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February 20, 2008
What's the Bad Stuff?
Dawnise and I enjoy a card game from Steve Jackson Games called Munchkin - it's sort of a stripped-down parody of the typical D&D dungeon crawl. The tag line - "Kill the Monsters, Steal the Treasure, Stab Your Buddy" - pretty much sums up the essence.
If you meet a monster you can't kill, it does something bad to you - this deleterious effect is described on the monster card as "The Bad Stuff."
"The Bad Stuff" ranges from losing items, to being dead (at which point, the other players go through your pockets looking for loose change).
This morning, over IM, I had a conversation with Dawnise that went something like this...
nise: you there?
me: yup, what's up?
nise: I was going to try the netflix movie watch. and it wants me to install something, is that okay?
me: what's the something?
nise: "free movie player software"
me: I've never tried it, so I don't know. it's up to you
nise: ok
me: I'd like to say it should be safe, but there are some horror stories out there about netflix and other services that use the same Microsoft DRM bits getting angry at each other, so I really can't say with any certainty
nise: what's the bad stuff, do you think?
me: the worst likely scenario I can imagine is that rhapsody breaks in a way that I can't fix without reinstalling your entire computer.
nise: awesome...
I'm pretty sure there's a Mac, and a virtualization solution like Parallels, in her future. At least then I can setup a couple of Windows VMs and give her confidence that if something she installs breaks something else, we can fix it with significantly less effort.
At this point I think I'm waiting for the Mac Mini and iMacs to see a model refresh so I can decide which compromise we're making. (buying an integrated screen we don't want, or getting crappy graphics)
Posted by dberger at February 20, 2008 8:51 AM