Agreed. I've been playing and running RPGs since white box/three book D&D, Traveller and Top Secret in the late '70s and designing card games for over a decade, and played computer games since it was possible. I've always felt that the thing that was really missing from online MMOs was the touch of a good face-to-face game master. I remember one of the D&D RPGs where you controlled a party of 4-6 characters and thought 'THIS is a game that's designed pretty well.' I've gotten some hints of that in Vanguard and Elder Scrolls Online, but that feeling in WoW is happening less and less. You're so heavily railroaded in WoW and there's really nothing you can do about it. Sure, you might be able to kill mobs of critters until you hit level cap, but it'd be pretty boring.

Yeah, there's definitely a market. My wife operates a 3.5 meter telescope, and one program that she runs works only on an old Sony laptop running XP. Apparently the graphic part of the program is tied so closely to the hardware that it just doesn't work as well on anything else. I really ought to scrounge and buy a couple more for backups. What will probably happen is the observatory won't do a thing until the current one rolls over and dies.

Well, Soundex has only been around for almost a century, we can't expect government programmers to be up on the latest technology. Even though every major relational database supports it. Even though most programming languages implement it. Even though you could write your own implementation without too much difficulty.

My PHBs wouldn't spring for something like Clipper. Still, we did some pretty amazing things with FB.

Medical/industrial toxic waste is still dangerous and can be used for making dirty bombs designed to spread said nuclear waste over a large area. Not incredibly deadly, but very expensive to clean up, it must be carefully and properly disposed of. I remember reading about a dental x-ray machine that was improperly disposed of and was basically taken south of the border and dumped. Somehow the container of nuclear material burst or was broken open and little kids played with the powder inside. I never heard what the follow-on health problems were.

Thank you, I've always wondered why these types of waste were not reprocessable. A friend of mine went to ASU in the '70s/'80s and they had an Indian physicist called Dr. Roy (no idea what the last name was) who claimed to have a method for safely disposing of nuclear waste, never heard of the program going live.

Man, I'll bet those two decades of me and my friends playing Champions really gave her a headache.

dBase III+ back in the '80s had a competitor called FoxBase. FB was crazy fast due to a very fast pre-compiler and a greatly improved indexing scheme. FB copied dBase's bugs because they had known workarounds in the programming community, and fixing the bug would break established code. Of course dBase was bought out by Borland, FB was bought out by Microsoft, and the world moved on to better implementations of the relational model.

Thank you, Dissy. My last job (and probably my next) was in a Windows environment, our ERP-that-is-not-to-be-named abused SQL Server to the point that if you unplugged the server while it was doing a payroll process, you had to load a backup from before the start: the ERP-system-never-sufficiently-cursed did not use SQL Server's transaction log, all record updates were line-by-line using cursors through an application server so that their one pustulent code base would work poorly against SQL Server, Oracle, and something else like PostgreSQL.

They could have written such a better system if they'd let me train their programmers in relational database and modern techniques, instead they forced them out in to retirement.

Too many people think the solution is to drop in *nix, not taking in to account business cases. And we the damned are forced to make it all work.

But only if you have the power to point to it, I can give you access if you want.

In the '70s when I first started shooting, I was a Pentax guy. Black-body MX with a winder, great assortment of lenses. Made the mistake of selling the whole kit to get in to a view camera which I was not ready for. Went through OIympus, Canon, I can't remember what all. Found out that whatever it was I was shooting in the late '80s needed a complete rebuild, was whining about it to a friend who was working as a studio assistant to a pro who told me that people were dumping Nikons for Canon Eos. After discussing it with him, I rented a 630 for two trips to Santa Fe and San Diego, ended up buying it with a 35-105 Canon zoom, and have never looked back. I'm on my third film body, an Elan 7, my wife bought me a Digital Rebel which I've replaced with a T2i. Love their gear. I've also shot Nikon, I just never cared for the feel of their equipment and though I liked the image quality, never considered it worth the price to replace my kit.

My dream is to find a nice used 5D Mk 2 for the full-frame sensor and the video capability. I hate not being able to get decent, affordable wide-angle.

I've been playing WoW since before the first expansion and it just doesn't do it for me any more, maybe the new expansion will be interesting. There's a lot of stuff that I really like in Vanguard much more than WoW, but Sony is sunsetting it at the end of July. I was really interested in the Pantheon Kickstarter, but I doubt it's going to get funded as it's under $500K of an $800K goal with three days to go. So it's Elder Scrolls Online will be the next thing that'll interest me, especially since it's multi-platform and I run Mac.

Standalone, I do a fair amount of Civ 5, though I find it easy enough, though tedious, to win. I'm planning on trying Sid's Pirates and Railroad games, just got them from the Humble Bundle sale. Tabletop, my fav far and above is Flash Point: Fire Rescue, I also received Game of Death which I'm really looking forward to playing. For RPGs, I'm loving reading up on Night's Black Agents, awesome game world.

I use the yam fork, the GUI is less gooey.

Totally OT, but by film club in Phoenix showed this at a member's house a year or two ago. I'm pretty sure it was on BluRay, and the guy's TV was a massive 5' screen. And it was too damn sharp. It was so bright and crisp, that it looked like a Made For TV movie, not at all the experience that I remember when I saw it on film or tape.

Well, technically my wife and I do. We each bought half of an iPad two years ago for our anniversary, conveniently they fit together, and I got a Nook HD+ for my birthday last month. That's not one person carrying both, but it is one marital unit.