"bacon was smoldering on the range, filling the house with gas-phase polycyclic aromatics-my favorite carcinogen by a long shot" - Sangamon Taylor from Neal Stephenson's "Zodiac"
Wonder what that nebula smells like?
You had me scratching my head at your first post:).
Yes, I agree that the multiple flavors of Linux ultimately hurt Linux adoption. I'm sure more than a few people have looked into switching to a Linux, only to come to a screeching halt when they can't figure out which distro to use. But by the same token, perhaps Linux wouldn't be as popular if people were not allowed to fork from it. I wonder where the balance is, and how far from it the world is currently at.
That's a really good point and one that I hadn't thought of. Thanks for sharing it.
Do you think that charging for upgrades or opening up a real world market economy would promote the game further? Or do you think that it would cause backlash and have people shun the game because the playing field is no longer balanced? Both?
Think of it as paying for XM radio subscription even though you bought the radio already.
Another factor to consider is that MMORPGs offer a LOT more entertainment for most people than an offline title would. It's not uncommon for MMORPG players to log thousands of hours on the game, when the average off the shelf $50 offline title might give you 40-80hrs of entertainment. The subscription payments give the publisher incentive to constantly enrich the MMORPG.
One of the key business challenges Next Generation faces is revenue variability. While box sales of Guild Wars have been phenomenal, it is basically a point sale with unlimited support costs flowing behind it. Next Generation plans on making money to cover the support costs by continuously releasing expansion packs and/or new games.
One challenge with this model is that the company will have consistently growing support costs while revenue will be generated in large spikes. It is very difficult to gauge how much revenue a new game will generate, and without an accurate forecast the problems of scaling backend support grow proportionately. But the real danger lies in that in only takes one poor-selling game to threaten the company's future.
If Guild Wars has 20 million players, and Next Generation is eating all those support costs without a monthly revenue stream supporting it, what happens if the next expansion pack flops? Suddenly you have another 9-12months of support costs ahead of you with no real revenue to feed it.
The whole thing reminds me of the pager companies in the 90s that offered lifetime pager service for an initial flat fee. They enjoyed explosive growth, but as soon as the market saturated, it only took one month for their support costs (satellite bandwidth in this case) to sink them. The owners of the company pocket millions and the subscribers were left out to dry. I can very easily see the same thing happening to the Guild Wars installed base.
IBM has been championing Linux for servers for quite a while now. By creating demand for Linux based servers, IBM creates a customer base that excludes the MSFT/DELL alliance and creates a base for their lucrative service contracts. Any success an open-sourced OS/2 would have would distract from this.
It's very important for companies' initiatives to be well-focused. If IBM released OS/2 to the community, they will dilute their Linux marketing campaign and further fragment the customer base they are trying to build. If OS/2 took off like mad, that would be yet another OS that IBM has to qual test it's servers with. While I have fond memories of using OS/2 and realize that many of its innovations are standard features in today's operating systems, I wouldn't want it polluting the OS base for all time to come. And apparently, neither does IBM.
According to the article itself, the "unlocked nude sex scene" only applies to the PC version of GTA. That means that any kiddies that get exposed to it must first find and download the mod off the internet, then apply it to the game. If the child can/will do this, then he is already being potentially exposed to all the pornography on the internet.
In other words, whats the difference between downloading and applying this mod and just downloading porn off the internet? Ratings are meaningless when children have unfettered access to the internet. It all comes back to parental oversight. Government is not a substitute for parenting.
I bought an Ergodex keyboard exclusively for gaming a few months ago. It took them 4 weeks to fill the order -- apparently, they haven't been able to scale large enough to distribute through the retail chains.
Being able to move the keys around is just one of many features that make the Ergodex valuable to me. You can also program complex macros and key-chords to a single keystroke on the fly. You can fine tune the timing of the individual keystrokes to the millisecond.
Right now I have my Ergodex set up for World of Warcraft. Anyone who has a few high level characters in the game know how quickly you fill up your toolbars with hotkeys and macros. The ergodex allows me to have an extra couple rows of hotkeys placed exactly where I want them. It also lets me chain precicely timed combos in a way that WoW's UI won't let you do at all.
The Ergodex will store profiles for different programs and automatically switch to that profile when you run the program as well. The buttons have great tactile feedback, and when you anchor them on the Ergodex they do not shift or wiggle one bit. You can also buy extra keys and an extra clear transparent keytray so that you can swap out entire sets.
At $150, it's not cheap. But considering that i've spent $400 for my graphics card that I'll end up replacing in 2 years, I expect to get a lot more bang for my buck with this upgrade. I wouldn't consider gaming without one now.
Emotive. You could feel the desperation when Zionites fought to hold the dock from the sentinels. The battle showed unsung heroes fighting to their death -- it was painful to watch but emotionally charging.
I read a comment about Neo not acting well in the final scene (like he was drugged). I think it was an incredible scene... Neo no longer had control. He was a vessle carrying out the Oracle's strategy -- with Trinity gone, he was dead inside. He just wanted to get it done... I don't think he had any desire to survive the battle at all.
As far as the white light destroying all the Ssmiths.. that came from the Machine. The Machine was tapped into Neo. Neo had to fight Smith because that was all he knew. The point of the fight was to lose and let Smith "infect" him. By doing so, Smith opened himself and all his copies up to the machine, which destroyed him. Again, Neo was a powerless vessle -- a tragic figure.
There are many many many things left unexplained in the final movie. I didn't come to the movie for answers, I came for entertainment. And I got it, in boatloads. Now what I'm REALLY looking forward to are all the short stories, comics, animations and websites that fans will create to answer these questions. If there were no questions, there would have been no Animatrix (which I love).
Boba Fett was a single dimensional character in the first Star Wars trilogy. Learning the history behind Mandalorian battle armor and insight into his motives came much letter in the form of a short story I read god knows where. I can't wait to see the same things for Matrix:)
The movie was just that, a movie. But the world the Matrix trilogy spawned belongs to us. And I can't wait to see what we do with it.
For starters, getting an MBA in International Business Development would help. Technology companies will remain headquartered in the US. R&D for the most part will stay here as well. Learn how to manage remote development teams while laising with domestic marketing and sales organizations. Extensive coding experience as well as business management skills are critical to this position. While a fresh graduate from India would be happy to code for $5k/year -- and do a decent job at it -- I have a hard time picturing somebody in that environment scaling across a multinational organization. Take your coding experience and turn it into the basis of a solid career in program/project management.
-Baz
Slashdot Mirror
"bacon was smoldering on the range, filling the house with gas-phase polycyclic aromatics-my favorite carcinogen by a long shot" - Sangamon Taylor from Neal Stephenson's "Zodiac" Wonder what that nebula smells like?
You had me scratching my head at your first post :).
Yes, I agree that the multiple flavors of Linux ultimately hurt Linux adoption. I'm sure more than a few people have looked into switching to a Linux, only to come to a screeching halt when they can't figure out which distro to use. But by the same token, perhaps Linux wouldn't be as popular if people were not allowed to fork from it. I wonder where the balance is, and how far from it the world is currently at.
That's a really good point and one that I hadn't thought of. Thanks for sharing it.
Do you think that charging for upgrades or opening up a real world market economy would promote the game further? Or do you think that it would cause backlash and have people shun the game because the playing field is no longer balanced? Both?
Think of it as paying for XM radio subscription even though you bought the radio already.
Another factor to consider is that MMORPGs offer a LOT more entertainment for most people than an offline title would. It's not uncommon for MMORPG players to log thousands of hours on the game, when the average off the shelf $50 offline title might give you 40-80hrs of entertainment. The subscription payments give the publisher incentive to constantly enrich the MMORPG.
One of the key business challenges Next Generation faces is revenue variability. While box sales of Guild Wars have been phenomenal, it is basically a point sale with unlimited support costs flowing behind it. Next Generation plans on making money to cover the support costs by continuously releasing expansion packs and/or new games.
One challenge with this model is that the company will have consistently growing support costs while revenue will be generated in large spikes. It is very difficult to gauge how much revenue a new game will generate, and without an accurate forecast the problems of scaling backend support grow proportionately. But the real danger lies in that in only takes one poor-selling game to threaten the company's future.
If Guild Wars has 20 million players, and Next Generation is eating all those support costs without a monthly revenue stream supporting it, what happens if the next expansion pack flops? Suddenly you have another 9-12months of support costs ahead of you with no real revenue to feed it.
The whole thing reminds me of the pager companies in the 90s that offered lifetime pager service for an initial flat fee. They enjoyed explosive growth, but as soon as the market saturated, it only took one month for their support costs (satellite bandwidth in this case) to sink them. The owners of the company pocket millions and the subscribers were left out to dry. I can very easily see the same thing happening to the Guild Wars installed base.
IBM has been championing Linux for servers for quite a while now. By creating demand for Linux based servers, IBM creates a customer base that excludes the MSFT/DELL alliance and creates a base for their lucrative service contracts. Any success an open-sourced OS/2 would have would distract from this.
It's very important for companies' initiatives to be well-focused. If IBM released OS/2 to the community, they will dilute their Linux marketing campaign and further fragment the customer base they are trying to build. If OS/2 took off like mad, that would be yet another OS that IBM has to qual test it's servers with. While I have fond memories of using OS/2 and realize that many of its innovations are standard features in today's operating systems, I wouldn't want it polluting the OS base for all time to come. And apparently, neither does IBM.
According to the article itself, the "unlocked nude sex scene" only applies to the PC version of GTA. That means that any kiddies that get exposed to it must first find and download the mod off the internet, then apply it to the game. If the child can/will do this, then he is already being potentially exposed to all the pornography on the internet. In other words, whats the difference between downloading and applying this mod and just downloading porn off the internet? Ratings are meaningless when children have unfettered access to the internet. It all comes back to parental oversight. Government is not a substitute for parenting.
I bought an Ergodex keyboard exclusively for gaming a few months ago. It took them 4 weeks to fill the order -- apparently, they haven't been able to scale large enough to distribute through the retail chains.
Being able to move the keys around is just one of many features that make the Ergodex valuable to me. You can also program complex macros and key-chords to a single keystroke on the fly. You can fine tune the timing of the individual keystrokes to the millisecond.
Right now I have my Ergodex set up for World of Warcraft. Anyone who has a few high level characters in the game know how quickly you fill up your toolbars with hotkeys and macros. The ergodex allows me to have an extra couple rows of hotkeys placed exactly where I want them. It also lets me chain precicely timed combos in a way that WoW's UI won't let you do at all.
The Ergodex will store profiles for different programs and automatically switch to that profile when you run the program as well. The buttons have great tactile feedback, and when you anchor them on the Ergodex they do not shift or wiggle one bit. You can also buy extra keys and an extra clear transparent keytray so that you can swap out entire sets.
At $150, it's not cheap. But considering that i've spent $400 for my graphics card that I'll end up replacing in 2 years, I expect to get a lot more bang for my buck with this upgrade. I wouldn't consider gaming without one now.
Emotive. You could feel the desperation when Zionites fought to hold the dock from the sentinels. The battle showed unsung heroes fighting to their death -- it was painful to watch but emotionally charging. I read a comment about Neo not acting well in the final scene (like he was drugged). I think it was an incredible scene... Neo no longer had control. He was a vessle carrying out the Oracle's strategy -- with Trinity gone, he was dead inside. He just wanted to get it done... I don't think he had any desire to survive the battle at all. As far as the white light destroying all the Ssmiths.. that came from the Machine. The Machine was tapped into Neo. Neo had to fight Smith because that was all he knew. The point of the fight was to lose and let Smith "infect" him. By doing so, Smith opened himself and all his copies up to the machine, which destroyed him. Again, Neo was a powerless vessle -- a tragic figure. There are many many many things left unexplained in the final movie. I didn't come to the movie for answers, I came for entertainment. And I got it, in boatloads. Now what I'm REALLY looking forward to are all the short stories, comics, animations and websites that fans will create to answer these questions. If there were no questions, there would have been no Animatrix (which I love). Boba Fett was a single dimensional character in the first Star Wars trilogy. Learning the history behind Mandalorian battle armor and insight into his motives came much letter in the form of a short story I read god knows where. I can't wait to see the same things for Matrix :)
The movie was just that, a movie. But the world the Matrix trilogy spawned belongs to us. And I can't wait to see what we do with it.
For starters, getting an MBA in International Business Development would help. Technology companies will remain headquartered in the US. R&D for the most part will stay here as well. Learn how to manage remote development teams while laising with domestic marketing and sales organizations. Extensive coding experience as well as business management skills are critical to this position. While a fresh graduate from India would be happy to code for $5k/year -- and do a decent job at it -- I have a hard time picturing somebody in that environment scaling across a multinational organization. Take your coding experience and turn it into the basis of a solid career in program/project management.
-Baz