This has nothing to do with fantasy. It has everything to do with the fact that, so far, every science-fiction themed MMO has outright sucked or, at best, been mediocre. So far, there has not been a stand-out sci-fi equivilent to World of Warcraft. SWG should have been that game, but LucasArts chose the wrong company to develop it.
A science-fiction themed MMO can be successful if:
* It isn't just a failed fantasy MMO with updated graphics.
* It is accessible and playable by non-hardcore MMO addicts (single biggest factor in WoW's success).
* It is essentially fun to play and not a grind (a concept that appears to be completely alien to most MMO designers until WoW).
* It uses the primary elements that make science fiction in general appealing as its main focus and theme (space, aliens, blasters, etc.) in the same way that successful fantasy use traditional fantasy themes as their main focus (magic, monsters, dugneons, treasure, etc.). See SWG at release for an example of what not to do.
It's possible for software to achieve higher than level 1, but you have to presume a standard hardware platform to run it on. They probably just picked a machine that met level 2 physical requirements and ran it through the process using it, so technically, it probably isn't certified unless it is running on that particular machine. This is pretty common.
Because the elements that comprise Ajax are all included in the typical browser without adding a plug-in. What's more, functionality similar to what XmlHttpRequest provides is currently making its way into the DOM standard.
If you stick to the standards and forego trying to maintain compatibility with very old browsers, you can write some pretty clean and functional apps with Javascript these days - and you can reasonably expect to run them on a variety of operating systems and platforms without the need for third-party add-ons. It's just a matter of testing - which is basically the same situation you're in if you expect your Java app to run across different JVMs/OSs.
It's been done. He lives in Deep Eddy - an trendy, expensive part of Austin in a house that is appraised at $450k (which is maximum value a house can be appraised at in that neighborhood - it actually worth quite a lot more). He also had (at least at one point) a shiny new Jag in the driveway.
In addition to sales and concurrency records, Blizzard is also shattering several long-held MMORPG industry myths - including a few of SOE's favorite sacred cows:
Myth #1 - an MMORPG must include numerous "time sinks"; long periods of unrewarding time spent with little or no character progression.
In the series of interviews recently posted where Raph Koster conspicuously omits any mention of WoW, you can almost hear his exasperated sighs as he laments the lack of opportunity to socialize in newer games because the action is so fast. If you want to chat, log into a chat system. Most of the rest of us would like to spend our limited gaming hours killing things and having fun, not waiting for shuttles or running around endlessly looking for things to fight.
Myth #2 - character death in an MMORPG must be a harsh, demoralizing experience.
Go read some of the discussions on this in SOE's forums. It's pretty amazing to think that a software company can entertain a serious discussion regarding intentionally "punishing" their users/players.
Myth #3 - MMOG design must be driven by a philosophy that is inherently different than conventional games [insert lots of grandiose game theory and virtual world talk here].
Bullshit. I'm sure Raph Koster is a brilliant guy and he has a lot of interesting ideas, but at some point you need to pull your head out of the clouds and remember that above all else, a game has to be fun to play.
Myth #4 - any new MMORPG must feature a complex, impossible-to-balance skill-based (non) "class" system.
Again, bullshit. WoW's simple, single-track class system is easy to understand and is well-balanced for both PVE and PVP (the usual nerf-calling notwithstanding).
Myth #5 - the fantasy MMORPG market is "saturated".
This seems to be the industry's favorite crutch - the notion that everyone who will ever play an MMOG is already playing one and that the "long, hard grind" model (EQ, DAoC, SWG, etc.) is the only kind of game those players want. Again, bullshit. WoW is cracking the market wide open and bringing a flood of new players who have never before touched an MMOG. To be fair here though, I think this one is at least partially true, the market *is* saturated when it comes to EQ-style treadmills.
Where other MMOs have seen subscription numbers flat-line after release (SWG, DAoC) or decline (AC), expect to see WoW break new records in the future. This isn't just because of the legions of D2 players migrating over or the Warcraft name - those things help, but they're not the whole story. With WoW, their first and only entry into the market, Blizzards "gets' what the others don't: a successful game is not about lofty "game theory" or grand visions, it's simply about having fun.
The writing is on the wall: fun is in, the grind is out.
And you obviously don't read anything but Slashdot.
Don't you think that if any of these crackpot conspiracy theories had any merit that the Democrats (and thereby the media) wouldn't be all over it like wet underwear? Or are you now going suggest that they are somehow in on the conspiracy to engineer their own loss?
All of the popular "Bush stole the election" theories have been analyzed pretty thoroughly by several magazines and news organizations - none of them hold up to serious scrutiny.
Every election that Democrats lose, there is no end of whining about how the "system is broken". Individual states have issues (mostly in counties run by partisan Democrat elected officials), to be sure, but the system as a whole is just fine and works pretty well.
"Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake." --Napoleon
Don't change a thing, guys - keep up the good work. The Republican Party really appreciates it.
For years, Soviet doctors and psychiatrists attempted to medicalize dissent, institutionalizing "patients" and subjecting them to a variety of experimental drugs and other treatments designed to "cure" them of anti-communist thought. When that didn't work, they just threw them in the gulag.
I'm sure those old Soviet doctors are glad to see their work being carried on here in the US.
While it is true that current accounting standards don't provide adequate protection and transparency to shareholders with regard to the impact that stock option grants have on a company's financial performance, the proposed rule will not correct this problem and at the same time do billions of dollars worth of harm to industries that traditionally use stock options as part of their incentive and compensation plans (i.e. the tech sector). Companies with stock option plans would immediately see large decreases in their reported earnings leading institutional and other investment elsewhere at least initially. Those options that companies were forced to expense could end up being worth significantly less than the arbitrary expense value. Long term, it is pretty clear that stock options would no longer be an attractive incentive device for rank and file employees - the immediate cost to the company's bottom line is just too great.
Why now? The tech dog is only now just now starting to show signs of life again and now the government wants to give it a good swift kick?
Go to http://www.technet.org/technet/employeestockoption s/ and let your congressman know how you feel. Also check out SaveStockOptions.org for related information and background.
The kind of change the article is talking about can take years, even generations. Widespread access to the web hasn't really existed in most areas of the world but for a few years. Just as radio and television broadcasts didn't topple governments overnight, neither can we expect the web to be able to. But the web will play an important role in change. Those young people surfing pop-culture sites are really the bigger threat to totalatarianism - as they grow older, they'll start to look around and see what people in more liberal, western countries have versus what they have and realize the truth.
Dean launched an unprecedented internet-based effort to recruit and mobilize supporters around the country. It really showcased the power of the net and helped to quickly push Dean to front-runner status. But even with all that support and publicity, Dean didn't win a single primary.
Well before the "I have a scream" speech, Dean's fate was sealed in large part due to the excessive publicity and daily coverage he received as the front-runner. It seems unlikely that any candidate can hold up for months on end prior to the elections under that kind of scrutiny without taking a few missteps.
The internet can certainly be a powerful promotional tool, but too much publicity can be a bad thing.
If the presidential election is within 10% either way (and from the current polls, that would seem to be likely), we are going to see a firestorm of lawsuits. With all the experts claiming electronic voting systems are insecure, both sides are already gearing up for legal battle.
Before you all start moaning that EU is anti-American, note that the complaint was made by Sun & Real (both american companies) which resulted in this ruling.
...in that age-old American tradition - if you can't compete, litigate.
Passport was a lame idea from the very beginning. While it may make sense for Microsoft, with MSN, MSDN, Messenger, etc., no right-thinking company is going to let go of such a critical element of customer account management. Think about it, one the first things a new customer needs to do is create an account - businesses just aren't going to trust that to a third party.
Backward compatibility has been a bit of a sacred cow in Windows for too long. Much of Windows' excess complexity and security deficiencies can be directly attributed to compromises made for the sake of compatibility with old applications.
At home anyway. This bears out my experience with Intel vs. AMD. The only difference I've seen in equivilently performing CPUs is the 2x price tag on the Intel.
I receive a crap load of email, ham, spam and otherwise. My computer is reasonably fast, but nothing out of the ordinary and I've never noticed any kind of performance issue with SpamBayes. Basically, I just never see spam unless I care to take a peek into the spam folder. Otherwise, you don't know it's there.
I'll third that - SpamBayes ROCKS.
I use it at work where our IT department just wasted huge amounts of money on a back-end solution that stops less than half my spam while at the same giving me trouble with blocking legitimate messages. SpamBayes cleans up what the back-end commercial solution misses every time.
The show was cancelled because it just wasn't that great. It didn't take watching more than the first 10 minutes to know it wouldn't survive. And this had nothing to do with any evil Fox conspiracies or not being family-friendly. Had the show merit, more people would have watched it and it would have survived.
What producers and directors of science-fiction shows (apparently including Whedon) don't seem to get is that their potential audience wants big stories, large scale, photon-cannons-blazing action and adventure backed up by solid, plausible science fiction. The the first few episodes of Battlestar Galactica, a few episodes and story arcs from the various Star Treks have hit on this, but weren't able to sustain it.
Unfortunately, what we seem to get more often is dull, inane dialog, pithy humor, sexual innuendo, fist-fights and character-worship.
We see this over and over again. When a company is going own the tubes instead of refocusing their business or getting back to their core competencies, they squander their few remaining resources on lawyers in an attempt to litigate themselves back in relevance. The good news is: few succeed.
Slashdot Mirror
This has nothing to do with fantasy. It has everything to do with the fact that, so far, every science-fiction themed MMO has outright sucked or, at best, been mediocre. So far, there has not been a stand-out sci-fi equivilent to World of Warcraft. SWG should have been that game, but LucasArts chose the wrong company to develop it.
A science-fiction themed MMO can be successful if:
* It isn't just a failed fantasy MMO with updated graphics.
* It is accessible and playable by non-hardcore MMO addicts (single biggest factor in WoW's success).
* It is essentially fun to play and not a grind (a concept that appears to be completely alien to most MMO designers until WoW).
* It uses the primary elements that make science fiction in general appealing as its main focus and theme (space, aliens, blasters, etc.) in the same way that successful fantasy use traditional fantasy themes as their main focus (magic, monsters, dugneons, treasure, etc.). See SWG at release for an example of what not to do.
It's possible for software to achieve higher than level 1, but you have to presume a standard hardware platform to run it on. They probably just picked a machine that met level 2 physical requirements and ran it through the process using it, so technically, it probably isn't certified unless it is running on that particular machine. This is pretty common.
Because the elements that comprise Ajax are all included in the typical browser without adding a plug-in. What's more, functionality similar to what XmlHttpRequest provides is currently making its way into the DOM standard.
If you stick to the standards and forego trying to maintain compatibility with very old browsers, you can write some pretty clean and functional apps with Javascript these days - and you can reasonably expect to run them on a variety of operating systems and platforms without the need for third-party add-ons. It's just a matter of testing - which is basically the same situation you're in if you expect your Java app to run across different JVMs/OSs.
There's a Deep Eddy in Austin, too.
It's been done. He lives in Deep Eddy - an trendy, expensive part of Austin in a house that is appraised at $450k (which is maximum value a house can be appraised at in that neighborhood - it actually worth quite a lot more). He also had (at least at one point) a shiny new Jag in the driveway.
In addition to sales and concurrency records, Blizzard is also shattering several long-held MMORPG industry myths - including a few of SOE's favorite sacred cows:
Myth #1 - an MMORPG must include numerous "time sinks"; long periods of unrewarding time spent with little or no character progression.
In the series of interviews recently posted where Raph Koster conspicuously omits any mention of WoW, you can almost hear his exasperated sighs as he laments the lack of opportunity to socialize in newer games because the action is so fast. If you want to chat, log into a chat system. Most of the rest of us would like to spend our limited gaming hours killing things and having fun, not waiting for shuttles or running around endlessly looking for things to fight.
Myth #2 - character death in an MMORPG must be a harsh, demoralizing experience.
Go read some of the discussions on this in SOE's forums. It's pretty amazing to think that a software company can entertain a serious discussion regarding intentionally "punishing" their users/players.
Myth #3 - MMOG design must be driven by a philosophy that is inherently different than conventional games [insert lots of grandiose game theory and virtual world talk here].
Bullshit. I'm sure Raph Koster is a brilliant guy and he has a lot of interesting ideas, but at some point you need to pull your head out of the clouds and remember that above all else, a game has to be fun to play.
Myth #4 - any new MMORPG must feature a complex, impossible-to-balance skill-based (non) "class" system.
Again, bullshit. WoW's simple, single-track class system is easy to understand and is well-balanced for both PVE and PVP (the usual nerf-calling notwithstanding).
Myth #5 - the fantasy MMORPG market is "saturated".
This seems to be the industry's favorite crutch - the notion that everyone who will ever play an MMOG is already playing one and that the "long, hard grind" model (EQ, DAoC, SWG, etc.) is the only kind of game those players want. Again, bullshit. WoW is cracking the market wide open and bringing a flood of new players who have never before touched an MMOG. To be fair here though, I think this one is at least partially true, the market *is* saturated when it comes to EQ-style treadmills.
Where other MMOs have seen subscription numbers flat-line after release (SWG, DAoC) or decline (AC), expect to see WoW break new records in the future. This isn't just because of the legions of D2 players migrating over or the Warcraft name - those things help, but they're not the whole story. With WoW, their first and only entry into the market, Blizzards "gets' what the others don't: a successful game is not about lofty "game theory" or grand visions, it's simply about having fun.
The writing is on the wall: fun is in, the grind is out.
That would be Star Wars Galaxies: Jump to Lightspeed - a massive multiplayer game you pay 15 bucks a month to play alone.
And you obviously don't read anything but Slashdot.
Don't you think that if any of these crackpot conspiracy theories had any merit that the Democrats (and thereby the media) wouldn't be all over it like wet underwear? Or are you now going suggest that they are somehow in on the conspiracy to engineer their own loss?
All of the popular "Bush stole the election" theories have been analyzed pretty thoroughly by several magazines and news organizations - none of them hold up to serious scrutiny.
Amen. Mod parent up.
Every election that Democrats lose, there is no end of whining about how the "system is broken". Individual states have issues (mostly in counties run by partisan Democrat elected officials), to be sure, but the system as a whole is just fine and works pretty well.
"Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake." --Napoleon Don't change a thing, guys - keep up the good work. The Republican Party really appreciates it.
For years, Soviet doctors and psychiatrists attempted to medicalize dissent, institutionalizing "patients" and subjecting them to a variety of experimental drugs and other treatments designed to "cure" them of anti-communist thought. When that didn't work, they just threw them in the gulag.
I'm sure those old Soviet doctors are glad to see their work being carried on here in the US.
While it is true that current accounting standards don't provide adequate protection and transparency to shareholders with regard to the impact that stock option grants have on a company's financial performance, the proposed rule will not correct this problem and at the same time do billions of dollars worth of harm to industries that traditionally use stock options as part of their incentive and compensation plans (i.e. the tech sector). Companies with stock option plans would immediately see large decreases in their reported earnings leading institutional and other investment elsewhere at least initially. Those options that companies were forced to expense could end up being worth significantly less than the arbitrary expense value. Long term, it is pretty clear that stock options would no longer be an attractive incentive device for rank and file employees - the immediate cost to the company's bottom line is just too great. Why now? The tech dog is only now just now starting to show signs of life again and now the government wants to give it a good swift kick? Go to http://www.technet.org/technet/employeestockoption s/ and let your congressman know how you feel. Also check out SaveStockOptions.org for related information and background.
I'll second that. If the words of supreme court justices can't be recorded or reported, then why are they giving speeches?
The kind of change the article is talking about can take years, even generations. Widespread access to the web hasn't really existed in most areas of the world but for a few years. Just as radio and television broadcasts didn't topple governments overnight, neither can we expect the web to be able to. But the web will play an important role in change. Those young people surfing pop-culture sites are really the bigger threat to totalatarianism - as they grow older, they'll start to look around and see what people in more liberal, western countries have versus what they have and realize the truth.
Dean launched an unprecedented internet-based effort to recruit and mobilize supporters around the country. It really showcased the power of the net and helped to quickly push Dean to front-runner status. But even with all that support and publicity, Dean didn't win a single primary.
Well before the "I have a scream" speech, Dean's fate was sealed in large part due to the excessive publicity and daily coverage he received as the front-runner. It seems unlikely that any candidate can hold up for months on end prior to the elections under that kind of scrutiny without taking a few missteps.
The internet can certainly be a powerful promotional tool, but too much publicity can be a bad thing.
If the presidential election is within 10% either way (and from the current polls, that would seem to be likely), we are going to see a firestorm of lawsuits. With all the experts claiming electronic voting systems are insecure, both sides are already gearing up for legal battle.
Don Campbell at USA Today has an interesting op/ed piece on the subject.
Berzerkely has collected a large amount of information on this site. Lots of interesting data.
Before you all start moaning that EU is anti-American, note that the complaint was made by Sun & Real (both american companies) which resulted in this ruling.
...in that age-old American tradition - if you can't compete, litigate.
Passport was a lame idea from the very beginning. While it may make sense for Microsoft, with MSN, MSDN, Messenger, etc., no right-thinking company is going to let go of such a critical element of customer account management. Think about it, one the first things a new customer needs to do is create an account - businesses just aren't going to trust that to a third party.
Backward compatibility has been a bit of a sacred cow in Windows for too long. Much of Windows' excess complexity and security deficiencies can be directly attributed to compromises made for the sake of compatibility with old applications.
It sounds like you're blaming general system configuration issues on the processor.
At home anyway. This bears out my experience with Intel vs. AMD. The only difference I've seen in equivilently performing CPUs is the 2x price tag on the Intel.
????
I receive a crap load of email, ham, spam and otherwise. My computer is reasonably fast, but nothing out of the ordinary and I've never noticed any kind of performance issue with SpamBayes. Basically, I just never see spam unless I care to take a peek into the spam folder. Otherwise, you don't know it's there.
I'll third that - SpamBayes ROCKS. I use it at work where our IT department just wasted huge amounts of money on a back-end solution that stops less than half my spam while at the same giving me trouble with blocking legitimate messages. SpamBayes cleans up what the back-end commercial solution misses every time.
The show was cancelled because it just wasn't that great. It didn't take watching more than the first 10 minutes to know it wouldn't survive. And this had nothing to do with any evil Fox conspiracies or not being family-friendly. Had the show merit, more people would have watched it and it would have survived.
What producers and directors of science-fiction shows (apparently including Whedon) don't seem to get is that their potential audience wants big stories, large scale, photon-cannons-blazing action and adventure backed up by solid, plausible science fiction. The the first few episodes of Battlestar Galactica, a few episodes and story arcs from the various Star Treks have hit on this, but weren't able to sustain it.
Unfortunately, what we seem to get more often is dull, inane dialog, pithy humor, sexual innuendo, fist-fights and character-worship.
We see this over and over again. When a company is going own the tubes instead of refocusing their business or getting back to their core competencies, they squander their few remaining resources on lawyers in an attempt to litigate themselves back in relevance. The good news is: few succeed.