When someone asks for my name or address, I usually decline, when I have a form/receipt/etc that has my name on it I rip it up into small pieces. Garbage cans are public property (police can obtain your DNA from cigarette butts, soda cans, etc that you throw away; yes I watch a lot of court TV)
I look at credit card receipts that the merchant has and if my CC number is listed I blackout parts of it (there is no need for them to have num CC number, they have transaction #).
If I get a call from telemarketer, I say no thanks and just hang up before they say anything else. If someone calls and starts a sales pitch I ask whom are they looking for, if they do not know exact name I just hang up.
All important papers get shredded and thrown out in the same bag as catbox litter.
There are people who prey on others out there, who will sift through your garbage and try to get info about you. Identity theft is very real.
RealPlayer is another "never install" software. It's the closest thing to a purchasable virus, it infects your system pretty badly but wedging itself everywhere you don't want it to be and takes some serious effort to recapture it. It should be in a category of its own called "AnnoyingWare".
That is exactly what has kept my main machine from being linux. I play games, and wish Warcraft 3, Everquest and Neverwinter Nights were available for Linux, then there would be no reason for me to use windows.
Use Mozilla Firebird as browser. Pine for email. OpenOffice for "productivity". mySQL ad database. UltraEdit / Eclipse / WebSphere for development. g++ to compile with make. Sun's J2EE / J2SE to compile with ant.
Where in that setup am I required to deal with VB script?
If you don't use microsoft products, you don't have to deal with VB script.
I for one am very happy they released version 1.1. I am a happy user of version 1.0 on Windows ME. I had a choice of installing OpenOffice and buying MS Office.
I thought about what I wanted to do, and came up with a small list: 1. Read.doc files that people use at work (don't really care about formatting or power features, just want to read the content) 2. Read Excel files and generate simple spreadsheets
That is all.
For email I use emacs, for a database I use mySQL.
Microsoft Office offered nothing for me.
I do NOT want VB script (as most MS bugs are rooted in that god awful script). I do NOT want Outlook, while it may be nice at work to schedule meetings and manage internal email, it is not suited as an email reader in the age of viruses and worms. Pine is just fine. (no rhyme intended). I do NOT want power point (as it is equivalent to brain rot and no one pays attention to those presentations anyways, easier to just give handouts and a URL). I sure as hell do NOT want Access database as it is inferior in every way to mySQL.
So after much thought, I decided that MS office is not worth the money and installed OpenOffice and to this day I am happy with my decision.
"proprietary encryption scheme for data stored on its hard drive"
$5 says it will be broken a day after it ships. WHen I hear proprietary and encryption I think "security by obscurity" and we all know how well that works.
STOP BUYING MUSIC CDs STOP BUYING MUSIC CDs STOP BUYING MUSIC CDs STOP BUYING MUSIC CDs STOP BUYING MUSIC CDs STOP BUYING MUSIC CDs STOP BUYING MUSIC CDs STOP BUYING MUSIC CDs STOP BUYING MUSIC CDs
Just in case it may not have been clear. The money used by music labels is funneled into RIAA which in turn is used to sue the people. It's not hard to boycott the music industry, just don't buy any more music, once the profits drop, the music industry will realize that people are serious about this. Right now they don't really care about people, they care about themselves and profit.
We all should stop supporting mmthe music industry, stop supporting the one-hit wonders, stop supporting sell outs, just stop supporting them.
You want music go to a live concert, but stop feeding the monster that is trying to feed on us.
The progression was obvious and what we have now is a dilution of a brand. When the first one came out the pixels were large and graphics were grainy, people used their imagination and made lara into a sex object. At that time the controls and camera were not the best but given the state of technology it was not unexpected.
Many years passed and every subsequent release was barely an improvement of the previous, camera work was still poor, graphics were not leading edge (or even close), gameplay too tedious and frustrating.
Lara became a marketing engine more than a game, that is the dicotomy. Eidos concentrated on selling Lara rather than making her a game heroine (unlike games like Gabriel Knight where the game improves with every release due to the software company's dedication).
Licensing to consoles also dampened the character as the implementations were less than stellar.
Lara Croft when introduced was a fun, spelunking game that was enjoyable by people of all ages, as time went on it was molded into a game that only males 15-29 could enjoy and the gameplay mechanics became too annoying to enjoy the real goal of the game, adventure.
The latest installment is the proverbial nail in the coffin. The story is weak at best, the controls are atrocious, the came is downright poor and overall the game becomes an excersize in frustration after about 10 minutes of playing it (once you enter the first room and to find things you have to manually rotate the camera and click 30 times to finally get things to open.
It's just sad to see greed overwhelm creativity (but is anyone surprised?)
When you see an add that has a glossy shot scanned from a porno mag about someone who can't wait to have sex with you, it is a fake and you should stay away.
There is a balance of how much spam you get and how much you have to pay. I tried using yahoo personals, excite personals, and few other free sites and it was all porn scam profiles. Moving up to pay services like matchmaker.com and match.com, I managed to see a lot of real ads (match had poor search capabilies and kept setting me up with people half way accross the US), matchmaker worked great, there are other good dating services that are specific to the locale (on the east coast match.com is better than matchmaker, on west coast it is the other way, ymmv).
Now the point of this story is that if it costs money to use a service, most spammers and scammers will stay away, as the costs to create many anon fake accounts becomes way to high to justify the results. So when a service like that charges for its use, then it will attract legitimate people serious about what the service is willing to provide, if the service is free there will be thousands of people there looking for a way to make a quick buck, harvest emails, start scams or promote products you do not need.
>>At least with commercial software you can get your money back.
Which retailer actually gives you money back or even accept an exchange on any software that has been opened.
Almost none.
Tech support for most software is awful, at least people in forums/email for lots of open/free software understand the product if not the authors themselves. With coprorations you get hourly wage employees that don't "want" to help you.
SWG seems like the designers took the worst features of both Anarchy Online and Dark Ages Of Camelot and put them together with a nice tradeskill system. The quests are boring and dungeons have no presonality (just like AO). The PvP and combat system is unexciting (just like DAoC). You would think that a company that gave us a refined (albeit aging) game like Everquest would produce something with character, but alas they like the last 2 Star Wars films have failed.
Personally I have never felt that Star Wars license had much to offer, it was part of a compelling saga and 3 great films (the first 3). But there was a serious lack of depth to the official star wars line (most of the depth was in fan fiction). With very little depth and paltry content, I am not surprised that people got so bored.
If SOE took star trek they may have had the same problem, had they taken star trek and all the fiction that was published they would have had enough lore to keep even the hard core fans busy.
What made EQ and its "lore" interesting was that there was a very open ended story and there was a serious attempt at developing an environment based on the story. Crushbone orcs with they alliance with dark elves and war with wood/high elves was seen not only in crushbone but in several cities. The conflict between dragons and iksar in the Kunark release provided enough to build up several dungeons (city of mist, old sebilis, karnor's castle, veeshan's peak) they all had a story line that was consistent. And on and on.
This is where a lot of MMORPGs fail, they do not create a tying storyline and very little consistency. Star Wars could have been a lot more if they dared to take the lore that existed and built upon it a lot not just a little. But that may have violated the contacts of the license, got hardcore fanatics angry or may have required a lot of work that may not be directly tied to ROI.
Alas, as long as financial/marketing people keep making decisions, the consumers will be at a loss.
IBM tends to overengineer everything into obsolescence, they add so much obscurity and features that it becomes less usable with every "feature". OS2? VisualAge?
There is a big difference between outsourced and open-sourced. People who work on open source in general are very good at what they do and do it because they love what they do. Outsourced is a bunch of people doing it to get paid...it is just a job for them and when the day is over they could care less about the bugs and issues.
Don't confuse the two, we open source people devote lots of our free time to develop code and we do it because it is what we are good at and what we love and never get paid for it.
This review ruined the book, it is like reading the last page of a book, now I won't even bother getting the book if I know what happens. This has got to be the worst review I have ever read.
Review is about the type of book, some hints about the plot, but never the equivalent of Cliff Notes.
It's fine and well to outsource and cut 450,000 jobs, but at the same time they are doing irreprable damage to the economy. These same 450,000 people will not be around to buy products and software which will in turn cut the contracts that IBM may be getting for it's products. And the vicious cycle continues.
Economy is a complex web, by sending more money overseas, IBM is seriously damaging the domestic economy and should be taxed accordingly. This tax will be used to pay the unemployement, job placement fees, etc for the multitude of workers out of work.
India, China and many other countries bordering on poverty in many regions will find workers that will literaly code for food. This will be seen as immediate profit for IBM (or other outsourcing company). What they never account for (I have come to the conclusion that most CFOs cannot see further than the next quarter) is that in the long run this will cost them way more than the money they saved.
I have worked at three different companies that outsourced some code to India and China. All three were utter failures.
In one case, their representatives here were making claims that they have PhD level people on their staff and can produce almost bug free code (salepeople are universal liars). In this particular case the company "had" a PhD that consulted with them, but most of the staff were people fresh out of college with a BS in CS or even worse people who took some CS courses and were sitting around collecting wages for the company and for themselves.
Well one fine week a co-worker was visiting India (his parents live there) and decided to drop by to check on their progress. He could not explain the chaos that caused. Their state of the art facility looked more like a low tech sweatshop, the owner quickly did a song and dance and took him elsewhere.
When it came time to deliver the alpha for review, they claimed they would need few more months and blamed our requirements (requirements were drafted and never changed thru the life of the project). It was a very simple data mapping of SGML to HTML (we did not have much faith in them and had 2 guys working in parallel just in case). Well months later we still got more hand waving and more complains and request for more time. At this point out internal version finished beta testing and was ready for official testing.
Well, when the executive who decided to go overseas found out about this "mutiny" he immediately ordered our project scrapped, asked for people to be reassigned and wanted to see heads roll. If the CEO did not find out about this debacle most people would have been fired and with correct spin the overseas project would have been made cost-effective.
After all was said and done, the Indian company was given an ultimatum of 1 month to deliver a beta product or else. A month came and went and they could not produce anything. We used the internally developed product while execs fiddled with numbers to justify the overseas loss.
I am sure there were many successful projects that were produced by Indian companies (I have yet to encounter one). I think some of the best developers India had to offer came to the US and despite the tough times, companies are not giving up their good people.
I wonder how long it took these guys to obfuscate the obvious that any software developer learned in CS101?! All they are saying that after a certain time the software development process (i.e. CVS checkin data) reaches an equilibrium only perturbed by small changes.
Well if that wasn't the most complicated summary of the software development process, I don't know what is.
Yes there are a lot of changes initially, since the product is being written, then as it reaches alpha the features taper off (thus the heavy CVS activity) and the new CVS activity is mostly high priority enhancements, as we reach the beta stage, the CVS activity is mostly bug fixes. Post release CVS activity is again intermittent CVS checkins of bug fixes, and such.
Now if these guys really wanted to prove their theory valid, they should have analyzed CVS branches individually and would have seen that their theory does not hold up. A branch in CVS is proportional to a change it will caryy and the CVS activity in a branch scaled to that will show that there is no slowdown but rather the same chaos as in the start of the project except localized to a branch.
I do wish these academics would try and write about something that will move us forward, rather than taking ideas that are well known and obfuscating them to a point that they set up back in the time it takes to understand what they are trying to say. Or maybe they just had a bad run with Babelfish:)
Don't forget that many of the girls that went after the cool guys are now wondering at what point was the "cool" replaced with beer swilling, remote hogging, sloth that left a permanent imprint in the couch.
Casual PVPer is like saying a casual serial killer. The only benefit to the MMORPG is that they can be used as a self policing aspect when reputation system is inadequate.
PvP is the scourge that prevented UO from growing and why EQ has over 300,000 subscribers. PvP is a small subset of players that somehow feel that they need to be supported while they drive away many of casual gamers. And there are 50x more casual gamers than hardcore gamers, from the financial point of view, the companies would rather cater to the casual gamers rather than the hardcore ones. Casual gamers still pay the same amount per account and play far less reducing the load on the servers and in the long run reducing bandwidth costs of a hardcore player. Hardcore players are actually financially the worst type of a customer they use up way more resources than their monthly payment "allows".
Most PvPer tend to be griefers, PKers and generally annoying people. Having played UO, I was unable to do anything in the game without someone attempting to kill me, the game became 1 domensional, leave town and run hoping you don't get killed. The only option was to become a PKer and prey on the clueless newbies and ruin their experience, and I chose not to do that.
If people want to PK then they should be playing Quake/Halflife/etc. where the environment is set up for them to kill each other and leave the rest of us MMORPG players to explore the world, group up, research, tradeskill and try to have a good time.
You probably can easily restore if you could figure out where the next savepoint is and buy the soul-restore card from the "Creator's Shop Of Upgrades". While there get the book that tells you all the secret codes for real life and where are all the powerups are hidden!
Slashdot Mirror
I am a paranoid person.
When someone asks for my name or address, I usually decline, when I have a form/receipt/etc that has my name on it I rip it up into small pieces. Garbage cans are public property (police can obtain your DNA from cigarette butts, soda cans, etc that you throw away; yes I watch a lot of court TV)
I look at credit card receipts that the merchant has and if my CC number is listed I blackout parts of it (there is no need for them to have num CC number, they have transaction #).
If I get a call from telemarketer, I say no thanks and just hang up before they say anything else. If someone calls and starts a sales pitch I ask whom are they looking for, if they do not know exact name I just hang up.
All important papers get shredded and thrown out in the same bag as catbox litter.
There are people who prey on others out there, who will sift through your garbage and try to get info about you. Identity theft is very real.
If it wasn't a reference to IBM, they should have called it Deep Pink and been done with it.
RealPlayer is another "never install" software. It's the closest thing to a purchasable virus, it infects your system pretty badly but wedging itself everywhere you don't want it to be and takes some serious effort to recapture it. It should be in a category of its own called "AnnoyingWare".
That is exactly what has kept my main machine from being linux. I play games, and wish Warcraft 3, Everquest and Neverwinter Nights were available for Linux, then there would be no reason for me to use windows.
Use Mozilla Firebird as browser.
Pine for email.
OpenOffice for "productivity".
mySQL ad database.
UltraEdit / Eclipse / WebSphere for development.
g++ to compile with make.
Sun's J2EE / J2SE to compile with ant.
Where in that setup am I required to deal with VB script?
If you don't use microsoft products, you don't have to deal with VB script.
I for one am very happy they released version 1.1. I am a happy user of version 1.0 on Windows ME. I had a choice of installing OpenOffice and buying MS Office.
.doc files that people use at work (don't really care about formatting or power features, just want to read the content)
I thought about what I wanted to do, and came up with a small list:
1. Read
2. Read Excel files and generate simple spreadsheets
That is all.
For email I use emacs, for a database I use mySQL.
Microsoft Office offered nothing for me.
I do NOT want VB script (as most MS bugs are rooted in that god awful script).
I do NOT want Outlook, while it may be nice at work to schedule meetings and manage internal email, it is not suited as an email reader in the age of viruses and worms. Pine is just fine. (no rhyme intended).
I do NOT want power point (as it is equivalent to brain rot and no one pays attention to those presentations anyways, easier to just give handouts and a URL).
I sure as hell do NOT want Access database as it is inferior in every way to mySQL.
So after much thought, I decided that MS office is not worth the money and installed OpenOffice and to this day I am happy with my decision.
You must be quite skilled to drive BOTH of them...
"proprietary encryption scheme for data stored on its hard drive"
$5 says it will be broken a day after it ships. WHen I hear proprietary and encryption I think "security by obscurity" and we all know how well that works.
Who are the member companies of RIAA and how do I stop supporting them?
STOP BUYING MUSIC CDs
STOP BUYING MUSIC CDs
STOP BUYING MUSIC CDs
STOP BUYING MUSIC CDs
STOP BUYING MUSIC CDs
STOP BUYING MUSIC CDs
STOP BUYING MUSIC CDs
STOP BUYING MUSIC CDs
STOP BUYING MUSIC CDs
Just in case it may not have been clear. The money used by music labels is funneled into RIAA which in turn is used to sue the people. It's not hard to boycott the music industry, just don't buy any more music, once the profits drop, the music industry will realize that people are serious about this. Right now they don't really care about people, they care about themselves and profit.
We all should stop supporting mmthe music industry, stop supporting the one-hit wonders, stop supporting sell outs, just stop supporting them.
You want music go to a live concert, but stop feeding the monster that is trying to feed on us.
The progression was obvious and what we have now is a dilution of a brand. When the first one came out the pixels were large and graphics were grainy, people used their imagination and made lara into a sex object. At that time the controls and camera were not the best but given the state of technology it was not unexpected.
Many years passed and every subsequent release was barely an improvement of the previous, camera work was still poor, graphics were not leading edge (or even close), gameplay too tedious and frustrating.
Lara became a marketing engine more than a game, that is the dicotomy. Eidos concentrated on selling Lara rather than making her a game heroine (unlike games like Gabriel Knight where the game improves with every release due to the software company's dedication).
Licensing to consoles also dampened the character as the implementations were less than stellar.
Lara Croft when introduced was a fun, spelunking game that was enjoyable by people of all ages, as time went on it was molded into a game that only males 15-29 could enjoy and the gameplay mechanics became too annoying to enjoy the real goal of the game, adventure.
The latest installment is the proverbial nail in the coffin. The story is weak at best, the controls are atrocious, the came is downright poor and overall the game becomes an excersize in frustration after about 10 minutes of playing it (once you enter the first room and to find things you have to manually rotate the camera and click 30 times to finally get things to open.
It's just sad to see greed overwhelm creativity (but is anyone surprised?)
When you see an add that has a glossy shot scanned from a porno mag about someone who can't wait to have sex with you, it is a fake and you should stay away.
There is a balance of how much spam you get and how much you have to pay. I tried using yahoo personals, excite personals, and few other free sites and it was all porn scam profiles. Moving up to pay services like matchmaker.com and match.com, I managed to see a lot of real ads (match had poor search capabilies and kept setting me up with people half way accross the US), matchmaker worked great, there are other good dating services that are specific to the locale (on the east coast match.com is better than matchmaker, on west coast it is the other way, ymmv).
Now the point of this story is that if it costs money to use a service, most spammers and scammers will stay away, as the costs to create many anon fake accounts becomes way to high to justify the results. So when a service like that charges for its use, then it will attract legitimate people serious about what the service is willing to provide, if the service is free there will be thousands of people there looking for a way to make a quick buck, harvest emails, start scams or promote products you do not need.
>>At least with commercial software you can get your money back.
Which retailer actually gives you money back or even accept an exchange on any software that has been opened.
Almost none.
Tech support for most software is awful, at least people in forums/email for lots of open/free software understand the product if not the authors themselves. With coprorations you get hourly wage employees that don't "want" to help you.
Obviously you are not a golfer....
Sony and eBay have contract to auto-delete any Everquest related auctions. PlayerAuctions is where most of EQ players went.
SWG seems like the designers took the worst features of both Anarchy Online and Dark Ages Of Camelot and put them together with a nice tradeskill system. The quests are boring and dungeons have no presonality (just like AO). The PvP and combat system is unexciting (just like DAoC). You would think that a company that gave us a refined (albeit aging) game like Everquest would produce something with character, but alas they like the last 2 Star Wars films have failed.
Personally I have never felt that Star Wars license had much to offer, it was part of a compelling saga and 3 great films (the first 3). But there was a serious lack of depth to the official star wars line (most of the depth was in fan fiction). With very little depth and paltry content, I am not surprised that people got so bored.
If SOE took star trek they may have had the same problem, had they taken star trek and all the fiction that was published they would have had enough lore to keep even the hard core fans busy.
What made EQ and its "lore" interesting was that there was a very open ended story and there was a serious attempt at developing an environment based on the story. Crushbone orcs with they alliance with dark elves and war with wood/high elves was seen not only in crushbone but in several cities. The conflict between dragons and iksar in the Kunark release provided enough to build up several dungeons (city of mist, old sebilis, karnor's castle, veeshan's peak) they all had a story line that was consistent. And on and on.
This is where a lot of MMORPGs fail, they do not create a tying storyline and very little consistency. Star Wars could have been a lot more if they dared to take the lore that existed and built upon it a lot not just a little. But that may have violated the contacts of the license, got hardcore fanatics angry or may have required a lot of work that may not be directly tied to ROI.
Alas, as long as financial/marketing people keep making decisions, the consumers will be at a loss.
IBM tends to overengineer everything into obsolescence, they add so much obscurity and features that it becomes less usable with every "feature". OS2? VisualAge?
There is a big difference between outsourced and open-sourced. People who work on open source in general are very good at what they do and do it because they love what they do. Outsourced is a bunch of people doing it to get paid...it is just a job for them and when the day is over they could care less about the bugs and issues.
Don't confuse the two, we open source people devote lots of our free time to develop code and we do it because it is what we are good at and what we love and never get paid for it.
What's the point to doing ALL that, in that time I could implement the damn thing myself.
This review ruined the book, it is like reading the last page of a book, now I won't even bother getting the book if I know what happens. This has got to be the worst review I have ever read.
Review is about the type of book, some hints about the plot, but never the equivalent of Cliff Notes.
What a shame.
SCO-Caldera has announced it will be merging with RIAA to better hassle the general public.
It's fine and well to outsource and cut 450,000 jobs, but at the same time they are doing irreprable damage to the economy. These same 450,000 people will not be around to buy products and software which will in turn cut the contracts that IBM may be getting for it's products. And the vicious cycle continues.
Economy is a complex web, by sending more money overseas, IBM is seriously damaging the domestic economy and should be taxed accordingly. This tax will be used to pay the unemployement, job placement fees, etc for the multitude of workers out of work.
India, China and many other countries bordering on poverty in many regions will find workers that will literaly code for food. This will be seen as immediate profit for IBM (or other outsourcing company). What they never account for (I have come to the conclusion that most CFOs cannot see further than the next quarter) is that in the long run this will cost them way more than the money they saved.
I have worked at three different companies that outsourced some code to India and China. All three were utter failures.
In one case, their representatives here were making claims that they have PhD level people on their staff and can produce almost bug free code (salepeople are universal liars). In this particular case the company "had" a PhD that consulted with them, but most of the staff were people fresh out of college with a BS in CS or even worse people who took some CS courses and were sitting around collecting wages for the company and for themselves.
Well one fine week a co-worker was visiting India (his parents live there) and decided to drop by to check on their progress. He could not explain the chaos that caused. Their state of the art facility looked more like a low tech sweatshop, the owner quickly did a song and dance and took him elsewhere.
When it came time to deliver the alpha for review, they claimed they would need few more months and blamed our requirements (requirements were drafted and never changed thru the life of the project). It was a very simple data mapping of SGML to HTML (we did not have much faith in them and had 2 guys working in parallel just in case). Well months later we still got more hand waving and more complains and request for more time. At this point out internal version finished beta testing and was ready for official testing.
Well, when the executive who decided to go overseas found out about this "mutiny" he immediately ordered our project scrapped, asked for people to be reassigned and wanted to see heads roll. If the CEO did not find out about this debacle most people would have been fired and with correct spin the overseas project would have been made cost-effective.
After all was said and done, the Indian company was given an ultimatum of 1 month to deliver a beta product or else. A month came and went and they could not produce anything. We used the internally developed product while execs fiddled with numbers to justify the overseas loss.
I am sure there were many successful projects that were produced by Indian companies (I have yet to encounter one). I think some of the best developers India had to offer came to the US and despite the tough times, companies are not giving up their good people.
I wonder how long it took these guys to obfuscate the obvious that any software developer learned in CS101?! All they are saying that after a certain time the software development process (i.e. CVS checkin data) reaches an equilibrium only perturbed by small changes.
:)
Well if that wasn't the most complicated summary of the software development process, I don't know what is.
Yes there are a lot of changes initially, since the product is being written, then as it reaches alpha the features taper off (thus the heavy CVS activity) and the new CVS activity is mostly high priority enhancements, as we reach the beta stage, the CVS activity is mostly bug fixes. Post release CVS activity is again intermittent CVS checkins of bug fixes, and such.
Now if these guys really wanted to prove their theory valid, they should have analyzed CVS branches individually and would have seen that their theory does not hold up. A branch in CVS is proportional to a change it will caryy and the CVS activity in a branch scaled to that will show that there is no slowdown but rather the same chaos as in the start of the project except localized to a branch.
I do wish these academics would try and write about something that will move us forward, rather than taking ideas that are well known and obfuscating them to a point that they set up back in the time it takes to understand what they are trying to say. Or maybe they just had a bad run with Babelfish
Don't forget that many of the girls that went after the cool guys are now wondering at what point was the "cool" replaced with beer swilling, remote hogging, sloth that left a permanent imprint in the couch.
Casual PVPer is like saying a casual serial killer. The only benefit to the MMORPG is that they can be used as a self policing aspect when reputation system is inadequate.
PvP is the scourge that prevented UO from growing and why EQ has over 300,000 subscribers. PvP is a small subset of players that somehow feel that they need to be supported while they drive away many of casual gamers. And there are 50x more casual gamers than hardcore gamers, from the financial point of view, the companies would rather cater to the casual gamers rather than the hardcore ones. Casual gamers still pay the same amount per account and play far less reducing the load on the servers and in the long run reducing bandwidth costs of a hardcore player. Hardcore players are actually financially the worst type of a customer they use up way more resources than their monthly payment "allows".
Most PvPer tend to be griefers, PKers and generally annoying people. Having played UO, I was unable to do anything in the game without someone attempting to kill me, the game became 1 domensional, leave town and run hoping you don't get killed. The only option was to become a PKer and prey on the clueless newbies and ruin their experience, and I chose not to do that.
If people want to PK then they should be playing Quake/Halflife/etc. where the environment is set up for them to kill each other and leave the rest of us MMORPG players to explore the world, group up, research, tradeskill and try to have a good time.
You probably can easily restore if you could figure out where the next savepoint is and buy the soul-restore card from the "Creator's Shop Of Upgrades". While there get the book that tells you all the secret codes for real life and where are all the powerups are hidden!