I actually left a company last year over a custom Magento project. At one point, they were throwing $1500/mo worth of dedicated server at a vanilla install (v1.1.something), and it was taking upwards of 20 seconds to load a product page. Load times have gotten significantly better since then, but it can still be showstoppingly slow even on tier 1 hardware.

Indie rockers Speechwriters LLC did something similar with one of their albums, in their case giving it away for free once its associated tour had been paid for and the next album released.

Of course, they're still fairly unknown, so that's not the best example. But I'm sure the number of gained listeners outweighed the number of lost sales, which is clearly what you want if you're considering this kind of price tinkering.

Printer & razor manufacturers have been doing this for years. And isn't this basically Apple's success story with iTunes, the cane toad of digital media players?

Try Morrowind. I got exactly this with Arkngthand, my first Dwemer ruin. Naively expecting to slice through whatever came my way, I proceeded to get killed by spider bots about 10 times before I gave up, dumbfounded that the dungeon somehow wasn't matched to my level. After doing a few more side quests, I leveled up sufficiently to carve through the previously unkillable foes and teleport back to the nearest temple, having used all my healing potions and acquired the artifact with something like 10% health remaining.

It was a legitimately awesome experience. Believe the hype, Morrowind really is Oblivion minus the sunshine & bad play mechanics.

This episode made me really glad I use Google Gears. Yes, it makes my Google Apps experience noticeably more wonky, but I've taken to using Safari as my day-to-day Gmail/Docs/Calendar app, firing it up in Firefox + Gears every week or so to keep the offline backup synced. To each his own, but as a guy who just wants a mindless backup solution and doesn't mind having copies of his life floating around Mountain View, I can't recommend Gears highly enough. YMMV.

From TFA: "Let's take a look at some notable shrinkage from the last three generations of consoles....We're not including handheld consoles in this story, but parallels can be made between revisions to Nintendo's Game Boy and DS products, as well as Sony's PSP."

Doesn't invalidate the research, but it's worth noting that Tacoma used to be the "most stressful U.S. city": http://edition.cnn.com/2004/US/West/01/10/life.stress.reut/

My favorite Tacoma memories generally involve being in a car and not stopping.

I love that the demo Thinkpad is running XP.

Spiff up the graphics, add online play. Everything else is already perfect.

"You stayed home this weekend and polished your marble. Spent: $27"

Yeah, BaK ate an entire season of my life. The weird part? It was Winter 2006.

DOSBox 4eva.

To quote John Dvorak: "My toothbrush has been doing this for years."

(ducks)

I can testify as a 100% independent, Cakewalk-in-the-bedroom, self-releasing musician that I submitted a form at soundexchange.com back in 2008 and was kind of shocked when they later sent me a (very small) "Webcast Royalty Statement". Despite the copious OpenMusic / Creative Commons language on my website and CDs.

They're everywhere, man.

Thought of this earlier today while running an index finger across my MacBook's aluminum chassis. Intentional or not, those unibdies hum like Swarovski crystal.