Except that, if memory serves me, DDO started as pay to play, and ended up as a micropayment game because it wasn't enough of a cash cow with subscriptions.
Why break what works?

I think that the secret grumblings going on is that these developers are wishing for a time when the Sega Master System and the Nintendo Entertainment System roamed the earth.

You didn't really get demos of games for these, free for downloading at the time they were popular.

( - This ignores, of course, the Nintendo Play Choice 10 machines, and any Sega equivalent of the time, in which I'm sure plenty of us of the respective age range would beg mom for quarters to feed whilst she did whatever she was out and about to do. It was great, because one would feed a machine quarters, play games, and when one gets home, beg dad to buy Track and Field or Contra, or whatever. PC10s were, effectively, paid demo machines that would give you access to the full game for the right amount of dosh and skill!
It also ignores the people who had dumpers and carts to dump their old games onto, or necessary emulation software to play it on a PC.)

A derp-a-derp-derp.
Would help if I actually linked what I discovered.

From TFA, I followed a link over to a blog at the Telegraph that contained links to the Netposti interface (link set to english. På svenska, Suomeksi are options for .fi, .se).

What shows up after logging in, I have to leave to someone who actually has a login for the service. It'd be an expensive, expensive trip overseas just for me to get an answer (passport, plane, time off from work, sedatives, rental vehicle, ...), so I'll leave it to someone who might just be able to walk down the road and get set up.

Doesn't seem so. Following a few links through the article, they genuinely appear to have a site set up for receiving digital mail.

Requires either a user/pass set, or a (government issued? possibly as part of the ID?) smartcard read by the site to get logged in.

I'm nowhere near there, so I lack a user/pass or ID for login, but it seems to be legit.

Yeah... call center full of geeks reading /. because we can't get anywhere else online, and now there's video being loaded. I'm sure that IT will filter us in the face shortly, and come slap us with rulers for watching not-work-related video with company bandwidth. =|

So, I guess this means we've got to kill it with fire on an epic scale, eh?

I couldn't find that package, so I decided to sudo aptitude install everything in subsection cli-mono instead.

Would that work?

You forgot to put on your sunglasses, but I can still take the cue:
YEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!

It tends to be overcome with a simple r:
'niner', 'ten' are now completely different lip movements. (Additionally, it breaks a tonal similarity between 9 and 5 up for people who are listening to me.)
This tends to be even easier to disambiguate in context.

I use 'niner' on a regular basis in my line of work, in which I give and receive a lot of numbers over the phone, as well as names and locations.

I'd think that this technology would use a similar method to disambiguate between 5, 9, and 10.

(Of asides and theory: I run under the assumption that most software that listens to voices for recognition are listening not for the lead or tail sounds of a number or letter, but for the shape your mouth makes and the resulting sound that comes with it. If you try saying numbers 0-10 without moving your jaw or tongue, you'll notice how some sounds are the same as well (eeo, uhn, oo, wee, or, i, ih, ehun, eeh, i, ehn, for those who skipped the practice level). Because of this, 'niner' becomes important, simply to change that aforementioned sound to 'ihr'. I think this theory holds a little weight, since I can log in to the voice system of my financial institution using that same method, and not have my lips read.)

Sorry, but I have to call you on this one, from personal experience.

Before doing the MS licensing dance from the website to link my new machine to my account (Old one was stolen, meh), if I were logged in on my Live account, but disconnected, all my downloaded games were stuck in Trial status.

The moment I connected, though, it would acquire the full license for my games and let me play them.

This was a pain in the ass when all I had was mobile broadband -- I'd have to leave my laptop turned on, share the connection with the 360, and log on that way. Usually took two tries, but then it'd let me play more than just chapter 1 of Ikaruga.

Quirky. I've had the best service ever with the credit union I'm with.

I can find ATMs everywhere.

Even when I'm not in my home state, I usually can run into an ATM that's supported by my CU to get free withdrawals (found that out on a trip to Minnesota, US, and again on a trip to Georgia, US).

I recently needed a loan to get my vehicle back after needing emergency repairs.
I called them on a Tuesday afternoon.
On Wednesday morning, the money I needed to pick up my vehicle was in my account and ready to go.
I didn't have to go do any paperwork or anything special. I just called.

I haven't paid any BS fees. The few times I actually managed an overdraft, I was charged the overdraft fee and that's it. I couldn't deposit anything for two weeks, but there were no fees other than that one overdraft.

This is unlike what has happened to a good friend of mine: He managed to overdraft by 47 cents (an automated transfer for something hit right after paying rent, heh).
The bank charged him for the overdraft, which is right and fine, albeit $40 is a pretty steep overdraft charge.
Then a week later, they hit him for a 'service fee' for the overdraft ($35).
A week after that, they hit him again for another 'service fee' ($35 again).
As a result, he gets to pay over $100 for overdrafting by 47 cents with a regular bank.
My CU would have charged him $29 for the same thing. That's it.

The few banks I've tried have pretty much scared me off with their fee schedules.

I puckered around with it this morning, and found that yes, you can categorize games with tags, and pull a specific tag up when trying to choose certain game types.

I've got Lord of the Rings Online, EVE, and Anarchy Online sitting under "MMORPG", Torchlight under "Crawler", Iji under "Platformer", and so on.

I've yet to see if the new overlay will work with a couple of games on this list (AO, Iji) since it didn't before, but I won't be disappointed if not.

Surprisingly, because it slowed down impulse shopping, and by the time we've found the game on the site, our urge to "buy the game if the screenshots or video looks good" is gone.

Also, as it was pointed out on the forums (can't link to the post for now -- behind the corp wall of fire) that this being broken under these particular configurations may speed up Impulse shopping, which could finally make Stardock a threat to Steam, since Impulse already had that "It just f'n works." thing going on. None of this "Open a browser to look, with purchasing client open at the same time" stuff -- See a thumbnail, click for screenshot, close lightbox when done, and if you want it, add it to the damn cart.

But that's just my opinion on that.

With this beta release of Steam, they fix an interesting issue that cropped up with the release of Windows 7.

For users of that particular OS who have either removed Internet Explorer, or did not have it installed at all when the OS was installed (see: Europe, and the rest of the world that couldn't even stand the browser), Steam was half-broken. One could not see any screenshots for a game before purchasing. Anything that needed a popup window in Steam would NOT default to the main browser installed on the system.

People complained about this, asking Steam to start looking for the default browser on the system so they could at least go back to browsing for games and possibly buying them.

It's good to see them actually address that issue.

Maybe I'll buy Space Giraffe to celebrate.

Smoooooooooth, Orb.

That should have read:
(Computrace, that is, with remote data deletion. It worked by allowing the computer to receive commands remotely once it hits the internet anywhere long enough to do its job. A delete job can be sent to the unit, wiping the drive. It was designed to survive some hardware replacements, as well, so swapping out the HDD isn't enough. At the time I did my research, there was a TSR that would regenerate itself on any Windows OS if the entire hardware batch wasn't swapped, but by the time you've done that, you could have just bought a replacement machine!)