Having worked at several large software companies I've actually seen linux builds of apps come and go internally that were never released to the public (products you've heard of too!).
The reason they were never launched is they were either deemed unsupportable or too expensive to test - and even those these apps were portable, there were plenty of platform specific issues that really would make triaging it across 4 platforms (linux, solaris, windows and mac) a serious effort.
If you're abused at your job, go and find another one. This can be done in any field. If you see that your field is always being abused, go to another field. There is no shortage of jobs in the US. I drive around times and it seems like everybody is hiring from small stores that anyone can do, forklift operators at big box stores, drivers for all types of vehicles, cashiers, desk and management jobs and even medical and IT. People are afraid of change and seem to want to hang around in an "abusive" environment too long and then they complain. I'm a young IT guy without any type of meaningful degree and I haven't been out of a job for more than 30 days. Sure, sometimes I have to move to a better place but I'm open to do that.
Is it wrong to want to have semi permanent employment? The hear I had like 4 w2's I thought this can't keep happening.
They never had a seniority system, although they did have tenure, but it was largely based if you had a masters degree in your field (or a phd).
The only requirements were teaching certificate from a state university. That wasn't a union requirement however - it was a state accreditation requirement.
Teachers ran the union so if there was an abuse or a problem - it was the teachers fault - not some scary union in the cloud.
People complain about union abuses but for get for every union abuse I could easily come up with 10 management abuses - many of which are listed in the article description. 90% of the reason I have to carry around a smartphone is because of poor planning by our company or a client. 90% of the reason I have to work 60 hour weeks is because of poor staffing levels at our company. I should have a say in this.
I work in technical support as a Tier 3 at a software every single person reading this has heard of. They are offshoring support left and right - why? Not because of unions - there aren't any in this company (as far as I know). Its because of the ever rising need to lower the costs of support.
I don't know if its because they want to drive profits up, or because it really is costing more and more and more to support our products - who knows.
If we had a union however we would certainly have a lot more insight into the process because we'd have a representative at these meetings.
A lot of people lose sight of the fact that in America we work in a at will employment system. You're manager can fire you for anything he/she likes (valid or not) and you can't do a thing about it.
This is a load really - most companies/government pensions are self supporting because they are based off smart investments and employee investments - at least thats the plan...
Its not like someone pays into it and it just sits there.
In fact from what I understand pension system at GM/Ford is in such dire trouble because of over-funded CEO pensions.
People complain that its so expensive to manufacture anything in the US, but often forget that the CEO's that make 900 times what the average worker makes has nothing to do with profitability. They don't have this problem nearly as severely in any other country.
I had one of the first ABIT soft-set motherboards (I put an AMD K6-200 in there to give you the vintage) - to be honest it was a piece of crap. It frequently forgot the settings and forced you to go into the bios.
I got it replaced because it died one day, and the one that replaced it wasn't much better.
In my experience every mmo that has challenged WoW's superiority has fallen flat on its face because a good majority of mmo's lack polish.
WoW isn't perfect either, but its easy to learn, controls are responsive and work (good example - don't ever ever ever jump in the water on lineage 2) and it has a broad spectrum of activities to do for most players.
People said the same thing about lotro - from what a few players in my WoW guild who left (and came back) said it was really awesome up to level 30 or so then kind of started to fall apart as content got more sparse and buggy (disclaimer - I've never played lorto, but I had more than one person describe the game this way to me).
We had a few people leave for Conan and come back as well - who felt the same way - great in the first few levels, but started to fall apart in the end game - and that the client was horribly buggy and would crash after a few hours play. (again - haven't played Conan, but at least two different people described the game this way to me).
It would be cool if War was better than WoW - because I'm always looking for something more interesting, but in 4 years I've seen a lot of challengers and "WoW killers" come and go and a lot of players leave and come back.
I'd say these days the entry point for a successful mmo is pretty high because of EQ and WoW really. I get the impression a lot of game studios use the same formulas for crap games we've been given in the past on mmorpg's and are not willing to stick it out for the long run and spend the initial money on the game to make it as good as or better than WoW on day one.
And to me WoW is more about the community. If my RL friends quit playing I would too. If you play a MMO for any other reason you're probably wasting your time because you're not going to get any satisfaction from the experience.
Plus never mind that for that much money you could have a seriously kick arse PC with the most memory, cpu cores, and video cards one could cram into a computer and have money left over for another 10 years of bleeding edge upgrades.
I dunno - I'm 32 and I've never bought any gold, but I've managed to buy 4 epic mounts/training on 4 characters (thats 20,000~g for those who don't play - and one of the main reasons I'm sure people buy).
Its the 12 year olds who always ask me how I make so much money - its really simple actually (and I don't grind for the most part) - do quests and don't spend it on crap. You'll never make money selling stuff in WoW - typically the materials for making anything are worth more than the items usually sell for.
There are grinds in WoW but most of them can be combined with quests, dungeons and raids - which I enjoy doing.
I know I'll be modded down to -infinity on this, but seriously - my Mac G5 has kernel panicked more than my Windows XP box (keep in mind my G5 has done this maybe twice last year?)
No need to swap republican/democrat. There's been at least one study done that shows that democratic presidents are more fiscally responsible. I think this editorial comic actually sums it up quite nicely (08/01/08)
I've never worked in game development, but I know at other software companies I worked for anything that went out the door (no matter how small - whether it was paid for or not) to the consuming public had to have gone through a full QA cycle which took weeks - especially for apps that were available in more than one language.
The reason for this is simple - if its crap (even if its free) you lose goodwill with the customer. For paid for applications doubly so because you may lose money on sales.
Server emulators really only re-create about a 1/10th of the game though.
I've found none of the spells work properly, none of the encounters work properly (unless you count a boss who either stands there or just auto-attacks working), npc's are missing etc.
I feel bad for someone who judges the game based on a "private server", however one of the things I discovered setting up my own emulator was just how much game state is controlled by the server - quite a bit it turns out.
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Having worked at several large software companies I've actually seen linux builds of apps come and go internally that were never released to the public (products you've heard of too!).
The reason they were never launched is they were either deemed unsupportable or too expensive to test - and even those these apps were portable, there were plenty of platform specific issues that really would make triaging it across 4 platforms (linux, solaris, windows and mac) a serious effort.
Maybe games are easier to test?
If you're abused at your job, go and find another one. This can be done in any field. If you see that your field is always being abused, go to another field. There is no shortage of jobs in the US. I drive around times and it seems like everybody is hiring from small stores that anyone can do, forklift operators at big box stores, drivers for all types of vehicles, cashiers, desk and management jobs and even medical and IT. People are afraid of change and seem to want to hang around in an "abusive" environment too long and then they complain. I'm a young IT guy without any type of meaningful degree and I haven't been out of a job for more than 30 days. Sure, sometimes I have to move to a better place but I'm open to do that.
Is it wrong to want to have semi permanent employment? The hear I had like 4 w2's I thought this can't keep happening.
That doesn't mean anything. I think it was the leader of the teamsters who once said - "want to get rid of unions? Have good management!"
From what I understand Honda/Toyota are pretty companies to work for because they respect their employees.
My father was in a union as a teacher.
They never had a seniority system, although they did have tenure, but it was largely based if you had a masters degree in your field (or a phd).
The only requirements were teaching certificate from a state university. That wasn't a union requirement however - it was a state accreditation requirement.
Teachers ran the union so if there was an abuse or a problem - it was the teachers fault - not some scary union in the cloud.
People complain about union abuses but for get for every union abuse I could easily come up with 10 management abuses - many of which are listed in the article description. 90% of the reason I have to carry around a smartphone is because of poor planning by our company or a client. 90% of the reason I have to work 60 hour weeks is because of poor staffing levels at our company. I should have a say in this.
I work in technical support as a Tier 3 at a software every single person reading this has heard of. They are offshoring support left and right - why? Not because of unions - there aren't any in this company (as far as I know). Its because of the ever rising need to lower the costs of support.
I don't know if its because they want to drive profits up, or because it really is costing more and more and more to support our products - who knows.
If we had a union however we would certainly have a lot more insight into the process because we'd have a representative at these meetings.
A lot of people lose sight of the fact that in America we work in a at will employment system. You're manager can fire you for anything he/she likes (valid or not) and you can't do a thing about it.
This is a load really - most companies/government pensions are self supporting because they are based off smart investments and employee investments - at least thats the plan...
Its not like someone pays into it and it just sits there.
In fact from what I understand pension system at GM/Ford is in such dire trouble because of over-funded CEO pensions.
People complain that its so expensive to manufacture anything in the US, but often forget that the CEO's that make 900 times what the average worker makes has nothing to do with profitability. They don't have this problem nearly as severely in any other country.
I had one of the first ABIT soft-set motherboards (I put an AMD K6-200 in there to give you the vintage) - to be honest it was a piece of crap. It frequently forgot the settings and forced you to go into the bios.
I got it replaced because it died one day, and the one that replaced it wasn't much better.
Sadly - last abit board I ever had.
You say this, but after spending 8 years doing customer service (mostly tech support) there really are people out there like this.
Have you seen some of these mmo's?
I used to do accounting application support and some games have business rules that are as complex as the games I've played.
In my experience every mmo that has challenged WoW's superiority has fallen flat on its face because a good majority of mmo's lack polish.
WoW isn't perfect either, but its easy to learn, controls are responsive and work (good example - don't ever ever ever jump in the water on lineage 2) and it has a broad spectrum of activities to do for most players.
People said the same thing about lotro - from what a few players in my WoW guild who left (and came back) said it was really awesome up to level 30 or so then kind of started to fall apart as content got more sparse and buggy (disclaimer - I've never played lorto, but I had more than one person describe the game this way to me).
We had a few people leave for Conan and come back as well - who felt the same way - great in the first few levels, but started to fall apart in the end game - and that the client was horribly buggy and would crash after a few hours play. (again - haven't played Conan, but at least two different people described the game this way to me).
It would be cool if War was better than WoW - because I'm always looking for something more interesting, but in 4 years I've seen a lot of challengers and "WoW killers" come and go and a lot of players leave and come back.
I'd say these days the entry point for a successful mmo is pretty high because of EQ and WoW really. I get the impression a lot of game studios use the same formulas for crap games we've been given in the past on mmorpg's and are not willing to stick it out for the long run and spend the initial money on the game to make it as good as or better than WoW on day one.
And to me WoW is more about the community. If my RL friends quit playing I would too. If you play a MMO for any other reason you're probably wasting your time because you're not going to get any satisfaction from the experience.
Plus never mind that for that much money you could have a seriously kick arse PC with the most memory, cpu cores, and video cards one could cram into a computer and have money left over for another 10 years of bleeding edge upgrades.
Yeah my OEM Intel motherboard uses EFI too:
http://www.intel.com/design/motherbd/bx2/bx2_industryspecs.htm if you're curious.
While growing up - I do remember the C64/Apple ][ etc being called PC's in all the relevant trade magazines.
Although I'd agree that these days PC usually denotes an IBM compatible - which Apple is.
Why not use two-way radios?
I dunno - I'm 32 and I've never bought any gold, but I've managed to buy 4 epic mounts/training on 4 characters (thats 20,000~g for those who don't play - and one of the main reasons I'm sure people buy).
Its the 12 year olds who always ask me how I make so much money - its really simple actually (and I don't grind for the most part) - do quests and don't spend it on crap. You'll never make money selling stuff in WoW - typically the materials for making anything are worth more than the items usually sell for.
There are grinds in WoW but most of them can be combined with quests, dungeons and raids - which I enjoy doing.
What do you know? http://www.northwind-inc.com/
I know I'll be modded down to -infinity on this, but seriously - my Mac G5 has kernel panicked more than my Windows XP box (keep in mind my G5 has done this maybe twice last year?)
Woot!
I do, but then I'd feel like a crack dealer or something. Honestly - unless you are really into this, you can't get much out of it.
There are no assholes in WoW?
No need to swap republican/democrat. There's been at least one study done that shows that democratic presidents are more fiscally responsible. I think this editorial comic actually sums it up quite nicely (08/01/08)
http://www.cagle.com/politicalcartoons/pccartoons/archives/greenberg.asp?Action=GetImage
Its not really a thrill, I just forget usually.
That said my Nokia n95 has a battery life of at least 4 days
I've never worked in game development, but I know at other software companies I worked for anything that went out the door (no matter how small - whether it was paid for or not) to the consuming public had to have gone through a full QA cycle which took weeks - especially for apps that were available in more than one language.
The reason for this is simple - if its crap (even if its free) you lose goodwill with the customer. For paid for applications doubly so because you may lose money on sales.
Not outsourced btw - those Indian software engineers actually work for Adobe.
Oh like you had no issues the first time you ever did this?
Server emulators really only re-create about a 1/10th of the game though.
I've found none of the spells work properly, none of the encounters work properly (unless you count a boss who either stands there or just auto-attacks working), npc's are missing etc.
I feel bad for someone who judges the game based on a "private server", however one of the things I discovered setting up my own emulator was just how much game state is controlled by the server - quite a bit it turns out.