The amazing thing to me is that they could figure this kind of stuff out *for sure* using simple queries on their own databases, and I suspect they are *out of their minds*.
1) Our raiding group regularly kills Nefarian -- I'd call the fight trivial -- but only half of our members have gotten to participate in that fight. So that's about 50% of a group of NON pickup high-end raiders.
2) Since they patched him, we can't kill Hakkar.
3) The changes they've made to the easier instances, such as Stratholme, appear to me to have widened the gap between folks who've reached level 60 and high-end raiders. It seems to me that the only people who can complete the 45-minute Baron runs to get Tier 0.5 gear are people with Tier 1-2 gear -- which is the same deranged logic that drives instances such as ZG and AQ20. The only people who can clear those zone don't need to.
I use Vonage and I like their service a lot -- so I decided to register for the IPO. You might like to read their prospectus -- it has things in it that you don't often see in prospectuses (i?) of companies going public such as:
"On March 1, 2004, we dismissed Amper, Politziner & Mattia P.C., as our independent registered public accounting firm previously engaged as the principal accountant to audit our financial statements. We re-engaged Amper, Politziner & Mattia P.C. on June 30, 2004, and dismissed the firm again on April 21, 2005. Amper, Politziner & Mattia P.C.'s report on our financial statements for the year ended December 31, 2003 did not contain any adverse opinion or disclaimer of opinion and was not otherwise qualified or modified as to uncertainty, audit scope or accounting principles."
I.e. they've fired and rehired their original auditors several times.
And:
"During a portion of the time that Mr. Citron (Founder, Chairman, and Chief Strategist of Vonage) was associated with Datek Securities, the SEC alleged that Datek Securities, Mr. Maschler, Mr. Citron and certain other individuals participated in an extensive fraudulent scheme involving improper use of the Nasdaq Stock Market's Small Order Execution System, or SOES."
Yup, their top guy has been involved in securities fraud (or at least accused of it). And consider just how egregious this kind of thing has to be to actually result in someone getting in actual trouble. Note that Mr. Citron was only 18 at the time and may have naively been sucked into malpractice by his associates, but still... not something you often see in a prospectus.
And then there's:
"Assumed initial public offering price per share...$17.00 Net tangible book value per share as of March 31, 2006...$(319.30)"
The total offering is for something like 30,000,000 shares, or roughly 20% of the company. So they're expecting punters to shell out $500,000,000 for 20% of a company losing money hand over fist which has 1.6 million customers.
If you compare it to Verizon (market cap $95B) that's very cheap *per customer* and absolutely lousy in every other respect. The question is, will Vonage be able to gain customers and become profitable faster than existing telcos are able to transition to VoIP.
It seems like the assumption is that there's money to be made in being "a phone company" and that all Vonage has to do is get enough customers and then one day it will be able to start gouging them enough to make a profit. Seems like a losing bet to me, so the only other question is whether greedy investors will buy up your (fundamentally) worthless Vonage stock after the IPO?
I'd suggest that there's money in providing data transmission, and that all the things you do with the data at each end (e.g. serve it, receive it (e.g. in a browser or phone), send it (e.g. from a camera or phone) will turn into or already are low margin interoperable commodities (e.g. like cameras, browsers, web servers, and phones). The artificially inflated profits afforded certain monopolies will, at best, be temporary, and I just don't see Vonage turning profits in time to pay off, especially since they don't own any key infrastructure (cell phone towers...). Meanwhile, I will continue to use my Vonage service, subsidized by credulous investors.
the simple fact that Apple Computer exists is because Apple Corps agreed to let them continue using a name which could (at the time) have been confused, on the condition that Apple Computer not get into the music business
What a load of hogwash. There was never any question of Apple's continued existence, it was a simple trademark decision. It's pretty sad Apple got any money at all ever over this exercise, since I can't see how they've been damaged by it.
1) "Apple" is an ordinary word. The Beatles can't stop folks from using it or naming companies Apple. Where I live, there's an Apple temp agency (and has been for years). I'm sure Apple Computer hires temps -- OMG lawsuit.
2) Apple started out in good faith as a computer company. Computers have turned out to touch on many fields. Any company producing versatile products would end up facing similar disputs (e.g. an electricity company). Let's suppose you produce medical instrumentation and your name is Apple Medical... you might find Apple computers running MRI software to be infringing (you'd argue that their products might be confused with yours). You'd complain and/or sue. There'd be a settlement. There's no "bad guy" here. Stuff happens.
If this weren't the Beatles' record label, most folks would just regard this as a nuisance "sues for quick bucks" B.S. story. Apple settled this already. The previous settlement -- IANAL -- actually entitles them to do pretty much anything they please (including distribute Apple branded digital music). But where's the damage? No-one buys records because they're from "Apple Music" or "Apple Corps". Heck, hardly anyone buys music based on label -- the artist is the brand. When was the last time you saw an ad for a recording that stressed it was from "Warner" or "Sony" or "EMI" and therefore great? (The exception to this might be classical music labels, such as Deutsche Gramophone).
My question would be - can Apple Corps start their internet Download Music Store and not get sued by Apple Computer? Is there a potential for mistakes in Apple iDMS and Apple iTMS?
Yes. Yes.
How is this relevant? This would be a bad faith exercise and subject to punitive damages. Apple didn't set out to hurt Apple Corps (and it really hasn't hurt Apple Corps). It didn't create a product designed to be mistaken for an existing successful product.
As the old joke goes, neither a real commercial microkernel operating system nor better development practices have been tried and found hard, they've both been found hard and left untried.
So, according to you, Macs don't have viruses/worms/trojans because nobody bothers to write them. I can see that, there's no profit in it, so why bother?
According to me, trojans are easy to write for any platform. Of course, on a Mac it's a little harder to write Trojans than under Windows because you can't do *quite* as much damage without getting root. (In Windows you can leave a machine a steaming ruin without needing root.)
If you're going to trick the user into entering his/her root password, why not simply skip a step and trick them into giving you their credit card details (or whatever)? Social engineering works cross-platform.
See art school comment. And that probably is the most likely scenerio for a Mac Worm, because (unlike home systems), networked Macs will have holes opened in the firewalls and therefore can be attacked via SMB/AFP/RPC/etc.
1) Networked macs have no ports open by default. 2) Networked Macs have their own firewalls. 3) My whole point is that most Macs are on the internet. Many of them aren't behind (separate) firewalls. Do the same thing with an unpatched PC and you won't last long.
phishing works cross-platform and is easier to do. Why trick someone into running your malicious code by entering their password when you can simply trick them into visiting bankamreica.us and enter their social security number and password?
Indeed, a Honda Civic (at $15,000) will consume 6000 gallons of gas in its 200,000 mile lifespan -- $39,000 @$4/gallon. A Prius (at $25,000 without subsidies) will consume 4500 gallons of gas -- $43,000 for the same 200,000 miles.
In general, manufacturing costs strongly reflect the costs of energy inputs -- so I suspect a Prius consumes more gasoline during manufacturing than a Civic. That, or the guys who build them drive bigger cars.
Don't forget the USA's highly subsidized high fructose corn syrup industry. This stuff is used in everything from salad dressing to soft drink, has far worse effects than the equivalent amount of sugar, and no positive qualities at all (it's only cheaper than sugar because of massive corn subsidies). What's worse, many "low fat" products replace fat with salt and corn syrup.
Apple should spend more time making it easier to switch -- like including a "start menu" equivalent, using the defacto standard "ctrl-c & ctrl-v" type shortcut keys, better windows-style support for right-click instead of always having to use ctrl-click to get a pop-up menu, real windows-style "uninstall" functionality.
I'd like to see the Apple menu doing what it did in OS 9 and earlier (i.e. what the Start Menu and dock do).
You do realize ctrl-c and ctrl-v are copied from the Mac...? Windows started out using alt-shift-delete and alt-shift-insert or somesuch. Of course, on the Mac they're command-C and command-V. I guess it wouldn't be too hard to support ctrl-C and ctrl-V as well if your app isn't doing anything else with those keystrokes.
You do realize right-clicking works exactly the way you're asking, assuming you use a two-or-more-buttoned mouse.
And you do realize that 'real windows "uninstall"' functionality would be a significant step backwards for Mac OS X. (Uninstall cannot perfectly track dependencies and so uninstalling program X can break program Y.)
Not strictly or explicitly speaking a movie about "the internet" but it presupposes global computer networks. It's also interesting because it's clearly written by people who know enough to be very silly. (Think of the character "Bit" who only says "Yes" or "No"... or the name of the movie itself -- the name of a standard MS BASIC debugging command.)
And then there's Terminator -- who if you recall was running 6502 assembler (it's visible in the scene where he's deciding what to say to the guy banging on his hotel room door).
Apple currently has thousands of people working in offices scattered around Cupertino. When folks on related projects need to meet they have to be bused around the place. Apple can justify its new campus simply in terms of consolidating existing operations.
Probably the best thing about Apple and Adobe merging might be the impact on XCode / Cocoa. The more folks inside Apple there are lobbying for Apple's development platform to serve real needs (including cross-platform development) the better those tools will get.
The downside will be the impact on clearly overlapping product lines... E.g. what happens with respect to Motion / After Effects / Shake / Final Cut Pro etc.? Still, if discreet can get by with so many mutually redundant products, I guess Apple can.
Apple offers every Adobe shareholder X shares of the combined stock in Apple/Adobe, where X reflects a favorable valuation of Adobe stock relative to Apple. Cost -- basically zero (printing new share certificates as someone said).
Aperture 1.1 looks like it addresses all the major issues with 1.0 and is starting to collect far more positive reviews.
My guess is that a few contractors have been let go and other folks moved to other projects after helping with the product release and bug fixes. Aperture isn't going to be abandoned (go play with Lightroom Beta 2 if you want to see a crippled product).
Unless you just want to tinker with things, just get a TiVo and have something that works. Sure, it's closed, proprietary, evil capitalist pig dog BUT...
If you use a TiVo for a year the component cost of a given custom PVR will drop by the amount you put into the TiVo. You can then decide to stick with TiVo or switch to a custom PVR. Lather, rinse, repeat.
The sad thing is that good MMORPGs are still (with this flaw) better games than most single player games -- in part because you're playing with other people, and in part because the folks producing them appear to have more creativity and talent than the folks generating fps tunnel of fun and groundhog day mission games.
So -- are MMORPGs perfect? Far from it, and here's one thing fundamentally wrong with them.
Does this mean that I'd rather watch paint dry or play Quake 7? No.
Your response is about as reasonable as telling someone who complains about injustice in the electoral system "well if you don't like it here, move to Cuba".
Call me anal, but it's bad enough when I pissed half my college years away playing Diablo II online for free. I don't see the point in having to pay for the privilege to waste my time.
Actually I think it's a good thing to charge a monthly fee, that way even folks who don't understand the concept of opportunity cost won't be blissfully unaware that playing games all day is never "free". The really annoying thing for me is that most of these games require you to, basically, work (in the game).
E.g. in WoW at some point you'll want to collect a set of gear from Molten Core. Each class has eight pieces of "tier 1 set gear" which can be obtained from Molten Core (we'll ignore the other stuff you can get there). It takes 40 people to clear Molten Core, you can only do it once per week, and you get about 20 pieces of set gear from one trip. Do the math and, optimistically, you'll need to do Molten Core 16 times to equip each of those forty people (of course, it will actually take much longer -- say six months -- to get most of the people most of their pieces).
Now, every visit to Molten Core -- once you figure out how to do it -- is pretty much the same. So after your first few nightmarish two-three evening death-a-thons, you'll eventually be able to "do" MC (as it's known) in maybe three hours. So we're talking at absolute minimum 48h solid gameplay, much of it mindless repetition. (You know how to do everything, you're just waiting for your helmet to "drop".)
But that's not all. At least until you all become very well equipped, Molten Core takes a toll on your equipment and consumables (e.g. potions and ammunition). To stock up on victuals and repair your gear, you'll probably need to spend another couple of hours prep time for each "adventure". So, we're now talking, at absolute minimum, 80h of solid grind to get a complete suit of "tier 1" gear. Again, all of this is mindless repetition.
Now Molten Core is just one instance. I don't know how long it took to assemble it, but I suspect it would take a team of developers fewer person hours to put something like Molten Core together than it will take a typical guild to finish collecting set armor. Of course, they had to attend meetings and so on, so multiply that by ten, but what you're looking at is the fundamental flaw in all current MMORPGs... they leverage a small amount of content with a gigantic dollop of tedium to keep people online as long as possible, paying their monthly fees and ruining their expensive college educations.
Frankly, I don't know why somebody doesn't build something along the lines of a 68040 powerbook with 2GB of RAM, no hard disk, running Mac OS 8.6 and a modern battery. You'd get a perfectly fine laptop for most of the things you really need* and ridiculously good battery life.
* The big exceptions would be a solid modern browser and QuickTime. I don't see why Apple couldn't address both if it wanted to release such a product (fat chance!)
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The amazing thing to me is that they could figure this kind of stuff out *for sure* using simple queries on their own databases, and I suspect they are *out of their minds*.
1) Our raiding group regularly kills Nefarian -- I'd call the fight trivial -- but only half of our members have gotten to participate in that fight. So that's about 50% of a group of NON pickup high-end raiders.
2) Since they patched him, we can't kill Hakkar.
3) The changes they've made to the easier instances, such as Stratholme, appear to me to have widened the gap between folks who've reached level 60 and high-end raiders. It seems to me that the only people who can complete the 45-minute Baron runs to get Tier 0.5 gear are people with Tier 1-2 gear -- which is the same deranged logic that drives instances such as ZG and AQ20. The only people who can clear those zone don't need to.
Yes there's downtime. The Draenei will get their own login servers and be able to log in at 11am on patch day.
I use Vonage and I like their service a lot -- so I decided to register for the IPO. You might like to read their prospectus -- it has things in it that you don't often see in prospectuses (i?) of companies going public such as:
"On March 1, 2004, we dismissed Amper, Politziner & Mattia P.C., as our independent registered public accounting firm previously engaged as the principal accountant to audit our financial statements. We re-engaged Amper, Politziner & Mattia P.C. on June 30, 2004, and dismissed the firm again on April 21, 2005. Amper, Politziner & Mattia P.C.'s report on our financial statements for the year ended December 31, 2003 did not contain any adverse opinion or disclaimer of opinion and was not otherwise qualified or modified as to uncertainty, audit scope or accounting principles."
I.e. they've fired and rehired their original auditors several times.
And:
"During a portion of the time that Mr. Citron (Founder, Chairman, and Chief Strategist of Vonage) was associated with Datek Securities, the SEC alleged that Datek Securities, Mr. Maschler, Mr. Citron and certain other individuals participated in an extensive fraudulent scheme involving improper use of the Nasdaq Stock Market's Small Order Execution System, or SOES."
Yup, their top guy has been involved in securities fraud (or at least accused of it). And consider just how egregious this kind of thing has to be to actually result in someone getting in actual trouble. Note that Mr. Citron was only 18 at the time and may have naively been sucked into malpractice by his associates, but still... not something you often see in a prospectus.
And then there's:
"Assumed initial public offering price per share...$17.00
Net tangible book value per share as of March 31, 2006...$(319.30)"
The total offering is for something like 30,000,000 shares, or roughly 20% of the company. So they're expecting punters to shell out $500,000,000 for 20% of a company losing money hand over fist which has 1.6 million customers.
If you compare it to Verizon (market cap $95B) that's very cheap *per customer* and absolutely lousy in every other respect. The question is, will Vonage be able to gain customers and become profitable faster than existing telcos are able to transition to VoIP.
It seems like the assumption is that there's money to be made in being "a phone company" and that all Vonage has to do is get enough customers and then one day it will be able to start gouging them enough to make a profit. Seems like a losing bet to me, so the only other question is whether greedy investors will buy up your (fundamentally) worthless Vonage stock after the IPO?
I'd suggest that there's money in providing data transmission, and that all the things you do with the data at each end (e.g. serve it, receive it (e.g. in a browser or phone), send it (e.g. from a camera or phone) will turn into or already are low margin interoperable commodities (e.g. like cameras, browsers, web servers, and phones). The artificially inflated profits afforded certain monopolies will, at best, be temporary, and I just don't see Vonage turning profits in time to pay off, especially since they don't own any key infrastructure (cell phone towers...). Meanwhile, I will continue to use my Vonage service, subsidized by credulous investors.
the simple fact that Apple Computer exists is because Apple Corps agreed to let them continue using a name which could (at the time) have been confused, on the condition that Apple Computer not get into the music business
What a load of hogwash. There was never any question of Apple's continued existence, it was a simple trademark decision. It's pretty sad Apple got any money at all ever over this exercise, since I can't see how they've been damaged by it.
1) "Apple" is an ordinary word. The Beatles can't stop folks from using it or naming companies Apple. Where I live, there's an Apple temp agency (and has been for years). I'm sure Apple Computer hires temps -- OMG lawsuit.
2) Apple started out in good faith as a computer company. Computers have turned out to touch on many fields. Any company producing versatile products would end up facing similar disputs (e.g. an electricity company). Let's suppose you produce medical instrumentation and your name is Apple Medical... you might find Apple computers running MRI software to be infringing (you'd argue that their products might be confused with yours). You'd complain and/or sue. There'd be a settlement. There's no "bad guy" here. Stuff happens.
If this weren't the Beatles' record label, most folks would just regard this as a nuisance "sues for quick bucks" B.S. story. Apple settled this already. The previous settlement -- IANAL -- actually entitles them to do pretty much anything they please (including distribute Apple branded digital music). But where's the damage? No-one buys records because they're from "Apple Music" or "Apple Corps". Heck, hardly anyone buys music based on label -- the artist is the brand. When was the last time you saw an ad for a recording that stressed it was from "Warner" or "Sony" or "EMI" and therefore great? (The exception to this might be classical music labels, such as Deutsche Gramophone).
My question would be - can Apple Corps start their internet Download Music Store and not get sued by Apple Computer? Is there a potential for mistakes in Apple iDMS and Apple iTMS?
Yes. Yes.
How is this relevant? This would be a bad faith exercise and subject to punitive damages. Apple didn't set out to hurt Apple Corps (and it really hasn't hurt Apple Corps). It didn't create a product designed to be mistaken for an existing successful product.
As the old joke goes, neither a real commercial microkernel operating system nor better development practices have been tried and found hard, they've both been found hard and left untried.
So, according to you, Macs don't have viruses/worms/trojans because nobody bothers to write them. I can see that, there's no profit in it, so why bother?
According to me, trojans are easy to write for any platform. Of course, on a Mac it's a little harder to write Trojans than under Windows because you can't do *quite* as much damage without getting root. (In Windows you can leave a machine a steaming ruin without needing root.)
If you're going to trick the user into entering his/her root password, why not simply skip a step and trick them into giving you their credit card details (or whatever)? Social engineering works cross-platform.
See art school comment. And that probably is the most likely scenerio for a Mac Worm, because (unlike home systems), networked Macs will have holes opened in the firewalls and therefore can be attacked via SMB/AFP/RPC/etc.
1) Networked macs have no ports open by default. 2) Networked Macs have their own firewalls. 3) My whole point is that most Macs are on the internet. Many of them aren't behind (separate) firewalls. Do the same thing with an unpatched PC and you won't last long.
phishing works cross-platform and is easier to do. Why trick someone into running your malicious code by entering their password when you can simply trick them into visiting bankamreica.us and enter their social security number and password?
Excellent point. The only viruses my Mac anti-virus software has detected in the last five years were MS Office viruses.
Also note: Mac OS 9 had quite a few viruses and also a pretty lousy market share. Apparently, architecture and not popularity do count.
Indeed, a Honda Civic (at $15,000) will consume 6000 gallons of gas in its 200,000 mile lifespan -- $39,000 @$4/gallon. A Prius (at $25,000 without subsidies) will consume 4500 gallons of gas -- $43,000 for the same 200,000 miles.
In general, manufacturing costs strongly reflect the costs of energy inputs -- so I suspect a Prius consumes more gasoline during manufacturing than a Civic. That, or the guys who build them drive bigger cars.
Don't forget the USA's highly subsidized high fructose corn syrup industry. This stuff is used in everything from salad dressing to soft drink, has far worse effects than the equivalent amount of sugar, and no positive qualities at all (it's only cheaper than sugar because of massive corn subsidies). What's worse, many "low fat" products replace fat with salt and corn syrup.
Apple should spend more time making it easier to switch -- like including a "start menu" equivalent, using the defacto standard "ctrl-c & ctrl-v" type shortcut keys, better windows-style support for right-click instead of always having to use ctrl-click to get a pop-up menu, real windows-style "uninstall" functionality.
I'd like to see the Apple menu doing what it did in OS 9 and earlier (i.e. what the Start Menu and dock do).
You do realize ctrl-c and ctrl-v are copied from the Mac...? Windows started out using alt-shift-delete and alt-shift-insert or somesuch. Of course, on the Mac they're command-C and command-V. I guess it wouldn't be too hard to support ctrl-C and ctrl-V as well if your app isn't doing anything else with those keystrokes.
You do realize right-clicking works exactly the way you're asking, assuming you use a two-or-more-buttoned mouse.
And you do realize that 'real windows "uninstall"' functionality would be a significant step backwards for Mac OS X. (Uninstall cannot perfectly track dependencies and so uninstalling program X can break program Y.)
Insightful?!
There's been many Mac "viruses" over the last 5 years, they just don't spread very fast or very far, probably due to a dispersed userbase.
There have? Name one.
Unless you can find a situation where a virus could easly jump from one Mac to hundreds of others, it will likely remain that way.
Imagine if someone hooked a Mac up to a network accessible by hundreds of others Macs!
Note I have "virues" in quotes because like most Windows "virues" they are acutally stupid trojans along the lines of "HAY! RUN THIS!".
So you have "virues" (sic) in quotes because you mean Trojans. There haven't even been many Mac trojans in the last five years (maybe three).
The Gartner group are just a tad (to say the least) biased against Micro$oft.
Since when? Can you cite any evidence?
Not strictly or explicitly speaking a movie about "the internet" but it presupposes global computer networks. It's also interesting because it's clearly written by people who know enough to be very silly. (Think of the character "Bit" who only says "Yes" or "No" ... or the name of the movie itself -- the name of a standard MS BASIC debugging command.)
And then there's Terminator -- who if you recall was running 6502 assembler (it's visible in the scene where he's deciding what to say to the guy banging on his hotel room door).
Wouldn't it be more fun to learn how a real WWII plane handled and what all the instruments did and get closer to the real experience?
Not for the XBox 360's target audience.
...but Google seems to have been oddly quiet on that front for the many years prior to IE7 that Firefox has made this feature available.
Many years?
Apple currently has thousands of people working in offices scattered around Cupertino. When folks on related projects need to meet they have to be bused around the place. Apple can justify its new campus simply in terms of consolidating existing operations.
Probably the best thing about Apple and Adobe merging might be the impact on XCode / Cocoa. The more folks inside Apple there are lobbying for Apple's development platform to serve real needs (including cross-platform development) the better those tools will get.
The downside will be the impact on clearly overlapping product lines... E.g. what happens with respect to Motion / After Effects / Shake / Final Cut Pro etc.? Still, if discreet can get by with so many mutually redundant products, I guess Apple can.
Don't hold your breath.
Apple offers every Adobe shareholder X shares of the combined stock in Apple/Adobe, where X reflects a favorable valuation of Adobe stock relative to Apple. Cost -- basically zero (printing new share certificates as someone said).
Aperture 1.1 looks like it addresses all the major issues with 1.0 and is starting to collect far more positive reviews.
My guess is that a few contractors have been let go and other folks moved to other projects after helping with the product release and bug fixes. Aperture isn't going to be abandoned (go play with Lightroom Beta 2 if you want to see a crippled product).
A PDA has a lousy screen, no keyboard, and dinky software. I can run FrameMaker, Photoshop 5, and HyperCard on the product I'm describing.
Incidentally, I have no idea why my original post was moderated "troll" -- offtopic, maybe. But troll?
Unless you just want to tinker with things, just get a TiVo and have something that works. Sure, it's closed, proprietary, evil capitalist pig dog BUT...
If you use a TiVo for a year the component cost of a given custom PVR will drop by the amount you put into the TiVo. You can then decide to stick with TiVo or switch to a custom PVR. Lather, rinse, repeat.
The sad thing is that good MMORPGs are still (with this flaw) better games than most single player games -- in part because you're playing with other people, and in part because the folks producing them appear to have more creativity and talent than the folks generating fps tunnel of fun and groundhog day mission games.
So -- are MMORPGs perfect? Far from it, and here's one thing fundamentally wrong with them.
Does this mean that I'd rather watch paint dry or play Quake 7? No.
Your response is about as reasonable as telling someone who complains about injustice in the electoral system "well if you don't like it here, move to Cuba".
You're right of course (although a guild which can do MC in less than 3h doesn't need to).
I've really only listed out the very tip of the iceberg in terms of the insane tedium that WoW requires.
Call me anal, but it's bad enough when I pissed half my college years away playing Diablo II online for free. I don't see the point in having to pay for the privilege to waste my time.
... they leverage a small amount of content with a gigantic dollop of tedium to keep people online as long as possible, paying their monthly fees and ruining their expensive college educations.
Actually I think it's a good thing to charge a monthly fee, that way even folks who don't understand the concept of opportunity cost won't be blissfully unaware that playing games all day is never "free". The really annoying thing for me is that most of these games require you to, basically, work (in the game).
E.g. in WoW at some point you'll want to collect a set of gear from Molten Core. Each class has eight pieces of "tier 1 set gear" which can be obtained from Molten Core (we'll ignore the other stuff you can get there). It takes 40 people to clear Molten Core, you can only do it once per week, and you get about 20 pieces of set gear from one trip. Do the math and, optimistically, you'll need to do Molten Core 16 times to equip each of those forty people (of course, it will actually take much longer -- say six months -- to get most of the people most of their pieces).
Now, every visit to Molten Core -- once you figure out how to do it -- is pretty much the same. So after your first few nightmarish two-three evening death-a-thons, you'll eventually be able to "do" MC (as it's known) in maybe three hours. So we're talking at absolute minimum 48h solid gameplay, much of it mindless repetition. (You know how to do everything, you're just waiting for your helmet to "drop".)
But that's not all. At least until you all become very well equipped, Molten Core takes a toll on your equipment and consumables (e.g. potions and ammunition). To stock up on victuals and repair your gear, you'll probably need to spend another couple of hours prep time for each "adventure". So, we're now talking, at absolute minimum, 80h of solid grind to get a complete suit of "tier 1" gear. Again, all of this is mindless repetition.
Now Molten Core is just one instance. I don't know how long it took to assemble it, but I suspect it would take a team of developers fewer person hours to put something like Molten Core together than it will take a typical guild to finish collecting set armor. Of course, they had to attend meetings and so on, so multiply that by ten, but what you're looking at is the fundamental flaw in all current MMORPGs
Frankly, I don't know why somebody doesn't build something along the lines of a 68040 powerbook with 2GB of RAM, no hard disk, running Mac OS 8.6 and a modern battery. You'd get a perfectly fine laptop for most of the things you really need* and ridiculously good battery life.
* The big exceptions would be a solid modern browser and QuickTime. I don't see why Apple couldn't address both if it wanted to release such a product (fat chance!)