There are some community remakes of Rock, but none I have seen are anything like the old one. There is rock-inspired one called gas_kaboom, which is considerably smaller and can be quite fun.
AoC tanked hard and early. Lots of MMOs enjoyed a couple years of good subscriber numbers but dwindled later. SWG, Planetside, CoX...and some are stil doing pretty decent like LotRO...and then we could go into the Asian ones if you want.
But yeah, the rule is that most MMOs will have a large surge initially and die off. Just most don't do it as bad as AoC did:-)
And I know AoC has improved a lot. But Funcom has shown to me they take way too long to fix anything. The reason I left months ago was because my server was a ghost town-I loved the game, despite the bugs and imbalances. A FFA PvP server sucks without other P's. And just last week they FINALLY merged them, whereas my Warhammer server has been merged twice already, despite launching after I quit AoC. But warhammer is getting dull now...looking forward to Darkfall and Aion. And then maybe I'm just an unhappy bastard that will never find a MMO that will keep me occupied like EQ did for four years.
Age of Conan is a bad example. It sold 800k copies, which is pretty good for many PC games. The number of subscribers retained is miniscule though.
What they did was made the first 20 levels of the game awesome. The remainder....to be very kind....not so awesome.
Basically, if your game is good, demo it with a hardcore cliffhanger ending. If your game is bad, don't demo it at all and show pretty screenshots and generate false hype.
You have to inform the general public, and the only way to do that is to get the knowledge in mainstream sources that many people see. That means:
A) Major news networks
B) Other big-name TV, Radio and Print sources
C) Major online destinations
D) Included with other products people buy
To get on those, you have to either pay out the ass for advertising, or be interesting content that they want to present to viewers/listeners/readers/customers.
Advertising on that scale is way to expensive for a free product. The only things that are generally newsworthy are about Microsoft, Apple, Intel, etc. One possible type of source that could educate the public is a place like Google or Wikipedia. Places that are big, and that have goals 'somewhat' in line with the ideals of FOSS. You see that happening a little with Firefox, but nothing about Linux or FOSS in general.
The last, and probably best option, is kind of what caused this mess. Computers with Linux and other FOSS pre-loaded. This forces people to learn...but can also piss them off at the same time, as was with this case. It's up to the manufacturers to make sure the Linux experience is good for end users, because they customize the distro that goes on their hardware. Netbooks are definately the front-runners in this space, and the problem there is Microsoft realizes it, so they are doing their best to keep Windows on a lot of those netbooks, and they're doing a good job. Manufacturers also have incentive to keep Windows on them, not just from Microsoft, but because it's much easier for them to support. Their callcenter staff don't have to be trained on Linux, and the users will have fewer calls because they are using something familiar to them (whether or not there are more support calls with Windows in the long run is debatable).
I personally think it's going to be a Windows, and possibly OSX world for a while...eventually Linux may become mainstream enough, but I think it will take years and years for it to happen. The year of Linux on the desktop, if it ever comes, is probably a decade away. Unless the way we use computers changes significantly. Cloud computing, web apps, or whatever buzzword tickles your fancy....the point is, a significant change means opportunity for anyone to come in and topple the existing system.
I understand where you are coming from...and I actually think Microsoft did the right thing by forcing it on people...otherwise hardly anyone would use the new interface. Actually it was rather bold, because if people hated it, it would have sold poorly...but it's doing quite well, because many people like it.
Let me explain my experiences with 07 to you.
I work at a medium business with about 100 users. We've been rolling it out a few people at a time...mostly with new PC setups. I live in a pretty rural area of Ohio...a lot of older, stubborn people, many who were used to the old interface, and most of them, quite frankly, pretty bad with computer literacy. They all complained at first, but after about a week they got used to it, and I would say at least once a week someone comes up and says, "Oh, I found this new cool feature in Excel/Powerpoint/etc...I never knew it was there.".
There is even this 60-year old lady, who was actually one of our 'better' Excel users. The next day, she came into my office and demanded I uninstall it. I told her if she feels the same way in a week, I'll do it. She never came back. In fact, about a month ago, I had someone call me asking to upgrade their office 03, becaus the 60-year old told them they had the 'shitty old version'.
Me personally, being very much an Excel guru, was quite annoyed by it at first, but I stuck with it. I now realize my productivity with it is much better, because I can change many options that used to reside in dialog boxes directly from the ribon. The layout makes sense and was not hard to adjust to.
Change isn't always easy, but sometimes it's for the better. How long has it been since you talked to Velma? Maybe her productivity is better than ever. If people are afraid to upgrade Office, why the hell would they switch OS?
(Also I have been playing with Win 7 since the leaked devloper beta...the Taskbar is nothing like the Apple dock, I was actually kind of disappointed because it's really not much different from the current one. Oh, you know they added the ribbon to Paint, Wordpad, etc?:-)
You pretty much summed it up for me too. Aside from security risks, Google has complete control and if something gets changed there isn't much you can do about it. There's also the issue of downtime. After one of the first big RIM/BlackBerry outages, we switched to WinMo devices that connect directly into our Exchange server. Our uptime was better than RIM's last year...kind of pathetic, really. I don't want to put our word processor in the same situation.
Going into the other point of this article, there is another big (maybe the biggest) reason people stick with Word...it's part of the Office *SUITE*. While Word is pretty easily replaced with OO.o Writer, Calc and Impress are not Excel and Powerpoint...they are shy just a few too many features. And if you have Exchange, Outlook is pretty much mandatory. It's cheaper to buy the Office suite than it is to buy Excel, Powerpoint, and Outlook separately. So you may as well use Word, since you will have it anyway.
If you're using Sharepoint and have problems like than, then you probably have something configured incorrectly. If it's just network shares though, yeah, that is a royal pain in the ass.
try something like Gracie Jiu Jitsu... choking a motherfucker out makes me feel better after a day of IT BS.
I agree completely...I work at a medium business (~100 users)...30 minutes of Team Fortress 2 at lunchtime and 1 hour in the evening does wonders. I play Heavy, and I'm pretty good at it...great stress reliever. If you play Engineer, the spies may just make things worse and you'll come into work the next day with a hardhat and wrench and nerdrage all over.
But that won't last for much longer. The only chipset available right now is the high end X58. The mainstream and 3rd party chipsets will be here sooner or later, and DDR3 prices have fallen a lot already, and they will continue to do so.
Either way I'm quite excited to see AMD gaining back ground. Fanboism is bad, competetion is good. Lately I've been using Intel chips for server and higher-end builds, and AMD for mid-lower end builds-I had used AMD almost exclusively in the P4 days. The Core i7 prices are a bit higher than I like, hopefully this will give Intel incentive to lower them, or at least drop prices on Core 2 Quads, which would make them a hell of a mid-range chip.
But you're talking about a fraction of a fraction of a percent now. The number of Windows copies purchased because a Linux client existed is probably much smaller than the number of Linux copies sold. They can project development costs for a Linux client, and they can do rough estimates on sales. They would have to be pretty sure that the number of copies sold would be significantly higher than the additional development costs. Hell, there's even a decent chance they lost money on NWN1 because they didn't sell enough Linux copies.
PC Gaming on Windows is already something of a niche market compared to consoles. We have issues as it is. Hoping for Mac and Linux support in a market already overlooked in favor of larger ones is really asking for a lot. There are only a few titles that could definately get away with it.
And you also have to remember that the number of Linux users and Linux gamers are not the same thing at all. Most every Linux user I have met that was a regular gamer either had a Windows box/dual boot for gaming, or was a console gamer.
The only way I really see Linux or OS X becoming a prevalent gaming platform is either: A) Several devolpers releasing major titles for the other OSes exclusively (or repeatedly across all OSes for several years), or B) Linux/OS X eventually gaining substantial marketshare in general, 20-25% or more. A) would require a lot of charity on the developer/publisher end, because, at least at first, it will cause loss of profit. B) seems the most likely, but it could take a decade or more for that to happen....and who knows what we'll see by then.
You indirectly gave another real world example. NWN 1 had Linux support. So when they made NWN2, they more than likely thought about doing it again, but they didn't. Why? Probably because they didn't sell enough copies of NWN1 to make it worthwhile. It all works down to how much the extra development costs versus additional copies sold (or you can throw in Microsoft paying them off conspiracy theories if you like).
No PC Game requires even a single $500 card to run properly.
Hell, most any game, INCLUDING Crysis, can be run quite well on a $200 card thrown into a budget system from HP/Dell/Acer. You can get a decent syste, with 3GB RAM, AMD X2 processor, and an empty PCIx x16 slot for $400 brand new. Throw in a $150-$200 (9800GT, HD3850) card and you have a very competent gaming PC.
Now if you want to run games like Crysis at max settings with 60+ FPS, then yes, you will need to splurge on your cards. And there are a few MMOs with good graphics that will use and abuse a $500 card. I played Age of Conan, and it would make my GTX280 cry like a bitch from time to time.
The PC-MMO connection is mostly because MMO's are evolving games that need to have a client that is adaptable to them. The latest consoles help this a long a lot more than the prior generation, expecially with the 360's capability to install games to disk.
The mouse+keyboard control is very helpful, although not necessary. FFXI does a pretty good job on the PS2 with a gamepad. It also requires the PS2 hard drive. So it has been doable for a while, it just makes it a hell of a lot harder on the devolopers.
That should be an optional setting though, because many people like to use password managers, and plugins should be able to catch and manage passwords if we allow them to.
Maybe a warning dialog "XXX extension is trying to record or monitor your password? Allow or Deny?" (yes, I worded that like UAC on purpose for comedic effect)
That's true in some places. It depends on where you live.
I'm from a fairly small town (~10k) not very near any city, and the only thing smaller than the number of people who own Macs are the number of people who have even heard of Linux. And on the flip side, people who know squat about computers are much harder to come by.
But it's not isolated to rural areas. Many cities are more often bases for corporate HQs and whatnot that are predominantly MS shops (I've been hunting around Columbus, OH, and they have a lot of Insurance HQs and whatnot). You have to go to the big cities (Chicago, NYC, LA) and ones known for their advertising/graphics industries to find enough Mac shops to go around.
If you are willing to relocate, yes, I would agree, you can definately find some good opportunities. But I still think the safest bet is the Windows XP cert (followed by Win2k3 or 2k8 to get your MCSA). And nothing is stopping you from getting both eventually.
Slashdot Mirror
There are some community remakes of Rock, but none I have seen are anything like the old one. There is rock-inspired one called gas_kaboom, which is considerably smaller and can be quite fun.
AoC tanked hard and early. Lots of MMOs enjoyed a couple years of good subscriber numbers but dwindled later. SWG, Planetside, CoX...and some are stil doing pretty decent like LotRO...and then we could go into the Asian ones if you want.
But yeah, the rule is that most MMOs will have a large surge initially and die off. Just most don't do it as bad as AoC did :-)
And I know AoC has improved a lot. But Funcom has shown to me they take way too long to fix anything. The reason I left months ago was because my server was a ghost town-I loved the game, despite the bugs and imbalances. A FFA PvP server sucks without other P's. And just last week they FINALLY merged them, whereas my Warhammer server has been merged twice already, despite launching after I quit AoC. But warhammer is getting dull now...looking forward to Darkfall and Aion. And then maybe I'm just an unhappy bastard that will never find a MMO that will keep me occupied like EQ did for four years.
And did I mention it installs from a single CD?
Impressive. I'm definately going to use this, as putting in a second disk is just way too much work.
Age of Conan is a bad example. It sold 800k copies, which is pretty good for many PC games. The number of subscribers retained is miniscule though.
What they did was made the first 20 levels of the game awesome. The remainder....to be very kind....not so awesome.
Basically, if your game is good, demo it with a hardcore cliffhanger ending. If your game is bad, don't demo it at all and show pretty screenshots and generate false hype.
You have to inform the general public, and the only way to do that is to get the knowledge in mainstream sources that many people see. That means:
A) Major news networks
B) Other big-name TV, Radio and Print sources
C) Major online destinations
D) Included with other products people buy
To get on those, you have to either pay out the ass for advertising, or be interesting content that they want to present to viewers/listeners/readers/customers.
Advertising on that scale is way to expensive for a free product. The only things that are generally newsworthy are about Microsoft, Apple, Intel, etc. One possible type of source that could educate the public is a place like Google or Wikipedia. Places that are big, and that have goals 'somewhat' in line with the ideals of FOSS. You see that happening a little with Firefox, but nothing about Linux or FOSS in general.
The last, and probably best option, is kind of what caused this mess. Computers with Linux and other FOSS pre-loaded. This forces people to learn...but can also piss them off at the same time, as was with this case. It's up to the manufacturers to make sure the Linux experience is good for end users, because they customize the distro that goes on their hardware. Netbooks are definately the front-runners in this space, and the problem there is Microsoft realizes it, so they are doing their best to keep Windows on a lot of those netbooks, and they're doing a good job. Manufacturers also have incentive to keep Windows on them, not just from Microsoft, but because it's much easier for them to support. Their callcenter staff don't have to be trained on Linux, and the users will have fewer calls because they are using something familiar to them (whether or not there are more support calls with Windows in the long run is debatable).
I personally think it's going to be a Windows, and possibly OSX world for a while...eventually Linux may become mainstream enough, but I think it will take years and years for it to happen. The year of Linux on the desktop, if it ever comes, is probably a decade away. Unless the way we use computers changes significantly. Cloud computing, web apps, or whatever buzzword tickles your fancy....the point is, a significant change means opportunity for anyone to come in and topple the existing system.
I understand where you are coming from...and I actually think Microsoft did the right thing by forcing it on people...otherwise hardly anyone would use the new interface. Actually it was rather bold, because if people hated it, it would have sold poorly...but it's doing quite well, because many people like it.
Let me explain my experiences with 07 to you.
I work at a medium business with about 100 users. We've been rolling it out a few people at a time...mostly with new PC setups. I live in a pretty rural area of Ohio...a lot of older, stubborn people, many who were used to the old interface, and most of them, quite frankly, pretty bad with computer literacy. They all complained at first, but after about a week they got used to it, and I would say at least once a week someone comes up and says, "Oh, I found this new cool feature in Excel/Powerpoint/etc...I never knew it was there.".
There is even this 60-year old lady, who was actually one of our 'better' Excel users. The next day, she came into my office and demanded I uninstall it. I told her if she feels the same way in a week, I'll do it. She never came back. In fact, about a month ago, I had someone call me asking to upgrade their office 03, becaus the 60-year old told them they had the 'shitty old version'.
Me personally, being very much an Excel guru, was quite annoyed by it at first, but I stuck with it. I now realize my productivity with it is much better, because I can change many options that used to reside in dialog boxes directly from the ribon. The layout makes sense and was not hard to adjust to.
Change isn't always easy, but sometimes it's for the better. How long has it been since you talked to Velma? Maybe her productivity is better than ever. If people are afraid to upgrade Office, why the hell would they switch OS?
(Also I have been playing with Win 7 since the leaked devloper beta...the Taskbar is nothing like the Apple dock, I was actually kind of disappointed because it's really not much different from the current one. Oh, you know they added the ribbon to Paint, Wordpad, etc? :-)
You pretty much summed it up for me too. Aside from security risks, Google has complete control and if something gets changed there isn't much you can do about it. There's also the issue of downtime. After one of the first big RIM/BlackBerry outages, we switched to WinMo devices that connect directly into our Exchange server. Our uptime was better than RIM's last year...kind of pathetic, really. I don't want to put our word processor in the same situation.
Going into the other point of this article, there is another big (maybe the biggest) reason people stick with Word...it's part of the Office *SUITE*. While Word is pretty easily replaced with OO.o Writer, Calc and Impress are not Excel and Powerpoint...they are shy just a few too many features. And if you have Exchange, Outlook is pretty much mandatory. It's cheaper to buy the Office suite than it is to buy Excel, Powerpoint, and Outlook separately. So you may as well use Word, since you will have it anyway.
If you're using Sharepoint and have problems like than, then you probably have something configured incorrectly. If it's just network shares though, yeah, that is a royal pain in the ass.
try something like Gracie Jiu Jitsu... choking a motherfucker out makes me feel better after a day of IT BS.
I agree completely...I work at a medium business (~100 users)...30 minutes of Team Fortress 2 at lunchtime and 1 hour in the evening does wonders. I play Heavy, and I'm pretty good at it...great stress reliever. If you play Engineer, the spies may just make things worse and you'll come into work the next day with a hardhat and wrench and nerdrage all over.
But that won't last for much longer. The only chipset available right now is the high end X58. The mainstream and 3rd party chipsets will be here sooner or later, and DDR3 prices have fallen a lot already, and they will continue to do so.
Either way I'm quite excited to see AMD gaining back ground. Fanboism is bad, competetion is good. Lately I've been using Intel chips for server and higher-end builds, and AMD for mid-lower end builds-I had used AMD almost exclusively in the P4 days. The Core i7 prices are a bit higher than I like, hopefully this will give Intel incentive to lower them, or at least drop prices on Core 2 Quads, which would make them a hell of a mid-range chip.
But you're talking about a fraction of a fraction of a percent now. The number of Windows copies purchased because a Linux client existed is probably much smaller than the number of Linux copies sold. They can project development costs for a Linux client, and they can do rough estimates on sales. They would have to be pretty sure that the number of copies sold would be significantly higher than the additional development costs. Hell, there's even a decent chance they lost money on NWN1 because they didn't sell enough Linux copies.
PC Gaming on Windows is already something of a niche market compared to consoles. We have issues as it is. Hoping for Mac and Linux support in a market already overlooked in favor of larger ones is really asking for a lot. There are only a few titles that could definately get away with it.
And you also have to remember that the number of Linux users and Linux gamers are not the same thing at all. Most every Linux user I have met that was a regular gamer either had a Windows box/dual boot for gaming, or was a console gamer.
The only way I really see Linux or OS X becoming a prevalent gaming platform is either: A) Several devolpers releasing major titles for the other OSes exclusively (or repeatedly across all OSes for several years), or B) Linux/OS X eventually gaining substantial marketshare in general, 20-25% or more. A) would require a lot of charity on the developer/publisher end, because, at least at first, it will cause loss of profit. B) seems the most likely, but it could take a decade or more for that to happen....and who knows what we'll see by then.
You indirectly gave another real world example. NWN 1 had Linux support. So when they made NWN2, they more than likely thought about doing it again, but they didn't. Why? Probably because they didn't sell enough copies of NWN1 to make it worthwhile. It all works down to how much the extra development costs versus additional copies sold (or you can throw in Microsoft paying them off conspiracy theories if you like).
from the can't-believe-this-is-news dept
When many people believe that the continued success of a large company depends on one individual, his health becomes news.
virus [vahy-ruhs] 4. a segment of self-replicating code planted illegally in a computer program, often to damage or shut down a system or network.
bug [buhg] 4. Informal. a defect or imperfection, as in a mechanical device, computer program, or plan; glitch.
Hmmm. Sounds like you're an idiot to me.
What, you expect one line of ASCII is supposed to be proportionally accurate?
It's at least twice that size.
( ))===|D >+o ?
Some people seem to forget that you don't have to play games at maximum settings.
No PC Game requires even a single $500 card to run properly.
Hell, most any game, INCLUDING Crysis, can be run quite well on a $200 card thrown into a budget system from HP/Dell/Acer. You can get a decent syste, with 3GB RAM, AMD X2 processor, and an empty PCIx x16 slot for $400 brand new. Throw in a $150-$200 (9800GT, HD3850) card and you have a very competent gaming PC.
Now if you want to run games like Crysis at max settings with 60+ FPS, then yes, you will need to splurge on your cards. And there are a few MMOs with good graphics that will use and abuse a $500 card. I played Age of Conan, and it would make my GTX280 cry like a bitch from time to time.
The PC-MMO connection is mostly because MMO's are evolving games that need to have a client that is adaptable to them. The latest consoles help this a long a lot more than the prior generation, expecially with the 360's capability to install games to disk.
The mouse+keyboard control is very helpful, although not necessary. FFXI does a pretty good job on the PS2 with a gamepad. It also requires the PS2 hard drive. So it has been doable for a while, it just makes it a hell of a lot harder on the devolopers.
The tinfoil will protect your backdoor, don't worry.
It's a bit like a Katana forged by a master craftsman.
Or a doomsday device created by a mad scientist.
If that were true, then explain the Deerhunter franchise.
Sadly, I rest my case.
We pay $8-$10/mo each for our ~150 IP addresses, and we're a relatively small company.
I really don't think $1/year will make that much difference.
That should be an optional setting though, because many people like to use password managers, and plugins should be able to catch and manage passwords if we allow them to.
Maybe a warning dialog "XXX extension is trying to record or monitor your password? Allow or Deny?" (yes, I worded that like UAC on purpose for comedic effect)
That's true in some places. It depends on where you live.
I'm from a fairly small town (~10k) not very near any city, and the only thing smaller than the number of people who own Macs are the number of people who have even heard of Linux. And on the flip side, people who know squat about computers are much harder to come by.
But it's not isolated to rural areas. Many cities are more often bases for corporate HQs and whatnot that are predominantly MS shops (I've been hunting around Columbus, OH, and they have a lot of Insurance HQs and whatnot). You have to go to the big cities (Chicago, NYC, LA) and ones known for their advertising/graphics industries to find enough Mac shops to go around.
If you are willing to relocate, yes, I would agree, you can definately find some good opportunities. But I still think the safest bet is the Windows XP cert (followed by Win2k3 or 2k8 to get your MCSA). And nothing is stopping you from getting both eventually.
Fox News is popular because it's watched by people who don't watch TV?
If that's your example of 'actual facts and truth', I would think being rewired to think so illogically would be quite painful indeed.
Seriously though, if idiots like you would quit all the insults and political stereotyping, this country would be a lot better for it.