You're making an argument that holds next to no water in real, business situations.
I've joked with my boss about switching the whole campus to Linux/OpenOffice to save cash. That's exactly what it is- a joke, and we both know it. Why?
We'd have to retrain an entire IT staff that knows Windows well and Linux not at all. (I have the only Linux server)
We'd have to retrain every staff and faculty member to deal with OO and other changes. You ever try to train a faculty member? We've had major issues just replacing their phones this summer.
We'd have to replace a bunch of highly specialized programs with significant customization with stuff that's nothing like what we currently have, then spend $$$ redoing the customizations. That's assuming that Linux even *has* an equivalent program. Quick question: what can we use instead of Raiser's Edge?
We'd have to deal with all of the document conversion issues. Colleges run on.DOC files. (Except for the PR guys, they rely on.PSDs. Telling them to use the GIMP instead will get you laughed at.)
We'd have to convert huge databases of info correctly between multiple systems. Screwing up the conversion could lose us our accredidation and thus our life as a school- we have to have every record for the past decade available.
Tech support $0? Don't make me laugh. HOWTOs are *not* technical support at the level we need. We need 24/7/365 on call people for our big apps because they *cannot* go down. We'd have to contract with RedHat for OS support and every other major vendor in the same way.
These costs *dwarf* what we pay for MS software. Complain all you want about organization intertia, but there's a good reason why people don't drop everything as soon as something newer comes along.
"I have to drive 40 minutes each way on Wednesdays. My kid won't SHUT UP! So I bought her a gameboy. Now she doesn't talk to me at all and it's GREAT!"
I think that is more common than anybody is willing to admit and I think THAT is what's sick, and not videogames and technology themselves.
While neither of my kids has a gameboy (neither do I) I can relate to this. I used to take my oldest to nursery school every day since it was at work. 30 minute drive and I'm not really good with mornings without caffeine like so many of us. I've got a hyperactive 4-year-old in the back seat talking a mile a minute the *entire* drive, either babbling about what he sees or asking me to tell him a new Thomas story. And another new Thomas story. And another new Thomas story. And another new Thomas story.
After a while it gets really, really draining. We give them books rather than gameboys, but it's the same idea- "Read your book and shut up for a bit, Daddy needs a break". We're in kindergarden this year, and that's only ~7 minutes away. That's easy enough to do while keeping up the patter even before my first cup of tea, but beyond that I start to lose it.
Considering how WoW is easily the most popular MMORPG on the market, if there is no lose(which I whole-heartedly agree with,) then is that what people really want? A virtual life to replace their own in which they can not possibly lose?
Well, I have a life outside of WoW. I have a job, a wife and two kids. I'm going to spend part of today in a probably nasty discussion with an outside vendor after a major fuckup this weekend. I'll go home and deal with my youngest who is having a major asthma incident right now so we're doing everything we can to keep him out of the hospital again.
I get plenty of chances to lose and lose big in the real world. Perhaps playing a game where a bad mistake only results in a few hours of lost time isn't such a horrible thing? (Even though I still feel bad when I make a mistake and cause my group to wipe)
Problem is they are all waste of time - they are virtual politics and virtual communities. And while social and community aspects might be very real, said communities cannot accomplish nothing and are essentially meaningless. Who will remember uber guild XXX from game NNN who did "that first" , "owned" server or other such BS? -Really nobody in a few years.
While I basically agree with you, this is also true for about 90% of all leisure time activities. Who's going to remember the time you eagled the 9th hole in a few years? Who's going to remember the 18lb bass you caught once? How about the last second shot in that pickup basketball game? None of those accomplishements are "meaningful" either past the time you spent with some friends having a good time. (Well, at least in basketball you got some exercise.)
People build up elaborate political structures around goof off activities- ask anyone who's organized a sports league. WoW is no different. None of it "means" anything- it's just relaxation.
One data point; I'm a WoW noob. Most MMOs have a trial period you can play for free, so for fun I tried out a bunch over a couple of months (WoW, EVE, Auto Assault, Planetside, Anarchy Online, A Tale in the Desert, EQ2.)
The only two that impressed me were EVE and WoW. EQ2 and ATITD had technical problems, Planetside and AO just didn't click at all and Auto Assault needs serious work. Given that I'm a fairly casual gamer (wife and two kids) i didn't think I had the time to spend learning the complexities of EVE only to lose everything to a bored 12-year-old waiting to gank me the instant I enter anything lower than 0.5 space, so I play on a new, PvE (carebear) WoW server. (Anvilmar)
I'm not the only noob by a long shot on Anvilmar- you can tell from general chat that a lot of folks have never played before. The WoW package came down in price recently and there was a tax free day in Virginia, so I thought "why not?"
Given that WoW has gone from 6 to 7 million accounts in the last few months I suspect that there's still a lot of expansion left
I played a pile of demos of MMORPGs for kicks recently, and you're quite right.
EVE is a classless system- you can learn anything in the enormous tech tree. But what? I was seriously confused as a noob since I had no idea what I needed now vs. what I might need in a few months. There are prereqs for every piece of equipment, and it's hard to figure out a decent way to get what you want to do. However, when you do figure it out you can make any character you want. (And then have everything you own wasted by some 12-year-old pirate in 0.0 space.)
Compare to WoW. You start with about two spells/abilities. You get new ones every few levels, and don't even start worrying about talents until 4-5 hours in. You can fairly rapidly get a feel for a given class- it only takes a few hours to create an alt and play through all the noob quests, so you get to choose what you want to play, but if you sink 100 hours into a warrior and decide it's not what you like after all and you'd rather be a mage, you're out those 100 hours since all you can do is reroll.
Another warning. I'm a noob player on a new server (Anvilmar) and there's been a lot of complaining from the PvP folks about the expansion. Since Anvilmar is a new server, there are very few 60s, which means there is very little twinking going on- there simply aren't enough high levels to give the killer loot to the 20s-40s. We go up against a more established realm in WSG30 for example and watch similar level characters on the other side doing vastly more damage.
<grumpyoldman>Also, to all you folks desperate for a WoW fix when your server goes down, get the hell off my server. I'm tired of all your alts trampling on my lawn!</grumpyoldman>
The I-10 bridge rebuild following the Northridge earthquake: details here
This is how big government projects *should* be done. Hire a good contractor, set a minimum and then give bonuses for good performance and penalties for bad. Did the final tally cost a lot in bonuses? Yes. Was it worth it? Yes- they fixed a major problem in amazing time and did it correctly, plus they had a bunch of blue-collar folks make serious coin working triple time, all of which got plowed back into the local economy.
You can argue it wasn't on budget due to the bonuses, but it was assumed from the beginning they'd be paying out. Since the daily economic loss to LA was higher than the daily bonus for finishing early, I'd argue it was actually under budget.
My mother is 72. She plays computer games every single day, often for several hours. She likes logic/puzzle type games: I've given her a bunch of the Everett Kaser logic games which she and I both enjoy- she plays while my Dad gardens. (I highly recommend Watson's Map)
I'm 40. I picked up WoW the other day and I'm busy playing around with Combination and Hetheru, my warlock and shaman. I also really like the little logic games as a good break at work. Time is an issue since I have a job, wife and two kids, so I'm not exactly powerleveling, but that's fine.
I had one about two years ago, and have another one sitting and waiting. After the initial burst of pain (which took a trip to the hospital for Dilaudid for pain and various other things to stop the constant vomiting) I had several days where I was working on passing it. I was stoned on Percocet the entire time, to the point where I had entire conversations I no longer remember with friends.
I spent a lot of time trying to find a decent dose of Percocet where I could be coherent but still deal with the pain levels. Anything that works to distract is good: I couldn't really read since I didn't have the concentration and I'd often fall asleep on a movie. I didn't play games, but I'll give it a try next time.
Puzzle Pirates is an MMO where you can pay your fees in virtual gold. For example, a shop badge (which lets you play more puzzles) costs 5 doubloons/month. You can buy 5D for ~$1-2 real money, or you can buy doubloons with the in-game currency of pieces of eight at about 1000 POE= 1D. You can buy a ship for ~50D: real cash that's $20 or about 50,000 POE. You'd have to play a lot, but it's doable.
I've heard of others, but can't remember them right now. (EVE, maybe?)
It's easy to make fun of Ballmer, but remember that he's *exactly* right here. MS has always made the development tools cheap and available.
Many years ago, I worked in a university department that mostly ran OS/2. This was back in the days of the OS/2 Workplace Shell and NT 3.5- OS/2 was in many ways vastly more sophisticated than NT. Queue up NT4- I went by the campus bookstore one day to look at software.
Sitting on one shelf was the OS/2 dev kit. ~$500, academic price. Then you needed OS/2 with the TCP/IP stack, which was another $200. Both were in ugly boxes to boot.
The other shelf had Visual Studio C++. $99. Came with a *free*, *full* copy of NT4. Nice pretty box. I knew at that instant OS/2 was doomed. $99 is an impulse purchase, even for college students. Hey, why not give it a try? $700, not so much.
Let's move up to today. You've got this. You have Visual Studio Express: free. Student prices for VStudio are still dirt cheap, and my understanding is that the development kits for XBox aren't really all that much compared to Nintendo/Sony's.
My wife and I have a five year old. He's quite good on a computer: we set him up with a few websites (Thomas the Tank Engine, Sesame Street, etc) but he's since figured out how to use the search bar in Firefox to look for things he likes. This is mostly Thomas and animals, which has led him to Wikipedia.
Most of Wikipedia is fine, but it links to lots of places that aren't fine, at least for a five year old. I'd like to restrict him to a know whitelist, but I don't want my and my wife's accounts to have the same restrictions. (We're both tired of Thomas.) In a few years, #2 son will want to look at stuff, and we'll need to loosen the whitelist for #1.
Anyone have a solution where we can have multiple filter sets for different accounts, and where the filter set can be protected from the users?
I decided to try the game out on a PC since it seemed to be different from the piles of me-too FPSes and RTSes.
First, there was no option to invert the yaxis on the mouse, an utter killer for people used to it. Come on guys, nothing screams "bad console port" (I'm looking at you, Silent Hill) like missing this simple option.
The camera had a tendency to swing wildly at bad times, obscuring the action
Finally, the game simply didn't run. I got to a place where I had to go to the next stage. Crash. Hmm, reload. Crash. Try changing graphics/sound options. Crash.
I returned it and bought something that actually *worked*
I think you underestimate the staying power of these groups. Consider the Parents Television Council. The FTC used to get ~350 complaints a year about indecency on TV; they get a quarter of a million now, 99% of them routed by the PTC. The FTC has gone on a very public crackdown due to this.
Or consider the various religious right groups. They have been spending years and a lot of cash to slowly put their folks on school boards across the country, often with great success. This hasn't been a one shot thing: the religious right has figured out that winning big national elections is nice, but winning all the local school board/city council/state representative races is better in the long run. Yeah, they get booted out occasionally or slapped down by the courts, but they are right back at the next election.
Many of the dittoheads can't remember what Rush said yesterday, true. But an awful lot, especially the morally conservative ones, can certainly keep focus for years and decades. (And there are plenty of folks on the left who are just as focused, they're just totally disorganized.)
WebCt isn't totally gone, but BB has bought it out. Given what has happened to Prometheus and other LMSs that BB has bought, don't expect it to be around much longer.
It took half a dozen admins a few minutes to find the obvious changes on a couple of targeted pages. I'll bet there are quite a few random pages on Wikipedia right now that say the elephant population has tripled. For example, I just edited George Takai's page to mention this, and it worked fine. (Don't worry, I removed the change) Have you had to write an edit scanner that looks for every change that mentions elephants, Oregon or the rest?
Again, what happens when Rush tells his millions of listeners to make sure that all the liberal bias is gone from Wikipedia, or the ICR decides to remove every mention of evolution from every biology page? Defending the obvious target pages like W's is one thing, defending Wikipedia as a whole is another. I'm sure it can be done, but at what cost?
Umm, I'm not so sure about that. The Elephant page *was* vandalized before it was locked down. So were multiple other pages having to do with Oregon, Colbert, other elephant-related stuff and the like. Every one of these pages is going to have to be either locked or watched continuously by editors for months if not years to prevent additional vandalism. I'm sure other talk show hosts will pick up on this somewhere along the line: can you imagine the edits if Rush or Hannity tells their followers to start changing stuff?
Depending on your needs, any of these could work fine. We've been running on Dokeos for the past three years, and although our needs aren't high it's worked quite well.
I'll be interested in what they can actually do. We use Dokeos, which is headquartered out of Belgium. They don't have a lot of penetration in the US and I can't imagine the EU holding this patent valid, so I'm going to ignore this entirely. Moodle is out of Australia and the press release indicates a corresponding patent has already been issued there and it does have a lot of folks in the US using it. Sakai will be the real test, since they are totally US based.
I can't imagine this isn't a long term strike against the Open Source LMSs out there. There's no real commercial competition anymore in the field with WebCT gone. Desire2Learn, Angel and the rest are ants under the feet of the Blackboard elephant, but Sakai and Moodle are getting real traction- the real buzz at EDUCAUSE isn't at the BB booth but at Sakai talks, the college just up the road dumped BB for Moodle this summer, etc.
I had a long conversation with some BB salesdroids last year and they more or less admitted that BB's long term future isn't their LMS, it's the OneCard system. They get a cut out of every purchase made with it, and it's a real cash cow.
Since you are (usually) in control of the game, the primary emotion I get when something bad happens is anger or annoyance. I'm angry I couldn't make things work out well, and often replay a segment to prevent a character I like dying.
Still, a good story within a game can come close. The two I remember are Planetscape Torment and Fallout. PsT during the scene where each of the characters sacrifices themselves for you, admittedly a scripted movie part of the game that you can't change, but i still get torn between laughter and sadness hearing Nodrom say "Chance of success: slight"
The closest I've ever gotten during an actual game part is watching Dogmeat die in Fallout. Sad, then annoyed I didn't save him, then sad again when I realized I'd have to leave him behind simply because he *couldn't* survive at the higher levels. He's one of the very few characters in any game I've ever felt emotions for.
Just stating it happens with any Army, no matter how well disciplined. Past a certain point you can't really blame the UN for their problems when we can't fix them in our army either. The best you can do is try, and the UN does do that.
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I'm not totally clear on that but I'm sure the porn industry will lead the way.
I've joked with my boss about switching the whole campus to Linux/OpenOffice to save cash. That's exactly what it is- a joke, and we both know it. Why?
These costs *dwarf* what we pay for MS software. Complain all you want about organization intertia, but there's a good reason why people don't drop everything as soon as something newer comes along.
I do not think that word means what you think it does...
I think that is more common than anybody is willing to admit and I think THAT is what's sick, and not videogames and technology themselves.
While neither of my kids has a gameboy (neither do I) I can relate to this. I used to take my oldest to nursery school every day since it was at work. 30 minute drive and I'm not really good with mornings without caffeine like so many of us. I've got a hyperactive 4-year-old in the back seat talking a mile a minute the *entire* drive, either babbling about what he sees or asking me to tell him a new Thomas story. And another new Thomas story. And another new Thomas story. And another new Thomas story.
After a while it gets really, really draining. We give them books rather than gameboys, but it's the same idea- "Read your book and shut up for a bit, Daddy needs a break". We're in kindergarden this year, and that's only ~7 minutes away. That's easy enough to do while keeping up the patter even before my first cup of tea, but beyond that I start to lose it.
Well, I have a life outside of WoW. I have a job, a wife and two kids. I'm going to spend part of today in a probably nasty discussion with an outside vendor after a major fuckup this weekend. I'll go home and deal with my youngest who is having a major asthma incident right now so we're doing everything we can to keep him out of the hospital again.
I get plenty of chances to lose and lose big in the real world. Perhaps playing a game where a bad mistake only results in a few hours of lost time isn't such a horrible thing? (Even though I still feel bad when I make a mistake and cause my group to wipe)
Problem is they are all waste of time - they are virtual politics and virtual communities. And while social and community aspects might be very real, said communities cannot accomplish nothing and are essentially meaningless. Who will remember uber guild XXX from game NNN who did "that first" , "owned" server or other such BS? -Really nobody in a few years .
While I basically agree with you, this is also true for about 90% of all leisure time activities. Who's going to remember the time you eagled the 9th hole in a few years? Who's going to remember the 18lb bass you caught once? How about the last second shot in that pickup basketball game? None of those accomplishements are "meaningful" either past the time you spent with some friends having a good time. (Well, at least in basketball you got some exercise.)
People build up elaborate political structures around goof off activities- ask anyone who's organized a sports league. WoW is no different. None of it "means" anything- it's just relaxation.
The only two that impressed me were EVE and WoW. EQ2 and ATITD had technical problems, Planetside and AO just didn't click at all and Auto Assault needs serious work. Given that I'm a fairly casual gamer (wife and two kids) i didn't think I had the time to spend learning the complexities of EVE only to lose everything to a bored 12-year-old waiting to gank me the instant I enter anything lower than 0.5 space, so I play on a new, PvE (carebear) WoW server. (Anvilmar)
I'm not the only noob by a long shot on Anvilmar- you can tell from general chat that a lot of folks have never played before. The WoW package came down in price recently and there was a tax free day in Virginia, so I thought "why not?"
Given that WoW has gone from 6 to 7 million accounts in the last few months I suspect that there's still a lot of expansion left
EVE is a classless system- you can learn anything in the enormous tech tree. But what? I was seriously confused as a noob since I had no idea what I needed now vs. what I might need in a few months. There are prereqs for every piece of equipment, and it's hard to figure out a decent way to get what you want to do. However, when you do figure it out you can make any character you want. (And then have everything you own wasted by some 12-year-old pirate in 0.0 space.)
Compare to WoW. You start with about two spells/abilities. You get new ones every few levels, and don't even start worrying about talents until 4-5 hours in. You can fairly rapidly get a feel for a given class- it only takes a few hours to create an alt and play through all the noob quests, so you get to choose what you want to play, but if you sink 100 hours into a warrior and decide it's not what you like after all and you'd rather be a mage, you're out those 100 hours since all you can do is reroll.
<grumpyoldman>Also, to all you folks desperate for a WoW fix when your server goes down, get the hell off my server. I'm tired of all your alts trampling on my lawn!</grumpyoldman>
Free energy devices: 0
"In this house we obey the laws of thermodynamics!"
This is how big government projects *should* be done. Hire a good contractor, set a minimum and then give bonuses for good performance and penalties for bad. Did the final tally cost a lot in bonuses? Yes. Was it worth it? Yes- they fixed a major problem in amazing time and did it correctly, plus they had a bunch of blue-collar folks make serious coin working triple time, all of which got plowed back into the local economy.
You can argue it wasn't on budget due to the bonuses, but it was assumed from the beginning they'd be paying out. Since the daily economic loss to LA was higher than the daily bonus for finishing early, I'd argue it was actually under budget.
I'm 40. I picked up WoW the other day and I'm busy playing around with Combination and Hetheru, my warlock and shaman. I also really like the little logic games as a good break at work. Time is an issue since I have a job, wife and two kids, so I'm not exactly powerleveling, but that's fine.
Age doesn't have to mean that you stop gaming.
I spent a lot of time trying to find a decent dose of Percocet where I could be coherent but still deal with the pain levels. Anything that works to distract is good: I couldn't really read since I didn't have the concentration and I'd often fall asleep on a movie. I didn't play games, but I'll give it a try next time.
I've heard of others, but can't remember them right now. (EVE, maybe?)
It's easy to make fun of Ballmer, but remember that he's *exactly* right here. MS has always made the development tools cheap and available.
Many years ago, I worked in a university department that mostly ran OS/2. This was back in the days of the OS/2 Workplace Shell and NT 3.5- OS/2 was in many ways vastly more sophisticated than NT. Queue up NT4- I went by the campus bookstore one day to look at software.
Sitting on one shelf was the OS/2 dev kit. ~$500, academic price. Then you needed OS/2 with the TCP/IP stack, which was another $200. Both were in ugly boxes to boot.
The other shelf had Visual Studio C++. $99. Came with a *free*, *full* copy of NT4. Nice pretty box. I knew at that instant OS/2 was doomed. $99 is an impulse purchase, even for college students. Hey, why not give it a try? $700, not so much.
Let's move up to today. You've got this. You have Visual Studio Express: free. Student prices for VStudio are still dirt cheap, and my understanding is that the development kits for XBox aren't really all that much compared to Nintendo/Sony's.
MS gets it, or at least some small part of it.
Most of Wikipedia is fine, but it links to lots of places that aren't fine, at least for a five year old. I'd like to restrict him to a know whitelist, but I don't want my and my wife's accounts to have the same restrictions. (We're both tired of Thomas.) In a few years, #2 son will want to look at stuff, and we'll need to loosen the whitelist for #1.
Anyone have a solution where we can have multiple filter sets for different accounts, and where the filter set can be protected from the users?
First, there was no option to invert the yaxis on the mouse, an utter killer for people used to it. Come on guys, nothing screams "bad console port" (I'm looking at you, Silent Hill) like missing this simple option.
The camera had a tendency to swing wildly at bad times, obscuring the action
Finally, the game simply didn't run. I got to a place where I had to go to the next stage. Crash. Hmm, reload. Crash. Try changing graphics/sound options. Crash.
I returned it and bought something that actually *worked*
Or consider the various religious right groups. They have been spending years and a lot of cash to slowly put their folks on school boards across the country, often with great success. This hasn't been a one shot thing: the religious right has figured out that winning big national elections is nice, but winning all the local school board/city council/state representative races is better in the long run. Yeah, they get booted out occasionally or slapped down by the courts, but they are right back at the next election.
Many of the dittoheads can't remember what Rush said yesterday, true. But an awful lot, especially the morally conservative ones, can certainly keep focus for years and decades. (And there are plenty of folks on the left who are just as focused, they're just totally disorganized.)
WebCt isn't totally gone, but BB has bought it out. Given what has happened to Prometheus and other LMSs that BB has bought, don't expect it to be around much longer.
Again, what happens when Rush tells his millions of listeners to make sure that all the liberal bias is gone from Wikipedia, or the ICR decides to remove every mention of evolution from every biology page? Defending the obvious target pages like W's is one thing, defending Wikipedia as a whole is another. I'm sure it can be done, but at what cost?
If that's a joke backfiring, what's success? Having America celebrate it's 750th birthday?
Why? It's not like there aren't already a lot of highly capable Open Source LMSs out there, some are even written in Java.
Depending on your needs, any of these could work fine. We've been running on Dokeos for the past three years, and although our needs aren't high it's worked quite well.
I can't imagine this isn't a long term strike against the Open Source LMSs out there. There's no real commercial competition anymore in the field with WebCT gone. Desire2Learn, Angel and the rest are ants under the feet of the Blackboard elephant, but Sakai and Moodle are getting real traction- the real buzz at EDUCAUSE isn't at the BB booth but at Sakai talks, the college just up the road dumped BB for Moodle this summer, etc.
I had a long conversation with some BB salesdroids last year and they more or less admitted that BB's long term future isn't their LMS, it's the OneCard system. They get a cut out of every purchase made with it, and it's a real cash cow.
Still, a good story within a game can come close. The two I remember are Planetscape Torment and Fallout. PsT during the scene where each of the characters sacrifices themselves for you, admittedly a scripted movie part of the game that you can't change, but i still get torn between laughter and sadness hearing Nodrom say "Chance of success: slight"
The closest I've ever gotten during an actual game part is watching Dogmeat die in Fallout. Sad, then annoyed I didn't save him, then sad again when I realized I'd have to leave him behind simply because he *couldn't* survive at the higher levels. He's one of the very few characters in any game I've ever felt emotions for.
Just stating it happens with any Army, no matter how well disciplined. Past a certain point you can't really blame the UN for their problems when we can't fix them in our army either. The best you can do is try, and the UN does do that.