XI actually had a lot of individual character development. Each expansion means you have to save the world from some different calamity. You get a pretty NPC girl as a companion for each story. (Really, the expansions are her story and you're just along for the ride, but she's part party member, part cheerleader, part heroine. So far we've had Lion, Prishe, Aphmau, and Lilsette, plus the new Danerys clone whose name I can't remember.) The Rank leveling quests (basically your military rank) put you in the middle of political battles for each of the three nations, and they are completely separate from your actual level. Same with all the expansion stories and the expansion ranks.
And since you could level all 22 jobs on a single character, you'd only have to do all that crap once.
I always get creeped out by the true role players in an MMO, especially when they stand around and talk in character. It feels more like actual human beings LARPing than it does people enacting a role. *shudder*
FFXI was an EQ clone, not a WoW clone, and it's still going strong. Not really "current" though. Even XIV:ARR is getting billed by some pessimists as "Final Fantasy of Warcraft" although I think it's closer to XI in spirit than it is WoW.
Sounds also like Square Enix's botched release of Final Fantasy XIV. Unlike AC2 though, 14 was so bad that it didn't lure many players away from XI. Once SE went into damage control mode and decided to rebuild XIV from scratch, they threw the XI players a bone and give them a new playground in the meantime. So while XIV languished, XI went through a bit of a renaissance.
I've been in the beta for the new version of XIV (ARR), and they've fixed all the crap that made the game so horrible the first go round. Also gave it a modern graphics engine. It's a considerably better game this time and actually worth playing. Maybe Blizzard saw what SE did with XIV and realized they'd better do the same with Titan before they released it to the market.
I think we've found that Agile is like democracy. It's a terrible system for programming (or government) but it's better than anything else we've come up with yet.
This is actually how our project management class suggested we do it as well last year. Waterfall is needed on large scale projects to ensure a cohesiveness of vision and to make sure individual components and modules are all headed in the same direction. (Also to make sure everyone is on the same page for code, libraries, APIs, etc, so the stuff actually works together.) Individual teams can do Agile on a smaller scale (or even scrum if they're masochistic.) That ensures that the team is accountable to each other. Then the team leader is accountable to the project management group, who can provided feedback and adjustments to steer folks back to the grand waterfall vision when necessary.
There are a handful of sites, such as web comic sites, where the people who made the website I'm viewing for free have politely asked me to unblock in AdBlocker, since it's a direct impact on their ad revenue. If they asked nicely (which all the web comic people did) I have done so. I even click through a few of the ads since I know they get more money that way and it takes me two seconds of effort. In exchange, they keep their ads scrubbed free of malware and bad advertisers. And give me funny web comics every day!
I don't hate Office 2013 as much as some folks do. (I also got it for free from my school. Lucky me.) So I've got both 2013 for the people that insist I work in the Microsoft formats, and LibreOffice for everything else.
They went through and optimized the code, for one thing. I seem to recall they culled about 50% of deprecated code that was just hanging around like junk DNA, doing nothing but bloating up the program. After they cleaned up the code, they tightened up the rest of it. The result was a leaner piece of software in all modules, so it loads faster and runs faster.
You don't need to be a mechanic, but you do need to know that when your car hits 60.000 miles you probably ought to get the timing belt changed. Or if the temperature gauge starts climbing, suck it up and pull over because it's probably not going to magically go back down again on its own. Or that you should get your tires checked (or do it yourself) once a month, especially in winter months, because they gradually lose PSI over time.
I'd be grateful if any time a marketing person found a bug in the code, they knew to snag a screenshot rather than give me a call and say, "My monitor broke again. Help!"
Graphics, especially, are just beginning to look old. Not that WoW was ever a paragon of robust graphic design (although mad props to their art directors), but for what is approaching a decade players were able to overlook the graphics because so many other aspects of the game were fun and appealing. Now, with over a dozen major MMOs due out this year, with every single one of them having better graphics than WoW by leaps and bound, people feel no obligation to stick around. (Also, many of my WoW-quitting friends found that Mists of Pandoria was the game jumping the shark, even if it was a fairly solid expansion.)
As I'm fond of saying, WoW is the King of MMOs in the same way that Budweiser is the King of Beers. It's popular and profitable. Personally, I prefer craft brews and niche MMORPGs.
While I agree about RT (stupid decision), the lack of adoption with Windows 8 has more to do with the lack of adoption by business app vendors. In fact, they're panicking about Win 8, because the morons never even got their crap running right on Windows 7. We have three XP systems with $3,000 software dongles on them that are still running XP because the vendor never made a Win 7 client.
Actually, I love Office 2013. I was using 2010 at work, and while I was off put by the design choices in 2013 (all caps? seriously?) the thing has worked flawlessly for me in Excel, Word, and Powerpoint.
One of the requirements of teaching classes in accredited education programs is that there's almost an apprenticeship aspect to it. Starting in sophomore level classes, prospective education majors are sent into the field for observations. This is followed up by mentoring and assisting a teacher directly, and then finally by a full semester of student teaching as a partner to the teacher in their senior year.
I just don't see how Coursera can replace that experience, which is what actually makes or breaks many education majors.
I think they also realized this, which is why they're starting out with continuing education and staff development. (Students don't need student teaching if they're already managing a classroom on their own.)
Hey, that was my 8th grade science experiment. Colored light filters affecting the growth of plants. Unfortunately I didn't have enough time to grow my baby plants so there wasn't any noticeable difference by the time I had to present.
A friend of mine worked for EA for about a year in Japan as a programmer. He quit because they treat their employees just as poorly as they treat their customers. He now works for a smaller company for a lesser salary, but still makes plenty enough and actually gets to go home for dinner with his wife during the week.
Don't leave businesses out of the equation here. Businesses chew through more desktops than consumers these days. None of our client's apps are certified for Windows 8, so we're buying hardware and imaging Windows 7 on it with our volume license key (something we hadn't had to do for a few years.) The big ERP application vendors are both Microsoft's salvation and downfall - because they only run on Windows 7, no one will switch to Mac or Linux. Because they only run on Windows 7, we're still deploying systems exclusively with Windows 7. (In-house, we're transitioning to 8 because we're gonna have to support it someday... better get used to it. Our SaaS stuff runs with no problems.)
However, once the sluggish ERP industry gives the green light to their major client server apps on Windows 8, the adoption rate of the OS will pick up significantly. I give it another year.
No, that's why I'm a 10x writer. For the last project I worked on I created three different manuals - a twenty page admin guide, a six page limited user guide, and a one page quick links cheat sheet. If someone has to call tech support from the admin side of that website, then they didn't RTFM.
The folks who want the latest stuff just build it
on
Why PC Sales Are Declining
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· Score: 3, Interesting
It used to be that the average user would replace their desktops every few years for something newer. The aforementioned "longer lasting system" trend - my husband's laptop is well over five years old and shows little signs of age - combines with the fact that PC enthusiasts build their systems, lovingly hand picking components or starting with a kit and slapping whatever OS they have lying around on it. (I have at least two OEM Windows 7 licenses kicking around from various systems.
There are still people who will pay oodles of money for a pre-built machine, but most of those folks have migrated over to the Mac platform by now.
I think the market is really there for the very small organizations (we're moving lots of folks to Google apps - if they have 4 people in the office it's not hard) and for the very largest organizations that have the clout to enforce change from the top down and do their own software in house, but I don't foresee the midsize businesses changing over from Office any time soon. It's integrated into certain ERP applications - for example, the medical software SRS relies on Excel and has a toolbar built right in. Getting software vendors to change their ways is going to be required before those mid size businesses can even consider breaking off the Microsoft teat.
A lot of his "47%" - the ones who actually voted for him, included the very people he called out for wanting things from the government. A single white mother in Alabama is more likely to be on welfare and more likely to vote Republican. An elderly gentleman on Medicare in California is more likely to be on SSI and to vote Republican. Not all Republicans are moochers (or at least they're not bottom feeding moochers - many very rich people are sucking just as heavily off the government teat as their poorer brethren), but neither are all Democrats. He failed to recognize that 53% of the country doesn't want things to be free - they want things to be fair. Right now, the game is rigged and over half of us knew it last November.
As for TFA, it's true that all politics is local. Everyone will vote for the lesser of two evils when two evils are the only choice, even if the lesser is not necessarily part of their own party. Given the choice between a moderate Republican and a Tea Partier, without any other left leaning options, I'll go for the moderate.
Slashdot Mirror
XI actually had a lot of individual character development. Each expansion means you have to save the world from some different calamity. You get a pretty NPC girl as a companion for each story. (Really, the expansions are her story and you're just along for the ride, but she's part party member, part cheerleader, part heroine. So far we've had Lion, Prishe, Aphmau, and Lilsette, plus the new Danerys clone whose name I can't remember.) The Rank leveling quests (basically your military rank) put you in the middle of political battles for each of the three nations, and they are completely separate from your actual level. Same with all the expansion stories and the expansion ranks.
And since you could level all 22 jobs on a single character, you'd only have to do all that crap once.
I always get creeped out by the true role players in an MMO, especially when they stand around and talk in character. It feels more like actual human beings LARPing than it does people enacting a role. *shudder*
FFXI was an EQ clone, not a WoW clone, and it's still going strong. Not really "current" though. Even XIV:ARR is getting billed by some pessimists as "Final Fantasy of Warcraft" although I think it's closer to XI in spirit than it is WoW.
Sounds also like Square Enix's botched release of Final Fantasy XIV. Unlike AC2 though, 14 was so bad that it didn't lure many players away from XI. Once SE went into damage control mode and decided to rebuild XIV from scratch, they threw the XI players a bone and give them a new playground in the meantime. So while XIV languished, XI went through a bit of a renaissance.
I've been in the beta for the new version of XIV (ARR), and they've fixed all the crap that made the game so horrible the first go round. Also gave it a modern graphics engine. It's a considerably better game this time and actually worth playing. Maybe Blizzard saw what SE did with XIV and realized they'd better do the same with Titan before they released it to the market.
I think we've found that Agile is like democracy. It's a terrible system for programming (or government) but it's better than anything else we've come up with yet.
This is actually how our project management class suggested we do it as well last year. Waterfall is needed on large scale projects to ensure a cohesiveness of vision and to make sure individual components and modules are all headed in the same direction. (Also to make sure everyone is on the same page for code, libraries, APIs, etc, so the stuff actually works together.) Individual teams can do Agile on a smaller scale (or even scrum if they're masochistic.) That ensures that the team is accountable to each other. Then the team leader is accountable to the project management group, who can provided feedback and adjustments to steer folks back to the grand waterfall vision when necessary.
There are a handful of sites, such as web comic sites, where the people who made the website I'm viewing for free have politely asked me to unblock in AdBlocker, since it's a direct impact on their ad revenue. If they asked nicely (which all the web comic people did) I have done so. I even click through a few of the ads since I know they get more money that way and it takes me two seconds of effort. In exchange, they keep their ads scrubbed free of malware and bad advertisers. And give me funny web comics every day!
I don't hate Office 2013 as much as some folks do. (I also got it for free from my school. Lucky me.) So I've got both 2013 for the people that insist I work in the Microsoft formats, and LibreOffice for everything else.
They went through and optimized the code, for one thing. I seem to recall they culled about 50% of deprecated code that was just hanging around like junk DNA, doing nothing but bloating up the program. After they cleaned up the code, they tightened up the rest of it. The result was a leaner piece of software in all modules, so it loads faster and runs faster.
You don't need to be a mechanic, but you do need to know that when your car hits 60.000 miles you probably ought to get the timing belt changed. Or if the temperature gauge starts climbing, suck it up and pull over because it's probably not going to magically go back down again on its own. Or that you should get your tires checked (or do it yourself) once a month, especially in winter months, because they gradually lose PSI over time.
I'd be grateful if any time a marketing person found a bug in the code, they knew to snag a screenshot rather than give me a call and say, "My monitor broke again. Help!"
Graphics, especially, are just beginning to look old. Not that WoW was ever a paragon of robust graphic design (although mad props to their art directors), but for what is approaching a decade players were able to overlook the graphics because so many other aspects of the game were fun and appealing. Now, with over a dozen major MMOs due out this year, with every single one of them having better graphics than WoW by leaps and bound, people feel no obligation to stick around. (Also, many of my WoW-quitting friends found that Mists of Pandoria was the game jumping the shark, even if it was a fairly solid expansion.)
As I'm fond of saying, WoW is the King of MMOs in the same way that Budweiser is the King of Beers. It's popular and profitable. Personally, I prefer craft brews and niche MMORPGs.
While I agree about RT (stupid decision), the lack of adoption with Windows 8 has more to do with the lack of adoption by business app vendors. In fact, they're panicking about Win 8, because the morons never even got their crap running right on Windows 7. We have three XP systems with $3,000 software dongles on them that are still running XP because the vendor never made a Win 7 client.
Actually, I love Office 2013. I was using 2010 at work, and while I was off put by the design choices in 2013 (all caps? seriously?) the thing has worked flawlessly for me in Excel, Word, and Powerpoint.
One of the requirements of teaching classes in accredited education programs is that there's almost an apprenticeship aspect to it. Starting in sophomore level classes, prospective education majors are sent into the field for observations. This is followed up by mentoring and assisting a teacher directly, and then finally by a full semester of student teaching as a partner to the teacher in their senior year.
I just don't see how Coursera can replace that experience, which is what actually makes or breaks many education majors.
I think they also realized this, which is why they're starting out with continuing education and staff development. (Students don't need student teaching if they're already managing a classroom on their own.)
Hey, that was my 8th grade science experiment. Colored light filters affecting the growth of plants. Unfortunately I didn't have enough time to grow my baby plants so there wasn't any noticeable difference by the time I had to present.
I want to see what the actual patent rejection contained that would make a lawyer assume someone was drunk and hit "mail merge" with another letter.
A friend of mine worked for EA for about a year in Japan as a programmer. He quit because they treat their employees just as poorly as they treat their customers. He now works for a smaller company for a lesser salary, but still makes plenty enough and actually gets to go home for dinner with his wife during the week.
I once met a guy who said that when his company ditched his AS/400, he'd take it as a sign to retire. Smart man.
This took down one of our clients who pay for Google apps. So it's not just the freebie users who got affected on this, hence Google's rapid response.
Don't leave businesses out of the equation here. Businesses chew through more desktops than consumers these days. None of our client's apps are certified for Windows 8, so we're buying hardware and imaging Windows 7 on it with our volume license key (something we hadn't had to do for a few years.) The big ERP application vendors are both Microsoft's salvation and downfall - because they only run on Windows 7, no one will switch to Mac or Linux. Because they only run on Windows 7, we're still deploying systems exclusively with Windows 7. (In-house, we're transitioning to 8 because we're gonna have to support it someday... better get used to it. Our SaaS stuff runs with no problems.)
However, once the sluggish ERP industry gives the green light to their major client server apps on Windows 8, the adoption rate of the OS will pick up significantly. I give it another year.
No, that's why I'm a 10x writer. For the last project I worked on I created three different manuals - a twenty page admin guide, a six page limited user guide, and a one page quick links cheat sheet. If someone has to call tech support from the admin side of that website, then they didn't RTFM.
It used to be that the average user would replace their desktops every few years for something newer. The aforementioned "longer lasting system" trend - my husband's laptop is well over five years old and shows little signs of age - combines with the fact that PC enthusiasts build their systems, lovingly hand picking components or starting with a kit and slapping whatever OS they have lying around on it. (I have at least two OEM Windows 7 licenses kicking around from various systems.
There are still people who will pay oodles of money for a pre-built machine, but most of those folks have migrated over to the Mac platform by now.
Nope, my in-laws are Tea Partiers. I call em ducks when I see ducks.
I think the market is really there for the very small organizations (we're moving lots of folks to Google apps - if they have 4 people in the office it's not hard) and for the very largest organizations that have the clout to enforce change from the top down and do their own software in house, but I don't foresee the midsize businesses changing over from Office any time soon. It's integrated into certain ERP applications - for example, the medical software SRS relies on Excel and has a toolbar built right in. Getting software vendors to change their ways is going to be required before those mid size businesses can even consider breaking off the Microsoft teat.
A lot of his "47%" - the ones who actually voted for him, included the very people he called out for wanting things from the government. A single white mother in Alabama is more likely to be on welfare and more likely to vote Republican. An elderly gentleman on Medicare in California is more likely to be on SSI and to vote Republican. Not all Republicans are moochers (or at least they're not bottom feeding moochers - many very rich people are sucking just as heavily off the government teat as their poorer brethren), but neither are all Democrats. He failed to recognize that 53% of the country doesn't want things to be free - they want things to be fair. Right now, the game is rigged and over half of us knew it last November.
As for TFA, it's true that all politics is local. Everyone will vote for the lesser of two evils when two evils are the only choice, even if the lesser is not necessarily part of their own party. Given the choice between a moderate Republican and a Tea Partier, without any other left leaning options, I'll go for the moderate.