Not necessarily, no, it isn't. Depends on the contract.
Bethesda has had it's shares of problems on it's own, at one point (talking daggerfall era) if you uninstalled their game in deleted all the.exe files on your computer. Oops. Relatively, the problems in new vegas are tame.
Depends. Disappearing NPC's and corrupting save games was an issue in Fallout 3, so that's probably the fault of the engine. Even with the unreal engine, they keep patching in fixes to the engine, if you lock your game to a specific version, yes, some of the bugs are the fault of the engine (which you may or may not have source code to even try and fix, assuming you have the right skills to fix that problem).
That NPC's will still be in old 'versions' of an area, and are unreachable is probably obsidians fault. (I'm thinking specifically about the NPC's in the hanger with the boomers).
As with any QC process you decide what bugs you'll live with, and what you'll delay shipping to fix. I've played fallout3 for >60 hours, and beaten it on hardcore mode. Those 3 bugs above are the only serious ones I encountered. The disappearing NPC or NPC's in the wrong area is fixable (for the player) with console commands. The corrupting save game thing is probably outside the realm of fixable by Obsidian. If the files were xml file dumps I might spend the time to try and figure out the problem, but they aren't, so I'm not 100% sure what's happening there. The file is definitely corrupted not just blanked though.
I tend to think you need a combination of technical and non technical people. The technical people don't need to be software developers necessarily, but it helps. They can look at a problem and say 'I'm seeing memory artefacts here after I do this, and it seems like you're doing this wrong". Admittedly I'm in academia, but I spend enough time writing game engines that there are a lot of bugs I can spot right away, and know what they are, how to fix them, and I can pass that on to devs. Yay free beta's. On the other hand, I easily bypass lots of small bugs without thinking, this npc isn't targettable by clicking,/target NPC, and move on, and don't even clue in that I necessarily just saw a seriously bug.
The non technical person will spot more errors, but be less able to articulate what happened, and how to fix them. A technical person will, if given the opportunity, just move on.
Two examples. Both from fallout New vegas. So I had save game corruption. I turned the game on, ran into a vault, picked up a gun, ran out, saved, that was it, I'd forgotten to pick it up the night before. That corrupted both my auto and quicksaves. My solution? Roll back to shadow copies made by Windows 7 the night before, and move on. A non technical person, who'd just had 50 hours blow up on them might actually send obsidian a message to the effect of 'fix my save game' (quite legitimately). Example two. There's a point in a quest where coming out of the brotherhood bunker you HAVE to talk to a person. The thing is, it doesn't trigger right away. If you run up and talk to the npc, you get the full conversation, but then 3 seconds later the NPC takes 3 steps towards the door where you were standing, and triggers the same conversation again. A non technical person will spot that as the game having the same convo twice, but not necessarily recognize that it's triggering the conversation after the NPC does a short animation. I'm trying to keep it short for/. but the problem seems to be that the conversation triggers on proximity to the player, and on proximity to the door, and it has no 'only run this convo once' setting.
More generally though. The OP should note that EVERYTHING black isle/obsidian has ever shipped, under any publisher, has been majorly bug ridden. You can complain about them shipping it all you want, but sometimes you just run out of money and have to ship the best product you can and use that money to fix it. Hopefully fallout NV puts enough cash in the coffers of both bethesda (who blew their fallout3 money buying ID), and obisidan they can have better QA in future, but too much cash can also lead to Duke nukem forever syndrome.
because no matter what anyone says, india is still rife with corruption and incompetence on a scale completely unheard of in the US. When you're there, immersed in it, you develop certain strategies to deal with it, but for a western company that is used to saying 'built to this spec/design, and at this time' and actually getting something close to it, either from china or other western companies, doing business in india is very frustrating. It's usually preferable to pay more, but actually get what you want, when you want it, and have some way to resolve contract disputes in a reasonable fashion.
Or, put another way, China is benefiting enormously from the economic opportunities the market for 54 inch TV's and DVD's has created, and the fact that their labour laws and practices haven't caught up is both a matter of time and necessity. You can't seriously have expected a country that 30 years ago had virtually no trade to suddenly know what of our laws to copy or not. Your supposition of 'need' doesn't make sense. If people needed those goods they would pay higher prices, the fact is they don't need it, they want it, but only so much, and that's why there is huge competition on price.
If you make money, you are entitled to spend it on whatever you want, that was the point of making it in the first place. The more money you stuff away and never spend in life the more gets bottled up in banks and ultimately the less benefit you ever see for having worked that hard. For all of the things wrong in china, they have benefitted enormously from people deciding to buy the things they make. There will be growing pains, but subsistence farmers don't exactly get to post on/.
And the companies that do the manufacturing are owned, or strongly tied to the government, meaning they have implicit, if not explicit permission to do these things.
Besides, when you do business in france, you follow french labour laws, in the US you follow US ones, in communist china you follow theirs. That communist china's laws (and practices, since in many cases their laws are up to date but not their desire to enforce the laws) are dangerously inadequate, and france's are generally too far the other way is a matter for them to sort out. We (as the rich west) can except pressure on how we do business and so on, but ultimately we are in no position to dictate to anyone else what the safety rules they have should be, or what their retirement should be.
You could use an integer number of some base element (hydrogen, helium, carbon 12 something like that). Sort of like time based on radiation emissions or the like. The problem is both precisely and accurately measuring it, and agreeing on what base element. The actual details are fairly simple, you probably want something with the minimum of unstable isotopes that occur in the minimum quantities possible. It's a matter then of finding something suitable (that you can either separate out the isotope easily, or that is naturally acceptable).
Sort of by definition what you said is that no one has come up with a way of doing the above, so they stick with the official masses. There's nothing circular about basing it on some fixed elemental composition. One could even define based on a fixed number of moles of platinum/iridium isotopes to make the current masses 'official'. The issue is whether or not it can be reconstructed exactly from only the definition, which presently it cannot, and under some other system it should be. Yes, the original definition is always going to be arbitrary, that's equally true of time. There's no fundamentally natural reason why our base unit of time needs to have the length of a second, or why we should use the kilogram specifically. There are conveniences associated with it, but it's not like there's some perfect 1 second pulse from the sun or perfect gram that is naturally occurring.
What exactly is NEEDED in Windows 8.0 that I should buy a license for? Until MS can answer that, they won't be making many sales from people who aren't buying their PC in the shop or must have the latest shiny. That is a LOT of people, but MS has always been a company that burned through cash. They NEED more sales. Vista hurt them bad. Windows 7 was better but not back to old form. I see no reason 8 should change this.
What exactly is needed in windows vista, or 7. Or Ubuntu anything greater than about 6? How about anything newer than OS 10.2? That's why people aren't upgrading. You only upgrade OS's when you buy a new computer. We're at the point where operating systems basically do what they're supposed to properly, and have been for a decade. That is to say, they generally don't crash unless you really torture them (or bad hardware), they generally run programs without getting non- recoverable stuck. Everything beyond that isn't really operating system, it's just fundamental computer user experience, but ultimately application level. What the new OS's do is have access to new hardware features, which could be supported in old versions but intentionally aren't, they add new computer experience programs (think windows media player, itunes etc.). Even how you organize your programs, whether it's a start menu list or a layered list or icons on screen or whatever is basically irrelevant, there might be very minor degrees of efficiency with different organizations but they all do basically the same thing.
So what are any of the OS makers going to do to get you to upgrade? They are trying to glue flashy stuff into an otherwise working system, and they're intentionally depreciating old versions. If you want a truly new computer use experience, stick in solid state drives. Otherwise it's all application driven. If I play a lot of games I want an OS that has the best drivers and the best support for OpenGl/DirectX possible, I still don't care if my desktop is 3D or 2D, or if my start button is on the bottom or top. And who ever said the OS was supposed to be upgraded except for that limited set of people who actually care about those sorts of minor details of the operating system anyway? You're suggesting MS is trying to sell boxed copies of Windows and Office, I'm sure they aren't opposed to selling boxed copies, but they are under no illusion that they could add new 'features' to warrant an upgrade over whatever comes with a computer, or whatever people already have. Unless you actually know what the new version adds for you specifically, you probably don't want to upgrade. And if you do know what it does for you, you already know why you're upgrading.
Now to be fair, one version of office/windows/OS/ubuntu/OO to the next is usually minor in new features. Even major revisions need time to iron out. But enough new versions along and you can start to see what has been fixed, and what has been improved with productivity studies advancing design. Which ultimately is to benefit of MS and the user. If you jump from a computer running windows XP to one running windows 8 (and I don't mean upgrade the OS I mean the next time you buy a computer), hopefully the new user experience will be that much better you'll be glad about the purchase.
15 or 20 years ago new OS's meant fairly dramatic changes in how the underlying OS worked. From 3.1 to 95, then from the 95/98 era up to XP you went from 'on top of DOS' to a full windowed system that crashed a lot, to a full windowed system that was basically stable. After that, there's not a lot of room to grow until someone comes out with a reason for a 3D UI or something else, and even then the underlying scheduling, etc. are all done sufficiently well that the OS shouldn't crash no matter what type of front end you stick on it. Unless they can figure out some fancy new multi core scheduling algorithm I don't see much to improve on. And since people don't generally run more than one or two intense applications at a ti
seems more like a back end than front end technology. Embed this bit of code in dreamweaver and it will take care of deciding the end user can support html 5 or not. I'm guessing this is adobe slowly creeping away from flash, and acknowledging that their tools need to support HTML 5.0, while at the same time providing their customers with a. shall we politely call flash.. a depreciated option.
India and pakistan have fought at least one war (in 1999) and probably 2 (in 1971) in which at least one if not both powers had nuclear weapons. Almost certainly the 1971 war necessitated pakistan acquiring nuclear weapons assuming they didn't have them before that. And india tested a nuclear weapon in 74, when exactly they built that weapon is up for debate, but they had enough plutonium from cirus to build their first bomb in or around 63.
That certainly doesn't invalidate your theory that countries would only want to use them for deterrence and final retribution. The problem, in both of those cases, is the nature of the states (as well as china) and how they are going to transition to new types of government. The US, France, and the UK could all transition via a military coup, which would, by definition keep the nuclear weapons under wraps likely, Russia went through essentially an internal coup to democraticish governance. North korea could implode, and both iran and china face violent revolution to change government. That's a very different sort of question though. Then you get into the religion question. There are a lot of crazy people who would say it's worth sacrificing 70 million persians to kill 300 million americans + 5 million iraeli's is a good trade. And they are far more likely to be in the government in iran than say, saudi.
by virtue of their salary government officials are immediately in the top 10% of wage earners (federal anyway). They also get healthcare and so on as part of their benefits so it's hard to pin down their exact equivalent wealth. Though I'm not sure you want poor people in government. The virtue of the house of lords is that by definition they're there because they're rich. No one needs to bribe them, they're looking out for money anyway. It also acknowledges that rich people pay a lot of the taxes, and will have, whether we like it or not, influence on government.
Elected officials are different. They are bought and sold by campaign contributions, cushy job offers when they finish, special perks and so on. Even if they can resist those temptations they are (in the US) basically 535 politicans who manage 3.5 trillion dollars in spending, about 6.5 billion dollars each, per year (yes I realize it's not organized that way, but on average that's about what spending works out to). Which is WAY more money than they can even really understand let alone effectively manage, and it's so much money compared to their salary that it's very hard to see a scenario where a million dollars here or there, which is nothing compared to 6.5 billion, wouldn't influence someone who makes 150k/ year. But the less money they make, the lower the barrier to bribery is, and the easier it is to hide.
And, lets face it. Rich people can afford to leave, at which point you'd get nothing. A billionaire living in switzerland pays no US taxes after all. They are trying to build a system that keeps the US a competitive place to live for the wealthy, otherwise they'll go to elsewhere.
the rule of thumb is that about 2/3rds of income goes to the top 20% of the population, who have about 80% of the wealth. I think the top 1% get about 20% of the overall income (http://www.taxfoundation.org/news/show/250.html) but that's before the economic meltdown. I'm not sure if one is best looking at 'typical' income/wealth/tax numbers or recent ones. The numbers from the CBO are only for income tax filers which is a slightly different calculation than population though (remember ~20% of the population don't need to file taxes because they are minors and earn no income).
To answer your question in specific, from the same source i just linked. In 2007 the top 10% earned 48.05% of AGI, (in 1980 this number was 32.13%). That number is the highest since 1980, and it was down to 45.77% in 2008. The bottom 50% get about 12.26% of total income as of 2007 (compared to over 17% in 1980). Note that the link I have puts the top 10% as paying 71.20% of all income tax (the top 5% pay 60.61% of total). I'm going to guess the difference is between IRS which is income tax focused, vs CBO which is more general.
So on one hand I would dispute your assertion the top 10% get more than 55% of the income, that simply is not, and has not been the case for at least 30 years. What percentage of national wealth they have is another matter.
Then you have to ask what is a 'reasonable' distribution of wealth. As people gain experience and or education they earn more money. I'm canadian so I've only ever really looked at this figured for canada, but a few years ago the 'top 10%' was basically masters degree +25ish years experience (which for 2008 using the link I quoted is about 113k/year). A bachelors in a high paying field (engineering comp sci etc.) and you got there a bit earlier. I'm not sure that's too far off reasonable. To get to the top 10% of AGI you, on average, need a decent education and some years of work experience. You would expect that the top wage earners would be close to retirement, with significant education, and houses paid off. Once they retire their incomes tank, and before that they spend a lot of time paying relatively low taxes. Are there people outside that mold? Certainly, and is the overall share of the wealth for the top 10% too high? Probably. But I'm reasonably comfortable with the idea that in a society where people who work for ~40 years that the top 10% are people towards the end of that, with decent education. I'm a computer scientist, not an economist so one of them could probably discuss in detail where exactly that point would be in various scenarios.
I think every school in the province has had wired Ethernet connections in it for years. Wireless just adds access control issues.
health effects. no. education effects, definitely
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Ontario School Bans Wi-Fi
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· Score: 2, Interesting
While the health argument is nonsense, there are a lot of very good reasons to ban wifi in public schools. If the school doesn't have a laptop policy then the students probably shouldn't use them, too much to go wrong, both on a support end and on the student effectively using the tools side of things. I went to both public and highschool in ontario, admittedly, quite a few years ago, but there wasn't really any time except maybe lunch that we would have had anywhere suitable to want a wifi connection anyway. You were either in class, and supposed to be paying attention to the front of the room, or on your way home. And if you actually needed internet access for something legitimate, well there were lots of computers around you had access to. Installing and running a wifi network if it doesn't fit with how the school operates seems unnecessary.
This school in question only goes to grade 6 it looks like. I sort of think that 10-11 year olds probably shouldn't have laptops at school, or smartphones or any of the other modern wifi connected gadgets which sap attention and productivity from the rest of us. They aren't really ready for that responsibility, both in value of stuff or in time management. Highschool might be different, but in public school you get a couple of 15 minute breaks, and some time at lunch, otherwise you aren't supposed to be there. In grade six they're still learning to measure angles with protractors and learning to guess the meanings of words they don't know (source: http://www.edu.gov.on.ca/eng/curriculum/elementary/grade6.html) . Looking up angle on wikipedia and finding formal definitions using trig functions seems like it's probably going to do more harm than good. Even if you want to argue a grade 6 kid might be ok with a laptop, grade 4 and 5 are pretty young to be using wireless devices on their own initiative.
On top of all that you get into issues of what has access to the network, and how do you enforce that policy, and if you're going to provide access how do you make it fair for students without the financial means to get laptops etc.
Like I say, in a school that only goes to grade 6 it's a bit different than the usual primary schools that go to grade 8 or a highschool or the like. 8 and 9 year old kids are still learning to write on lined paper, they aren't really ready for constant internet access, and by the time they are, they aren't at this school anyway.
Agreed. It depends on what you're tracking though, if you have say a record every our of every day 365 days a year you only need to track 244 thousand people for a year, or 24k people for 10 or the like to hit that cap Not to mention all of the *other* stuff that they'd need to have in the same database which probably include all sorts of stuff about who is tracking who, and with which equipment etc.
To be fair, they are correct, his views on political reform and free expression by definition subvert state power, but the PRC is in no mood to have it's authority questioned when they are working hard to deflate currency and hide government incompetence and environmental damage.
not that I disagree. But there are tiers of action here. Sending an e-mail and they'll think it's spam. But call the house and say, "we've sent this e-mail" or "we have free security tools available at this site" etc. and get them to actually try and use it might be an appropriate first step. There are certainly other things you could do too, to go so far as to call them when their traffic is spiking and explain what's going on.
Interestingly ISPs are the one business today that connects PC users with support, because they pay for internet access and if you can provide fairly basic support for installing and configuring software that's a good deal. You could also set up with a local company (or a chain that has local offices) a deal where ISP users can take their comp in for maintenance/software help. Maybe it should incur a fee (but as someone who doesn't really need the support, I'd rather pay a flat fee for it that applies to everyone to make sure everyone who needs it really does have it).
For of it's faults the MS does a decent job of providing the tools to make a platform anyone can write for, linux does too, and in the mobile space that's going to become more an more an issue. Too much porn on phones and someone is going to step in to regulate business (and apple has done a good job trying to keep under the radar here) but eventually the restrictive nature of apples store should be trumped by a more open Windows/Android set of stores. Those two can compete on who makes the better tools, hardware, UI etc. But I don't see Apple as a long term competitor to MS in the phone business if MS plays it's cards right. Ultimately it's the same problem as the PC world, for all it's faults MS doesn't care if you use a $7000 or $700 computer, it tries to give developers as much access to the hardware as it can either way, and users (and developers) can manage their own application specific requirements. If I really want a smartphone that doesn't have a camera, MS (and android) will have operating systems for one, but apple doesn't. If I want to spend 7000 bucks on a cell phone that has internals worth that much, apple won't sell it to me, but MS and Google will, and that gives them, IMO a much better market in future as people stratify much more on what they want.
The Nokida Vertu series is sort of along those lines, but a bit too much diamond encrusting and not enough dual socket dual core internals sort of product for my taste.
there seems to be a disconnect between a corporation having the same privacy rights as people, or having privacy rights that happen to be the same as those afforded individuals. I don't dispute the corporations have a right to some degree of privacy, I'm not sure that should be the same as is extended to people or not, but a corporation is a collection of people, and at some point you cannot decouple the people of a corporation from a 'person' on their own. A person has a right to keep their salary private, so by extension people in a corporation should be allowed to keep their salaries private, because it's the same right just from a different direction. (Caveat: not government employees in ontario where I live though, since if they make over 100k/year their salary is public, but I'm trying to illustrate a point).
If a corporation cannot have free speech, but cannot infringe on the free speech of employees/owners what exactly does that mean for corporate policies or corporate employees that have opinions they wish to voice? Isn't that a bit like trying to enforce don't ask don't tell for both straight and gay people? And shouldn't a collection of people be free to say what it thinks best represents the interests of its members/owners, employees or customers? In an era where our 'work' persona's and personal persona's are somewhat intertwined, and significantly less separate from the era of punching a card to be on the clock, or not, it seems like courts have to be careful that limiting the 'rights' of a corporation is really limiting the rights of the people that make up the corporation.
Which sort of goes to your idea of voting. A corporation as an entity doesn't get the right to vote because the people within the corporation have the right to vote, and you cannot take away the right to vote of a corporation because that would imply taking away the right to vote of the members of the corporation, but you don't grant it either, because the people as part of it already have that right. McCain-Feingold falls afoul of the idea that a collection of people (of whatever type of organization) can freely express their opinions, because it's ultimately a personal right that happens to be going through a company, at least that's how I figure it. IANAL and not even an american subject to it.
For all of the hate on corporations, really that hate should probably be directed specifically at the people who control the corporation, not the entirety of the corporate entity, which oddly probably includes most of us through pension plans.
Wouldn't that depend heavily on their intent? When making first contact with japan the US basically sailed into tokyo bay with the biggest ship it could muster in the area. Sometimes you introduce yourself with the biggest guns you have, and make very clearly why you're there, and other times you gingerly step ashore with few guys a flag, and if you're lucky a translator.
If anyone really wants attention you find the densest plot of land, or the one with the most lights, and land there. If they're trying to hide then there are a whole lot of tracts of mostly uninhabited places they could set up shop.
more likely it is the bureaucracy of the UN planning for every contingency, and establishing a hierarchy of who's in charge if something happens.
If aliens were to show up, and land in China or the US I cannot seriously envision a situation where they would defer to the UN ambassador to make first contact. However if they show up in somewhere with less bravado, and less scientists, they might have to go along with the UN or at the very least the UN would be fairly heavily involved in making sure they get as many representatives as they can there.
hence the need to lower prices. There is only a finite amount of money being spent on games, the more of it that goes to developers rather than retailers (or resellers) the better. Part of the value in any product it it's resale value, if they're going to take that away, as they should, the price should go down to reflect the loss in value.
The problem is that if you can resell the game, so can gamestop, and they've institutionalized buying a used game for 50% of it's price and reselling it for 90%. Which is good for their profit margin, but bad for the people who actually produced the the product. I'd rather just see games 45% the price, and not possible to resell in the first place. It's that or we have to see higher developer cuts (and therefore higher prices) in the first place, but I'm not sure raising prices is a path to making more money in an era of free piracy.
that's a very big leap. pc game sales are very different than consoles. PC games get no respect from major retailers, which means no shelf space, which means no stock, and the market is substantially more diverse than on consoles, making the need for shelf space substantially harder. Digital downloads make a lot more sense for a lot of the PC market. Want to buy star rule or patrician IV? I bet you'd be the only person at a north american gamestop to ask for a copy. They don't want to stock it for that, and why order it when you can just download it (legally of course but either way, you get to play the game today, not 3 days from now).
Consoles are a whole other animal. First of all it's inherently much harder to pirate games for the PS3, and to some degree the xbox, and you're always taking the risk they'll brick your console. MS isn't ever going to brick your PC if they think you modded it to copy a game, not that you need to mod it anyway. The studios don't want to (and you don't want to) be pushing high def content back and forth in any major quantity. If the next gen of games average 25 or 30 gigabytes (or more), you'd exclude a huge batch of customers from the market simply because they couldn't get more than one game a month.
I would be very surprised if the PS4, Xbox3 and Wii2 don't have physical media. The PS5, xbox4, who knows by then, but for now I think you're probably safe. The console market is sufficiently centralized to make it worthwhile for there still to be physical media.
Obviously the whole used game business is going to be in for a shake up, no matter what. That's probably for the better in the long run, developers may have to (eventually) lower prices to get more sales, but at least *they* will get the money, not the retailers. Honestly, I have no loyalty to gamestop, and if they implode as a company for whatever reason I can buy games elsewhere, but if interplay or troika or black isle or whomever goes out of business I lose out on their products, and those stories, which I'd probably enjoy won't get told. Paying the people who actually develop the content is good, paying the people who re-shovel it at you isn't.
I would stick to alice and or flash. A lot of art guys already know how to make movies in flash (which is a valuable skill unto itself for them), making a game is different, but a text like Foundation Game Design with Flash by Rex Van der spuy works well. Alice is too simple for programming students but not bad for arts ones.
I would emphasize the distinction between "design' and "development'. They should get an overview of the whole process and the content pipeline, and a light introduction to programming, but the most you're going to get is a basic VB cardgame or something. If you put them with a robust 3D engine (unreal, unity) they'll get lost very quickly. Stick with simple. Design on the other hand is something they can do with creativity and then you can have them apply that in simple ways, and they can design something as complex as they want.
For example. A room full of straight guys. Have them design a gossip girl game, in flash, about dressing the character. Here you get to first teach them that you design what you're paid to design, whether you like the material or not, and secondly you break all of their pre-conceived notions about what a game should be. What makes a game fun? How do you make interactivity in a game about how to dress? How do you make the game accessible? What should the UI and controls be for a game about dressing? The technical aspects would be very limited, but they would have something at the end they could put on a webpage and showoff, and it highlights a lot of art skills. You can hand them core stuff, how to collide with walls that sort of thing, keep it to the level of putting stuff in arrays, iterating over arrays, and some basic strings text boxes that sort of thing. There are other examples.
Basically treat them like first year uni/college students, and ask yourself what can you do with 50 hours of lecture time (that's basically 1 and a half semesters of courses, depending on whether or not you're including labs), and what can 1st year comp sci students develop in that time? What can you stick in array, maybe a list, how can you traverse it, how do you define objects in memory, how do you manipulate them, and how do you make basic decisions.
That's about 1000x harder than you present it. First off if people get bored early, they leave, and you go bankrupt. If the tools don't work to create content, you get bad press, and people don't play your game, and you go bankrupt. Free trials only work if there looks like a worthwhile world to explore, or you get thousands of people adding to your sever load, who don't pay you anything, and you go bankrupt. Simple frameworks are boring unless you are really good at building tools, and that's pretty hard.
Seriously, the spend 100 million dollar business plan is actually a good one, as long as you hire decent designers and managers. You have to build a living breathing world, and, somewhat less obviously, a very stable set of servers for it to live on. You can't under capacity yourself at launch, because all your users will give up and go to something else. When players get there they have to not run out of things to do in at least a month. If even one player runs out of stuff to do, they'll post about it on your forums and demoralize all the other players. Even if everyone else would take 5x as long to see everything, they still feel like there isn't much there. And building community tools for content creation is no small feat, especially when you want to launch them with the game.
Really the only product that has mostly followed your model is Eve. Which, credit where credit is due, has done very well for itself, but they also started well before all of these other MMO's that did spend 100 million dollars, and designed their whole system around favouring both early adopters and long time players, and it appeals to a very specific (i.e. small) niche, but they've captured basically everyone who wants that sort of hardcore pvp space game.
Oh and as I said somewhere above. Registered users does not equate to paying users, which is a common industry trick.
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Not necessarily, no, it isn't. Depends on the contract.
Bethesda has had it's shares of problems on it's own, at one point (talking daggerfall era) if you uninstalled their game in deleted all the .exe files on your computer. Oops. Relatively, the problems in new vegas are tame.
Depends. Disappearing NPC's and corrupting save games was an issue in Fallout 3, so that's probably the fault of the engine. Even with the unreal engine, they keep patching in fixes to the engine, if you lock your game to a specific version, yes, some of the bugs are the fault of the engine (which you may or may not have source code to even try and fix, assuming you have the right skills to fix that problem).
That NPC's will still be in old 'versions' of an area, and are unreachable is probably obsidians fault. (I'm thinking specifically about the NPC's in the hanger with the boomers).
As with any QC process you decide what bugs you'll live with, and what you'll delay shipping to fix. I've played fallout3 for >60 hours, and beaten it on hardcore mode. Those 3 bugs above are the only serious ones I encountered. The disappearing NPC or NPC's in the wrong area is fixable (for the player) with console commands. The corrupting save game thing is probably outside the realm of fixable by Obsidian. If the files were xml file dumps I might spend the time to try and figure out the problem, but they aren't, so I'm not 100% sure what's happening there. The file is definitely corrupted not just blanked though.
I tend to think you need a combination of technical and non technical people. The technical people don't need to be software developers necessarily, but it helps. They can look at a problem and say 'I'm seeing memory artefacts here after I do this, and it seems like you're doing this wrong". Admittedly I'm in academia, but I spend enough time writing game engines that there are a lot of bugs I can spot right away, and know what they are, how to fix them, and I can pass that on to devs. Yay free beta's. On the other hand, I easily bypass lots of small bugs without thinking, this npc isn't targettable by clicking, /target NPC, and move on, and don't even clue in that I necessarily just saw a seriously bug.
The non technical person will spot more errors, but be less able to articulate what happened, and how to fix them. A technical person will, if given the opportunity, just move on.
Two examples. Both from fallout New vegas. So I had save game corruption. I turned the game on, ran into a vault, picked up a gun, ran out, saved, that was it, I'd forgotten to pick it up the night before. That corrupted both my auto and quicksaves. My solution? Roll back to shadow copies made by Windows 7 the night before, and move on. A non technical person, who'd just had 50 hours blow up on them might actually send obsidian a message to the effect of 'fix my save game' (quite legitimately). Example two. There's a point in a quest where coming out of the brotherhood bunker you HAVE to talk to a person. The thing is, it doesn't trigger right away. If you run up and talk to the npc, you get the full conversation, but then 3 seconds later the NPC takes 3 steps towards the door where you were standing, and triggers the same conversation again. A non technical person will spot that as the game having the same convo twice, but not necessarily recognize that it's triggering the conversation after the NPC does a short animation. I'm trying to keep it short for /. but the problem seems to be that the conversation triggers on proximity to the player, and on proximity to the door, and it has no 'only run this convo once' setting.
More generally though. The OP should note that EVERYTHING black isle/obsidian has ever shipped, under any publisher, has been majorly bug ridden. You can complain about them shipping it all you want, but sometimes you just run out of money and have to ship the best product you can and use that money to fix it. Hopefully fallout NV puts enough cash in the coffers of both bethesda (who blew their fallout3 money buying ID), and obisidan they can have better QA in future, but too much cash can also lead to Duke nukem forever syndrome.
because no matter what anyone says, india is still rife with corruption and incompetence on a scale completely unheard of in the US. When you're there, immersed in it, you develop certain strategies to deal with it, but for a western company that is used to saying 'built to this spec/design, and at this time' and actually getting something close to it, either from china or other western companies, doing business in india is very frustrating. It's usually preferable to pay more, but actually get what you want, when you want it, and have some way to resolve contract disputes in a reasonable fashion.
Or, put another way, China is benefiting enormously from the economic opportunities the market for 54 inch TV's and DVD's has created, and the fact that their labour laws and practices haven't caught up is both a matter of time and necessity. You can't seriously have expected a country that 30 years ago had virtually no trade to suddenly know what of our laws to copy or not. Your supposition of 'need' doesn't make sense. If people needed those goods they would pay higher prices, the fact is they don't need it, they want it, but only so much, and that's why there is huge competition on price.
If you make money, you are entitled to spend it on whatever you want, that was the point of making it in the first place. The more money you stuff away and never spend in life the more gets bottled up in banks and ultimately the less benefit you ever see for having worked that hard. For all of the things wrong in china, they have benefitted enormously from people deciding to buy the things they make. There will be growing pains, but subsistence farmers don't exactly get to post on /.
And the companies that do the manufacturing are owned, or strongly tied to the government, meaning they have implicit, if not explicit permission to do these things.
Besides, when you do business in france, you follow french labour laws, in the US you follow US ones, in communist china you follow theirs. That communist china's laws (and practices, since in many cases their laws are up to date but not their desire to enforce the laws) are dangerously inadequate, and france's are generally too far the other way is a matter for them to sort out. We (as the rich west) can except pressure on how we do business and so on, but ultimately we are in no position to dictate to anyone else what the safety rules they have should be, or what their retirement should be.
You could use an integer number of some base element (hydrogen, helium, carbon 12 something like that). Sort of like time based on radiation emissions or the like. The problem is both precisely and accurately measuring it, and agreeing on what base element. The actual details are fairly simple, you probably want something with the minimum of unstable isotopes that occur in the minimum quantities possible. It's a matter then of finding something suitable (that you can either separate out the isotope easily, or that is naturally acceptable).
Sort of by definition what you said is that no one has come up with a way of doing the above, so they stick with the official masses. There's nothing circular about basing it on some fixed elemental composition. One could even define based on a fixed number of moles of platinum/iridium isotopes to make the current masses 'official'. The issue is whether or not it can be reconstructed exactly from only the definition, which presently it cannot, and under some other system it should be. Yes, the original definition is always going to be arbitrary, that's equally true of time. There's no fundamentally natural reason why our base unit of time needs to have the length of a second, or why we should use the kilogram specifically. There are conveniences associated with it, but it's not like there's some perfect 1 second pulse from the sun or perfect gram that is naturally occurring.
What exactly is NEEDED in Windows 8.0 that I should buy a license for? Until MS can answer that, they won't be making many sales from people who aren't buying their PC in the shop or must have the latest shiny. That is a LOT of people, but MS has always been a company that burned through cash. They NEED more sales. Vista hurt them bad. Windows 7 was better but not back to old form. I see no reason 8 should change this.
What exactly is needed in windows vista, or 7. Or Ubuntu anything greater than about 6? How about anything newer than OS 10.2? That's why people aren't upgrading. You only upgrade OS's when you buy a new computer. We're at the point where operating systems basically do what they're supposed to properly, and have been for a decade. That is to say, they generally don't crash unless you really torture them (or bad hardware), they generally run programs without getting non- recoverable stuck. Everything beyond that isn't really operating system, it's just fundamental computer user experience, but ultimately application level. What the new OS's do is have access to new hardware features, which could be supported in old versions but intentionally aren't, they add new computer experience programs (think windows media player, itunes etc.). Even how you organize your programs, whether it's a start menu list or a layered list or icons on screen or whatever is basically irrelevant, there might be very minor degrees of efficiency with different organizations but they all do basically the same thing.
So what are any of the OS makers going to do to get you to upgrade? They are trying to glue flashy stuff into an otherwise working system, and they're intentionally depreciating old versions. If you want a truly new computer use experience, stick in solid state drives. Otherwise it's all application driven. If I play a lot of games I want an OS that has the best drivers and the best support for OpenGl/DirectX possible, I still don't care if my desktop is 3D or 2D, or if my start button is on the bottom or top. And who ever said the OS was supposed to be upgraded except for that limited set of people who actually care about those sorts of minor details of the operating system anyway? You're suggesting MS is trying to sell boxed copies of Windows and Office, I'm sure they aren't opposed to selling boxed copies, but they are under no illusion that they could add new 'features' to warrant an upgrade over whatever comes with a computer, or whatever people already have. Unless you actually know what the new version adds for you specifically, you probably don't want to upgrade. And if you do know what it does for you, you already know why you're upgrading.
Now to be fair, one version of office/windows/OS/ubuntu/OO to the next is usually minor in new features. Even major revisions need time to iron out. But enough new versions along and you can start to see what has been fixed, and what has been improved with productivity studies advancing design. Which ultimately is to benefit of MS and the user. If you jump from a computer running windows XP to one running windows 8 (and I don't mean upgrade the OS I mean the next time you buy a computer), hopefully the new user experience will be that much better you'll be glad about the purchase.
15 or 20 years ago new OS's meant fairly dramatic changes in how the underlying OS worked. From 3.1 to 95, then from the 95/98 era up to XP you went from 'on top of DOS' to a full windowed system that crashed a lot, to a full windowed system that was basically stable. After that, there's not a lot of room to grow until someone comes out with a reason for a 3D UI or something else, and even then the underlying scheduling, etc. are all done sufficiently well that the OS shouldn't crash no matter what type of front end you stick on it. Unless they can figure out some fancy new multi core scheduling algorithm I don't see much to improve on. And since people don't generally run more than one or two intense applications at a ti
seems more like a back end than front end technology. Embed this bit of code in dreamweaver and it will take care of deciding the end user can support html 5 or not. I'm guessing this is adobe slowly creeping away from flash, and acknowledging that their tools need to support HTML 5.0, while at the same time providing their customers with a. shall we politely call flash.. a depreciated option.
India and pakistan have fought at least one war (in 1999) and probably 2 (in 1971) in which at least one if not both powers had nuclear weapons. Almost certainly the 1971 war necessitated pakistan acquiring nuclear weapons assuming they didn't have them before that. And india tested a nuclear weapon in 74, when exactly they built that weapon is up for debate, but they had enough plutonium from cirus to build their first bomb in or around 63.
That certainly doesn't invalidate your theory that countries would only want to use them for deterrence and final retribution. The problem, in both of those cases, is the nature of the states (as well as china) and how they are going to transition to new types of government. The US, France, and the UK could all transition via a military coup, which would, by definition keep the nuclear weapons under wraps likely, Russia went through essentially an internal coup to democraticish governance. North korea could implode, and both iran and china face violent revolution to change government. That's a very different sort of question though. Then you get into the religion question. There are a lot of crazy people who would say it's worth sacrificing 70 million persians to kill 300 million americans + 5 million iraeli's is a good trade. And they are far more likely to be in the government in iran than say, saudi.
by virtue of their salary government officials are immediately in the top 10% of wage earners (federal anyway). They also get healthcare and so on as part of their benefits so it's hard to pin down their exact equivalent wealth. Though I'm not sure you want poor people in government. The virtue of the house of lords is that by definition they're there because they're rich. No one needs to bribe them, they're looking out for money anyway. It also acknowledges that rich people pay a lot of the taxes, and will have, whether we like it or not, influence on government.
Elected officials are different. They are bought and sold by campaign contributions, cushy job offers when they finish, special perks and so on. Even if they can resist those temptations they are (in the US) basically 535 politicans who manage 3.5 trillion dollars in spending, about 6.5 billion dollars each, per year (yes I realize it's not organized that way, but on average that's about what spending works out to). Which is WAY more money than they can even really understand let alone effectively manage, and it's so much money compared to their salary that it's very hard to see a scenario where a million dollars here or there, which is nothing compared to 6.5 billion, wouldn't influence someone who makes 150k/ year. But the less money they make, the lower the barrier to bribery is, and the easier it is to hide.
And, lets face it. Rich people can afford to leave, at which point you'd get nothing. A billionaire living in switzerland pays no US taxes after all. They are trying to build a system that keeps the US a competitive place to live for the wealthy, otherwise they'll go to elsewhere.
the rule of thumb is that about 2/3rds of income goes to the top 20% of the population, who have about 80% of the wealth. I think the top 1% get about 20% of the overall income (http://www.taxfoundation.org/news/show/250.html) but that's before the economic meltdown. I'm not sure if one is best looking at 'typical' income/wealth/tax numbers or recent ones. The numbers from the CBO are only for income tax filers which is a slightly different calculation than population though (remember ~20% of the population don't need to file taxes because they are minors and earn no income).
To answer your question in specific, from the same source i just linked. In 2007 the top 10% earned 48.05% of AGI, (in 1980 this number was 32.13%). That number is the highest since 1980, and it was down to 45.77% in 2008. The bottom 50% get about 12.26% of total income as of 2007 (compared to over 17% in 1980). Note that the link I have puts the top 10% as paying 71.20% of all income tax (the top 5% pay 60.61% of total). I'm going to guess the difference is between IRS which is income tax focused, vs CBO which is more general.
So on one hand I would dispute your assertion the top 10% get more than 55% of the income, that simply is not, and has not been the case for at least 30 years. What percentage of national wealth they have is another matter.
Then you have to ask what is a 'reasonable' distribution of wealth. As people gain experience and or education they earn more money. I'm canadian so I've only ever really looked at this figured for canada, but a few years ago the 'top 10%' was basically masters degree +25ish years experience (which for 2008 using the link I quoted is about 113k/year). A bachelors in a high paying field (engineering comp sci etc.) and you got there a bit earlier. I'm not sure that's too far off reasonable. To get to the top 10% of AGI you, on average, need a decent education and some years of work experience. You would expect that the top wage earners would be close to retirement, with significant education, and houses paid off. Once they retire their incomes tank, and before that they spend a lot of time paying relatively low taxes. Are there people outside that mold? Certainly, and is the overall share of the wealth for the top 10% too high? Probably. But I'm reasonably comfortable with the idea that in a society where people who work for ~40 years that the top 10% are people towards the end of that, with decent education. I'm a computer scientist, not an economist so one of them could probably discuss in detail where exactly that point would be in various scenarios.
I think every school in the province has had wired Ethernet connections in it for years. Wireless just adds access control issues.
While the health argument is nonsense, there are a lot of very good reasons to ban wifi in public schools. If the school doesn't have a laptop policy then the students probably shouldn't use them, too much to go wrong, both on a support end and on the student effectively using the tools side of things. I went to both public and highschool in ontario, admittedly, quite a few years ago, but there wasn't really any time except maybe lunch that we would have had anywhere suitable to want a wifi connection anyway. You were either in class, and supposed to be paying attention to the front of the room, or on your way home. And if you actually needed internet access for something legitimate, well there were lots of computers around you had access to. Installing and running a wifi network if it doesn't fit with how the school operates seems unnecessary.
This school in question only goes to grade 6 it looks like. I sort of think that 10-11 year olds probably shouldn't have laptops at school, or smartphones or any of the other modern wifi connected gadgets which sap attention and productivity from the rest of us. They aren't really ready for that responsibility, both in value of stuff or in time management. Highschool might be different, but in public school you get a couple of 15 minute breaks, and some time at lunch, otherwise you aren't supposed to be there. In grade six they're still learning to measure angles with protractors and learning to guess the meanings of words they don't know (source: http://www.edu.gov.on.ca/eng/curriculum/elementary/grade6.html) . Looking up angle on wikipedia and finding formal definitions using trig functions seems like it's probably going to do more harm than good. Even if you want to argue a grade 6 kid might be ok with a laptop, grade 4 and 5 are pretty young to be using wireless devices on their own initiative.
On top of all that you get into issues of what has access to the network, and how do you enforce that policy, and if you're going to provide access how do you make it fair for students without the financial means to get laptops etc.
Like I say, in a school that only goes to grade 6 it's a bit different than the usual primary schools that go to grade 8 or a highschool or the like. 8 and 9 year old kids are still learning to write on lined paper, they aren't really ready for constant internet access, and by the time they are, they aren't at this school anyway.
Agreed. It depends on what you're tracking though, if you have say a record every our of every day 365 days a year you only need to track 244 thousand people for a year, or 24k people for 10 or the like to hit that cap Not to mention all of the *other* stuff that they'd need to have in the same database which probably include all sorts of stuff about who is tracking who, and with which equipment etc.
To be fair, they are correct, his views on political reform and free expression by definition subvert state power, but the PRC is in no mood to have it's authority questioned when they are working hard to deflate currency and hide government incompetence and environmental damage.
not that I disagree. But there are tiers of action here. Sending an e-mail and they'll think it's spam. But call the house and say, "we've sent this e-mail" or "we have free security tools available at this site" etc. and get them to actually try and use it might be an appropriate first step. There are certainly other things you could do too, to go so far as to call them when their traffic is spiking and explain what's going on.
Interestingly ISPs are the one business today that connects PC users with support, because they pay for internet access and if you can provide fairly basic support for installing and configuring software that's a good deal. You could also set up with a local company (or a chain that has local offices) a deal where ISP users can take their comp in for maintenance/software help. Maybe it should incur a fee (but as someone who doesn't really need the support, I'd rather pay a flat fee for it that applies to everyone to make sure everyone who needs it really does have it).
For of it's faults the MS does a decent job of providing the tools to make a platform anyone can write for, linux does too, and in the mobile space that's going to become more an more an issue. Too much porn on phones and someone is going to step in to regulate business (and apple has done a good job trying to keep under the radar here) but eventually the restrictive nature of apples store should be trumped by a more open Windows/Android set of stores. Those two can compete on who makes the better tools, hardware, UI etc. But I don't see Apple as a long term competitor to MS in the phone business if MS plays it's cards right. Ultimately it's the same problem as the PC world, for all it's faults MS doesn't care if you use a $7000 or $700 computer, it tries to give developers as much access to the hardware as it can either way, and users (and developers) can manage their own application specific requirements. If I really want a smartphone that doesn't have a camera, MS (and android) will have operating systems for one, but apple doesn't. If I want to spend 7000 bucks on a cell phone that has internals worth that much, apple won't sell it to me, but MS and Google will, and that gives them, IMO a much better market in future as people stratify much more on what they want.
The Nokida Vertu series is sort of along those lines, but a bit too much diamond encrusting and not enough dual socket dual core internals sort of product for my taste.
there seems to be a disconnect between a corporation having the same privacy rights as people, or having privacy rights that happen to be the same as those afforded individuals. I don't dispute the corporations have a right to some degree of privacy, I'm not sure that should be the same as is extended to people or not, but a corporation is a collection of people, and at some point you cannot decouple the people of a corporation from a 'person' on their own. A person has a right to keep their salary private, so by extension people in a corporation should be allowed to keep their salaries private, because it's the same right just from a different direction. (Caveat: not government employees in ontario where I live though, since if they make over 100k/year their salary is public, but I'm trying to illustrate a point).
If a corporation cannot have free speech, but cannot infringe on the free speech of employees/owners what exactly does that mean for corporate policies or corporate employees that have opinions they wish to voice? Isn't that a bit like trying to enforce don't ask don't tell for both straight and gay people? And shouldn't a collection of people be free to say what it thinks best represents the interests of its members/owners, employees or customers? In an era where our 'work' persona's and personal persona's are somewhat intertwined, and significantly less separate from the era of punching a card to be on the clock, or not, it seems like courts have to be careful that limiting the 'rights' of a corporation is really limiting the rights of the people that make up the corporation.
Which sort of goes to your idea of voting. A corporation as an entity doesn't get the right to vote because the people within the corporation have the right to vote, and you cannot take away the right to vote of a corporation because that would imply taking away the right to vote of the members of the corporation, but you don't grant it either, because the people as part of it already have that right. McCain-Feingold falls afoul of the idea that a collection of people (of whatever type of organization) can freely express their opinions, because it's ultimately a personal right that happens to be going through a company, at least that's how I figure it. IANAL and not even an american subject to it.
For all of the hate on corporations, really that hate should probably be directed specifically at the people who control the corporation, not the entirety of the corporate entity, which oddly probably includes most of us through pension plans.
Wouldn't that depend heavily on their intent? When making first contact with japan the US basically sailed into tokyo bay with the biggest ship it could muster in the area. Sometimes you introduce yourself with the biggest guns you have, and make very clearly why you're there, and other times you gingerly step ashore with few guys a flag, and if you're lucky a translator.
If anyone really wants attention you find the densest plot of land, or the one with the most lights, and land there. If they're trying to hide then there are a whole lot of tracts of mostly uninhabited places they could set up shop.
more likely it is the bureaucracy of the UN planning for every contingency, and establishing a hierarchy of who's in charge if something happens.
If aliens were to show up, and land in China or the US I cannot seriously envision a situation where they would defer to the UN ambassador to make first contact. However if they show up in somewhere with less bravado, and less scientists, they might have to go along with the UN or at the very least the UN would be fairly heavily involved in making sure they get as many representatives as they can there.
hence the need to lower prices. There is only a finite amount of money being spent on games, the more of it that goes to developers rather than retailers (or resellers) the better. Part of the value in any product it it's resale value, if they're going to take that away, as they should, the price should go down to reflect the loss in value.
The problem is that if you can resell the game, so can gamestop, and they've institutionalized buying a used game for 50% of it's price and reselling it for 90%. Which is good for their profit margin, but bad for the people who actually produced the the product. I'd rather just see games 45% the price, and not possible to resell in the first place. It's that or we have to see higher developer cuts (and therefore higher prices) in the first place, but I'm not sure raising prices is a path to making more money in an era of free piracy.
that's a very big leap. pc game sales are very different than consoles. PC games get no respect from major retailers, which means no shelf space, which means no stock, and the market is substantially more diverse than on consoles, making the need for shelf space substantially harder. Digital downloads make a lot more sense for a lot of the PC market. Want to buy star rule or patrician IV? I bet you'd be the only person at a north american gamestop to ask for a copy. They don't want to stock it for that, and why order it when you can just download it (legally of course but either way, you get to play the game today, not 3 days from now).
Consoles are a whole other animal. First of all it's inherently much harder to pirate games for the PS3, and to some degree the xbox, and you're always taking the risk they'll brick your console. MS isn't ever going to brick your PC if they think you modded it to copy a game, not that you need to mod it anyway. The studios don't want to (and you don't want to) be pushing high def content back and forth in any major quantity. If the next gen of games average 25 or 30 gigabytes (or more), you'd exclude a huge batch of customers from the market simply because they couldn't get more than one game a month.
I would be very surprised if the PS4, Xbox3 and Wii2 don't have physical media. The PS5, xbox4, who knows by then, but for now I think you're probably safe. The console market is sufficiently centralized to make it worthwhile for there still to be physical media.
Obviously the whole used game business is going to be in for a shake up, no matter what. That's probably for the better in the long run, developers may have to (eventually) lower prices to get more sales, but at least *they* will get the money, not the retailers. Honestly, I have no loyalty to gamestop, and if they implode as a company for whatever reason I can buy games elsewhere, but if interplay or troika or black isle or whomever goes out of business I lose out on their products, and those stories, which I'd probably enjoy won't get told. Paying the people who actually develop the content is good, paying the people who re-shovel it at you isn't.
I would stick to alice and or flash. A lot of art guys already know how to make movies in flash (which is a valuable skill unto itself for them), making a game is different, but a text like Foundation Game Design with Flash by Rex Van der spuy works well. Alice is too simple for programming students but not bad for arts ones.
I would emphasize the distinction between "design' and "development'. They should get an overview of the whole process and the content pipeline, and a light introduction to programming, but the most you're going to get is a basic VB cardgame or something. If you put them with a robust 3D engine (unreal, unity) they'll get lost very quickly. Stick with simple. Design on the other hand is something they can do with creativity and then you can have them apply that in simple ways, and they can design something as complex as they want.
For example. A room full of straight guys. Have them design a gossip girl game, in flash, about dressing the character. Here you get to first teach them that you design what you're paid to design, whether you like the material or not, and secondly you break all of their pre-conceived notions about what a game should be. What makes a game fun? How do you make interactivity in a game about how to dress? How do you make the game accessible? What should the UI and controls be for a game about dressing? The technical aspects would be very limited, but they would have something at the end they could put on a webpage and showoff, and it highlights a lot of art skills. You can hand them core stuff, how to collide with walls that sort of thing, keep it to the level of putting stuff in arrays, iterating over arrays, and some basic strings text boxes that sort of thing. There are other examples.
Basically treat them like first year uni/college students, and ask yourself what can you do with 50 hours of lecture time (that's basically 1 and a half semesters of courses, depending on whether or not you're including labs), and what can 1st year comp sci students develop in that time? What can you stick in array, maybe a list, how can you traverse it, how do you define objects in memory, how do you manipulate them, and how do you make basic decisions.
That's about 1000x harder than you present it. First off if people get bored early, they leave, and you go bankrupt. If the tools don't work to create content, you get bad press, and people don't play your game, and you go bankrupt. Free trials only work if there looks like a worthwhile world to explore, or you get thousands of people adding to your sever load, who don't pay you anything, and you go bankrupt. Simple frameworks are boring unless you are really good at building tools, and that's pretty hard.
Seriously, the spend 100 million dollar business plan is actually a good one, as long as you hire decent designers and managers. You have to build a living breathing world, and, somewhat less obviously, a very stable set of servers for it to live on. You can't under capacity yourself at launch, because all your users will give up and go to something else. When players get there they have to not run out of things to do in at least a month. If even one player runs out of stuff to do, they'll post about it on your forums and demoralize all the other players. Even if everyone else would take 5x as long to see everything, they still feel like there isn't much there. And building community tools for content creation is no small feat, especially when you want to launch them with the game.
Really the only product that has mostly followed your model is Eve. Which, credit where credit is due, has done very well for itself, but they also started well before all of these other MMO's that did spend 100 million dollars, and designed their whole system around favouring both early adopters and long time players, and it appeals to a very specific (i.e. small) niche, but they've captured basically everyone who wants that sort of hardcore pvp space game.
Oh and as I said somewhere above. Registered users does not equate to paying users, which is a common industry trick.