Humans are storytelling creatures.

For many moons we've sat around campfires, hearths, lamps, and glowing rectangles telling each other stories -- about the hunt, the weather, myths, fables, our neighbours, ourselves, the day's work, and even math problems. Sometimes we stick to the facts, but often the teller exagerrates, embellishes, or flat out lies. Never let the truth get in the way of a good story, or so it goes.

Fiction is part of the human condition.

The VMware vCenter Server is not required for a VM cluster to function.

It provides a handy interface from which to view your entire cluster and provides tools to make administration and initial setup easier, but the cluster will run just fine without it. High availability and load balancing continue to function. You can always log in to each VM host server directly as well.

If you've installed VMware License Server on the same VM as vCenter then you won't be able to add any new licenses and some ESX features expire in 14 days. However, one would hope that you've been able to bring your Licensing/vCenter VM back online by then.

The failure case is an annoyance that should be dealt with, but it is not a disaster by any means.

Where did I say that the vendors had the right to do it either?

If you've sold the laptop, or given it away as a gift or a donation, by what right do you have to limit what the recipient can do with it?

And, yet, fantasy where 'anything goes' is usually terrible, in my opinion. I think good fantasy remains consistent to its own internal laws, whatever those laws may be.

Plant some Roundup Ready corn around their building and send Monsanto after them.

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exxon_Valdez_oil_spill:
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"Forget the drunken skipper fable. At the helm, the third mate would never have collided with Bligh Reef had he looked at his Raycas radar. But the radar was not turned on. In fact, the tanker's radar was left broken and disabled for more than a year before the disaster, and Exxon management knew it. It was [in Exxon's view] just too expensive to fix and operate." -- Greg Palast, BBC

At the time of impact with Bligh Reef, Captain Hazelwood was asleep in his quarters, having left Third Mate Gregory Cousins in charge of the navigation bridge and Able Seaman Robert Kagan at the helm.

Captain Hazelwood was accused of being drunk at the time of the accident, though at trial he was cleared of this charge.
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Exxon used him as a fall guy.

Pipelining was invented by Douglas McIlroy, not Dennis Ritchie. But that, of course, doesn't lessen Dennis' status one bit.

Many moons ago I was playing an old game called Midwinter. One of the ways to win the game was to blow up the building where the commander of the invading army was staying.

The game involved warning NPC's about the invasion and also recruiting them to help. But some of them didn't get along and could only be recruited by specific characters. You could play from the viewpoint of any recruit, and you had to worry about supplies, routes of attack, and other various strategic bits. I imagine playing the game as intended would take a long time to win.

I fired up the game, simply ignored the invaders completely, skied all the way to said building and blew it up with the initial character. Total time, 15 minutes.

I wished I hadn't done that. It ruined the game for me since I then didn't want to play it The Proper Way, with all the recruiting and grand strategy.

Space Pirates and Zombies is on Steam, unlocking on August 15th.

Congratulations on your achievement, and may there be more in your future.

Won't it make them think "stay off his lawn"?

-1 is the only way to browse. Otherwise you let modders with axes decide what you get to read.

The line between insightful and flamebait is often blurry. Why let someone else draw the line for you?

you == generic && != The_Moof

I'm reprogramming Below the Root from the ground up to run on modern computers. It's an as-is clone: same graphics, same sound, using the Commodore 64 version as my baseline. I've extracted all the sound and music, most of the graphic blocks, and I've re-created the sprite sheets. It's taken me longer than I'd have liked, but I'll get there (my sig strikes home).

The author of the books gave me license to clone the game. Years ago someone bought the rights to make a movie and possible new game, so the author couldn't give me permission to redo the game with new graphics and sound. Alas, whoever bought the rights has apparently done nothing, or at least not that the author knows of.