Actually, most people have no idea what other people do in their free time, especially if that free time is conducted in the privacy of their own home. So to say people "don't" spend more than a couple hours doing it would be an opinion, which you're certainly entitled to but remember that it is just that, an opinion. As far as physical endurance goes, the human body has the ability to adapt to strain. This means that while you can say "Most people cannot exercise for more than an hour a day" and be correct, it is entirely possible for someone to develop their body to the point that they can exert it for most of their waking hours if they so desired. We generally call these people "atheletes", which as a side note in the discussion has an overall positive connotation to it.
By the same token, you can say "a WoW player can spend 14 hours or more in one session playing the game", but overlook that you could be looking at the "athelete"-equivalent group of the player base and missing that the vast majority of people who play the game fall similarly into the "can't do it for more than an hour or two" group.
As a comparison, I read heavily. Always have, and I can recite all sorts of goodly bits of trivia about multiple fictional universes with an absolutely frightening recall rate. I keep characters and plots in my mind for the years that pass between installments of a series as well as deep ruminating on the symbolism and commentary often contained in the works. Can this tire a mind out? Yes. By the same token, anything that involves other people in a game like WoW takes on a far more intense intellectual exercise. Grinding, of course, is about as stimulating as stapling papers together, but to say that grinding is the "norm" in the game is a subjective view. Most of the time that I am in WoW, and I play daily much as I read things daily, I'm in an instance with friends and we are faced with these so-called "unusual" states of affairs. As we constantly alter the equation in what role we fulfill and what we have to work with, it is a constant intellectual stimulation that delves deep into a numbers game of immense depth and theory.
To continue with the sports reference, if you look at most any sport played by sandlot kids, the games are ludicrously simple. Throw the ball to the open guy, hit the other guy harder, put the ball through the hoop, kick the ball in the goal, etc. You could program a robot to play the game at a basic level. Conversely, if you look closely at almost every sport at a professional level, you'll notice high-level strategy and group reaction. You have to have a deep understanding of the game oftentimes to notice the theory and meta-game that's being played behind the scenes by coaches, but most every sport has it. A robot is going to have difficulty coping with the meta-game such as intentionally running a play you know won't work to set up the other team for a surprise play that nets a huge reward.
Similarly, WoW (and by extension most MMOs) at it's basic level is a very simple game that anyone could play, and you can easily make "robots" to do. At the top level, where a larger percentage of players DO play because unlike professional sports there aren't as many entry barriers, it's something that's so random and complex that your mind simply get exercised plotting out possible outcomes and reacting as quickly as possible when needed. Is it the same sort of stimulation as a book? No, but running track and lifting weights are different sorts of physical stimulation and both are seen as viable forms of exercise.
Again, it's all a matter of perspective. People choose to believe there is no value in gaming because they themselves do not see it. If you would do something that provides no direct benefit to you or society, you must be addicted to it is the prevailing logic. However, just because one individual lacks the understanding to grasp the deeper mechanics at work does not mean that such mechanics do not exist and that the abilities being exercised through gaming (desicion-making, group play, organization) are not real.
I beg to differ that games cannot be tiring, as that will vary from game to game. A game such as WoW where you might be called upon to make split-second reactions in the context of multiple people could be argued to be just as intellectually stimulating as reading a book, if not more so due to the required level of interactivity. Extended amounts of that sort of activity of plotting out actions and executing them (and reacting to changes at a moment) does place a similar amount of stress on the mind. Similarly, a very active session of Wii Sports can put a great deal of physical strain on even the fittest of individuals. So to say games are viewed as an addiction because they're "passive" I believe presents a somewhat overgeneralized view. Yes, certainly some games fall into the category you describe, but a significant number, including many targeted as "addictive" do not fit neatly within that idea.
I'd submit a slightly different view. That things like going to the gym or playing a sport constantly or having to do the daily Sudoku are not viewed as addictions because they are socially respected activities. You can make the argument that the football player who continues to play even though he knows he's injured (possibly badly) is addicted to the thrill of competition because he's ignoring his own well being to continue to experience the pleasure that playing football gives him. However, society holds the ability to continue in the face of adversity as a desirable trait so we don't classify it as an addiction. Someone who spends time every night working on that day's crossword isn't viewed as being addicted to crosswords, even if he cancels plans to work on them, because our society (sometimes) prizes intellect. What it boils down to is that society currently does not see a redeeming value in gaming, and so people who engage in it heavily must be addicts. Were society to see a good reason for gaming, which probably is many years away if ever, I doubt there'd be any consideration of them as such. This would also be why gambling is viewed as an addiction, because people have a hard time finding any socially redeeming value in a person who'd give away their life on the chance they'd improve it.
Actually I read something about this myth, and it really boils down to contractor billing laziness. Back "in the day" contractors used to sell things as a unit, and the cost of the unit would be distributed amongst all the components equally, so lets say we're discussing a $100 million jet. If there are say, 2500 components that go into said jet they would bill each component as $40,000...even if one of the components was something as seemingly trivial as the flight stick. Of course, this ignored that it also affected the super-high-end items as well, so those giant jet engines were also $40,000 as was the avionics system and everything else that would typically be millions of dollars.
Of course, the media gets a hold of the story that they paid $40,000 for a flight stick and report only this, leaving out the rest of the story that actually allows these actions to make some sort of sense. That's not to say that contractors didn't overcharge for things, but it wasn't nearly to the scale that the media reported at the time which has since spiraled into its own myths about government spending. Supposedly as a result of their rather...sensationalist journalism, contractors are no longer allowed to bill in that fashion, which is an arguable good move (more transparency but increased overhead and cost as a result).
Just remember though, the media has a primary interest in selling advertising space...not in reporting the truth. Been that way for a long time, longer than anyone posting to/. has been alive mostly likely, but people never seem to realize it.
Meaning "If I want to play solo most of the time I can progress to the same level of gear/abilities/etc. that people who participate in larger scale affairs, albeit at a suitably adjusted rate based on number of people involved" (in other words, if I choose to play solo instead of in a 5 man group, I progress at roughly 1/6th the speed I would in said group giving me incentive to group, but not forcing me to should I not desire to) or "If I want to advance solely via PvP I can, or if I want to focus just on PvE I can do the same."
As it stands, there are very few MMOs where a player can opt to play exclusively by themselves and advance past a certain point. WoW, for instance, allows this to the level cap, but then almost immediately starts to funnel you to larger and larger group affairs. That's fine for some people, but not for others, especially people who do not have the ability in their schedule to devote whole blocks of time and would like to be able to get in 30 minutes here and there. WoW also has the problem of trying to keep PvP in line with PvE and vice versa. When they increase the effectiveness of a class for one, they now have to turn around and consider its impact on the other.
In that particular case what I find ironic about that example is that Blizzard learned a similar situation with their Paladins vs. Shamans where changes to one had to be done in context to changes in the other was a bad idea because, at their core, they were two totally different classes and the "design in parallel" was hurting them both. Yet, after figuring out that practice was bad there, they seem oblivious to the fact that PvE and PvP are much the same situation. Yes, they can share some systems, but at their core they're fundamentally different and trying to keep them both in line merely makes them both worse. Figure out a way to design specific systems tailored to those environments, adjust the way the classes interact with those systems accordingly, and you produce a higher quality product for both.
Does all of that fall into the realm of "Easier said than done"? Yes, but my point is merely the designer who figures that out will create an MMO that will probably put WoW's subscription numbers to shame just like WoW's put EverQuest's to shame.
Not to derail this too much, but I do believe that complaining that the WoW launch had "Major lag" is overlooking that nobody, Blizzard included, had any idea what WoW would become. They probably thought by February of '05 they might have 500,000 subscribers, which was roughly the peak of EQ's success. I'm sure the concept that there would be (at that time) 1.2 million people playing (based on information from http://www.mmogchart.com/ )was almost their publisher's wet dream, not something that could actually happen. Most of the lag was caused by Blizzard underestimating how popular their product would be and not building up their infrastructure accordingly. Sure, it's an error on Blizzard's part at the end of the day, but all the same had you said in May of 2004 that there would be an MMO out there with 8 million+ people paying to play it, I think anyone around you would have asked for whatever it was you were smoking. That was a major monkey-wrench in their launch plans, but I'm sure most companies would kill to have the problem of "there's too many people paying us". In contrast, their expansion's launch was fairly smooth. There was a lot of off-hours instability, but the general performance during prime-time was quite good overall and the game mechanics were adjusted appropriately to account for the insane rush of people in the same areas.
Hopping back on topic, this reminds me of another article I read on/. talking about MMO design and how many MMO developers don't seem to grasp that much of what they do is downright annoying to their customers and could probably be done differently and that people would probably respond. Most of his criticism seemed to be leveled at EQ (and those EQ-ish features that WoW seems to have included) and when Vanguard was presented as a refinement of EQ, it seemed to me that his thoughts on at least that count were correct. While it appeals to some people, if you're looking for the mass-market appeal, you need to *gasp* appeal to the mass-market and not a niche! While they might have targeted a niche from the get-go, it's still a very foolish idea to look at the majority of the marketplace and tell them "We're not interested in your money, now go away."
I too grow tired of hearing about "The game sucks, but it has a great vision!" (and it's been said about more than just Vanguard). When someone figures out that how to balance solo play with group play with PvP and PvE so that any combination you want to choose is viable and actually delivers it...that's an MMO who's "vision" I'd like to hear about. WoW works for now, but their developers are oftentimes just as guilty of forgetting the core question any games developer should be asking themselves: "Is it fun? And not just to me, but other people?" Seems like that question never got asked around Sigil....nor did the "Will this even run properly?" question. Were there external factors to that? Sure, money is a big driving force in any business. Still, "release now, patch later" is the singularly most stupid business practice to indulge in. Good customers don't mind waiting for quality, and when you release it they will be happy they waited. Bad customers do mind, but probably nothing you release would satisfy them in the long-term anyway. Release a bad or half-baked product and you lose them both.
Maybe SOE can fix the game, but given their body of work with Star Wars: Galaxies, The Matrix Online and PlanetSide (a great concept game that SOE did nothing with and allowed to wither on the vine)...I wouldn't hold out much hope. If a quality game emerges though, I'll be happy to be proven wrong.
Pay no attention to the systems administrator part of my job title...it's just a standard honorific. >_>
Before I launch into this, it really seems like they define good and bad by their customer service skills, so that's what I'm addressing by "good" and "bad", not so much their technical knowledge.
In my experience, the problems with sysadmins tends to be that with the ones that lack the ability to understand the user. This is what people refer to as the "IT mindset" where the user is the enemy and is doing whatever they can to make IT's life more difficult. In some cases, this is very true. There ARE abusive users out there. However, most people simply want to do their job, and their job is NOT getting these machines to work right. Getting back to the "understanding the user" thing, I find a great many sysadmins have no empathy for how a user feels when their machine has gone down, and why would they? When has a sysadmin ever really felt the panic and/or frustration of having a machine crash and not having the first clue of how to fix it? We KNOW what we should do, and while we'll be annoyed at the extra work, we're (hopefully) never flailing around blindly...or if we are we're careful never to show signs of it. A user's machine goes down and they have no idea what to do. They panic, they worry, they don't think logically...they immediately run to the nearest person who they think can help them and oftentimes get the look of "Why should I?" or "Can't you see I'm busy right now?"
Again, that doesn't mean there aren't people who don't actively try to bypass what they SHOULD be doing to get the problem they caused looked at immediately because they think they're more important. However, I think the sysadmins that most people complain about are the ones who let the handful of lazy/abusive users jade their dealings with the ones who simply want to do their job and go home.
However, I find that the "bad" sysadmins are about as common as the truly abusive users. They stand out in your memory so it seems like there's a lot of them, but they're actually far from the rule. YMMV, of course. After all, in the course of a day three or four people might stop to hold open a door for you, but the one you remember at the end of the day is the idiot that cut you off on the highway. Human memory is a funny thing...
...when they're the ones who broke the rules in the first place.
As many other people have already stated, just because you can get around something doesn't suddenly make it OK. If a bank left its vault wide-open, is it magically OK to take all the money out? No, because that's not your money and you have no right to it. Just because the network security is lax, does that magically make it OK to do whatever you want with it? No, that equipment was provided for a specific purpose and if you're not going to use it for that purpose, then you're abusing it and actions should be taken against you. The idea of an action being wrong isn't "it's wrong only if you get caught" (which is sadly what most schools teach), it's wrong because it's taking something given to you for a specific use and completely misusing it, and in the case of a network, actually taking resources away from people who ARE trying to use it for work.
In terms of keeping the kids out of things, much like DRM, trying to outwit clients is going to end up as an exercise in futility. There are more tricks at the disposal of the people trying to circumvent the rules than there are to the ones who have to enforce it. Any roadblocks that can be set up can be bypassed as well. Is it possible to set up a highly locked-down system that blocks everything but a few specific sites? Yes, but now look how absolutely worthless that network is for education now. Believe me, there are more sites out there of actual, legitimate educational value on the Internet than any one group can catalog, and now you're hurting the actual point of the network in the first place! The kind of thinking that says "well lock it all down!" epitomizes everything that's wrong with the way Americans approach laws; destroy the usefulness of a tool for EVERYONE just because a select handful abuse it. NO! You punish the half-wits that abuse these things while leaving it as useful as it reasonably can be to those who wish to use it legitimately.
I do agree though that while action should be taken against students who break the rules simply because they CHOSE to break the rules, most school IT groups could learn a thing or three from those kids. I know we had one hell-raiser who was constantly bypassing filters and security measures. Smart kid, no concept of his actions having greater consequences beyond himself (a common teenager mindset). What'd we do with him? Kept him on a tight leash while we was in class (which I'm sure had minimal impact on his activities) and the moment he graduated he was made an intern. When we rolled out new security policies, we had him break them (which he invariably did...given enough time) and we used how long it took him as the benchmark. We also made him do a lot of work on machines that his peers had screwed up, just as a life lesson that while you think it's "cool" to steal mouse balls or black out optical mice or install Linux or any of a myriad of other acts of nerd rebellion, someone has to go in and clean that up. I like to think he actually gained a bit of perspective from having to load entire machines with the benefit of a mouse because of a stunt he might have thought was funny a few months earlier.
But now I'm starting to ramble like I'm an old man...scary to think I'm not even a decade removed from when I would have thought messing up a mouse as a high school prank was funny...
Recent information indicates that it will be necessary to also ban hammers from sale on Ebay, to avert future criticism along these same lines. But...wouldn't the banhammer itself be caught up in a hammer ban?! Oh the paradox!
I do love how we trumpet the "OMG HE BOUGHT CLIPS ON EBAY!!" as somehow being a warning sign that he was going to go batshit insane and kill 32 people and himself. Everything taken in totality, combined with hindsight, makes it clear that there was something wrong, but who beforehand had all of this information in one place to say "Hey, something's up here..."
But of course to come to the conclusion that eBay had no liable role in this would require thought, this is America, where thinking is an art and indulged in by few. Since Cho's dead, I suppose it's cathartic to go after anyone who could have possible assisted him, but at the end of the day is it a company's job to do a psychological evaluation of every customer before they sell something potentially dangerous? Hell, a nail gun (to continue the hammer theme) can kill people and is available at most hardware stores...we need to start psych evals for them too? Realize that crazy people are called crazy for a reason. They defy natural logic and any attempts to approach their actions logically will fail. Trying to guard against crazy people really just has the effect of making life for the sane people that much harder. Just like gun control will fail due to another basic concept: Criminals don't care about laws...that's why they're criminals....all it does it make it harder for law-abiding citizens.
It's quite true that most users and small businesses don't upgrade until they buy a new machine, and that is by far the wisest course of action when dealing with any new OS is to put it on the best you can give it. However, to put an OS out that only works well on a new computer is a very short-sighted strategy. We always spec our machines much higher than they need to be because we never know just how long a given box will be in service. Even the machines we were buying in 2001 would miss the current Vista requirements by 67Mhz on the processor and 512MB of RAM, which overall would be a minimal cost to upgrade if those machines were even still in service. However, the problem for most enterprises is the amount of that hardware that is being consumed (for little justifiable reason) by something with an intended purpose of being a facilitator between applications and hardware. If applications perform noticeably slower, there must be a reason to accept the lower user productivity and, to date, Vista has yet to provide that reason. That's not to say a reason does not or will not exist, just that it has yet to be uncovered to date in my own personal experiences.
Each previous Windows OS upped the requirements by a small, fairly acceptable degree. Windows 95 to Windows 98 was a small change, 98 to Me/2k hardly bigger and even the jump from 2k to XP wasn't that massive. To triple the requirements, even for an OS that was delayed as long as Vista was and accounting that technology changes much more in a six year span than a three year...it begs the question of "why?"
Does every modern Linux distribution share this jump? Does OS X have this requirements jump? Why does Vista bring with it such drastically higher hardware requirements for something that doesn't directly contribute to my computer being useful to me? Remember, the OS allows my applications to be useful, and hence it is indirectly useful to me. To have it consume that many resources when it's predecessors did not is what is causing people to take a very hard look at Vista and prompting people to ask why their hardware is being diverted to do things that have nothing to do with what they want to be doing. As MS discovered with DirectX, the best things Windows can do is get the hell out of the way. Really it feels a bit unfair to single out MS there because every OS could do well to learn that once the user has decided an application to run the OS should become largely transparent (much like a good waiter that leaves you to enjoy your meal, not one that interrupts you every five seconds asking if everything is ok)...but MS has clearly learned the lesson once and didn't retain it.
From what I've heard the major problem with Vista is that it was designed by committee with dozens of people involved in even the most minute aspects. The problem with that of course being that that more people = more compromise and a compromise is, from one viewpoint, simply a solution that leaves everyone equally unhappy. From my testing of Vista and reading the various feedback threads, I think that's been an excellent tagline for Vista thus far...the OS that will leave everyone equally unhappy with it.
The culture at Redmond simply looks like it's gotten so insulated from this "reality" thing that they're sliding into a world where they don't understand that most people do not like the OS. The OS is a required evil to get to what they actually want, which is the applications. The faster the OS gets to those applications and gets the hell out of the way, the better...for most users at any rate. Why this concept seems to elude OS designers is beyond me, but Microsoft needs to come to terms with the idea that when I sit down at a computer to check my email, I want to use my email program, not the OS. If I want to play a game, I want to play the game...not work with the OS. If I need to write something, I want to write...not deal with the OS. It's quite simple really, which is probably why they don't get it.
On the one hand, I do dislike invasions of privacy...even if privacy is not a concept that's technically enshrined by law as much as it is by public perception. If I want to run programs X, Y and Z on my own machine, that's my business and Blizzard has no intrinsic right to view it.
On the other, however, I can acknowledge that the rules change in a social setting. I would scream bloody murder if someone just randomly opened my laptop bag and started rummaging through it on the street, but at the same time I think nothing of letting the TSA rummage through it (and every other bag I have) when I fly. WoW is not a standalone experience and your actions do have an impact on others. Using WoWGlider is without a doubt a negative thing for the game even if it allows people who find the game "too boring" to advance. Do I think airplane security vs. in-game cheating are equivalent? No, I'm pointing out that when other people are impacted by your actions and choices, it adds a different dimension to privacy. You have to surrender a bit of privacy to be a part of a social experience or situation. You want total privacy, you stay within the walls of your own home and communicate with nothing.
As far as the case itself, I can see what they're going for with it. They're saying that a program sold to cheat at and wholly dependent on their copyrighted application is infringement...someone is making money off of their efforts, and that's what copyrights are supposed to protect. If I made something that was wholly dependent on someone else's technology and didn't give them their due, I'd expect a similar lawsuit. If he can prove that you could use WoWGlider to cheat at more than just WoW though, he might have a defense.
So you have cheaters and people who abuse privacy. While I don't consider either moral, at least I can see circumstances that privacy needs to take a backseat. Cheating though, I'm not sure I've ever come across a situation where that's moral and ok.
Actually from reading the article, it appears that they're concerned about adding a layer of rights to the *broadcasters* not to the creators. What they're saying is that US law only recognizes the creators of content, not the distributor (which is in essence what a lot of broadcasters are). There was talk about the treaty giving broadcasters IP rights to public domain works effectively as well as very long protections on broadcasts.
From the article:
"The Revised Draft Broadcasting Treaty appears to grant broadcasters extensive new, exclusive rights in their transmissions for a term of at least 20 years, regardless of whether they have a right in the content they are transmitting,"
Those would be the rights they are concerned about adding to the mix, and in this case I can't disagree with them. No, you shouldn't have your signal stolen so that others can profit off of your labor, but similar you should not be able gain rights to something you didn't create in the first place. Imagine if that idea was applied to the Internet...that whoever was simply hosting the content gained any sort of rights to that content for their own sale and redistribution. Somewhat scary to think about there...
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Actually, most people have no idea what other people do in their free time, especially if that free time is conducted in the privacy of their own home. So to say people "don't" spend more than a couple hours doing it would be an opinion, which you're certainly entitled to but remember that it is just that, an opinion. As far as physical endurance goes, the human body has the ability to adapt to strain. This means that while you can say "Most people cannot exercise for more than an hour a day" and be correct, it is entirely possible for someone to develop their body to the point that they can exert it for most of their waking hours if they so desired. We generally call these people "atheletes", which as a side note in the discussion has an overall positive connotation to it.
By the same token, you can say "a WoW player can spend 14 hours or more in one session playing the game", but overlook that you could be looking at the "athelete"-equivalent group of the player base and missing that the vast majority of people who play the game fall similarly into the "can't do it for more than an hour or two" group.
As a comparison, I read heavily. Always have, and I can recite all sorts of goodly bits of trivia about multiple fictional universes with an absolutely frightening recall rate. I keep characters and plots in my mind for the years that pass between installments of a series as well as deep ruminating on the symbolism and commentary often contained in the works. Can this tire a mind out? Yes. By the same token, anything that involves other people in a game like WoW takes on a far more intense intellectual exercise. Grinding, of course, is about as stimulating as stapling papers together, but to say that grinding is the "norm" in the game is a subjective view. Most of the time that I am in WoW, and I play daily much as I read things daily, I'm in an instance with friends and we are faced with these so-called "unusual" states of affairs. As we constantly alter the equation in what role we fulfill and what we have to work with, it is a constant intellectual stimulation that delves deep into a numbers game of immense depth and theory.
To continue with the sports reference, if you look at most any sport played by sandlot kids, the games are ludicrously simple. Throw the ball to the open guy, hit the other guy harder, put the ball through the hoop, kick the ball in the goal, etc. You could program a robot to play the game at a basic level. Conversely, if you look closely at almost every sport at a professional level, you'll notice high-level strategy and group reaction. You have to have a deep understanding of the game oftentimes to notice the theory and meta-game that's being played behind the scenes by coaches, but most every sport has it. A robot is going to have difficulty coping with the meta-game such as intentionally running a play you know won't work to set up the other team for a surprise play that nets a huge reward.
Similarly, WoW (and by extension most MMOs) at it's basic level is a very simple game that anyone could play, and you can easily make "robots" to do. At the top level, where a larger percentage of players DO play because unlike professional sports there aren't as many entry barriers, it's something that's so random and complex that your mind simply get exercised plotting out possible outcomes and reacting as quickly as possible when needed. Is it the same sort of stimulation as a book? No, but running track and lifting weights are different sorts of physical stimulation and both are seen as viable forms of exercise.
Again, it's all a matter of perspective. People choose to believe there is no value in gaming because they themselves do not see it. If you would do something that provides no direct benefit to you or society, you must be addicted to it is the prevailing logic. However, just because one individual lacks the understanding to grasp the deeper mechanics at work does not mean that such mechanics do not exist and that the abilities being exercised through gaming (desicion-making, group play, organization) are not real.
I beg to differ that games cannot be tiring, as that will vary from game to game. A game such as WoW where you might be called upon to make split-second reactions in the context of multiple people could be argued to be just as intellectually stimulating as reading a book, if not more so due to the required level of interactivity. Extended amounts of that sort of activity of plotting out actions and executing them (and reacting to changes at a moment) does place a similar amount of stress on the mind. Similarly, a very active session of Wii Sports can put a great deal of physical strain on even the fittest of individuals. So to say games are viewed as an addiction because they're "passive" I believe presents a somewhat overgeneralized view. Yes, certainly some games fall into the category you describe, but a significant number, including many targeted as "addictive" do not fit neatly within that idea.
I'd submit a slightly different view. That things like going to the gym or playing a sport constantly or having to do the daily Sudoku are not viewed as addictions because they are socially respected activities. You can make the argument that the football player who continues to play even though he knows he's injured (possibly badly) is addicted to the thrill of competition because he's ignoring his own well being to continue to experience the pleasure that playing football gives him. However, society holds the ability to continue in the face of adversity as a desirable trait so we don't classify it as an addiction. Someone who spends time every night working on that day's crossword isn't viewed as being addicted to crosswords, even if he cancels plans to work on them, because our society (sometimes) prizes intellect. What it boils down to is that society currently does not see a redeeming value in gaming, and so people who engage in it heavily must be addicts. Were society to see a good reason for gaming, which probably is many years away if ever, I doubt there'd be any consideration of them as such. This would also be why gambling is viewed as an addiction, because people have a hard time finding any socially redeeming value in a person who'd give away their life on the chance they'd improve it.
Social Darwinism, in essence.
Actually I read something about this myth, and it really boils down to contractor billing laziness. Back "in the day" contractors used to sell things as a unit, and the cost of the unit would be distributed amongst all the components equally, so lets say we're discussing a $100 million jet. If there are say, 2500 components that go into said jet they would bill each component as $40,000...even if one of the components was something as seemingly trivial as the flight stick. Of course, this ignored that it also affected the super-high-end items as well, so those giant jet engines were also $40,000 as was the avionics system and everything else that would typically be millions of dollars.
/. has been alive mostly likely, but people never seem to realize it.
Of course, the media gets a hold of the story that they paid $40,000 for a flight stick and report only this, leaving out the rest of the story that actually allows these actions to make some sort of sense. That's not to say that contractors didn't overcharge for things, but it wasn't nearly to the scale that the media reported at the time which has since spiraled into its own myths about government spending. Supposedly as a result of their rather...sensationalist journalism, contractors are no longer allowed to bill in that fashion, which is an arguable good move (more transparency but increased overhead and cost as a result).
Just remember though, the media has a primary interest in selling advertising space...not in reporting the truth. Been that way for a long time, longer than anyone posting to
Meaning "If I want to play solo most of the time I can progress to the same level of gear/abilities/etc. that people who participate in larger scale affairs, albeit at a suitably adjusted rate based on number of people involved" (in other words, if I choose to play solo instead of in a 5 man group, I progress at roughly 1/6th the speed I would in said group giving me incentive to group, but not forcing me to should I not desire to) or "If I want to advance solely via PvP I can, or if I want to focus just on PvE I can do the same."
As it stands, there are very few MMOs where a player can opt to play exclusively by themselves and advance past a certain point. WoW, for instance, allows this to the level cap, but then almost immediately starts to funnel you to larger and larger group affairs. That's fine for some people, but not for others, especially people who do not have the ability in their schedule to devote whole blocks of time and would like to be able to get in 30 minutes here and there. WoW also has the problem of trying to keep PvP in line with PvE and vice versa. When they increase the effectiveness of a class for one, they now have to turn around and consider its impact on the other.
In that particular case what I find ironic about that example is that Blizzard learned a similar situation with their Paladins vs. Shamans where changes to one had to be done in context to changes in the other was a bad idea because, at their core, they were two totally different classes and the "design in parallel" was hurting them both. Yet, after figuring out that practice was bad there, they seem oblivious to the fact that PvE and PvP are much the same situation. Yes, they can share some systems, but at their core they're fundamentally different and trying to keep them both in line merely makes them both worse. Figure out a way to design specific systems tailored to those environments, adjust the way the classes interact with those systems accordingly, and you produce a higher quality product for both.
Does all of that fall into the realm of "Easier said than done"? Yes, but my point is merely the designer who figures that out will create an MMO that will probably put WoW's subscription numbers to shame just like WoW's put EverQuest's to shame.
Not to derail this too much, but I do believe that complaining that the WoW launch had "Major lag" is overlooking that nobody, Blizzard included, had any idea what WoW would become. They probably thought by February of '05 they might have 500,000 subscribers, which was roughly the peak of EQ's success. I'm sure the concept that there would be (at that time) 1.2 million people playing (based on information from http://www.mmogchart.com/ )was almost their publisher's wet dream, not something that could actually happen. Most of the lag was caused by Blizzard underestimating how popular their product would be and not building up their infrastructure accordingly. Sure, it's an error on Blizzard's part at the end of the day, but all the same had you said in May of 2004 that there would be an MMO out there with 8 million+ people paying to play it, I think anyone around you would have asked for whatever it was you were smoking. That was a major monkey-wrench in their launch plans, but I'm sure most companies would kill to have the problem of "there's too many people paying us". In contrast, their expansion's launch was fairly smooth. There was a lot of off-hours instability, but the general performance during prime-time was quite good overall and the game mechanics were adjusted appropriately to account for the insane rush of people in the same areas.
/. talking about MMO design and how many MMO developers don't seem to grasp that much of what they do is downright annoying to their customers and could probably be done differently and that people would probably respond. Most of his criticism seemed to be leveled at EQ (and those EQ-ish features that WoW seems to have included) and when Vanguard was presented as a refinement of EQ, it seemed to me that his thoughts on at least that count were correct. While it appeals to some people, if you're looking for the mass-market appeal, you need to *gasp* appeal to the mass-market and not a niche! While they might have targeted a niche from the get-go, it's still a very foolish idea to look at the majority of the marketplace and tell them "We're not interested in your money, now go away."
Hopping back on topic, this reminds me of another article I read on
I too grow tired of hearing about "The game sucks, but it has a great vision!" (and it's been said about more than just Vanguard). When someone figures out that how to balance solo play with group play with PvP and PvE so that any combination you want to choose is viable and actually delivers it...that's an MMO who's "vision" I'd like to hear about. WoW works for now, but their developers are oftentimes just as guilty of forgetting the core question any games developer should be asking themselves: "Is it fun? And not just to me, but other people?" Seems like that question never got asked around Sigil....nor did the "Will this even run properly?" question. Were there external factors to that? Sure, money is a big driving force in any business. Still, "release now, patch later" is the singularly most stupid business practice to indulge in. Good customers don't mind waiting for quality, and when you release it they will be happy they waited. Bad customers do mind, but probably nothing you release would satisfy them in the long-term anyway. Release a bad or half-baked product and you lose them both.
Maybe SOE can fix the game, but given their body of work with Star Wars: Galaxies, The Matrix Online and PlanetSide (a great concept game that SOE did nothing with and allowed to wither on the vine)...I wouldn't hold out much hope. If a quality game emerges though, I'll be happy to be proven wrong.
Pay no attention to the systems administrator part of my job title...it's just a standard honorific. >_>
Before I launch into this, it really seems like they define good and bad by their customer service skills, so that's what I'm addressing by "good" and "bad", not so much their technical knowledge.
In my experience, the problems with sysadmins tends to be that with the ones that lack the ability to understand the user. This is what people refer to as the "IT mindset" where the user is the enemy and is doing whatever they can to make IT's life more difficult. In some cases, this is very true. There ARE abusive users out there. However, most people simply want to do their job, and their job is NOT getting these machines to work right. Getting back to the "understanding the user" thing, I find a great many sysadmins have no empathy for how a user feels when their machine has gone down, and why would they? When has a sysadmin ever really felt the panic and/or frustration of having a machine crash and not having the first clue of how to fix it? We KNOW what we should do, and while we'll be annoyed at the extra work, we're (hopefully) never flailing around blindly...or if we are we're careful never to show signs of it. A user's machine goes down and they have no idea what to do. They panic, they worry, they don't think logically...they immediately run to the nearest person who they think can help them and oftentimes get the look of "Why should I?" or "Can't you see I'm busy right now?"
Again, that doesn't mean there aren't people who don't actively try to bypass what they SHOULD be doing to get the problem they caused looked at immediately because they think they're more important. However, I think the sysadmins that most people complain about are the ones who let the handful of lazy/abusive users jade their dealings with the ones who simply want to do their job and go home.
However, I find that the "bad" sysadmins are about as common as the truly abusive users. They stand out in your memory so it seems like there's a lot of them, but they're actually far from the rule. YMMV, of course. After all, in the course of a day three or four people might stop to hold open a door for you, but the one you remember at the end of the day is the idiot that cut you off on the highway. Human memory is a funny thing...
...when they're the ones who broke the rules in the first place.
As many other people have already stated, just because you can get around something doesn't suddenly make it OK. If a bank left its vault wide-open, is it magically OK to take all the money out? No, because that's not your money and you have no right to it. Just because the network security is lax, does that magically make it OK to do whatever you want with it? No, that equipment was provided for a specific purpose and if you're not going to use it for that purpose, then you're abusing it and actions should be taken against you. The idea of an action being wrong isn't "it's wrong only if you get caught" (which is sadly what most schools teach), it's wrong because it's taking something given to you for a specific use and completely misusing it, and in the case of a network, actually taking resources away from people who ARE trying to use it for work.
In terms of keeping the kids out of things, much like DRM, trying to outwit clients is going to end up as an exercise in futility. There are more tricks at the disposal of the people trying to circumvent the rules than there are to the ones who have to enforce it. Any roadblocks that can be set up can be bypassed as well. Is it possible to set up a highly locked-down system that blocks everything but a few specific sites? Yes, but now look how absolutely worthless that network is for education now. Believe me, there are more sites out there of actual, legitimate educational value on the Internet than any one group can catalog, and now you're hurting the actual point of the network in the first place! The kind of thinking that says "well lock it all down!" epitomizes everything that's wrong with the way Americans approach laws; destroy the usefulness of a tool for EVERYONE just because a select handful abuse it. NO! You punish the half-wits that abuse these things while leaving it as useful as it reasonably can be to those who wish to use it legitimately.
I do agree though that while action should be taken against students who break the rules simply because they CHOSE to break the rules, most school IT groups could learn a thing or three from those kids. I know we had one hell-raiser who was constantly bypassing filters and security measures. Smart kid, no concept of his actions having greater consequences beyond himself (a common teenager mindset). What'd we do with him? Kept him on a tight leash while we was in class (which I'm sure had minimal impact on his activities) and the moment he graduated he was made an intern. When we rolled out new security policies, we had him break them (which he invariably did...given enough time) and we used how long it took him as the benchmark. We also made him do a lot of work on machines that his peers had screwed up, just as a life lesson that while you think it's "cool" to steal mouse balls or black out optical mice or install Linux or any of a myriad of other acts of nerd rebellion, someone has to go in and clean that up. I like to think he actually gained a bit of perspective from having to load entire machines with the benefit of a mouse because of a stunt he might have thought was funny a few months earlier.
But now I'm starting to ramble like I'm an old man...scary to think I'm not even a decade removed from when I would have thought messing up a mouse as a high school prank was funny...
I do love how we trumpet the "OMG HE BOUGHT CLIPS ON EBAY!!" as somehow being a warning sign that he was going to go batshit insane and kill 32 people and himself. Everything taken in totality, combined with hindsight, makes it clear that there was something wrong, but who beforehand had all of this information in one place to say "Hey, something's up here..."
But of course to come to the conclusion that eBay had no liable role in this would require thought, this is America, where thinking is an art and indulged in by few. Since Cho's dead, I suppose it's cathartic to go after anyone who could have possible assisted him, but at the end of the day is it a company's job to do a psychological evaluation of every customer before they sell something potentially dangerous? Hell, a nail gun (to continue the hammer theme) can kill people and is available at most hardware stores...we need to start psych evals for them too? Realize that crazy people are called crazy for a reason. They defy natural logic and any attempts to approach their actions logically will fail. Trying to guard against crazy people really just has the effect of making life for the sane people that much harder. Just like gun control will fail due to another basic concept: Criminals don't care about laws...that's why they're criminals....all it does it make it harder for law-abiding citizens.
Oh well, who needs karma, right?
It's quite true that most users and small businesses don't upgrade until they buy a new machine, and that is by far the wisest course of action when dealing with any new OS is to put it on the best you can give it. However, to put an OS out that only works well on a new computer is a very short-sighted strategy. We always spec our machines much higher than they need to be because we never know just how long a given box will be in service. Even the machines we were buying in 2001 would miss the current Vista requirements by 67Mhz on the processor and 512MB of RAM, which overall would be a minimal cost to upgrade if those machines were even still in service. However, the problem for most enterprises is the amount of that hardware that is being consumed (for little justifiable reason) by something with an intended purpose of being a facilitator between applications and hardware. If applications perform noticeably slower, there must be a reason to accept the lower user productivity and, to date, Vista has yet to provide that reason. That's not to say a reason does not or will not exist, just that it has yet to be uncovered to date in my own personal experiences.
Each previous Windows OS upped the requirements by a small, fairly acceptable degree. Windows 95 to Windows 98 was a small change, 98 to Me/2k hardly bigger and even the jump from 2k to XP wasn't that massive. To triple the requirements, even for an OS that was delayed as long as Vista was and accounting that technology changes much more in a six year span than a three year...it begs the question of "why?"
Does every modern Linux distribution share this jump? Does OS X have this requirements jump? Why does Vista bring with it such drastically higher hardware requirements for something that doesn't directly contribute to my computer being useful to me? Remember, the OS allows my applications to be useful, and hence it is indirectly useful to me. To have it consume that many resources when it's predecessors did not is what is causing people to take a very hard look at Vista and prompting people to ask why their hardware is being diverted to do things that have nothing to do with what they want to be doing. As MS discovered with DirectX, the best things Windows can do is get the hell out of the way. Really it feels a bit unfair to single out MS there because every OS could do well to learn that once the user has decided an application to run the OS should become largely transparent (much like a good waiter that leaves you to enjoy your meal, not one that interrupts you every five seconds asking if everything is ok)...but MS has clearly learned the lesson once and didn't retain it.
From what I've heard the major problem with Vista is that it was designed by committee with dozens of people involved in even the most minute aspects. The problem with that of course being that that more people = more compromise and a compromise is, from one viewpoint, simply a solution that leaves everyone equally unhappy. From my testing of Vista and reading the various feedback threads, I think that's been an excellent tagline for Vista thus far...the OS that will leave everyone equally unhappy with it.
The culture at Redmond simply looks like it's gotten so insulated from this "reality" thing that they're sliding into a world where they don't understand that most people do not like the OS. The OS is a required evil to get to what they actually want, which is the applications. The faster the OS gets to those applications and gets the hell out of the way, the better...for most users at any rate. Why this concept seems to elude OS designers is beyond me, but Microsoft needs to come to terms with the idea that when I sit down at a computer to check my email, I want to use my email program, not the OS. If I want to play a game, I want to play the game...not work with the OS. If I need to write something, I want to write...not deal with the OS. It's quite simple really, which is probably why they don't get it.
On the one hand, I do dislike invasions of privacy...even if privacy is not a concept that's technically enshrined by law as much as it is by public perception. If I want to run programs X, Y and Z on my own machine, that's my business and Blizzard has no intrinsic right to view it.
On the other, however, I can acknowledge that the rules change in a social setting. I would scream bloody murder if someone just randomly opened my laptop bag and started rummaging through it on the street, but at the same time I think nothing of letting the TSA rummage through it (and every other bag I have) when I fly. WoW is not a standalone experience and your actions do have an impact on others. Using WoWGlider is without a doubt a negative thing for the game even if it allows people who find the game "too boring" to advance. Do I think airplane security vs. in-game cheating are equivalent? No, I'm pointing out that when other people are impacted by your actions and choices, it adds a different dimension to privacy. You have to surrender a bit of privacy to be a part of a social experience or situation. You want total privacy, you stay within the walls of your own home and communicate with nothing.
As far as the case itself, I can see what they're going for with it. They're saying that a program sold to cheat at and wholly dependent on their copyrighted application is infringement...someone is making money off of their efforts, and that's what copyrights are supposed to protect. If I made something that was wholly dependent on someone else's technology and didn't give them their due, I'd expect a similar lawsuit. If he can prove that you could use WoWGlider to cheat at more than just WoW though, he might have a defense.
So you have cheaters and people who abuse privacy. While I don't consider either moral, at least I can see circumstances that privacy needs to take a backseat. Cheating though, I'm not sure I've ever come across a situation where that's moral and ok.
Actually from reading the article, it appears that they're concerned about adding a layer of rights to the *broadcasters* not to the creators. What they're saying is that US law only recognizes the creators of content, not the distributor (which is in essence what a lot of broadcasters are). There was talk about the treaty giving broadcasters IP rights to public domain works effectively as well as very long protections on broadcasts. From the article: "The Revised Draft Broadcasting Treaty appears to grant broadcasters extensive new, exclusive rights in their transmissions for a term of at least 20 years, regardless of whether they have a right in the content they are transmitting," Those would be the rights they are concerned about adding to the mix, and in this case I can't disagree with them. No, you shouldn't have your signal stolen so that others can profit off of your labor, but similar you should not be able gain rights to something you didn't create in the first place. Imagine if that idea was applied to the Internet...that whoever was simply hosting the content gained any sort of rights to that content for their own sale and redistribution. Somewhat scary to think about there...