And explain again how "crappy expensive & proprietary" has any bearing on "successful"? Most of us have a "crappy expensive proprietary" OS on our computers from a successful company. The two aren't mutually exclusive.

I have really enjoyed a few of his books including 'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep.' I definitely HIGHLY recommend 'A Scanner Darkly' and 'Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said'.

On the other hand, I thought 'Maze of Death' lacked depth and was entirely predictable. I also didn't like 'The Broken Bubble', mainly I think because it deals with a lot of "human" issues and not much sci-fi. Possibly I didn't understand it.

I'm slowly working my way through all his books I can pick up at the library. After going this thread, I really want to read 'Ubik.'

I don't agree. bnetd used absolutely NO CODE of Blizzard's to create a battle.net server emulator. Yes, it enabled piracy. The sad truth is that ANY commercial software will be pirated.

bnetd should live on today. If common people like you and I are not allowed to create software that interacts and connects with *gasp* proprietary software, then what kind of world is that? The world we have today apparently, where Mozilla Firefox cannot connect to IIS running ASP. Oh wait, that's entirely possible and legal. Weird...

The last game I bought from Blizzard was the the Starcraft: Broodwar expansion and it will be staying that way.