Nay, nay and thrice nay!

A web forum I have to read with *your* choice of UI and functionality.

A mailing list I can read with *my* choice of UI and functionality.

No contest.

This. How anyone is still writing code that does this baffles me beyond all belief. I despair every time I click on a "forgot my password" link and get an email with a copy of my plain-text password...

Around my way, they're actively marketing themselves against the pound shop, as being better value!

They also have huge, supposedly-professionally printed advertising in the windows proclaiming that you get "alot more for your money". This makes me want to go in and try to buy an alot at as a pet, but I suspect their cashiers don't read Hyperbole-and-a-Half...

Commodore BASIC, as with most 8-bit micro built-in languages, was interpreted, not compiled. If you're old enough to have cut your teeth on such a beastie, you're old enough to know (and to care about) the difference ;)

The BBC Micro is the only device of that era I can remember being otherwise. You could augment the interpreted BASIC programs with in-line assembler - which would have saved me many hours spent with the Big Book of 6502 Opcodes on my VIC-20, before I could afford an assembler.

A nice 2D platformer rather than *another* FPS (*yawn*)?

A game with nuggets of self-mocking humour rather than a wave of misogynist (and frankly somewhat creepy) nonsense?

Does no-one actually remember Duke Nukem's origins? Am I the only one who still laughs at "Why I'm So Great"?

I'm forcing inmates to eat Chinese food?

Hint: the word you're looking for is "wanton".

Why do they even *have* to be "realistic", at least for every game?

I'm replaying Oddworld: Abe's Oddesey at the moment. It's a 1998 PS1 title, and while the graphics are somewhat blocky, there is a definite artistic style to them that means it's still a joy to play.

Compare that to something that was *trying* to be realistic a year or two (or three) ago, which is just going to look like crap against current technology.

What could someone with actual artistic vision do with a modern console?

Or, er, not. Link-state protocols, like OSPF or IS-IS, have a coherent view of the network *within a single autonomous system*.

The wider, BGP-speaking Internet is a very long way from being a single view of anything, because each router is making its own best-path selection, and hence deciding which routes to send to its neighbours.

Great graphics, music, characters, story. Horrible, horrible combat.

I was very annoyed, I had to give up in frustration a *long* time before seeing the end - and I really wanted to play the game through to completion.

That most young gamers aren't interested, I'll give you.

That there are better games out there? Maybe some 2D platformers (but they are just as "outdated"), or whatever you put the 3D explorer / platformers into (I'm thinking Zelda, Metroid Prime).

If I had to stick exclusively with one genre of game, though, turn-based RPGs (which mostly points towards JRPGs these days) would certainly be it!

Mine's on there. East Mersea Oyster Fisheries :)

Credits to the school and to my geography teacher don't appear until you read all the way through to the last of the East Mersea entries, though.

As an almost totally unrelated rant, I get served coffee too hot to drink pretty much everywhere. I assume this is due to the coffee being made at a temperature based on it being contaminated with (cooler) milk or cream, rather than being served as the good Lord intended :)

This.

"Games" and "first-person shooters" are *not* equivalent, as many of those complaining about putting a cross-hair exactly where there want seem to think.

I'd be quite happy for the genre to fade into obscurity on consoles and go back to PCs / mouse / keyboard, leaving console developers to concentrate on things that interest me.

Sixxs, with the AICCU client. Works from behind NAT without forwarding prot41 or anything else, tunneling protocol is dynamic using TIC and AYIYA.

There's a couple of drivers for this, both technical and more social (or at least at layers 8+ in the stack).

Part of the reason so many providers get away with one IP address per subscriber is going back to the beginning of dial-up access, where the idea of needing more than a single address per connection was close to unthinkable. IPv6 starts in a world where every end-site is full of networked devices, all needing a v6 address, and comes with an standards document that strongly suggests (not quite mandates) that each end-site (be that an office or a house) should ideally get a /48, but could be a /56 if you want. Even a /64 gets you 64 bits - that's an IPv4 Internet squared! - of host addresses. Allocating a /128 to an end site doesn't even get a mention.

Technically, lots of routers are assuming /64 as the network size, as does a lot of the way DHCP works for v6, especially in terms of prefix-delegation. ISPs are going to have to work quite hard, and give themselves a lot of un-needed support nightmares, to provide end-users with anything longer than a /64.

I had the same concerns as you originally that despite the potentially of the protocol, all the ISPs who want the Internet to work like TV would manage to cripple it, but the more I look at it, the less likely I see this being.