Not all Star Wars games suck; I really liked the Jedi Knight games from a pure lightsaber hack-and-slash perspective (dismembering stormtroopers with a lightsaber never really gets old.) There are some stinkers, sure, but Star Wars has a surprisingly good success rate considering how many are out there.
The GC overall is a much better *console* system than the PS2 or Xbox. Nintendo has been making console systems for alot longer than MS/Sony, and it shows. I'm on my third PS2 (the first two broke,) while I still have my original Gamecube from the month it was launched. If Nintendo had the marketing department that Sony does, they wouldn't have been relegated to the back seat. With the pricing scheme for the Wii/360/PS3, I think Nintendo has a real shot to take back their "King of Videogames" crowd.
Well, it's also that graphics are not special anymore. There are plenty of games that look really pretty out there. In order to stand above the crowd of pretty looking mediocre games, you have to do more.
Pointless speculation is what they want; it's free press and it keeps WoW in the gamer's mind.
But personally, I disagree with their game design philosophy. Catering the bulk of endgame content to people who have no life and the patience of a saint is where they went wrong. After raiding for near 6 months solid, I cancelled my account a month ago and haven't wanted to play the stupid game since. I had hopes that the WoW design team was smart enough to come up with a game that didn't force large party content down your throat, but apparently that is not the case.
A lot of the servers are turning in to ghost towns where people log in and raid for 4 hours a night and log off immediately when done. I have a feeling that Blizzard is losing many of their core customers, because if you're not in a large raiding guild it is very hard to find a group to do anything anymore. If they're like me, not even the expansion will bring them back.
Some government regulation is bad. Ensuring that the entire internet stays available to everyone connected to it is not. ISPs are salivating over the amount of money that Google is making, and they want a cut. But when you go "pay to play" like this then we will eventually end up with a segregated internet, and I think you'll actually see it hurt ISPs more than help.
What about companies who are big enough to get lots of traffic, but small enough not to be able to afford an extra net-extortion fee? Lowering the QoS on these guys would severely screw with a lot of the emerging technologies on the net, like VoIP and AJAX which rely on low-latency connections.
This basically means "Don't start a VoIP / SaaS company unless you have millions in VC to get a priority at all the major ISPs and compete with the big boys." There is no reason for it other than money grubbing, it will exponentially increase customer service incidents for both the ISP and the service provider at the remote end ("why doesn't this work? why is the internet so slow?") and all it will really do in the end is lock out the little guy (the big guys like Google, MSN and Apple can afford a few million a year no problem.)
Hopefully consumers will be aware enough not to pay the same amount for an intentionally degraded service. The most important thing about the internet is that it is basically the same no matter where you connect from; changing that will remove a lot of value for many of us.
Other Hollywood studios are now likely to launch similar services. They believe movie fans will prefer to pay a reasonable price for a legal downloaded movie rather than risk illegally swapping a computer file that could contain viruses or be a poor quality copy of a film.
And they're right! Holy fucking shit, the movie industry might actually get it. As long as they don't fuck it all up by heaping mountains of DRM on top of it, they could have a gold mine on their hands. This is what we've been asking for for the past decade.
When iTunes came out, everyone said "This is what we've been asking for all along." It was wildly successful. Do the same with movies and it will be successful as well. People have already shown a willingness to download movies P2P, and I think they would be willing to pay a little money to make sure they get a clean, good looking file (no more camjobs!)
The difference being you do not have SLAs with Blizzard that guarantee you 99.99% uptime, nor do you pay Blizzard an exorbitant fee every year to provide you with patches. You are relying on public systems with no guarantee of service. If you stake your livelihood on these systems, that's your own problem. This is a risk that you have accepted.
It's a different story with Oracle. Many companies buy Oracle database software not because it is the best available (though this is pretty much the case anyway) but because you can pay Oracle a crapton of money and they stand behind their product. You pay out the nose for software upgrades and when that much money is DIRECTLY paid to Oracle, their customers expect a lot more than your average software company. They have put themselves in this situation with their pricing structure, maybe Larry Ellison needs to stop counting his money and hire more programmers to fix his software.
Yeah, but if this happens to enough of them, it might get rid of some of the get-rich-quick types.
I'm not advocating murder in any way, and honestly I doubt this had anything to do with spam (if you're involved in illegal activity in Russia, you're usually involved with organized crime. Piss them off and these things happen.)
Because most English language papers are not on the same level as Americans in their political leanings. Even the most liberal Americans are right-wingers over in Europe. People like what they read to agree with what they already "feel" as some sort of validation that their feelings and opinions are correct. This is not a conspiracy, it's human nature. We like to be right, even if that means redefining what it means to *be* right.
They lose a lot of money in the replacement parts market.
In the case of 4 or 5 year old import cars, they are stolen specifically for their parts. If you know how to move the merchandise you can chop up a 98 Civic and sell them for twice what the car is worth. Car companies lose money off replacement parts because many times unscrupulous mechanics will sell stolen parts as new.
Most of the cars on the "top ten most stolen" list are stolen for this exact purpose. So it has more impact on their bottom line than you might think.
If anyone would read TFA, they would have noticed the last paragraph:
So far the researchers have only worked through the mathematics to prove that the device is plausible. The practicalities of making one have yet to be solved.
They haven't even made the prototype device that will undoubtedly be much larger than a cloak. A cloak using this technology is probably at least 30 years off (yes, that's a guess.)
With the way fuel prices are going, I think shipping companies would love to be able to raise a mast on a clear, windy day and catch a free ride and save $50,000 worth of gas. I don't think there would be a ship like this without an engine at all (too many deadlines to make) but it makes sense if the weather is right.
It's environmentally friendly *and* it saves money. That's the only thing that is going to make companies "go green" en masse.
No, typically the press secretary for the white house is a one or two year job anyway. The press gets tired of asking the same questions to the same person. The same person cannot change his answers for fear of looking inconsistent and "flip-floppy." They also get tired of hearing the same non-answers, so you bring in a new guy to not answer their questions in the hope of making it LOOK like you're being more forthcoming.
Much of the "news" posted on slashdot are just reposted press releases. You just pay a wire service to run your press release and it spreads like wildfire with all the news aggregators on the net.
It's also pretty easy to plant a few favorable articles around the place to give yourself PR. It's just marketing. I treat slashdot articles as basically like a tech news wire.. Most of them are probably planted by marketing firms (it's not like slashdot is some secret hideout, everyone knows about it,) so take it with a grain of salt.
Of course; IBM's pserver division has always made computers marketed at tech professionals from 10 years ago.
Note to IBM: Don't make me pull my terminal out of the closet when I need to access the machine physically. People stopped using these years ago for a reason. Just use VGA, unless you think it will make the mainframe dorks stop respecting you.
By the same token, the lack of documentation causes the project to be less useful. However, it seems that many open source developers start their projects with the goal of making money someday through implementation services, and writing a successful open source app that people want to use but not documenting it means that people will pay you to set it up and train their employees. If this is your goal, then it is probably in your best interest not to write good documentation.
Open source stopped being about sharing with the community when people figured they could make money with it. The developers aren't stopping anyone from writing documentation, there's just no incentive for them to do so themselves.
Um, WLANs suck ass for gaming. Latency can spike easily if someone turns on the microwave. If you're going to play games, you'll be less frustrated using a wired LAN.
Because they have to pay developers, bandwidth fees, datacenter fees, customer service people, billing people, web designers, janitors, office supplies, and basically everything else it takes to run a business. $35 million / month with probably 15-20 million a month in overhead.
Yes they are making money (businesses are allowed to do this, remember?) Re-architecting a massively distributed game like this takes time *and* money. They underbuilt their infrastructure to begin with, which is where they really went wrong. They are supposedly trying to remedy that, but by the time you have re-architected the system it has grown to the point where you have to do it again.
Also, they're pulling so much bandwidth from so many disparate places that when a link close to them goes down, all the other links have to compensate and there's not necessarily enough fat pipes close to their datacenters to allow everyone on. I would be curious to see what percentage of traffic flowing over certain core routers can be attributed to World of Warcraft; I am betting it is non-trivial.
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Not all Star Wars games suck; I really liked the Jedi Knight games from a pure lightsaber hack-and-slash perspective (dismembering stormtroopers with a lightsaber never really gets old.) There are some stinkers, sure, but Star Wars has a surprisingly good success rate considering how many are out there.
The GC overall is a much better *console* system than the PS2 or Xbox. Nintendo has been making console systems for alot longer than MS/Sony, and it shows. I'm on my third PS2 (the first two broke,) while I still have my original Gamecube from the month it was launched. If Nintendo had the marketing department that Sony does, they wouldn't have been relegated to the back seat. With the pricing scheme for the Wii/360/PS3, I think Nintendo has a real shot to take back their "King of Videogames" crowd.
Well, it's also that graphics are not special anymore. There are plenty of games that look really pretty out there. In order to stand above the crowd of pretty looking mediocre games, you have to do more.
Pointless speculation is what they want; it's free press and it keeps WoW in the gamer's mind.
But personally, I disagree with their game design philosophy. Catering the bulk of endgame content to people who have no life and the patience of a saint is where they went wrong. After raiding for near 6 months solid, I cancelled my account a month ago and haven't wanted to play the stupid game since. I had hopes that the WoW design team was smart enough to come up with a game that didn't force large party content down your throat, but apparently that is not the case.
A lot of the servers are turning in to ghost towns where people log in and raid for 4 hours a night and log off immediately when done. I have a feeling that Blizzard is losing many of their core customers, because if you're not in a large raiding guild it is very hard to find a group to do anything anymore. If they're like me, not even the expansion will bring them back.
Some government regulation is bad. Ensuring that the entire internet stays available to everyone connected to it is not. ISPs are salivating over the amount of money that Google is making, and they want a cut. But when you go "pay to play" like this then we will eventually end up with a segregated internet, and I think you'll actually see it hurt ISPs more than help.
What about companies who are big enough to get lots of traffic, but small enough not to be able to afford an extra net-extortion fee? Lowering the QoS on these guys would severely screw with a lot of the emerging technologies on the net, like VoIP and AJAX which rely on low-latency connections.
This basically means "Don't start a VoIP / SaaS company unless you have millions in VC to get a priority at all the major ISPs and compete with the big boys." There is no reason for it other than money grubbing, it will exponentially increase customer service incidents for both the ISP and the service provider at the remote end ("why doesn't this work? why is the internet so slow?") and all it will really do in the end is lock out the little guy (the big guys like Google, MSN and Apple can afford a few million a year no problem.)
Hopefully consumers will be aware enough not to pay the same amount for an intentionally degraded service. The most important thing about the internet is that it is basically the same no matter where you connect from; changing that will remove a lot of value for many of us.
Other Hollywood studios are now likely to launch similar services. They believe movie fans will prefer to pay a reasonable price for a legal downloaded movie rather than risk illegally swapping a computer file that could contain viruses or be a poor quality copy of a film.
And they're right! Holy fucking shit, the movie industry might actually get it. As long as they don't fuck it all up by heaping mountains of DRM on top of it, they could have a gold mine on their hands. This is what we've been asking for for the past decade.
When iTunes came out, everyone said "This is what we've been asking for all along." It was wildly successful. Do the same with movies and it will be successful as well. People have already shown a willingness to download movies P2P, and I think they would be willing to pay a little money to make sure they get a clean, good looking file (no more camjobs!)
The difference being you do not have SLAs with Blizzard that guarantee you 99.99% uptime, nor do you pay Blizzard an exorbitant fee every year to provide you with patches. You are relying on public systems with no guarantee of service. If you stake your livelihood on these systems, that's your own problem. This is a risk that you have accepted.
It's a different story with Oracle. Many companies buy Oracle database software not because it is the best available (though this is pretty much the case anyway) but because you can pay Oracle a crapton of money and they stand behind their product. You pay out the nose for software upgrades and when that much money is DIRECTLY paid to Oracle, their customers expect a lot more than your average software company. They have put themselves in this situation with their pricing structure, maybe Larry Ellison needs to stop counting his money and hire more programmers to fix his software.
Yeah. Because the Windows users, who make up 95% of the computing market, aren't lemmings.
Yeah, but if this happens to enough of them, it might get rid of some of the get-rich-quick types.
I'm not advocating murder in any way, and honestly I doubt this had anything to do with spam (if you're involved in illegal activity in Russia, you're usually involved with organized crime. Piss them off and these things happen.)
Because most English language papers are not on the same level as Americans in their political leanings. Even the most liberal Americans are right-wingers over in Europe. People like what they read to agree with what they already "feel" as some sort of validation that their feelings and opinions are correct. This is not a conspiracy, it's human nature. We like to be right, even if that means redefining what it means to *be* right.
They lose a lot of money in the replacement parts market.
In the case of 4 or 5 year old import cars, they are stolen specifically for their parts. If you know how to move the merchandise you can chop up a 98 Civic and sell them for twice what the car is worth. Car companies lose money off replacement parts because many times unscrupulous mechanics will sell stolen parts as new.
Most of the cars on the "top ten most stolen" list are stolen for this exact purpose. So it has more impact on their bottom line than you might think.
They haven't even made the prototype device that will undoubtedly be much larger than a cloak. A cloak using this technology is probably at least 30 years off (yes, that's a guess.)
That picture scares me.
I am just disappointed that nobody has replied to this yet with the obligatory "THUNDERCATS, HOOOOOOO!"
Think about it for a sec.
With the way fuel prices are going, I think shipping companies would love to be able to raise a mast on a clear, windy day and catch a free ride and save $50,000 worth of gas. I don't think there would be a ship like this without an engine at all (too many deadlines to make) but it makes sense if the weather is right.
It's environmentally friendly *and* it saves money. That's the only thing that is going to make companies "go green" en masse.
Moral of the story: Experience matters more than certs. This has always been the case.
I'm waiting for OS X "Cheetarah."
Rowr.
No, typically the press secretary for the white house is a one or two year job anyway. The press gets tired of asking the same questions to the same person. The same person cannot change his answers for fear of looking inconsistent and "flip-floppy." They also get tired of hearing the same non-answers, so you bring in a new guy to not answer their questions in the hope of making it LOOK like you're being more forthcoming.
Much of the "news" posted on slashdot are just reposted press releases. You just pay a wire service to run your press release and it spreads like wildfire with all the news aggregators on the net.
It's also pretty easy to plant a few favorable articles around the place to give yourself PR. It's just marketing. I treat slashdot articles as basically like a tech news wire.. Most of them are probably planted by marketing firms (it's not like slashdot is some secret hideout, everyone knows about it,) so take it with a grain of salt.
Of course; IBM's pserver division has always made computers marketed at tech professionals from 10 years ago.
Note to IBM: Don't make me pull my terminal out of the closet when I need to access the machine physically. People stopped using these years ago for a reason. Just use VGA, unless you think it will make the mainframe dorks stop respecting you.
By the same token, the lack of documentation causes the project to be less useful. However, it seems that many open source developers start their projects with the goal of making money someday through implementation services, and writing a successful open source app that people want to use but not documenting it means that people will pay you to set it up and train their employees. If this is your goal, then it is probably in your best interest not to write good documentation.
Open source stopped being about sharing with the community when people figured they could make money with it. The developers aren't stopping anyone from writing documentation, there's just no incentive for them to do so themselves.
As with most things in life, a good gas powered chain saw will do the job in a tenth of the time, and it's a lot more fun.
Just make sure there aren't any electrical conduit where you're making your hole. That might make it less fun.
Um, WLANs suck ass for gaming. Latency can spike easily if someone turns on the microwave. If you're going to play games, you'll be less frustrated using a wired LAN.
Because they have to pay developers, bandwidth fees, datacenter fees, customer service people, billing people, web designers, janitors, office supplies, and basically everything else it takes to run a business. $35 million / month with probably 15-20 million a month in overhead.
Yes they are making money (businesses are allowed to do this, remember?) Re-architecting a massively distributed game like this takes time *and* money. They underbuilt their infrastructure to begin with, which is where they really went wrong. They are supposedly trying to remedy that, but by the time you have re-architected the system it has grown to the point where you have to do it again.
Also, they're pulling so much bandwidth from so many disparate places that when a link close to them goes down, all the other links have to compensate and there's not necessarily enough fat pipes close to their datacenters to allow everyone on. I would be curious to see what percentage of traffic flowing over certain core routers can be attributed to World of Warcraft; I am betting it is non-trivial.