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3D Realms seems unlikely and the random edit was only in Wikipedia for a few minutes. And why does the summary link to the static "down" html page? The website is up and working. Nice twisting there.

But really, the previous owner was Music Television. I always thought that was a little bit weird.

They're too late to join the game. The problem is that Facebook already has everyone you know, so everyone joins it because everyone else already is there. Some random mumblings about walled gardens and open source won't make normal people switch over.

Difference with AOL (never even heard about Prodigy) versus email is that a lot of people used the standard email. I think AOL was mostly just US-centric too, I don't know anyone who would had actually used it. This was also time when internet was mostly used by geeks who understood it and valued open standards.

Someone in these kind of stories always suggests that you set up your own Facebook-like service or just a website. That's just thinking too much of yourself - why would people visit your site just to see your stuff? Facebook is great because it lets me easily see them from all the people, even if I don't keep in touch with them so much.

Also, how do you handle things like Facebook games and cooperation with people in them? Oh, you say Facebook games are stupid and people shouldn't play them. Arrogant attitudes like that don't really help either, because people obviously like the games. We aren't the ones to tell other people what they should or shouldn't like.

In Facebook's case one big service works a lot better than thousand small ones. How would you even search for people, places, events and so on with them? It would go back to the @something.com convention which defeats the whole purpose.

When I was recently visiting a different country I could easily search for the one guy I knew. From his connections I found everyone else I had met and also saw a lot of interesting events and businesses I wouldn't had otherwise known about. You can't really use a search engine for something you don't know about. This was the first time I actually understood how great service Facebook is - you just have to use it correctly.

Did you notice the story is about targeted attacks? OS doesn't have much to do with those. In fact since these are companies internal networks and servers and not workstations, I suspect they actually run some UNIX variant.

I play Modern Warfare 2 almost all for it's multiplayer. The single player campaign was great, but the fun begins in multiplayer. I also love games that have co-op play along with single player, because you can play with your friends and it opens up a lot of new possibilities. Games like Left 4 Dead with 4 player co-op (and versus mode) are also extremely fun because you have to work as a group and if you mess up, other players need to save you and you affect the game. It's a lot of fun.

I do also play games like Splinter Cell Conviction and Civilization series where the main point is with the single player. However for example playing Civilization with real people add completely new aspects to it.

Why it has to be either only single player or multiplayer (or badly tossed in multiplayer)? Work on both of them to make them great. The upcoming Medal of Honor actually has two completely different teams working for single player and multiplayer - EA's own team for single player and DICE for multiplayer and they even use different engines.

Multiplayer provides a lot of fun, so why take it off? Especially when it's value that usually only paying customers can enjoy. Many times on slashdot I've read that companies should provide more value to paying customers versus pirates - multiplayer is it and can definitely be a good factor in if a person buys the game or pirates it, and I personally love playing with other people.

Note that in this case the games itself would be free like in asian markets and I doubt that the normal games are going anywhere. This is most likely to expand their market. There are a lot of people, especially teens, who rather pay for individual items than go to a store and pay full $60 for a game.

It also makes piracy really hard, especially when the games are played online and the info about items and addons you own are on the server. It's practically impossible to pirate that. With the 90% piracy rate on PC games it's not surprising that publishers are looking for new ways, even if that's sad. PC gamers really need to think about their future and not try to get everything for free, because it just leads to publishers making games where it's not possible - shitty online games with microtransactions for the housewifes.

Just because someone makes positive comments doesn't make one a shill. It's funny that I've also been accused of being a shill for Valve, Steam, Google, and large amount of other companies or products I have good experience with. It's almost funny how often someones first defense on slashdot to some positive comment is to call him a "shill". But yeah, lets all be negative.

and fyi, I stopped posting on slashdot because for the last three months some people followed me and down modded all my comments, even many days later, resulting in -1 karma and 2 posts limit.