I played since beta, lasted until a little while after they merged some servers, took a break for about 9 months, then came back to it. It is much improved from the original launch. There is finally some high-end content that is rather enjoyable and complex -- not all encounters are pure "burn" fights and require instead a lot of strategy, timing and cooperation by 18 to 24 players. And as mentioned above, expanding the level cap by introducing AA's will make the grind much more worthwhile than killing an entire populations of high-end mobs.
Plus, as mentioned elsewhere, the new Isle of Dawn "tutorial" will level you up to the max of the first tier for all professions -- you can leave the nexbie area after completing the last combat quest or you can stick around until you are a level 10 adventurer, 10 diplomat, 10 crafter, and maxed out on tier 1 harvesting as well. The adventuring, crafting and diplo quests are all inter-related when it comes to the story line as well. When you finish the combat questline, you get an item that grows in power as you rise in levels -- existing players have to go to ridiculous lengths to get a similar item.
Plus, the Isle has some silly, fun features that you can't get on the mainland, like Slappy's whistle.
Sure, there are still problems. Bugs still related to ones from launch, bugs introduced with the new content. And there are the eventual nerfs of favorite character abilities, but the devs do pay attention to the player base, even if they can't fix an issue immediately.
If your main interest in an MMO is PvP, then this probably isn't the game for you. Originally, there were two types of PvP servers -- Free For All and Team PvP (similar to SWGs Imps and Rebels, but based on the race of your character). I loved the team-based PvP, but when Sony merged servers the one remaning PvP server went FFA. Plus, overpowered classes have a much more dramatic effect on game play in PvP than in PvE, IMO (too many TLAs, I know;^). I wound up migrating my PvP toons over to a PvE server, got hooked up by a friend into a heavy raiding guild, and haven't looked back on my decision. The raids are far more challenging than PvP combat in this game ever was. But for those who want a taste of it, the devs introduced an FFA PvP arena on the PvE servers.
If you want to give it another look -- get the 14-day trial and give it a look. That way you won't have to spend money for a month if you decide you don't like it... just don't get too attached to your characters unless you want to convert the trial into a full account -- no transfer of toons between accounts is available.
Yes, I have a lvl 50 Tailor and apprentices in all the other professions. And you got what I said completely backwards.
As it is now, crafter loot drops where lvl 50 adventurers can go, but the stuff is soulbound. That means they cannot share it with pure crafters or sell it on the exchange. In my experience, the gear goes to high level adventurers who are low-level crafters and they may never grind their crafters high enough to use the gear. It's a waste to make these things soulbound.
And btw, my lvl 50 Tailor is wearing gear he got solely from crafting work order rewards, with some crafting society jewelry. And I make most of my money from what I craft, not from adventuring.
Crafting is just like adventuring -- if you know your class and how to play it, you'll succeed.
I took about 9 months off the game because of all the bugs at launch and the lack of end-game content, but was pretty surprised and impressed when I came back about 4 months ago.
The game is still visually stunning -- one of the best looking MMOs I've played. It's also is one of the largest, in terms of game landmass. The multiple paths you can take -- anyone can be an adventurer, crafter, diplomat and harvester -- can offer a variety of different challenges depending on your play style. Most importantly, there have been a lot of bug fixes, exploits patched, and some great end-game content added with more to come (the point of this article). Grouping was always limited to 6 people, but for the high-level content your can form up to 24 people raids. Until recently, the most challenging raid content was limited to 18 people (3 groups, with 1 for support, swapping people in/out) but a new raid dungeon has opened with 24 man raid content.
As mentioned in a post above, there are limitations to the crafting and diplomacy branches. There still are lag (as any game) and chunking (switching between land zones) issues. As more powerful mobs get introduced, some character abilities (like levitation in APW) get nerfed to make the battles harder, but leaving players with those skills disgruntled. A lot of character class balance has been addressed, but there are still some over-powered and under-powered classes... but not so much as there being a "class of the month" sort of issue. The PVP aspects of the game are dying off, but then this game was never really built for PVP. (A lot of people credit this from a change from having a few team-pvp servers to an only-FFA server, including me). A PVP arena has recently been introduced on the PVE servers for people who want a taste of that, with some of the staples of PVP (such as infamy gained or lost from kills) changed into a loot system that rewards players for gaining infamy, instead of the stat being fairly useless.
A lot has been said about the "low player base" because of server merges about a year ago, but except for the PVP server population seems to have risen or at least stabilized. Plus, with all its problems, the game is still enjoyable enough that when I see guildies leave for the game of the month (AOC, WAR, etc.) they eventually come back to Vanguard. It's survived the hype and the problems that almost killed off the game because it didn't live up to the hype, so now it's a fairly solid MMO with a loyal player base and continually improving content.
In general, the poster has many valid points, but:
Crafting is not completely borked. Sure, it's fallen into niches or into status items (like having a galleon now), but there remain areas for which a crafter is essential. A few examples (and sadly, there are only a few) are guild halls and houses, particularly GHs for the guild buffs. Specialized gear, such as spell countering gear for casters, can pretty much only be crafted and is essential for critical raid battles... try killing Kotasoth without being able to counter his heals. Focuses are critical, too -- my cleric has almost a full set of APW armor and it's caused my healing focus so much I'm checking into using a focus instead of a shield to get my healing focus back over the cap. All of these get into the fourth line of progression -- harvesting -- which has been widely overlooked these days because of dropped items. If you want your specialized gear, you have to do a lot of harvesting to get the rare and ultra-rare resources and dusts to make these, or have the plat to buy them off the exchange (if they are available). Some of the best APW gear is crafted gear as well, based on materials you need to harvest off of APW mobs.
We can be thankful at least that Sony hasn't completely screwed crafting like they did in Star Wars Galaxies -- once it was both essential and an artform that required a great deal of skill, now it's a joke.
I can't say much for diplomacy, other than using the VGTact.com resource, but again it's essential to the game. Adventurers, crafters and even diplos can all benefit from civic diplomacy buffs and we have a number of level 50 diplos in our guild to make sure the adventuring buffs are up before beginning any raid. Diplo buffs are another way of gaining some prestige -- at least enough to push you over the limit you need if you're relatively close. Again, VGTact.com also has information on locations and quests to help level you up.
These two definitely need attention, like making more raid gear drops targeted at these professions and making the items Bind On Equip, not Soulbound, but more importantly attention needs to be paid to the main ideas behind the classes. They've been ignored for too long.
Sure, pre-CU there were enough people out there who macroed their way through the game but if you wanted to play a game that required some intelligence, SWG offered that. But like anything that Sony Online Entertainment does, it's been nerfed into banality.
They must have training seminars for executives of all Sony divisions in how to show the proper level of contempt for customers. From DRM'd CDs installing rootkits to its failure to acknowledge it's a non-factor in portable music players to how it handles its online games (my personal pet peeve) to this?
What's good for Sony is good for the rest of the world. Just give them your money and don't ask any questions.
You can burn the exact same playlist exactly three times,
You can include DRM'd songs on other songs with other DRM'd or non-DRM'd songs on other playlists and burn each one of those combinations 3 times,
You can keep mixing things up like this ad infinitum and you'll still be able to burn those DRM'd files
Or, you can just that that audio cd (with the DRM now stripped from the files) and reimport them as non-DRM'd AAC or mp3 files, which you can then download onto your non-iPod player.
Apple pretty much has said that upfront. It's admitted that it(s DRM is a joke and) can be bypassed pretty simply. Then it asks you not to steal music. Seems like a fair deal to me -- Apple gives its users a simple means to bypass this DRM and you agree not to steal music.
DRM gets people's undies so bunched around here, people don't bother looking into how some of this stuff works. Or, in this case, arguably doesn't work. But if it shuts RIAA up and gets them to drink the kool-aid, then more power to FairPlay
... and for those who claim you can hear the difference between compressed files burned to an uncompressed audio disc then recompressed using a reasonably high bit-rate, then you either need to go to some louder concerts or forget digital music and go back to vinyl.
There's an old saying about how "An IQ test measures exactly what it measures." If people can't agree on what something that is supposed to be as "objective" as IQ is, then how are tests that measure "personality" going to be able to assess something squishy like "personality" in any objective, reliable way?
Personality tests can range from things taken out of legitimate psych research to some management guru's take on personality to pop science. Not only is what can be interpreted from them as a measure of one person's personality questionable, the people doing the interpretation may hardly be qualified to understand what the "score" of the test might be.
Picking a test to administer to prospective employees may say more about the company than any individual's results may say about that person. How strictly the company follows up on those results says even more. If some upper management hack falls in love with the Myers-Briggs scale, gives all his middle and lower level managers a one-day training session on how to use MB ratings to optimize productivity and group dynamics, and then actually expects these people to make use of this information on a daily basis (no, I wouldn't be talking about, say, the US Postal Service here, not at all!)... I'd run away as fast as possible.
From TFA, I think that Dana Massey has it spot on and Jon Wood is completely missing the point. The changes that have happened in Star Wars Galaxies have "supposedly" happened to make the game more "Star Warzy" (their term, not mine). The result has been to force players into a very narrow range of professions apparently based on movie characters (such as my personal favorite, the medical droid who took care of Luke at the end of EpV).
People used to be able to live out virtual lives in SWG, including taking up professions that had nothing to do directly with any combat. There were big ideas and themes that helped to make ties to the Star Wars universe palpable, and with the expansions this was strengthened. But what the developers and, more likely, the higher-ups directly which way the game would go failed to see was that it was primarily the players who created the content of the game. SOE could provide props to use, but an MMORPG like this is an act of collaborative fiction -- forcing us into replaying the actions of the movies is just plain stupid.
Digital TVs have no need to support XHTML 2.0 either. Maybe in the future they'll write their menus in XHTML 2, but why bother? No one is browsing their own TV as a server (although that might be a cool hack). TVs need custom interfaces, not web pages.
Why bother? Because using proprietary language and developing proprietary code can cost more than using an off-the-shelf solution. You should also ask the question "Why bother to use anything other than XHTML?" It's more than the coding language you use, too, it gets into delivery systems. Is your set-top box going to use an OS with an HTML parser or some sort of browser capabilities built in? If yes, why create additional overhead when all you need is to feed your data to that built-in feature? So, which is the bigger bother in the end? Depends on the path you take... but not considering both sides of the decisions you need to make isn't very prudent.
Well, in some cases you have a point. The X means nothing and contributes nothing but "image" to the name. But eXtensible Forms, eXtensible HTML, OS (ten), (variable values)86... should we be saying #86 or n86 or -86 instead?
Now, "i" in front of things is far closer to meaningless for most uses.
Like I said, this is crap science and does absolutely nothing to further our understanding of how diseases spread.
The evidence you offer is practically anecdotal. That isn't even crap science -- it's opinion.
If you had read TFA, you'd realize that the exact reasons you raise for why you believe it to be crap science are what makes modeling human movements by tracking the movements of money a reasonable thing. Previous models of the spread of contagions were based on older models of human movement driven by out-of-date goals relying on out-of-date transporation methods. The sort of disjoint movement you describe is precisely the sorts of changes that scientists want to capture.
The whole point of developing a model is to provide explanatory and predictive power regarding a particular phenomenon. What has to be acknowledged from the start is that the model may not be the actual mechanism that produces the phenomenon. Statistical mechanics may provide some means of explaining macroscopic thermodynamic phenomena and provide us with equations that allow us to predict the outcomes of experiments or investigations, but do physicists actually think that the building blocks of matter are little billiard balls? Certainly, the greater our understanding of a phenomenon, the closer we can get our models to matching the mechanism at work, but at the other extreme models that are more metaphor than mechanism can still be of value if that metaphor has explanatory or predictive power.
That being said, the movement of money is probably a very good match with the movement of contagion by people simply because money is moved by people. And, as TFA says, it's a bit difficult to tag people with radio transmitters (unless you want an RFID tag stapled to the back of your neck) like biologists can tag animals. Money is much easier to track. Employing a statistical analysis of a large number of movements is precisely the means of modeling "behaviors" that will smooth out the individual peculiarities that you mention in your particular case while teasing out subtleties that cannot be seen unless you can see the whole of the forest and not just a tree or two.
You're making the mistake of criticizing a model about the movements of people and diseases with what might occur in a single case. N=1 studies do not meet the criteria of providing an alternative to what is discussed in TFA, which is modeling the movements of populations.
A couple of people have pointed out that the larger the sample size, the less chance there is to attribute a meaningful difference to a situation that is actually a random fluctuation. That may be true, but I believe the point the parent is trying to make is that one of the key advantages of statistical modeling is that you can accurately model very large groups by studying very small samples of that group. If there was actually a need for this large a sample, then fine. Otherwise, the sample size is more sensational than informational.
For example, many medical studies rely on samples of a couple thousand people. If that number is supposed to represent US citizens, then that sample size is roughly 0.001% of the population.
To answer whether 1 billion cases is overkill or not, it would be helpful to know the size of their entire database -- how many individual web pages have they catalogued? How big was the sample size relative to the population? Another issue that might have influenced choosing such a large sample is the number of pages generated dynamically, using standardized templates. If Google has catalogued a corporate website that has several thousand pages all following the same template, do those pages act as unique, individual entries that should be given the same weight page-by-page as a site that has only 10 pages? How might the entire depository of, say, eBay.com or even Slashdot.org skew results? The large sample size may have been required to render such "cell" sizes irrelevant.
Of course, seeing some numbers from their study would have been nice. If they reported p values of 0.00000001 then it would have been easy to say this was a case of overkill.
As you may or may not know, Sony Online did not distribute the millions of CDs which destroyed millions of computers' security. That was Sony Music.
True, but they are both children of Sony, who apparently runs regular seminars on Arrogance for Executives. Everywhere you look in the press, you see Sony [insert division here] expecting the world to step to the beat of their drummer without question and, when consumers turn their backs without a second glance, those Sony execs express their disbelief and indignation that the marketplace could get things so wrong.
I think a political blog that has to go dark whenever a controversial issue comes along is not going to be very useful, eh?
Controversy is one thing. Hooliganism is quite another. How do you respond when there is nothing intelligent to respond to? This isn't a question of heated discussion from both sides of an issue -- this is an example of mindless violence directed at a public individual. There is nothing to discuss. And, given the anonymity afforded to the posters -- something present in the first place to allow people to feel free to enter into intelligent discussions without violating their own privacy -- there is no way to publicly shame the offenders into retracting their statements and changing their behavior.
If the posters involved were making intelligent, issue-relevant comments against the Post's editorial stance on this issue or the author's stance, then you would have a point. Those would merit publication and response. Personal attacks have no place in a discussion of issues. So, the Post should suck it up because "that's the way the world is"? Personal attacks should be expected? Well, publishing them would be more than accepting the way things are: it would be stating that that is the way the world should be. Keeping them published would be equivalent to the Post stating that this sort of behavior was acceptable.
What TFA says and the summary misses is that closing the blog is in all likelihood a temporary closing. Jim Brady (the Post's website executive editor) is cited as saying that the barrage of tirades started eating up the time of two people just to keep deleting offensive posts, and that the blog will likely be reopened in the future.
So, what looks like it might be a case of self-censorship due to e-hooliganism is more of a sensible decision to cut the idiots off from their hate outlet and wait until they forget about the Post and focus on someone else instead.
I have had an iPod since they first came out, which pre-dates the iTunes Music Store opening. The main reason there is less ill-gotten music on my iPod now than when I first got it is because of the iTMS. Since I can buy single tracks there, I've been replacing my ill-gotten music with actual purchases as I can afford it. I know that most of that $0.99 goes to the record companies, but hopefully some of it will finally get back to the artist.
Some beers already have higher levels of these compounds than others. The lager and pilsner beers commonly sold in domestic U.S. brews have fairly low levels of these compounds, but some porter, stout and ale brews have much higher levels.
Damn! I guess that means I'll have to drink more Guinness. Life is so unfair!!
...he wanted a real mechanical bell ring like that from his old rotary dial phone. We recorded the phone ring as a wave file and uploaded it to the phone, easy as pie.
Hey! Is that copyrighted? Can you put it up somewhere so I can download it? Seriously! That is so retro it's delicious!
Slashdot Mirror
I played since beta, lasted until a little while after they merged some servers, took a break for about 9 months, then came back to it. It is much improved from the original launch. There is finally some high-end content that is rather enjoyable and complex -- not all encounters are pure "burn" fights and require instead a lot of strategy, timing and cooperation by 18 to 24 players. And as mentioned above, expanding the level cap by introducing AA's will make the grind much more worthwhile than killing an entire populations of high-end mobs.
;^). I wound up migrating my PvP toons over to a PvE server, got hooked up by a friend into a heavy raiding guild, and haven't looked back on my decision. The raids are far more challenging than PvP combat in this game ever was. But for those who want a taste of it, the devs introduced an FFA PvP arena on the PvE servers.
... just don't get too attached to your characters unless you want to convert the trial into a full account -- no transfer of toons between accounts is available.
Plus, as mentioned elsewhere, the new Isle of Dawn "tutorial" will level you up to the max of the first tier for all professions -- you can leave the nexbie area after completing the last combat quest or you can stick around until you are a level 10 adventurer, 10 diplomat, 10 crafter, and maxed out on tier 1 harvesting as well. The adventuring, crafting and diplo quests are all inter-related when it comes to the story line as well. When you finish the combat questline, you get an item that grows in power as you rise in levels -- existing players have to go to ridiculous lengths to get a similar item.
Plus, the Isle has some silly, fun features that you can't get on the mainland, like Slappy's whistle.
Sure, there are still problems. Bugs still related to ones from launch, bugs introduced with the new content. And there are the eventual nerfs of favorite character abilities, but the devs do pay attention to the player base, even if they can't fix an issue immediately.
If your main interest in an MMO is PvP, then this probably isn't the game for you. Originally, there were two types of PvP servers -- Free For All and Team PvP (similar to SWGs Imps and Rebels, but based on the race of your character). I loved the team-based PvP, but when Sony merged servers the one remaning PvP server went FFA. Plus, overpowered classes have a much more dramatic effect on game play in PvP than in PvE, IMO (too many TLAs, I know
If you want to give it another look -- get the 14-day trial and give it a look. That way you won't have to spend money for a month if you decide you don't like it
... the MMO's penalize YOU!
Tell me, are you crafting?
Yes, I have a lvl 50 Tailor and apprentices in all the other professions. And you got what I said completely backwards.
As it is now, crafter loot drops where lvl 50 adventurers can go, but the stuff is soulbound. That means they cannot share it with pure crafters or sell it on the exchange. In my experience, the gear goes to high level adventurers who are low-level crafters and they may never grind their crafters high enough to use the gear. It's a waste to make these things soulbound.
And btw, my lvl 50 Tailor is wearing gear he got solely from crafting work order rewards, with some crafting society jewelry. And I make most of my money from what I craft, not from adventuring.
Crafting is just like adventuring -- if you know your class and how to play it, you'll succeed.
Nice that someone is interested.
I took about 9 months off the game because of all the bugs at launch and the lack of end-game content, but was pretty surprised and impressed when I came back about 4 months ago.
The game is still visually stunning -- one of the best looking MMOs I've played. It's also is one of the largest, in terms of game landmass. The multiple paths you can take -- anyone can be an adventurer, crafter, diplomat and harvester -- can offer a variety of different challenges depending on your play style. Most importantly, there have been a lot of bug fixes, exploits patched, and some great end-game content added with more to come (the point of this article). Grouping was always limited to 6 people, but for the high-level content your can form up to 24 people raids. Until recently, the most challenging raid content was limited to 18 people (3 groups, with 1 for support, swapping people in/out) but a new raid dungeon has opened with 24 man raid content.
As mentioned in a post above, there are limitations to the crafting and diplomacy branches. There still are lag (as any game) and chunking (switching between land zones) issues. As more powerful mobs get introduced, some character abilities (like levitation in APW) get nerfed to make the battles harder, but leaving players with those skills disgruntled. A lot of character class balance has been addressed, but there are still some over-powered and under-powered classes ... but not so much as there being a "class of the month" sort of issue. The PVP aspects of the game are dying off, but then this game was never really built for PVP. (A lot of people credit this from a change from having a few team-pvp servers to an only-FFA server, including me). A PVP arena has recently been introduced on the PVE servers for people who want a taste of that, with some of the staples of PVP (such as infamy gained or lost from kills) changed into a loot system that rewards players for gaining infamy, instead of the stat being fairly useless.
A lot has been said about the "low player base" because of server merges about a year ago, but except for the PVP server population seems to have risen or at least stabilized. Plus, with all its problems, the game is still enjoyable enough that when I see guildies leave for the game of the month (AOC, WAR, etc.) they eventually come back to Vanguard. It's survived the hype and the problems that almost killed off the game because it didn't live up to the hype, so now it's a fairly solid MMO with a loyal player base and continually improving content.
In general, the poster has many valid points, but:
Crafting is not completely borked. Sure, it's fallen into niches or into status items (like having a galleon now), but there remain areas for which a crafter is essential. A few examples (and sadly, there are only a few) are guild halls and houses, particularly GHs for the guild buffs. Specialized gear, such as spell countering gear for casters, can pretty much only be crafted and is essential for critical raid battles ... try killing Kotasoth without being able to counter his heals. Focuses are critical, too -- my cleric has almost a full set of APW armor and it's caused my healing focus so much I'm checking into using a focus instead of a shield to get my healing focus back over the cap. All of these get into the fourth line of progression -- harvesting -- which has been widely overlooked these days because of dropped items. If you want your specialized gear, you have to do a lot of harvesting to get the rare and ultra-rare resources and dusts to make these, or have the plat to buy them off the exchange (if they are available). Some of the best APW gear is crafted gear as well, based on materials you need to harvest off of APW mobs.
We can be thankful at least that Sony hasn't completely screwed crafting like they did in Star Wars Galaxies -- once it was both essential and an artform that required a great deal of skill, now it's a joke.
I can't say much for diplomacy, other than using the VGTact.com resource, but again it's essential to the game. Adventurers, crafters and even diplos can all benefit from civic diplomacy buffs and we have a number of level 50 diplos in our guild to make sure the adventuring buffs are up before beginning any raid. Diplo buffs are another way of gaining some prestige -- at least enough to push you over the limit you need if you're relatively close. Again, VGTact.com also has information on locations and quests to help level you up.
These two definitely need attention, like making more raid gear drops targeted at these professions and making the items Bind On Equip, not Soulbound, but more importantly attention needs to be paid to the main ideas behind the classes. They've been ignored for too long.
Credit Guy Kawasaki for that, maybe someone before him, but anyway dead is definitely too old. If you're not dead yet, you're not too old.
Sure, pre-CU there were enough people out there who macroed their way through the game but if you wanted to play a game that required some intelligence, SWG offered that. But like anything that Sony Online Entertainment does, it's been nerfed into banality.
Oops! My bad. This ain't MacDailyNews.
They must have training seminars for executives of all Sony divisions in how to show the proper level of contempt for customers. From DRM'd CDs installing rootkits to its failure to acknowledge it's a non-factor in portable music players to how it handles its online games (my personal pet peeve) to this?
What's good for Sony is good for the rest of the world. Just give them your money and don't ask any questions.
You'd know that:
Or, you can just that that audio cd (with the DRM now stripped from the files) and reimport them as non-DRM'd AAC or mp3 files, which you can then download onto your non-iPod player.
Apple pretty much has said that upfront. It's admitted that it(s DRM is a joke and) can be bypassed pretty simply. Then it asks you not to steal music. Seems like a fair deal to me -- Apple gives its users a simple means to bypass this DRM and you agree not to steal music.
DRM gets people's undies so bunched around here, people don't bother looking into how some of this stuff works. Or, in this case, arguably doesn't work. But if it shuts RIAA up and gets them to drink the kool-aid, then more power to FairPlay
... and for those who claim you can hear the difference between compressed files burned to an uncompressed audio disc then recompressed using a reasonably high bit-rate, then you either need to go to some louder concerts or forget digital music and go back to vinyl.
There's an old saying about how "An IQ test measures exactly what it measures." If people can't agree on what something that is supposed to be as "objective" as IQ is, then how are tests that measure "personality" going to be able to assess something squishy like "personality" in any objective, reliable way?
Personality tests can range from things taken out of legitimate psych research to some management guru's take on personality to pop science. Not only is what can be interpreted from them as a measure of one person's personality questionable, the people doing the interpretation may hardly be qualified to understand what the "score" of the test might be.
Picking a test to administer to prospective employees may say more about the company than any individual's results may say about that person. How strictly the company follows up on those results says even more. If some upper management hack falls in love with the Myers-Briggs scale, gives all his middle and lower level managers a one-day training session on how to use MB ratings to optimize productivity and group dynamics, and then actually expects these people to make use of this information on a daily basis (no, I wouldn't be talking about, say, the US Postal Service here, not at all!) ... I'd run away as fast as possible.
What a disappointment!! I was hoping for a day off from work, BUT NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!
No crashing networks, no choked ISPs, my ping in SWG didn't even go up. What a waste of paranoid hysteria....
From TFA, I think that Dana Massey has it spot on and Jon Wood is completely missing the point. The changes that have happened in Star Wars Galaxies have "supposedly" happened to make the game more "Star Warzy" (their term, not mine). The result has been to force players into a very narrow range of professions apparently based on movie characters (such as my personal favorite, the medical droid who took care of Luke at the end of EpV).
People used to be able to live out virtual lives in SWG, including taking up professions that had nothing to do directly with any combat. There were big ideas and themes that helped to make ties to the Star Wars universe palpable, and with the expansions this was strengthened. But what the developers and, more likely, the higher-ups directly which way the game would go failed to see was that it was primarily the players who created the content of the game. SOE could provide props to use, but an MMORPG like this is an act of collaborative fiction -- forcing us into replaying the actions of the movies is just plain stupid.
Why bother? Because using proprietary language and developing proprietary code can cost more than using an off-the-shelf solution. You should also ask the question "Why bother to use anything other than XHTML?" It's more than the coding language you use, too, it gets into delivery systems. Is your set-top box going to use an OS with an HTML parser or some sort of browser capabilities built in? If yes, why create additional overhead when all you need is to feed your data to that built-in feature? So, which is the bigger bother in the end? Depends on the path you take ... but not considering both sides of the decisions you need to make isn't very prudent.
Well, in some cases you have a point. The X means nothing and contributes nothing but "image" to the name. But eXtensible Forms, eXtensible HTML, OS (ten), (variable values)86 ... should we be saying #86 or n86 or -86 instead?
Now, "i" in front of things is far closer to meaningless for most uses.
The evidence you offer is practically anecdotal. That isn't even crap science -- it's opinion.
If you had read TFA, you'd realize that the exact reasons you raise for why you believe it to be crap science are what makes modeling human movements by tracking the movements of money a reasonable thing. Previous models of the spread of contagions were based on older models of human movement driven by out-of-date goals relying on out-of-date transporation methods. The sort of disjoint movement you describe is precisely the sorts of changes that scientists want to capture.
The whole point of developing a model is to provide explanatory and predictive power regarding a particular phenomenon. What has to be acknowledged from the start is that the model may not be the actual mechanism that produces the phenomenon. Statistical mechanics may provide some means of explaining macroscopic thermodynamic phenomena and provide us with equations that allow us to predict the outcomes of experiments or investigations, but do physicists actually think that the building blocks of matter are little billiard balls? Certainly, the greater our understanding of a phenomenon, the closer we can get our models to matching the mechanism at work, but at the other extreme models that are more metaphor than mechanism can still be of value if that metaphor has explanatory or predictive power.
That being said, the movement of money is probably a very good match with the movement of contagion by people simply because money is moved by people. And, as TFA says, it's a bit difficult to tag people with radio transmitters (unless you want an RFID tag stapled to the back of your neck) like biologists can tag animals. Money is much easier to track. Employing a statistical analysis of a large number of movements is precisely the means of modeling "behaviors" that will smooth out the individual peculiarities that you mention in your particular case while teasing out subtleties that cannot be seen unless you can see the whole of the forest and not just a tree or two.
You're making the mistake of criticizing a model about the movements of people and diseases with what might occur in a single case. N=1 studies do not meet the criteria of providing an alternative to what is discussed in TFA, which is modeling the movements of populations.
You actually have a billion points there.
A couple of people have pointed out that the larger the sample size, the less chance there is to attribute a meaningful difference to a situation that is actually a random fluctuation. That may be true, but I believe the point the parent is trying to make is that one of the key advantages of statistical modeling is that you can accurately model very large groups by studying very small samples of that group. If there was actually a need for this large a sample, then fine. Otherwise, the sample size is more sensational than informational.
For example, many medical studies rely on samples of a couple thousand people. If that number is supposed to represent US citizens, then that sample size is roughly 0.001% of the population.
To answer whether 1 billion cases is overkill or not, it would be helpful to know the size of their entire database -- how many individual web pages have they catalogued? How big was the sample size relative to the population? Another issue that might have influenced choosing such a large sample is the number of pages generated dynamically, using standardized templates. If Google has catalogued a corporate website that has several thousand pages all following the same template, do those pages act as unique, individual entries that should be given the same weight page-by-page as a site that has only 10 pages? How might the entire depository of, say, eBay.com or even Slashdot.org skew results? The large sample size may have been required to render such "cell" sizes irrelevant.
Of course, seeing some numbers from their study would have been nice. If they reported p values of 0.00000001 then it would have been easy to say this was a case of overkill.
True, but they are both children of Sony, who apparently runs regular seminars on Arrogance for Executives. Everywhere you look in the press, you see Sony [insert division here] expecting the world to step to the beat of their drummer without question and, when consumers turn their backs without a second glance, those Sony execs express their disbelief and indignation that the marketplace could get things so wrong.
Controversy is one thing. Hooliganism is quite another. How do you respond when there is nothing intelligent to respond to? This isn't a question of heated discussion from both sides of an issue -- this is an example of mindless violence directed at a public individual. There is nothing to discuss. And, given the anonymity afforded to the posters -- something present in the first place to allow people to feel free to enter into intelligent discussions without violating their own privacy -- there is no way to publicly shame the offenders into retracting their statements and changing their behavior.
If the posters involved were making intelligent, issue-relevant comments against the Post's editorial stance on this issue or the author's stance, then you would have a point. Those would merit publication and response. Personal attacks have no place in a discussion of issues. So, the Post should suck it up because "that's the way the world is"? Personal attacks should be expected? Well, publishing them would be more than accepting the way things are: it would be stating that that is the way the world should be. Keeping them published would be equivalent to the Post stating that this sort of behavior was acceptable.
What TFA says and the summary misses is that closing the blog is in all likelihood a temporary closing. Jim Brady (the Post's website executive editor) is cited as saying that the barrage of tirades started eating up the time of two people just to keep deleting offensive posts, and that the blog will likely be reopened in the future.
So, what looks like it might be a case of self-censorship due to e-hooliganism is more of a sensible decision to cut the idiots off from their hate outlet and wait until they forget about the Post and focus on someone else instead.
I have had an iPod since they first came out, which pre-dates the iTunes Music Store opening. The main reason there is less ill-gotten music on my iPod now than when I first got it is because of the iTMS. Since I can buy single tracks there, I've been replacing my ill-gotten music with actual purchases as I can afford it. I know that most of that $0.99 goes to the record companies, but hopefully some of it will finally get back to the artist.
Damn ... I knew I should have picked up Chinese as my second language....
From TFA:
Damn! I guess that means I'll have to drink more Guinness. Life is so unfair!!
Hey! Is that copyrighted? Can you put it up somewhere so I can download it? Seriously! That is so retro it's delicious!