Moraelin: Actually, I see another even bigger problem, at least for more traditional (WoW-type) MMOs. How big should your world be?

The question of how big an MMO should be is a simple matter of planning desired player density, introducing sufficient hooks to ensure interest, and mitigating player turnover by making the action easy enough for low-level characters to get into. All of this is part of the design of any MMO worth its salt.

However, remember that "should" is the most dangerous word in the English language. Forget "should." Screw "should"'s eye sockets until its ears cry.

How big will the game be? Because all that planning won't amount to anything if nobody shows up and the place feels like a well-lit and mip-mapped ghost town. Or if it takes off faster than expected and suddenly you're running the most popular lag machine in town.

It's been years since they were relevant, and they last updated in January 2008. However, they've been featured on Slashdot before and that January 2008 update his close to the mark on this one.

Clueless Mailers is the group that mapped the flow of spam, tracking email addresses as they were sold from one company to another to another until they mapped who fed what.

That "recent" article covers the current problem of (supposedly) reputable companies buying mailing lists from clueless clowns, and the troubles that ensued.

If it's a company you've heard before, and you can verify that the "opt out" will actually go to them, then opt out that way. If you don't see why you got on their list, tell them so, and they may twig onto the fact that their list wasn't all that hot.

If it's a company you've never heard of or there's something in it that smells hinky, just delete it, let it slide, and let them think that the message sailed off into the æther, never to be heard from again.

That third case? If it looks like a reputable company but the opt-out goes someplace apparently unrelated, do not simply opt out. Send a copy of the message to the people at the real company complaining of the deception. And that one's the one to hope for. Because if you can point out to the home office either (a) that someone is using their name poorly or (b) if they are authorized agents, they're getting bogus email addresses from somewhere, then they'll stop buying those discount lists of bulk email addresses and start doing their own damn work.

...and trust me, I don't normally use those two words that close together.

I second snowwrestler's comment. It was Seth Godin who pointed out that anyone seriously involved in marketing (as opposed to someone bulk-emailing thousands of people trying to sucker a precious two or three) would absolutely hate hate hate to alienate individuals by annoying them with unwanted messages. Even if they've never bought the product in question before, pissing them off with spam will only drive them away and generate poor word of mouth. Better to back off and preserve what chance you have rather than push harder and poison the well, to coin a mixed metaphor.

gizmoiscariot: Agreed. Not sure what all the hate for 4ed comes from. If you don't like it, don't play it. Its not like the previous edition's books exploded at a certain date and were not usable.

The problem is that depending how they get the books, they might not know how much they're going to hate it until they get the books, sit down with them, and find out just how limited this edition really is.

If you're lucky enough to live near a game store that has a back room or upstairs dedicated to playing games (a dying breed, those, but that's a rant for another time), then odds are good that either someone there plays 4th or the store itself runs demos. That's the best opportunity to play the game without needing the books yourself, because someone else likely already has them.

If you're just browsing in a bookstore, there's less opportunity to see the thing in action. You can read snippets and passages, but unless your bookstore is progressive and offers places where you can sit down and peruse what you want to buy, you're likely not going to capture the spirit of what makes a game good or bad.

As for why there's no love for 4th, I think it's limitation shock: 3.5 had become a hairy, unkempt, unruly man-child with many stress fractures where the added-on feats and features were causing bloat. The attempt to streamline it, give it a nice haircut, and maybe even get back to old-fashioned values (i.e. its wargaming roots) was overdone and overdone hard, to the point where I now refer to it as "the bastard child of role-playing and slot-car racing."

Counterpoint: At the risk of the "troll" moderation, those people who insist that roleplaying is impossible with 4th edition rules is doing it wrong. Roleplaying is a matter of characterization, independent of whatever structure of rules is at the table. It has more to do with imagination than the list of moves that your character can execute in combat, though they serve well as a reference for definition.

When I first saw this here, the first place I looked for additional information was the Internet Storm Center, where they eat this kind of stuff up. And sure enough, they even had a call from someone at Symantec saying that yes, this one is theirs.

Conspiracy theory or no (and it's looking more like no), there are two things that rescue this from dullsville:

In the comments on that SANS article, it's mentioned that yes, Symantec is deleting comments left and right, and meanwhile the talk is slowly wending its way onto the ZoneAlarm forums, which just goes to show that one man's misstep is another man's opportunity. And...

While the story behind the PIFTS file itself isn't terribly interesting, some unsavory rapscallion had noticed its popularity as a search term, and planted malware where people looking for information on it could stumble upon it. Fun stuff, eh? Look for malware information, and find it the hard way.

Google has already removed that link, but it might still be out there, just in case you use a different search engine. And there's no reason he/they won't try again on another site.

cdrguru: Buy? Once you "have", you have all you need.

The value of recorded music is zero, and that's all anyone I know is paying.

That's not quite true. There is a value to most music: it can convey ideas and moods, change one's outlook, and serve as anything from light entertainment to a rallying theme depending on the intent and skill of the songwriters and performers involved.

Really, if there was zero value, would people really bother to collect it? It wouldn't be worth downloading if there were some sort of desirability to at least some of it.

The problem is not so much the value as the cost. The people who produce it want to sell it at a specific price, which most people don't want to pay. Meanwhile, the cost of reproduction has dropped just about to zero, and that's what people are paying in money to get the stuff. They're still paying costs in effort, storage space, etc. to find, grab, and warehouse the stuff.

After all, it's not like they don't have someplace to look for alternatives. Apple itself has a whole section on their downloads website dedicated to third party business and financial software. This includes freebies, shareware, and demo versions of larger, more robust packages that they can try out. (Yeah, I know, that covers everything.)

Can anyone recommend any of the software available in there? I need to recommend something for my parents sooner or later too, come to think of it, and the 2006 version I'm using now is getting a little hoary.