviously are putting out a message that you can at list critique. Britney Spears is generally panned by critics because she is not really making any artistic statement. She's a prime example of style over substance.
First Person Shooters currently rule the roost in video games. What is the message of Halo 2 or Killzone? In many ways they all share the same message, which is that killing huge numbers of living opponents is a good thing. How much more can you say about the message behind such a game?
How many web sites do you visit on a regular basis that make use of Flash for navigation? From what I've seen, the majority majority of web development professionals have learned the uses and limitations of Flash. Most of the superfluous Flash I see these days is relegated to entertainment-oriented sites that are trying really hard to impress 18-25 year olds.
But IBM and Apple are both smart enough to realize that merging two companies with their own unique cultures is a difficult, sometimes impossible task. Bigger is not always better, as IBM learned during their dark years. A loose alliance based on mutual respect is likely far better for both companies.
Rumors about Apple mating with other companies have been around as long as the Mac has existed. Sun, Disney, Sony, IBM - I wonder who it'll be on the next iteration of the rumor mill.
You're missing the big draw of TV, and the reason that it is still hanging in there in spite of the fact that most of what is on TV is crap: TV is a passive medium. Unless you're watching a very creatively done show, or one that is trying to teach you something, it is a passive experience.
Many people sit at their computers all day for work, and the last thing they want to do is sit in front of them for entertainment. I think Steve Jobs is right when he says that when you want to create something, you use your computer, and when you want to passively absorb something, you use the TV.
Physical comfort is not important to you, but my guess is you're not yet old enough that daily aches and pains matter. I'm not ready for the Barcalounger just yet, but there are definitely times when I want to sit down on a sofa and watch something that I know will not be mentally taxing.
Thankfully TiVO allows me to watch what I want, rather than simply whatever happens to be on at a given time.
Do I *prefer* TV to the computer? Absolutely not. In a choice between the two, the Internet wins every time. But not everyone watches TV for six hours a day, and sometimes TV is the most convenient vehicle for relaxation.
Critiquing a movie on IRC while doing other things and somehow watching a movie at the same time is indeed getting more done, but it doesn't seem very relaxing to me. I'm not sure that passively watching a movie (at home on the TV or at the theater) is an evil experience, just because it's not interactive.
I'd say TV is ruinous primarily because some people do watch it for hours on end and do nothing else, and because 95% of what's on is total crap. I'm not sure that the medium itself is inherently evil, though.
Well, IBM has poured a ton of money and resources into their chip division, which is finally bearing fruit.
The PC market is rapidly becoming commoditized, and IBM is getting out at a good time. You either invest heavily in R&D like Apple, trying to always push the consumer market forward, or you go with the strength of your distribution model the way Dell does. If you're not able to do either of those things, you've got very little to differentiate on beyond price.
Plus, why be a combatant when you can be an arms merchant? Chips power everything, and IBM is well-positioned to take business from all of the other server chip vendors. They're also pulling in revenue from Apple's G5s, and as adoption of Linux continues in large organizations, IBM won't have the conflict of interest issues that have given Dell, et. al. such fits. If MS has no strings to pull, you can do your own thing.
Until about two months ago, I'd have agreed with you. But the mainstream press has been picking up the Firefox story in a big way. Google shows 104k links to GetFirefox.com (and Google underreports links). Articles on Slate, the BBC, CNN, and countless tech sites, not to mention print articles in newspapers from the Wall Street Journal to USA Today, have been almost universally positive.
I'm also encouraged that people don't necessarily connect Firefox to Netscape. That's a point in Firefox's favor.
More and more Regular Joes are hearing about Firefox, and as legions of geeks switch to Firefox, they're taking their less-informed bretheren with them. Remember that for a time Netscape had a stranglehold on the browser market, and nobody paid any attention to Internet Explorer. This is not an unchanging market, though it has been moribund for a few years.
Remember what happened in the search engine market when Google hit the scene? The barrier to entry isn't as low in the browser market, but Firefox has made it very easy to download, install, and use Firefox. I don't see Firefox taking over the browser market, but I think in 2005 Firefox will see increased name recognition, and more importantly, a continued increase in marketshare.
So true. One of the reasons my gaming group became so attracted to RuneQuest before Avalon Hill got a hold of it was that the game system was simple, elegant, and lean. It was supposed to be a vehicle for your imagination, not the prop upon which everything rested.
The suppliments released by Chaosium were oritented primarily toward illuminating Glorantha, the "official" world of RuneQuest. The suppliments contained adventures, but their primary appeal was that they provided the GM so many kernels for creation of unique adventures, as well as rich notes about geography, culture, and the denizens of the area. IMHO, the Trollpak and Pavis boxed suppliments were the best pencil and paper game suppliments ever created.
Chaosium had a very "mix and match" attitude toward what was "official' and what wasn't. They didn't really care whether you slavishly followed every word of what Steve Perrin wrote about Glorantha, and they didn't care if you modified the game mechanics to suit your needs. That attitude came out in their books and in the RQ community at large.
It's truly a shame that RuneQuest didn't survive. RQ was a game for roleplayers, and it was very difficult to "game the system" It set the standard for clean, elegant rules and a thoroughly explored yet still wide-open game world.
Dungeons and Dragons is fun, but as we all know, the best don't always win out with the public.
Starting price for a PC desktop: $499
This is an old and tired argument. There is no way you can find a Mac laptop or desktop that *starts* at a price as low as that offered by Dell or some other PC vendor. That's because Apple is not willing to drop below a certain quality point with their hardware.
As you move up the ladder in performance, you'll find plenty of high-end laptops and desktops that exceed their Mac counterparts in price.
Expense also includes a wide variety of other factors, including necessity for hardware and software support, ease and speed of peripheral deployment, time (and money) spent dealing with security and malware issues, and so on.
Comparing a bottom of the barrel PC with the lowest-priced Mac is like comparing a Dell Inspiron to an Alienware Area 51 machine.
They're the sort of middlemen I was referring to. Look at most big nonprofits these days and check out their overhead.
Well, you know the Army does pride itself on being the lean, green fighting machine. D'oh! Please, don't throw rotten eggs. I just cleaned this suit.
There's that whole nasty "human interpretation" thing again. It's almost as if people actually aren't machines with binary thought processes. Weird, isn't it?
I should have been more specific. I was referring to the computer-assisted bullshit that's been turned into the Devil's own art by party hacks in the last decade. Vote fraud, gerrymandering, and the like has been around since the birth of the republic (in some places it's more enshrined than in others, I suppose). I just find the systematic and technologically-assisted nature of today's fraud particularly repulsive, in that it is widespread and very difficult to combat.
There's a frightening article in the Jan/Feb 2004 issue of The Atlantic (you have to pay to retrieve it from their online archive, so I didn't bother with a link). The gist of it is that the gerrymandering has become so effective that it protects itself. If you do a good enough job locking in the right constituent base through gerrymandering, you can keep your party in control of a region until the next round of gerrymandering, which you will of course control.
That statement is not "exactly" or even remotely correct. Your hostility to the federal government is coloring your interpretation of the facts.
Communism, which btw has never been truly achieved, is based on the concept of collective ownership. No matter how onerous the US federal government's "extraction of resources," private property (physical and intellectual) ownership is at the core of the American system of government.
You berate people for not *understanding* that the Constitution is not a matter open to interpretation, yet you take great liberties with the meaning of the term communism in your effort to paint the US government as a bogeyman.
Hey, how'd you know about my little problem?
Regarding Amendment X: The power to regulate interstate commerce is given to the Federal government.
Regarding Amendment IX: The right to regulate the Internet has not been established as retained by the states or "the people." In fact, the Internet was created by the United States government, so from its birth it has been under Federal mandate.
As for politicians not checking the 9th or 10th since the early 1800s, there's far more to the equation than that, as I'm sure you're aware. Interpretation of the Constitution by politicians (and more importantly by the Supreme Court) is dependent in large part on the will of the people. People wanted a strong Federal government, and they got one. We may not want such a strong Federal government now, but that does not mean that its current size and scope are in violation of the Constitution.
I served on a jury in Washington, DC for a simple marijuana case, and was amazed to find that I was the only white collar professional in the jury. In a city chock full of white collar workers, the jury consisted almost exclusively of retirees and fast food employees. This is not to say that retirees and fast food employees aren't smart, discerning, and able to make competent decisions. But I found it incredible that I was the only person who lived in Northwest DC (where the vast majority of white collar professionals in DC live) and the only one who seemed unconcerned about the length of the trial. These people really didn't care whether they got back to work in an hour, a day, or a week.
Your comments about streamlining the selection process are right on the money in my book. Think of how much time and wrangling we could save by simply drawing members of the community to serve as jurors in their community - plain and simple. Imagine also how much that would cut down on legal fees and save taxpayers money at the same time.
I'm with you on redistricting boards, too. The thing about jerrymandering is that both parties think it serves their needs when they are in power, but they cry foul when they are out of power. Clean, fair districts could really breathe some fresh air into the American political system and give people the feeling that they are not being completely manipulated. It's not often talked about, but in my book systematic gerrymandering is one of the single worst things that has happened to the American political process in the last 50 years.
Talk about a true "clean up government" platform. I think it's time for me to start writing letters to the Governator about redistricting... .
Dunno if you've seen this yet, but it's an interesting attempt to focus attention this issue.
Here's an example of an SBC customer horror story experienced by a real person I know intimately (me):
1) Move to new house, sign up for SBC DSL through local ISP. Start receiving bills from SBC three days later.
2) One week after receiving first bill, I call call my ISP. They say there's an issue with SBC provisioning. So I call SBC and on the third attempt make it through their "we designed our phone tree to mimic our corporate structure, not your needs" system. I speak to a real person in the DSL provisioning department who is most helpful. This person determines that my DSL has been ordered but isn't quite ready for provisioning. He's not sure why. But he tells me to call back in three days if my DSL isn't working yet.
3) Four days later (I figured I'd cut them some slack, which they of course richly deserved), I call again. The phone tree somehow doesn't work the same way this time. On my third attempt (hey, at least it didn't take me longer this time), I connect with a human being. She puzzles over why I'm still not provisioned. She sends me to someone in another department, but (shock!) somehow the PHONE COMPANY drops my call and I'm back to square one.
4) Not having another 45 minutes to devote to this nonsense, I try again the following day, early in the morning (in a fit of optimism, I figure this will somehow help). After three transfers to different people in the SBC hall of mirrors, I talk to a guy who really knows his shit. This guy is good. I want to hug this guy. He's on top of it. He tells me the problem is that while the billing department knows I have an account, the provisioning department doesn't know that I have an account, because somehow the billing department's computer didn't pass the word to the provisioning department's computer. Unfortunately this is not easily fixed. In fact, they have a specialist for these sort of problems (right about now I'm seeing good ol' Robert DeNiro creeping around in Brazil. My good buddy at SBC informs me that it will take three days at the most for this elite SBC commando to remedy the situation and contact me. I even get her name and a direct line.
5) You can tell where this is going, can't you? After three days, I call her. Oh, how strange. The number is INCORRECT. Of course, I have no way to find this woman, because the last thing SBC wants is for me to actually talk to the one person who is uniquely trained, qualified, and psychologically prepared to deal with the situation. By now I am.. well... rather disappointed and a bit PUT OUT by SBC.
6 - 11) More painful, annoying, frustrating bullshit.
12) SIX WEEKS after ordering my DSL service (which I was assured would be activated within a week - and no, this didn't happen in the early days of their California rollout - this was in 1993), it was finally activated.
Did I mention that at the time I worked from home and was heavily dependent on high bandwidth Internet access? Yes, cable would have been better. No, it was not available in my area.
SBC and MS. Two partners that truly deserve each other.