Everybody already is running away. Check out the market share numbers- BB is on a serious decline, with most small schools like the one I work for ditching them for almost anything else.
Sadly, we went for Angel, which has been bought out by BB so we need to do another switch. BB will be among the possible options we'll be putting out there for the committee, but given our previous miserable experience with them I'll be amazed if we pick it over either Moodle or Sakai.
The music genome project. Insert a band you like and Pandora will find other things similar, then shuffle the tunes. The listening library can be a bit small if you like obscure stuff, but it's also found me some bands I've never heard of and really enjoy. Entering the Liquid Tension Experiment into Pandora got me the Travis Larson Band for example- I'd never heard of them before, but they're a great little group.
I'm a bit confused here- yes, people have differing abilities and some folks are just better at some things than other people. But to become great at anything in RL requires practice, and usually tons of it, no matter how much innate skill you have.
I'm trying to teach myself guitar right now. I have no innate musical talent (I know this from previous experience on the viola) but I'm gradually gaining skill through practice, much of it pretty boring. I'm going to do endless chord change exercises, play the same songs hundreds of times, run the same scales over and over and so on.
I can look at someone like John Petrucci, a truly great guitarist and think "Wow- talent". True, but it's built on an enormous amount of work exactly like what I'm doing now. Myung and he had an agreement that they'd practice 6+ hours a day, every single day. I've read lots of comments from pro guitarists that add up to "Anyone can learn to shred. Start practicing scales and arpeggios and don't stop"
This is true for everything else in the world- want to learn to speak French? Speak it for hours a day. Learn to code assembler? Start programming and keep going.
You don't need absurd accuracy? Maybe not, but having watched the Natal preview video, I noticed that the girl playing the F1 racing game never moved her feet Can Natal measure foot deflections to the centimeter level? If not, it's going to fail miserably for racing games, and having a racing game with *no* foot control at all is such a massive pile of failure I can't imagine anyone actually playing it. So why doesn't the video show it?
1) Rigged demo (because they haven't coded that part to working yet) that they forgot to fully act out? -or-
2) Natal can't measure accurate foot deflection?
If Natal could do it, why isn't it in the video? If it can't, there's huge classes of games that simply won't work.
Am I the only person who enjoyed The Incredibles at first, but after thinking about the philosophies behind it got rather queasy?
The main villain in the movie is an incredibly intelligent kid, capable of dreaming up and engineering devices that give him superpowers. This isn't good enough though- you have to be *born* with the powers to be of any value. Never mind that Buddy/Syndrome was fully capable of being a superhero, and indeed wanted desperately to be one- Mr. Incredible dismisses him with disgust, and he ends up a villain because of that rejection. It reminds me a lot of the football player picking on the geeky kid because he's not as strong or handsome.
Compare that to the messages in the rest of the Pixar films such as Up or Wall-E, and somehow the film ends up more than a bit tarnished.
I think the article is being a bit harsh on the "LOTRO is handcuffed" bit. First, LOTRO wouldn't even exist without the stories. It's a fairly generic fantasy MMO- very well done, excellent graphics and sound, etc, but it's still a standard MMO at the core. Without the legions of rabid Tolkien fans, it probably would be scraping along right now rather than being a solid title. We've seen a couple of AAA MMOs die recently and there are plenty more hanging on by virtue of high sunk costs and low running expenses- don't knock a built-in core audience.
Second, what's wrong with working within a framework? I have a lot of respect for the LOTRO Storyline writers and world designers for being able to work within the niches available to them. In the original (pre-Moria) incarnation, they managed to get a well balanced set of classes *without* a mage/wizard type. They have written an parallel storyline to LOTR without stomping too hard on the original. They've created entire areas (Forochel) out of 3-sentence descriptions in the books. They even managed a way to fight a Balrog and a dragon, and they managed to make those raids complex and epic-feeling. Knowing how rare Balrogs and dragons are in the LOTR, it gives a bit of extra "that's cool" feeling as opposed to the "Insert Generic Raid Boss" you get out of WoW or Everquest.
It's kind of like writing a sonnet. Why would you ever want to hobble yourself with all those restrictions about number of lines, rhyming patterns and so on when writing a poem- why not just write free verse?
As for your last story, it rings true for both humans and dogs: I've spent a fair amount of time (mostly in the military) around wanna-be badasses as well as true badasses. The nearly universal rule I've seen? The *true* badasses don't advertise. They don't need to.
You're making a really fundamental mistake here. You're assuming that most MMO players are interested in questing, building up their characters and "living with the consequences" if they misbehave. You have a touching faith in human nature, but the reality will be rather different.
Let's look at what will actually happen with scenario #2.
Possibility A. You have a police force/army more powerful than the players. If that's the case, why aren't they defending the town? Are they just standing around, did they all sit down to lunch? The classic "I'm too busy to do X" excuse that virtually every MMO questgiver uses fails when the rampaging hordes are burning down your house. But you can't have them actually leave the city, because then you end up with:
Possibility B: The players are more powerful than the army/police. The "L33T hardcore" players will join up with the Darkspawns and proceed to grief all the players in the town, slaughter all the questgivers, etc. They will sit outside the res circle and wait for people to spawn and then gank them before they have a chance to finish loading. Barring that, they will wait until players are talking to the questgivers, harvesting resources or some other similar activity and then gank them.
Almost any MMO that allows any degree of "sandbox" play devolves into a gank fest. See Darkfall for the best example (if you can stop laughing), although it's no accident that 90% of the UO population moved to Trammel as soon as it was available. (EVE gets a slight pass here, but it has such high penalties for death that people avoid it) MMOs are full of budding sociopaths who love nothing more than to make other player's lives miserable- the restrictive MMO ruleset is designed in large part to keep these folks bottled up.
Interestingly, so does LOTRO. Two of my 3 guilds in WoW were female run, and my LOTRO kin is as well. (Or was- leadership rotates between a couple of players, some married.) This also highlights the way around the "WoW formula"- you can have virtually identical mechanics but differentiate based on story and lore. There are a lot of Tolkien nerds out there, so LOTRO has a stable (if not WoW-huge) playerbase, a lot of whom are female.
At least from my experience, the female run guilds/kins work a *lot* better. Less drama, less tension.
As a huge Iain Banks fan, his stories are pretty unfilmable without massive adaptations. The basics of the entire Culture are vastly different than our own, and without understanding that most of the plot lines don't make much sense. This is assuming you can even represent the action- Player of Games couldn't be done (how do you represent a game in a movie?) and most of the characters in Excession are 100 kilometer long starships.
Stephenson would need major rewrites to simplify as well as write actual endings, Vinge usually has too much backstory on the space opera stuff (although something like Rainbow's End might be doable) and you'd need a degree in Physics to really understand most of Forward's stuff.
One that I'd like to see tried is Mieville's stuff. You'd need some serious simplification/rewrites/backstory fill to understand New Crobuzon, but the scale is a little more human than some of the others.
The other I'd *love* to see are Stross' Laundry series. That's totally doable today- they're basically Bond films with added monsters, although the humor is so geeky I'm not sure 95% of the population would get it.
I seem to recall a few companies operating groups like this. Get a bunch of ordinary workers not associated with a project and have them look at it. If they can see it appearing in a Dilbert strip, you probably need to axe the idea.
This one clearly fails the Dilbert test. Alice would kick the managers responsible into their own hats.
You were discovered? You hurt a guard? I think you miss the entire point of the series. Discovery or using the sword for anything beyond cutting drapes to check for treasure means you are doing it wrong. If you actually kill a guard you do fail the mission- on hard mode you can't ever kill anything, and that's the only way to actually play the series.
Look, you're not cleared for CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN or GAME ANDES REDSHIFT. Please keep your opinions about what is truly important to yourself and leave the decisions on the deployment of MAGINOT BLUE STARS to those that understand the situation.
Unless you have some better plan for CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN than a ubiquitous surveillance system running SCORPION STARE, we're all going to have to live with these sorts of inconveniences. Being spied on is nowhere near as bad as the alternative.
I am still waiting for someone to replicate Starflight
I've never played Starflight, but looking at Wikipedia the Escape Velocity series seems pretty similar in concept. EV Nova has been ported to the PC- you might want to try the demo.
Why would The9 care about US customers? The majority of WoW's playerbase is in Asia anyway, and there are plenty of Asian MMORPGs with high subscriber numbers that aren't even on the US radar. They'll have plenty of customers merely by stripping out chunks of that and then they'll never have to worry about IP laws, trademarks or any of those annoying Western concepts like ideas having value.
But the area in which these problems are occurring seems to be relatively small, compared to the entire trip these ships are taking. Why wouldn't it be reasonable to drop off 10-15 marines/mercenaries at a point before they get close enough for pirates to be a threat, and pick them up on the other side. You'd think that it would be getting cheaper than just buying insurance on the cargo pretty soon.
I don't remember the laws WRT mercenaries, but you can't use US Marines except on a US flagged ship*, and very, very few ships fly a US flag. Liberian and Panamanian marines, sure. Have the shipowners go ahead and call up the country who flagged their ship and ask for protection. After all, they certainly provide the same level of defense that the US can, right?
Either that or let them pay the ransoms. On this one I don't have a lot of sympathy for the shipowners- they don't feel like paying taxes, decent wages or maintaining their ships? Don't expect the US taxpayer to bail their sorry ass out of trouble.
*I seem to recall hearing once that there's an exception for allied ships in wartime, but I'm not a naval lawyer so who really knows.
He's saying this for the headlines- he knows it's not possible. I'm a huge proponent of tech in education- it's been my career for close to 15 years, and it's simply not in the realm to do this now or in the near future.
The list of objections is just huge:
How do you do science and engineering? These are hands on fields that require a large amount of very expensive (and potentially dangerous) equipment. Claiming you can do it in a virtual lab experience is about as sane as claiming that getting good at MS Flight Simulator means you can pilot a 747. Yes, you can learn a lot with a virtual lab (and I push their use whenever appropriate), but it's simply not the same. Virtual courses work great for history or philosophy, not so much for organic chem.
How do you do student research? You don't have the facilities at home, and you can't afford the books/journals/database access to get to the data you really need. This is changing slowly with things like PLoS, but until publishing there gives you the same bennies as Nature or Science (and J. Org. Chem...) you're going to need those too for any serious work. A university library is a very different animal from the thing in your local town, they cost a fortune to run and the internet is nowhere near a substitute.
A huge amount of learning involves inter-personal interaction, either with other students or students to professors
A huge amount of getting a job after graduation involves inter-personal interaction, either with other students or students to professors. These two are critical. Businesses expect people to be able to work in teams- sitting behind a computer reading, watching some videos and taking an online test really isn't an amazingly useful skill. The networking you do in higher ed really is critical both to learning and to long term job/social life prospects, and virtual is going to be a pale substitute for a long time until Beer-Over-IP becomes possible. (He even admits BYU is going to survive simply as a place for Mormons to meet potential mates.)
Finally, he seems to conflate two totally separate things- virtual universities like U. Phoenix and online course material postings like OpenCourseWare. They aren't the same- U Phoenix is a real university, with professors, dedicated courses and the like. (It's worth noting though that their course listings are *very* sparse- outside of business courses they offer almost nothing.)
He's right that universities need to change but they already are changing, and a lot more rapidly than most people think. We already are using virtual textbooks- my seminar course (along with many others) doesn't really have a textbook, but instead a series of postings on electronic reserve. This is hardly uncommon- we've been doing it for years. We already use wikis and blogs in courses to facilitate sharing. We're working (against entrenched copyright holders) to find ways to distribute and edit/mash audio, video, print and electronic content. We already use message boards and Skype to connect language learners with each other despite distances. Yes, tech is changing education, but the school I work for has been here for 177 years, survived everything from a Confederate attack to allowing women and blacks into the ranks to the advent of high tech and I'll put quite a bit of money that it'll still be here long after anyone reading this is dead.
Einstein got it for the photoelectric effect, and it was richly deserved. It was a property that could easily be observed and tested (unlike relativity, which was a lot harder to verify) and that couldn't be explained by classical physics but could be through quantum mechanics. Winning for PE wasn't a bad thing
What was bad was that he missed out on the other *4* he should have gotten
Photoelectric effect (won)
Special relativity
General relativity
Brownian motion
Heat capacity of crystals
Fighting for scraps? Not really, when you consider those "scraps" would have been considered major successes in the pre-WoW days- 200k subscribers was thought to be a high end number. There's plenty of room in the MMO market and quite a few thriving MMOs- you just have to find a niche that's not "Generic fantasy PvE MMO" because WoW has that sewed up. Lord of the Rings Online is doing well based on the lore and built in story, WAR and AoC are contracting but there's a market for the PvP oriented games, and EVE is doing well in the "economic simulation for psychopaths" arena
I figure I can conservatively classify about 95% of all current and future sites as potentially falling into that TLD. I'm going to be rich, rich I tell you!
For people wanting a "SciFi" MMO, steampunk would seem to be ideal- most tech is still pretty slow, personal and limited (no super-AI, no ultra-fast robots, no insta-slaughter weapon systems.) One of the big problems with high-tech SF is the impersonality. Even in the modern day hand held, cheap, off the shelf weapons such as a decent sniper rifle offer one-shot kills from a kilometer away. Scale that up with "smart" high tech ammo and suddenly you can kill anything you can see with a telescope. Do a bit of work with portable grenade throwers/missile lanuchers and slaughter hundreds at a time without them even knowing the attack's coming. How boring is that?
Go a bit farther and you begin to wonder what the purpose of humans even is? I'm reminded of some of the fights between drones or epic space battles in Bank's Culture universe- they take place in millisconds. Human reaction times are simply too slow.
So why not go back to the steampunk era? Computers are big wheezing things, robots clank and hiss and a gatling gun is high tech. Something like the Thief universe would make a really nice MMO, or New Crobuzon from China Mieville's works. You get magic with both of those too so folks from both sides of the tracks could play. I'd love to play in either
Slashdot Mirror
Sadly, we went for Angel, which has been bought out by BB so we need to do another switch. BB will be among the possible options we'll be putting out there for the committee, but given our previous miserable experience with them I'll be amazed if we pick it over either Moodle or Sakai.
And No again since blank messages get rejected
The music genome project. Insert a band you like and Pandora will find other things similar, then shuffle the tunes. The listening library can be a bit small if you like obscure stuff, but it's also found me some bands I've never heard of and really enjoy. Entering the Liquid Tension Experiment into Pandora got me the Travis Larson Band for example- I'd never heard of them before, but they're a great little group.
I'm trying to teach myself guitar right now. I have no innate musical talent (I know this from previous experience on the viola) but I'm gradually gaining skill through practice, much of it pretty boring. I'm going to do endless chord change exercises, play the same songs hundreds of times, run the same scales over and over and so on.
I can look at someone like John Petrucci, a truly great guitarist and think "Wow- talent". True, but it's built on an enormous amount of work exactly like what I'm doing now. Myung and he had an agreement that they'd practice 6+ hours a day, every single day. I've read lots of comments from pro guitarists that add up to "Anyone can learn to shred. Start practicing scales and arpeggios and don't stop"
This is true for everything else in the world- want to learn to speak French? Speak it for hours a day. Learn to code assembler? Start programming and keep going.
Talent is overrated. Grind is everything.
1) Rigged demo (because they haven't coded that part to working yet) that they forgot to fully act out? -or-
2) Natal can't measure accurate foot deflection?
If Natal could do it, why isn't it in the video? If it can't, there's huge classes of games that simply won't work.
The main villain in the movie is an incredibly intelligent kid, capable of dreaming up and engineering devices that give him superpowers. This isn't good enough though- you have to be *born* with the powers to be of any value. Never mind that Buddy/Syndrome was fully capable of being a superhero, and indeed wanted desperately to be one- Mr. Incredible dismisses him with disgust, and he ends up a villain because of that rejection. It reminds me a lot of the football player picking on the geeky kid because he's not as strong or handsome.
Compare that to the messages in the rest of the Pixar films such as Up or Wall-E, and somehow the film ends up more than a bit tarnished.
Second, what's wrong with working within a framework? I have a lot of respect for the LOTRO Storyline writers and world designers for being able to work within the niches available to them. In the original (pre-Moria) incarnation, they managed to get a well balanced set of classes *without* a mage/wizard type. They have written an parallel storyline to LOTR without stomping too hard on the original. They've created entire areas (Forochel) out of 3-sentence descriptions in the books. They even managed a way to fight a Balrog and a dragon, and they managed to make those raids complex and epic-feeling. Knowing how rare Balrogs and dragons are in the LOTR, it gives a bit of extra "that's cool" feeling as opposed to the "Insert Generic Raid Boss" you get out of WoW or Everquest.
It's kind of like writing a sonnet. Why would you ever want to hobble yourself with all those restrictions about number of lines, rhyming patterns and so on when writing a poem- why not just write free verse?
As for your last story, it rings true for both humans and dogs: I've spent a fair amount of time (mostly in the military) around wanna-be badasses as well as true badasses. The nearly universal rule I've seen? The *true* badasses don't advertise. They don't need to.
Let's look at what will actually happen with scenario #2.
Possibility A. You have a police force/army more powerful than the players. If that's the case, why aren't they defending the town? Are they just standing around, did they all sit down to lunch? The classic "I'm too busy to do X" excuse that virtually every MMO questgiver uses fails when the rampaging hordes are burning down your house. But you can't have them actually leave the city, because then you end up with:
Possibility B: The players are more powerful than the army/police. The "L33T hardcore" players will join up with the Darkspawns and proceed to grief all the players in the town, slaughter all the questgivers, etc. They will sit outside the res circle and wait for people to spawn and then gank them before they have a chance to finish loading. Barring that, they will wait until players are talking to the questgivers, harvesting resources or some other similar activity and then gank them.
Almost any MMO that allows any degree of "sandbox" play devolves into a gank fest. See Darkfall for the best example (if you can stop laughing), although it's no accident that 90% of the UO population moved to Trammel as soon as it was available. (EVE gets a slight pass here, but it has such high penalties for death that people avoid it) MMOs are full of budding sociopaths who love nothing more than to make other player's lives miserable- the restrictive MMO ruleset is designed in large part to keep these folks bottled up.
At least from my experience, the female run guilds/kins work a *lot* better. Less drama, less tension.
Stephenson would need major rewrites to simplify as well as write actual endings, Vinge usually has too much backstory on the space opera stuff (although something like Rainbow's End might be doable) and you'd need a degree in Physics to really understand most of Forward's stuff.
One that I'd like to see tried is Mieville's stuff. You'd need some serious simplification/rewrites/backstory fill to understand New Crobuzon, but the scale is a little more human than some of the others.
The other I'd *love* to see are Stross' Laundry series. That's totally doable today- they're basically Bond films with added monsters, although the humor is so geeky I'm not sure 95% of the population would get it.
This one clearly fails the Dilbert test. Alice would kick the managers responsible into their own hats.
Grumman billed North American Aerospace for towing the crippled Apollo 13 command module back from the moon. Make it worth enough and I'm sure someone will be up there shortly
You were discovered? You hurt a guard? I think you miss the entire point of the series. Discovery or using the sword for anything beyond cutting drapes to check for treasure means you are doing it wrong. If you actually kill a guard you do fail the mission- on hard mode you can't ever kill anything, and that's the only way to actually play the series.
Look, you're not cleared for CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN or GAME ANDES REDSHIFT. Please keep your opinions about what is truly important to yourself and leave the decisions on the deployment of MAGINOT BLUE STARS to those that understand the situation.
Unless you have some better plan for CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN than a ubiquitous surveillance system running SCORPION STARE, we're all going to have to live with these sorts of inconveniences. Being spied on is nowhere near as bad as the alternative.
I've never played Starflight, but looking at Wikipedia the Escape Velocity series seems pretty similar in concept. EV Nova has been ported to the PC- you might want to try the demo.
Why would The9 care about US customers? The majority of WoW's playerbase is in Asia anyway, and there are plenty of Asian MMORPGs with high subscriber numbers that aren't even on the US radar. They'll have plenty of customers merely by stripping out chunks of that and then they'll never have to worry about IP laws, trademarks or any of those annoying Western concepts like ideas having value.
I don't remember the laws WRT mercenaries, but you can't use US Marines except on a US flagged ship*, and very, very few ships fly a US flag. Liberian and Panamanian marines, sure. Have the shipowners go ahead and call up the country who flagged their ship and ask for protection. After all, they certainly provide the same level of defense that the US can, right?
Either that or let them pay the ransoms. On this one I don't have a lot of sympathy for the shipowners- they don't feel like paying taxes, decent wages or maintaining their ships? Don't expect the US taxpayer to bail their sorry ass out of trouble.
*I seem to recall hearing once that there's an exception for allied ships in wartime, but I'm not a naval lawyer so who really knows.
He's saying this for the headlines- he knows it's not possible. I'm a huge proponent of tech in education- it's been my career for close to 15 years, and it's simply not in the realm to do this now or in the near future.
The list of objections is just huge:
How do you do science and engineering? These are hands on fields that require a large amount of very expensive (and potentially dangerous) equipment. Claiming you can do it in a virtual lab experience is about as sane as claiming that getting good at MS Flight Simulator means you can pilot a 747. Yes, you can learn a lot with a virtual lab (and I push their use whenever appropriate), but it's simply not the same. Virtual courses work great for history or philosophy, not so much for organic chem.
How do you do student research? You don't have the facilities at home, and you can't afford the books/journals/database access to get to the data you really need. This is changing slowly with things like PLoS, but until publishing there gives you the same bennies as Nature or Science (and J. Org. Chem...) you're going to need those too for any serious work. A university library is a very different animal from the thing in your local town, they cost a fortune to run and the internet is nowhere near a substitute.
A huge amount of learning involves inter-personal interaction, either with other students or students to professors
A huge amount of getting a job after graduation involves inter-personal interaction, either with other students or students to professors. These two are critical. Businesses expect people to be able to work in teams- sitting behind a computer reading, watching some videos and taking an online test really isn't an amazingly useful skill. The networking you do in higher ed really is critical both to learning and to long term job/social life prospects, and virtual is going to be a pale substitute for a long time until Beer-Over-IP becomes possible. (He even admits BYU is going to survive simply as a place for Mormons to meet potential mates.)
Finally, he seems to conflate two totally separate things- virtual universities like U. Phoenix and online course material postings like OpenCourseWare. They aren't the same- U Phoenix is a real university, with professors, dedicated courses and the like. (It's worth noting though that their course listings are *very* sparse- outside of business courses they offer almost nothing.)
He's right that universities need to change but they already are changing, and a lot more rapidly than most people think. We already are using virtual textbooks- my seminar course (along with many others) doesn't really have a textbook, but instead a series of postings on electronic reserve. This is hardly uncommon- we've been doing it for years. We already use wikis and blogs in courses to facilitate sharing. We're working (against entrenched copyright holders) to find ways to distribute and edit/mash audio, video, print and electronic content. We already use message boards and Skype to connect language learners with each other despite distances. Yes, tech is changing education, but the school I work for has been here for 177 years, survived everything from a Confederate attack to allowing women and blacks into the ranks to the advent of high tech and I'll put quite a bit of money that it'll still be here long after anyone reading this is dead.
What was bad was that he missed out on the other *4* he should have gotten
Photoelectric effect (won)
Special relativity
General relativity
Brownian motion
Heat capacity of crystals
Einstein really was a staggering genius.
Fighting for scraps? Not really, when you consider those "scraps" would have been considered major successes in the pre-WoW days- 200k subscribers was thought to be a high end number. There's plenty of room in the MMO market and quite a few thriving MMOs- you just have to find a niche that's not "Generic fantasy PvE MMO" because WoW has that sewed up. Lord of the Rings Online is doing well based on the lore and built in story, WAR and AoC are contracting but there's a market for the PvP oriented games, and EVE is doing well in the "economic simulation for psychopaths" arena
Right?
Oh, whoops, violent crime rates have been falling like a rock the entire time video games have been getting more realistic.
You can claim that video games are directly tied to aggressive behavior, but *real world* evidence flatly contradicts that assertion.
I figure I can conservatively classify about 95% of all current and future sites as potentially falling into that TLD. I'm going to be rich, rich I tell you!
Go a bit farther and you begin to wonder what the purpose of humans even is? I'm reminded of some of the fights between drones or epic space battles in Bank's Culture universe- they take place in millisconds. Human reaction times are simply too slow.
So why not go back to the steampunk era? Computers are big wheezing things, robots clank and hiss and a gatling gun is high tech. Something like the Thief universe would make a really nice MMO, or New Crobuzon from China Mieville's works. You get magic with both of those too so folks from both sides of the tracks could play. I'd love to play in either