Sony recently upped the monthly cost to $14.99 so for EQ it's about $180/year per account.
My wife and I both play EQ (3 accounts total) and DAoC (2 more accounts at $12.00/month) so that's almost $70.00/month we pay. Of course, when you figure we play an average of 4 nights a week for about 4 hours each night that works out to $70.00/128 hours of entertainment or about $0.55 cents an hour. The only thing that competes with that is TV and I'd rather spend the time hitting myself in the head with a hammer than watching that much TV.
Actually they didn't *lay-off* anyone. Several of there senior devs left and a lot of EQ dev team went missing so people thought they had been laid off. According to posts on the EQ board by some of the supposedly fired workers they were still there just moved to different projects (EQ2, SW:G and the new Planes of Power expansion).
Yes online games need to constantly patch but the vast majority of the patches are either to add content or to fix bugs.
As for not having experience in runnin server centers with guaranteed up-times, I play both Dark Ages of Camelot and Everquest and the only real downtimes are usually scheduled maintenance and patch days and even those are usually around 4 hours. In the 3+ years I've been playing I've only experience 1 unexpected server crash when a drive array apparently ate itself with no warning. There have been numerous times where they took down certain sections of the games for an emergency repair but they were always able to give 10 or 15 minutes warning and were usually back within an hour.
Actually the "source code" for targetting nuclear missles or missles of any type is very much open source...It's called MATH. For ICBM's it's a fairly simple calculation, even air to air targetting isn't that complex. The only secrets are the values of the variables (thrust, mass etc.) and, for nukes, actual target cities.
And just so you understand, the government does control the source for their targetting programs, each system has custom software either written by the contractor or written in house. The source code for these programs is considered part of the deliverable from the company that gets the contract.
I did tech support for Compaq during the time they shipped 3.1 on their systems and I have no clue what you're talking about.
The only things different about the OEM installation were the addition of drivers for the specific machine the install shipped on and the 3rd party software bundle.
As far as MS having increased tech support costs, I'm not sure why they would since the only number we provided our customers was for our tech support line. If we came across a known MS issue we would refer them to MS and usually give them a knowledge base article number to provide the tech they talked to there.
Oh the one other difference was the default background and the startup screen.
I'd bet that the "Spaminator" is 100% effective at blocking spam from companies that haven't paid Earthlink for the right to fill up your mailbox. If you want an easy way to generate a list of spammers just setup an Earthlink account.
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Sony recently upped the monthly cost to $14.99 so for EQ it's about $180/year per account. My wife and I both play EQ (3 accounts total) and DAoC (2 more accounts at $12.00/month) so that's almost $70.00/month we pay. Of course, when you figure we play an average of 4 nights a week for about 4 hours each night that works out to $70.00/128 hours of entertainment or about $0.55 cents an hour. The only thing that competes with that is TV and I'd rather spend the time hitting myself in the head with a hammer than watching that much TV.
Actually they didn't *lay-off* anyone. Several of there senior devs left and a lot of EQ dev team went missing so people thought they had been laid off. According to posts on the EQ board by some of the supposedly fired workers they were still there just moved to different projects (EQ2, SW:G and the new Planes of Power expansion). Yes online games need to constantly patch but the vast majority of the patches are either to add content or to fix bugs. As for not having experience in runnin server centers with guaranteed up-times, I play both Dark Ages of Camelot and Everquest and the only real downtimes are usually scheduled maintenance and patch days and even those are usually around 4 hours. In the 3+ years I've been playing I've only experience 1 unexpected server crash when a drive array apparently ate itself with no warning. There have been numerous times where they took down certain sections of the games for an emergency repair but they were always able to give 10 or 15 minutes warning and were usually back within an hour.
Actually the "source code" for targetting nuclear missles or missles of any type is very much open source...It's called MATH. For ICBM's it's a fairly simple calculation, even air to air targetting isn't that complex. The only secrets are the values of the variables (thrust, mass etc.) and, for nukes, actual target cities.
And just so you understand, the government does control the source for their targetting programs, each system has custom software either written by the contractor or written in house. The source code for these programs is considered part of the deliverable from the company that gets the contract.
I did tech support for Compaq during the time they shipped 3.1 on their systems and I have no clue what you're talking about. The only things different about the OEM installation were the addition of drivers for the specific machine the install shipped on and the 3rd party software bundle. As far as MS having increased tech support costs, I'm not sure why they would since the only number we provided our customers was for our tech support line. If we came across a known MS issue we would refer them to MS and usually give them a knowledge base article number to provide the tech they talked to there. Oh the one other difference was the default background and the startup screen.
I'd bet that the "Spaminator" is 100% effective at blocking spam from companies that haven't paid Earthlink for the right to fill up your mailbox. If you want an easy way to generate a list of spammers just setup an Earthlink account.