If LotRO is too mindless and dumbed-down MMOs are your bane, then head straight to DDO! It is easily the most complex MMO out there, free to play, and a a great deal of fun. Nothing comes close to the truly insane character customization it has.

DDO basically starts with D&D 3.5, so out of the gate you can have multiclassed characters. So unlike a typical MMO where you're a tank or a caster, in DDO you can literally play a fighter for 10 levels, play wizard for 6 more levels and then play 4 more as a cleric, and have the skills from all 3 at the same time!

From D&D you have the Feats selection, then on top of that, each class has multiple enhancement trees. Currently Wizard has 3 different trees, and you can choose enhancements from any of them. If you're multiclass, you can choose from ALL the enhancement trees for each class, and there's also a racial enhancement tree, so a single character could have as many as ten trees to choose from! And each race has it's own impact on your character as well.

But wait, there's more! Turbine's gone past level 20 ("epic levels") and characters also have epic destinies - yet another enhancement tree system. There are 8 of those, one for each class, but you can choose whichever you want, so you can be a lev 20+ fighter with the druid tree active! You can also also "twist" 3 of the skills from any tree into whatever you're doing, so your fighter can have druid enhancements, and twist in a couple rogue enhancements at the same time.

[shamwow voice]But there's STILL more![/shamwow] And, just because you don't want to be a cookie cutter build, you can also opt to kill your capped character and resurrect them, True Resurrection, which gives your character a permanent past life bonus. In fact you can 3 times .. per class! There is even a feat "completionist" for people who've played and TR'd as every character class. And there are truly insane people in the game who are trying to do that three times for every past life buff in the game.

Of course a fighter/wizard/cleric would be a pretty poor combination, and having druid active may not make sense. Nothing stops you from making a truly gimped character in DDO, and new players generally shouldn't multiclass, but a good way to see the insanity is to check out the DDOracle. It's currently out of date, but look at the what people are playing, in particular the top multiclass combos, and race/class combos. Note there's also a least common multiclass list as well, which is often amusing.

DDO does a good job of being D&D. It's quest oriented, not grind oriented, and XP is based on completion. One of my favorite features is the dungeon master - as you're crawling through a quest, there's a DM voiceover that adds a lot of D&D feel. The other thing DDO does is TRAPS! This is not WoW - dungeons have traps that can and will kill your character instantly on high difficulty. Respect the trap! Take a rogue. Or a cleric that can rez

What DDO doesn't get you is PVP. It's D&D - you versus the dungeons, monsters, pirates, demons, undead - anything but other players. There is an extremely limited brawling facility in taverns and that's it, and no griefing. Adventurers quest together, in parties (up to 6) or raids (up to 12). Evil alignment is not available - True Neutral is as evil as you can get. And everything is instanced, so only in public areas (towns, taverns) are you running past other players -- there are no WoW style 200-person fights around Tarren Mills.

DDO is free to play but there were two paid expansions. Simply playing the game earns you points that you can spend on expansion packs, and in theory you could play long enough and simply earn all the game content. In theory you might be playing when you're 80, too. There are enough points to earn that you'll get expansion packs, but in practice people generally buy at least a few as each pack gives more opportunities to earn points.

Looking over this, I realize it probably sounds insanely hard to play, and it's not. It's D&D. You can just get the client, roll up a paladin and start banging heads all the way to cap and have fun. But there's enormous depth to DDO, and that's what makes it fun. If you want to go farther, ddowiki.com will be a bookmark. But gameplay here is a little different. In most MMO's you play the content, get sick of it, and then wait for new content. In DDO it's almost more like golf, where each quest is a golf course that you visit repeatedly, and the real focus is on your character and your game.

This! Apparently the author is Gen Y (Z?) and didn't live through the painful Hell that was 60hz monitors, which are well below human "framerate". 75 Hz generally fixed the brutal flashing for most people, but that was just for still images. For serious gaming, 100 Hz was finally getting there.

What's sad is how this impacts the dumbing down and slowing down of gaming over time. (Or is it the other way around?) Today's popular shooters are like bullet time compared to old titles, not worth discussing. Going backward from a more real gaming era, Unreal Tournament 3 was slower than UT 2K4/3, which was slower than UT, and so Quake 3, Quake 2, Quake, and finally Doom . Ah the glorious Doom! I shudder to think what this console generation would do in a deathmatch with typical Doom players - with no powerups, no invul, no way to assauge their egos except to have skillz and not suck. Good luck with that.

Of course the article also claims 1920x1080 is a standard. For a TV set, perhaps, or someone being cheap, but that's not a monitor - 1920x1200 is a PC monitor.

This is spot on. Maybe some designer told you that gutters are all the rage, but in an era where almost all monitors are WIDESCREEN, the amount of wasted space is epic.

Never let art students design your website or book. They're called 'coffee table' books because they sit on coffee tables not being read, looking pretty and missing the point.

While I agree with the ultimate suggestion, the specifics here? Not so much. Some 4 yr olds are way, way past understanding a phone, Skype, or the physics of 2 cups and a string. It's just not that magical.

Perhaps OP's kid isn't in the zone. Most aren't, but we need to realize that some are and not hold them back.

True, they aren't typically this cheap. Usually they want 10% of your salary to promise that everything will be swell after you die, as long as you followed their orders. This one's on sale.

Though critics liken the monitoring to government stalking, school officials and their contractor say the purpose is student safety.

If "safety" is created by stalking, the price is too high.

The Android brand is no longer important.

Best of luck with that.

Thank you for making my point. According to your 2dboy article Linux users didn't buy more software, they made more donations. The word "sales" does not appear in their article. Donations are not sales, they're political statements, saving whales, bunnies, trying to scream "woo penguin power", etc.

Those don't translate into day to day sales for devs. And as long as Linux users won't pay for software, devs are stuck with Windows, consoles and OSX. But who knows? Let's watch Ouya and see how devs fare outside of Homebrew Channel ports and emulators running pirate ROMs.

I'm a developer. Linux isn't a target because F/OSS users think that if one thing is free, everything is (or should be, or is when I copy it.) Thus Linux isn't an option, leaving Windows.

And no, I don't care about Humble Bundle averages. Those 'purchases' are political statements that don't translate to sales for actual developers outside the bundle

Wait, what? How many geeks have been harped on to get out, go to parties and see real people? Now the truth -- seeing other people is anti-social!

Guess it's back to playing violent video games with a million other people, the last vestige of polite society.

To once and for all prove that Twinkies are immortal.

I was a pioneer/advocate/addict of multimonitor gaming. To the point where back in the day when I got a deal on 22" Nokia high-res CRTs I bought three. I had my second on the desk and was going back for the third when I looked back and realized my desk was buckling under the weight of just two! After reinforcing the desk, XP era, it became obvious that multimonitor gaming was broken, because the resolution wasn't there to support it. What's the point of running 3 monitors if it's not 3 TIMES your normal res, which at 1920x1200, took quite a while to arrive. So I shelved it for a while.

Eventually, tech caught up and it struck me about 6 months back that I had the parts lying around to 5760x1200 the 24's and call it good. So I bought the adapter for #3, hooked it all up and prepared to rejoice. And there wasn't much rejoicing. Games just don't work.

What triple screen gaming even means is up for debate, but fundamentally, I think we all expect the extra screens to be more views on reality. More FOV, more of what we really see from our eyes in real life - wrap around video. Well, except it's NOT just FOV. Games need to be designed for it, and they're not.

I spent days running EVERY title I could. Widescreengaming.net is a huge help for this. But in the end, the views in everything from Quake to Rage are unbearably broken. The best results by far were from Dungeons & Dragons Online, which looked almost good enough to keep, but Unreal Engine titles, ID engine titles, everything else - nothing worked without horrible distortion. At last I fired up Civ IV, thinking isometric viewing at least would work; not a chance, instead of seeing the world (wrapped!) in glorious high-res, I got a screen where the men in cities 75% were as tall as the screen, and a small fraction of the world was displayed!

DDO actually was pretty hot, but frankly the only truly multimonitor title may be Flight Simulator. And that's almost cheating - they just have more than one screen to display. But Eyefinity et al is DOA if there aren't titles that support it. Otherwise it's about as effective as piling all your speakers on top of each other and playing Master & Commander in 5.1. Enjoy the mud.

This is the perfect excuse to read up, get your fix, then hop into D&D Online and get some tabletop action come to life. The client and a decent amount of content is free, and the DM voiceovers rock.

NOTE: This is Dungeons & Dragons Online, not WoW. There be TRAPS in dem dar dungeons, and they can and will kill you very dead!