Wow, LotRO made the /. headlines, awesome :)

I had never previously paid any money to play an MMO before LotRO. I used to play Ultima Online, first as a free 1-month trial and then on free unoffical servers many years ago. I joined LotRO a few months ago because it was free to play, and I quickly became hooked. It is a very high-quality game and very fun to play. Yes, I admit it is very commercialized because there is a 'store' built right into the game, and you can purchase points to buy things in-game. These things include additional content, quests and such, items, and lots of other 'little' things that can make things more convenient and/or fun.

But the beauty of it is -- you don't need to purchase _anything_ from the store to play through the main quest line, or to go to any area in the game except the major expansons. You can also _earn_ points without paying real money for them, just by playing the game. So I could avoid a monthly fee altogether and just throw a couple of bucks at it if there's something I want, or I could earn it by playing. And the stuff you spend the points on does not really imbalance the game. Sure, you can level a little bit faster or you can fast-travel to distant lands a bit more easily, but it's not like the free players are at a huge disadvantage.

I played for about a month and then I purchased the big expansion for the game, Mines of Moria. You need to be level 45+ to really go to the expansion area, anyway.. So along with this expansion I got a 'free' month of 'VIP' access, which includes many of the perks you can purchase using the points system. I really liked having these things after my free trial expired, so I decided to continue my VIP access by paying $10/month. I still play this game every day, so why not? But if I ever start playing less frequently, I can completely stop paying any money and still reap the benefits that I have unlocked already. That, to me, is really awesome. If this were WoW, if I stopped paying I could not play at all, period. It's a really ingenious system, IMO.

From the btrfs wiki:

Btrfs is under heavy development, but every effort is being made to keep the filesystem stable and fast. As of 2.6.31, we only plan to make forward compatible disk format changes, and many users have been experimenting with Btrfs on their systems with good results. Please email the Btrfs mailing list if you have any problems or questions while using Btrfs.

OK, I guess the word "finalized" was a bit premature. It's "forwards-compatible", lol. I run 2.6.32 btw.

I agree. BTRFS is definitely not ready for production or for storage of anything important that is not backed up elsewhere. It has known bugs, like for example the reported free space on a raid 1 will show the total disk size and not the actual free space, so it may be dangerous to fill the array too close to 100% (shown as 50% in df). It is unclear when (or if) it will be ready, but it is being worked on -- I've seen updates for the userland tools in Debian testing, and the newer kernels have updates for the fs driver. The bug I mentioned is fixed in 2.6.33, I believe. I was only countering the argument that it is too unstable even to test it out. That is untrue. Heck, even Linus Torvalds reportedly uses BTRFS as the root filesystem on one of his laptops.

BTRFS is not that unstable really.. I have been running for a few months now, since the on-disk file structure was finalized. it's in a raid 1 configuration across 2 300gig drives on one of my home servers and it hasn't had a hiccup yet, even with lots of file i/o. i think it would like more than the CPU and RAM I gave it, but its still less resource intensive than ZFS. AFAIK ZFS would not even run on that machine due to the 32 bit processor and only 512mb of RAM. Some of the features are not implemented yet but it is certainly stable enough to test..

I paid about $80 for a brand new Samsung ML-2510 monochrome laser printer. This printer can be found for even less if you get it on sale. I buy the (non-OEM) cartridges on Monoprice for about $20 apiece. One cartridge will last me FOREVER. At least 1000 pages I am sure. Oh, the cartridges are also easily refillable with a $6 bottle of standard copier toner. There is a removable plug on the cartridge that allows direct access to the toner chamber. It's not really worth my time, though, because the cartridges are so cheap. I have been using this printer for about 3 years and have only used up two cartridges.

I haven't been interested enough in color printing to buy a color laser, but I am sure that cheap, good ones do exist.

This is the sort of thing that will cause the US to start taking space seriously again.

I predict the space race will heat up real nice again real soon, but with multiple participants, this time.

It should be very exciting.  Just because we're sitting on our laurels, doesn't mean the other guys are.

(But we do have a very nice private industry starting).

Wrong again.. Nextel is actually iDEN, which is yet another different technology that happens to use a SIM card. Having a SIM card does not make it GSM.

PS3 may not have RRoD but it does have YLoD. Same thing, really. The graphics chip de-solders itself from the motherboard due to heat buildup and inadequate cooling. If you read up on it, you will find that essentially all of the original 60gb models are dropping like flies now. The 60gb was the best PS3 version that had full hardware-based backward compatibility and memory card readers and "install other os" feature. I wanted this version and I actually went as far as buying a used one but it died within minutes of turning it on. And remember -- this piece of crap cost $600 at release, and barely lasted 2-3 years. I don't think Sony is any better than Microsoft.. Even worse when you consider Sony did not extend any warranties past one year like MS did. Hardware reliability for consoles really took a nosedive this generation.

This interests me a lot. I am a WM user and I have never owned an Android phone (yet) but at this rate it looks like my next phone will have to run Android or Meego. In the Android case, I certainly plan to run a rooted phone with a hacked ROM like Cyanogen. Isn't it possible to block carrier OTA updates? That's a *serious* downside to Android if not.. The whole purpose of a hacked ROM is to have total control over my own hardware. If the carrier can screw it all up on a whim, then I'm not really in control, am I? I certainly had no idea that could ever be possible. On WM, there was never any such thing as an OTA update, and I like it that way..

Absolutely, any decent smartphone made in the last few years has an actual GPS receiver that communicates with GPS satellites. My point was that it also requires an active internet connection because it does not cache the maps. What good is knowing your latitude/longitude if you still don't know what is around you? If you drive out in the boonies somewhere and you lose cell signal then you also lose your maps and navigation. Maybe Google will improve this with smart caching or something, but right now if you want to store the maps on your device you still need to purchase an app or a standalone GPS from a company like Garmin, TomTom, etc..