But seriously. If Linux ever becomes as popular as windows, I guarantee malcontents will find any and every way to comprimise your system in under 4 minutes.
This is like the New Pig Times reporting that if brick ever becomes as popular as straw then wolves would just start blowing them down as easily. In other words you are arguing under the Fallacy of the General Rule; namely that all platforms have exactly the same vulnerabilities, if only someone would bother to look for them.
Windows has large, exploitable holes that other platforms don't. Period. End of sentence. It is the height of tunnel sighted arrogance to think today's hackers wouldn't each love to be the one that finally writes the mighty virus that gets through OS X or Linux.
Yes, a large percentage of problems are from copy cats. But you will not convince me there aren't those who take pride in their hacking that wouldn't love to be the one to break the OS X/Linux barrier and aren't working at doing so just to show it can be done.
I was visualizing saving entire documents, not incremental saves. It's an interesting idea to save user actions, but you're talking incremental saving essentially. If you need to recover from that, the OS would basically have to act as the user performing each action. So if between saves (for example), I paste in 5 pages of text, then delete it, then paste in 4 different pages, then delete it, then 6 other pages, then delete it, etc., in an incremental scheme we've now saved 15+ extra pages of text, that would all be cycled through during recovery.
I would postulate having programs have Autosave functions that are easy to use and invisible (I have the $ files that seem to show up in word) would be the best solution. I think such things exist, but I've yet to find one that is actually useful to me.
Ignoring his confusion between Design Flaws and Bugs...
1) Power Failure Crash
-- A "Continuous Save" is unpractical. Committing every action to permanent storage, aka a hard drive, would both kill performance and shorten the drive life. It would also increase the risk of hard drive failure during the crash by increasing the likelihood that the drive would be in use.
2) The Macintosh Dock
-- "It's not that the Dock sucks so much as a productivity tool as it is that Apple threw away so many more powerful, useful objects in its favor." So it works, but there were better options in his opinion? You'd be hard pressed to find anything that couldn't be described in this way.
3) Mysteriously dimmed menu items
-- I can see the point of wanting them to say why, but it is very short sighted to say the message must be exact. A much better solution is that in Help, every menu option should be searchable and explain exactly when it can be used and how. (Though I miss the Apple Help Balloons. Heck, now that I think about it I think they worked and could explain disabled Menu Options but no one bothered to fill them out.)
4) ASCII Sort
-- This is a consistent extension of alphabetic sorts, and will likely never change in standard file system listings. The example of iTunes is a specific application with a specific data set, and any application should organize data as appropriate for the use. Part of the point of iTunes IS to organize files in a way that makes sense for what they are, whereas the operating system must treat all file names equally and not make assumptions about what they represent.
5) URL Naming Bug
-- Correct history: filenames didn't have spaces because the early command line parsers separated tokens by spaces. Even today, command line parsers need help either by quoting the entire name or escaping the spaces. (The Apple II worked because the parser was even simpler; every command was only one word and everything afterwards named the object to be acted upon.) The problem with the proposed fix is that the only place spaces are not allowed is in the machine address part; spaces are allowed willy nilly in the directory portion as per the server's setup. There is no consistent way to know whether spaces in that portion should be dropped. While the browser could be written to automatically remove spaces in the first portion doing so in the directory portion would be disastrous for many web sights. Having it do both would seem to be a blatant inconsistency.
6) Let's you save me some work
-- This is actually reasonable, and as a programmer it's a pet peeve of mine that the computer should do the work. It's not always possible though, and sometimes compromises must be made. I prefer if the field only wants numbers it would say so and prevent numbers from being typed without beeping or anything. I think it's a good compromise between getting a clean entry and not interfering with the user, since any spaces/dashes would just be ignored.
7) The Disk Drive Nazi
-- This was a feature. It prevented floppy or system corruption. (The System was on a floppy and could otherwise be ejected.) OS X is much more dynamic in recovering from these incidents, having to deal with USB, Firewire, and Network drives. The incident with the Powerbook described is most likely the result of using a non-Apple drive with a bad driver. Booting from an emergency CD would eliminate. Given the author's history it's even possible he was using OS 9, increasing the likelihood of a driver problem.
compared to my $29 for DSL isn't really a good deal.
Umm... unless you buy the DSL only for playing WoW, it's pretty much pointless to include it as a cost for playing. That's like including the cost of your car every time you budget for going to a movie.
They were probably planning on it from the beginning, but waited until a good ways into the Beta to implement it at all so they could get a base line of normal XP/leveling speed/etc. The first version they implemented was actually completely sliding, where if you were online for quite a while without resting you would progress through Tired stages that netted 50% or even 25%XP. Boy, the stink that went up over that. I'm sure it made sense in meetings, but players did not want to be punished for playing. In the end you still had idiots arguing that because some players were getting a 'bonus' it was as if they were getting 'punished', but they slowly died down as the system got tweaked.
There are quests in WoW that require hours on end, and there are apparently large high-end raids that require a lot of planning. It is possible to go to the cap of 60 in 3 or 4 hour increments on a casual basis, but dedicated players will get there faster and have unique items from certain quests as well.
In other words, it's not that certain quests are open to hardcore players, more that casual players probably just won't do them. All in all it works out well enough.
No, there were less then 10,000 through the Closed Beta. Before the stress tests they only had 3 servers tops, and I never saw more than 2 or 3 thousand on one at a given time. The Stress Tests had 100,000 each. The Open Beta was open to all applicants, but they cut it off after 500,000 as they were only planning on testing about 40 servers for it.
I'm going to address your second point, and say WoW already has a rest system for this. If you are at 'Rested' instead of 'Normal', you get 200% of XP for kills. The longer you are logged out between playing, the longer you will be at Rested while playing. It went through many forms to get to that point, and in the end pretty much all Beta players agreed it was a reasonable amount.
As for death penalties, if you have choice you would just open yourself for headaches for your choices from support requests. Request type one would be players who chose A, but are now in a guild with B's and want to change because they keep falling behind. And virtually every C will claim they were killed by lag and want to be resurrected. It's much simpler if you pick one that people will accept, even if they would prefer more or less.
There were numerous suggestions during Beta for a "Hardcore" (type C) server. When others replied "Just delete your character when you die and own your experience", they would whine that if everyone didn't have the same penalty it wasn't fair. So I don't think having the 3 choices on one server would work, and having different servers with different rules still be troublesome from a support point of view.
The economics against a free trial are a lot higher for MMORPGS. First of all, it's not trivial but relatively simple to release a demo of a standard game that is simply short on content. The best you could do with a MMORPG is limit it to level 10 or something.
But that's not the big issue. The $15 monthly goes to server support and maintenance, including things like electricity and bandwidth. There were 500,000 applicants accepted into WoW's Open Beta; who knows how many applied. If a standard MMORPG allowed a free trial they would see thousands of non-paying players using their resources for free. And either they run the risk of having the free players disrupt a standing server with no real repercussions, or they have to maintain trial servers for free.
Everyone understands the 'more likely to buy if allowed to try' principle. It's the 'hey it's free and I can do what I want' principle that gets in the way.
Uh, if the PC game industry goes all-DRM expect those Mac ports to be loaded down with it, too.
1) There is no indication that the entire game industry is going DRM.
2) There ARE Mac-only games; many of them Shareware and cheaper. Granted, they don't look like multi-million dollar projects, but many people care about playability and only notice graphics when they distract from the game play.
If that's your philosophy there's no need to buy a Mac. Just play old PC games on an older Windows OS, until the cows come home.
3) Holy non-sequitur, Batman! Clearly I meant at anytime I feel like getting a new game of a given type I might not have thousands of choices but I'll be able to find a good game anyway. If I was really someone who never went for new I'd just stick to my Atari 2600 and be done with it.
Let's review:
No games worth playing on the Mac: FALSE
Can always play newest games on the Mac: FALSE
Can always find a good game to play on the Mac: TRUE
Conclusion: if you always have to play the latest hit of the week, the Mac isn't for you. If you use your computer to get things done and occasionally play a game, the Mac is perfectly viable. I can't make it any plainer than that.
What happens next, when EA writes its own clone of Steam, without which no EA titles will run? And when Activision writes its clone? And Sony writes its clone? And the MPAA writes its clone and bundles it with Windows Media Player 16.666? And RIAA writes its clone as a part of theyTunes 2.0?
You buy a Mac and a Playstation 2. Seriously, with crap like this I'll take the fewer games on my computer. Sure, only 20% of the games for Windows get ported over, but they're pretty much the top of a saturated pile. Furthermore, anything that's missing I can usually get for the PS2 with a lot less hassle, not to mention a trade in value when I'm done. (Sure, it might drop down to as low as 3 bucks, but hey - that's more than zero.)
After all, between a family and a job I'm not buying all that many games anymore as it is. Any gametype that can't be played well on the PS2 has a couple of Mac games, and vice versa. There may only be a handful, but you only need one good one. For example, Mac users will have little choice in MMORPG, but with one choice being Blizzard's World of Warcraft I really don't see a reason to complain.
Is there any reason to expect that the number of job opportunities in this area are going to increase in the coming years?
I imagine this would depend on whether the crime rate is rising or falling. Good luck getting a consistent answer to that. Every study will measure it differently, and the results will be used/reported depending on the answers wanted by whomever is quoting them.
I end up giving my better half a running commentary of dodgy science as we watch.
And they keep watching with you? That's my trick to get out of watching something; a couple of minutes and it's 'Fine, I'll watch in the other room!"
Granted, it's not like shows I like have never done this (I've always wondered how Star Fleet computers can reconstruct an entire face from an ear and an eyebrow), but I just ignore it then. If I don't like what I'm watching, nitpicking is the entertainment.
Unfortunately not. I was looking forward to writing my own 'geeks for weed' jokes or maybe something about outsourcing to Canada, but it turns out that while THC can reduce pressure it also reduces blood flow through the optic nerve which is apparently not good for glaucoma.
I've been in since April, and I can't think of anything the rabbits would drop that crafting requires. And if you weren't catching any fish, I'm guessing you were fishing in to high of an area for your skill level. It levels pretty smoothly in the right area. Though there are NO crafts that require fishing to level up with, so I have no idea why everyone felt they had to fish instead of trying to buy it from the auction house and didn't just go out and kill things.
I don't know what kind of person WANTS to wander all over Dwarf-Land looking for +2 Balls of Twine but from talking to the Diablo and Warcraft fans I met at that LAN party, it doesn't seem like much of Blizzard's fan base is going to appreciate the final WoW product.
Firstly, all crafting is voluntary and for fun. If you don't enjoy it, don't do it - there isn't anything crafting gets you that is required to progress that you couldn't buy off someone willing to spend the time. Secondly, the servers being overloaded from 500,000 trying to constantly play suggest you may have a very small sampling of Blizzard's fan base that doesn't scale to do projections very well.
The fact remains that MMORPG's are not for everyone, including some fans of previous Blizzard games. The general rule of thumb is if you wouldn't want to play a regular paper & pencil RPG, you probably won't like a Massive Online version either. It definitely sounds like the group you were watching is not the target audience, and the is nothing wrong with that on either side.
I'm running on a 800 g3 ibook and its playable, but not really.
You can try adding memory, but it isn't going to get better. From Requirements:
933 MHz or higher G4 or G5 processor.
512 MB RAM or higher. DDR RAM recommended.
I think it's playable with slightly less, but they are essentially covering their butts. I've been playing since April on a 1Ghz Powerbook with 512MB, and the performance is a lot better now. It still bogs down in certain areas, but is pretty good overall.
... paleontology graduate student Jacqueline M. Kozisek...
Did it occur to her to ask an entomologist? From Wikipedia
In the autumn, young queens mate with male drone bees and hibernate over the winter in a warm area. Oftentimes, a queen will burrow into the ground to keep herself from freezing. In the spring, a queen awakens and finds a suitable place to create her hive, and then builds wax pots in which to lay her fertilized eggs from the previous winter. The eggs that hatch are female workers, and in time they populate the hive.
I am not an entomologist, but even I can postulate a) they are triggered out of hibernation by temperature, so they just stayed until the earth heated up. Winters around here (Western Penn) can spend quite some time around and below freezing, but the ground stays near freezing. All it would have taken would have been a relative hardy handful to survive; if they haven't changed much since then it's not like they were cross breeding like crazy. Heck, for all we know there were thousands of bee types beforehand and these are the only ones that could survive being frozen as queens.
It's almost as if this paleontologist didn't know queen bees hibernate, even for tropical bees. (See here. I will give her credit for an original approach, but even if I'm way off base (which I'll admit) it took me 2 minutes to find 'hibernate in winter' in reference to bumblebees. It may just be the article left out her accounting for this fact, but if she found out about it hopefully she can address whether or not they could have hibernated long enough.
Ok, I know I'm rambling so I'll make my point: while the temperatures were shown to kill off flying bees, I'm curious whether she was aware of the hibernation possibility and accounted for whether the temperatures were low enough, long enough to kill them as well.
The $50 upfront pays for the past ~4 years of development, printing, boxes, advertising, etc.
The $15/month goes towards active storage, backups, GM/support, internet fees, and, most importantly, active development and fixes.
Here comes the math: Over one year, WoW would cost $50 + $15x12 or $230, which would break down to just over $20 a month if you only play one year. How much do you spend on movie/game rentals, concerts, books, or whatever entertainment you do in a month? Hell, one nice dinner with drinks could cost 20 bucks. If you end up playing just 5 hours a week, you're active entertainment cost is $1/hour. Given that a movie cost $7-$10 for ~2 hours, and you aren't in charge, it works out pretty well.
Sorry for that math rant, but it's kind of pointless to say 'can't justify the cost' if you don't actually do the math.
This is almost certainly true. The last download breaks the install file into four CD-friendly chunks, and is almost certainly what's been sent off to be burned. We already know there are a couple of features to be patched in in the upcoming week or so, but in theory it will be a 'small' patch. I think I read that some of the features exist in the installation, but aren't enabled and would just need final values when ready. (e.g. For the missing talents, they already know what they will look like and be called and the animation files are in, it's just a matter of setting the values representing Cool Down time, Cast Time, Level, Damage, etc. they decide on from internal testing.)
They test everything in house, and they've had these talents for some time. They will get a tweak if in two weeks it's obviously unbalanced, but it's not as if they just came off the blackboard yesterday.
Again, they've tested Battlegrounds internally. Basically most of the testing here is for PvP balancing, which we've been doing for months.
Hero classes aren't until level 60. They have a couple of months. (I'm not getting into a power leveler vs. casual player tangent, but keeping a casu
Racial traits are in in internal builds and have been for a while; they've been commented on the boards by Blizzard employees.
They've said repeatedly on the boards that they weren't sure if they would show raid content in the Beta, as they want to keep it as a surprise.
Trades skills, warlock pets, Horde content, unfinished quests - going to play the 'internal build' card again.
Before I get labeled a Blizzard apologist, I too was surprised at the suddenness of this announcement, though I'm starting to think they've known for a while but didn't want people to slow their testing with a possible character wipe coming. But on the flipside, with 90% of an intended release done having your internal testers testing the last 10% is not that bad. You have thousands test everything until you get to the point where what you are changing can actually be tested by dozens effectively. Then you release it with a couple of weeks left to check for gross problems, and you're done.
I will agree that there are a couple of things that didn't get done (e.g. weather), but I think the few things that you've listed that are needed by launch will be there.
Actually, it will test two areas. 1) Whether their servers are ready, since conceivably the Open Beta will be larger then the Stress Test. 2) It let's in a LOT more system configurations who will let them know if there are any glitches they hadn't caught yet.
Also, come to think of it, it will provide a test for their GM's/support staff; no one is paying so they have a little leeway, but it will help them judge what to expect when people get in who haven't been playing for months on end, or even following the boards to know the answers to 'simple' questions.
Where have you stalled? What side are you on? I've been playing in Closed Beta since March, and I didn't start 'stalling' until the late 20's, but back then they simply hadn't done the zones I needed to quest in yet. Quests are pretty steady, though sometimes you have to go to entirely new areas to get more that are your level if you rush through some with higher level players.
Frankly, one night of playing an MMORPG is not enough time to judge anything, let alone make recommendations. Why not let them play and judge for themselves? Maybe it's just not your kind of game if you can't get past one night; it's meant to last months if not years of playtime after all.
Taxi Driver isn't a very exciting title either, is it?
You think that's bad? What about The Godfather? Come on, a movie about some old guy you barely know that sends you bizarre Christmas presents? Please. At least Showgirls sounds exciting.
I think part of the occurrence with TS2 was that Disney views animation sequels as direct-to-video cash cows. Unlike other animation sequels Pixar went all out on it and convinced Disney to move it to theatres, but it was still not counted as a 'feature' but as a 'sequel' for contractual purposes.
This article confirms that it originally was a direct-to-video project, as does this one. I thought Pixar had to fight harder, but I may have just read a biased story at the time. There was a story during the contract 'negotiations' that Disney would develop Toy Story 3 on it's own, but I don't know if that's still true. Probably, though; they own all the characters from the original contracts and aren't ones to not milk something to death.
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But seriously. If Linux ever becomes as popular as windows, I guarantee malcontents will find any and every way to comprimise your system in under 4 minutes.
This is like the New Pig Times reporting that if brick ever becomes as popular as straw then wolves would just start blowing them down as easily. In other words you are arguing under the Fallacy of the General Rule; namely that all platforms have exactly the same vulnerabilities, if only someone would bother to look for them.
Windows has large, exploitable holes that other platforms don't. Period. End of sentence. It is the height of tunnel sighted arrogance to think today's hackers wouldn't each love to be the one that finally writes the mighty virus that gets through OS X or Linux.
Yes, a large percentage of problems are from copy cats. But you will not convince me there aren't those who take pride in their hacking that wouldn't love to be the one to break the OS X/Linux barrier and aren't working at doing so just to show it can be done.
I was visualizing saving entire documents, not incremental saves. It's an interesting idea to save user actions, but you're talking incremental saving essentially. If you need to recover from that, the OS would basically have to act as the user performing each action. So if between saves (for example), I paste in 5 pages of text, then delete it, then paste in 4 different pages, then delete it, then 6 other pages, then delete it, etc., in an incremental scheme we've now saved 15+ extra pages of text, that would all be cycled through during recovery.
I would postulate having programs have Autosave functions that are easy to use and invisible (I have the $ files that seem to show up in word) would be the best solution. I think such things exist, but I've yet to find one that is actually useful to me.
Ignoring his confusion between Design Flaws and Bugs...
1) Power Failure Crash
-- A "Continuous Save" is unpractical. Committing every action to permanent storage, aka a hard drive, would both kill performance and shorten the drive life. It would also increase the risk of hard drive failure during the crash by increasing the likelihood that the drive would be in use.
2) The Macintosh Dock
-- "It's not that the Dock sucks so much as a productivity tool as it is that Apple threw away so many more powerful, useful objects in its favor." So it works, but there were better options in his opinion? You'd be hard pressed to find anything that couldn't be described in this way.
3) Mysteriously dimmed menu items
-- I can see the point of wanting them to say why, but it is very short sighted to say the message must be exact. A much better solution is that in Help, every menu option should be searchable and explain exactly when it can be used and how. (Though I miss the Apple Help Balloons. Heck, now that I think about it I think they worked and could explain disabled Menu Options but no one bothered to fill them out.)
4) ASCII Sort
-- This is a consistent extension of alphabetic sorts, and will likely never change in standard file system listings. The example of iTunes is a specific application with a specific data set, and any application should organize data as appropriate for the use. Part of the point of iTunes IS to organize files in a way that makes sense for what they are, whereas the operating system must treat all file names equally and not make assumptions about what they represent.
5) URL Naming Bug
-- Correct history: filenames didn't have spaces because the early command line parsers separated tokens by spaces. Even today, command line parsers need help either by quoting the entire name or escaping the spaces. (The Apple II worked because the parser was even simpler; every command was only one word and everything afterwards named the object to be acted upon.) The problem with the proposed fix is that the only place spaces are not allowed is in the machine address part; spaces are allowed willy nilly in the directory portion as per the server's setup. There is no consistent way to know whether spaces in that portion should be dropped. While the browser could be written to automatically remove spaces in the first portion doing so in the directory portion would be disastrous for many web sights. Having it do both would seem to be a blatant inconsistency.
6) Let's you save me some work
-- This is actually reasonable, and as a programmer it's a pet peeve of mine that the computer should do the work. It's not always possible though, and sometimes compromises must be made. I prefer if the field only wants numbers it would say so and prevent numbers from being typed without beeping or anything. I think it's a good compromise between getting a clean entry and not interfering with the user, since any spaces/dashes would just be ignored.
7) The Disk Drive Nazi
-- This was a feature. It prevented floppy or system corruption. (The System was on a floppy and could otherwise be ejected.) OS X is much more dynamic in recovering from these incidents, having to deal with USB, Firewire, and Network drives. The incident with the Powerbook described is most likely the result of using a non-Apple drive with a bad driver. Booting from an emergency CD would eliminate. Given the author's history it's even possible he was using OS 9, increasing the likelihood of a driver problem.
8) 9) 10)
Apparently, he's counting in base 7.
I hope you included the price of your DVD player, your TV, and your electric bill in that calculation. :)
compared to my $29 for DSL isn't really a good deal.
Umm... unless you buy the DSL only for playing WoW, it's pretty much pointless to include it as a cost for playing. That's like including the cost of your car every time you budget for going to a movie.
They were probably planning on it from the beginning, but waited until a good ways into the Beta to implement it at all so they could get a base line of normal XP/leveling speed/etc. The first version they implemented was actually completely sliding, where if you were online for quite a while without resting you would progress through Tired stages that netted 50% or even 25%XP. Boy, the stink that went up over that. I'm sure it made sense in meetings, but players did not want to be punished for playing. In the end you still had idiots arguing that because some players were getting a 'bonus' it was as if they were getting 'punished', but they slowly died down as the system got tweaked.
There are quests in WoW that require hours on end, and there are apparently large high-end raids that require a lot of planning. It is possible to go to the cap of 60 in 3 or 4 hour increments on a casual basis, but dedicated players will get there faster and have unique items from certain quests as well.
In other words, it's not that certain quests are open to hardcore players, more that casual players probably just won't do them. All in all it works out well enough.
No, there were less then 10,000 through the Closed Beta. Before the stress tests they only had 3 servers tops, and I never saw more than 2 or 3 thousand on one at a given time. The Stress Tests had 100,000 each. The Open Beta was open to all applicants, but they cut it off after 500,000 as they were only planning on testing about 40 servers for it.
I'm going to address your second point, and say WoW already has a rest system for this. If you are at 'Rested' instead of 'Normal', you get 200% of XP for kills. The longer you are logged out between playing, the longer you will be at Rested while playing. It went through many forms to get to that point, and in the end pretty much all Beta players agreed it was a reasonable amount.
As for death penalties, if you have choice you would just open yourself for headaches for your choices from support requests. Request type one would be players who chose A, but are now in a guild with B's and want to change because they keep falling behind. And virtually every C will claim they were killed by lag and want to be resurrected. It's much simpler if you pick one that people will accept, even if they would prefer more or less.
There were numerous suggestions during Beta for a "Hardcore" (type C) server. When others replied "Just delete your character when you die and own your experience", they would whine that if everyone didn't have the same penalty it wasn't fair. So I don't think having the 3 choices on one server would work, and having different servers with different rules still be troublesome from a support point of view.
The economics against a free trial are a lot higher for MMORPGS. First of all, it's not trivial but relatively simple to release a demo of a standard game that is simply short on content. The best you could do with a MMORPG is limit it to level 10 or something.
But that's not the big issue. The $15 monthly goes to server support and maintenance, including things like electricity and bandwidth. There were 500,000 applicants accepted into WoW's Open Beta; who knows how many applied. If a standard MMORPG allowed a free trial they would see thousands of non-paying players using their resources for free. And either they run the risk of having the free players disrupt a standing server with no real repercussions, or they have to maintain trial servers for free.
Everyone understands the 'more likely to buy if allowed to try' principle. It's the 'hey it's free and I can do what I want' principle that gets in the way.
Your level of ignorance is truly outstanding.
Uh, if the PC game industry goes all-DRM expect those Mac ports to be loaded down with it, too.
1) There is no indication that the entire game industry is going DRM.
2) There ARE Mac-only games; many of them Shareware and cheaper. Granted, they don't look like multi-million dollar projects, but many people care about playability and only notice graphics when they distract from the game play.
If that's your philosophy there's no need to buy a Mac. Just play old PC games on an older Windows OS, until the cows come home.
3) Holy non-sequitur, Batman! Clearly I meant at anytime I feel like getting a new game of a given type I might not have thousands of choices but I'll be able to find a good game anyway. If I was really someone who never went for new I'd just stick to my Atari 2600 and be done with it.
Let's review:
No games worth playing on the Mac: FALSE
Can always play newest games on the Mac: FALSE
Can always find a good game to play on the Mac: TRUE
Conclusion: if you always have to play the latest hit of the week, the Mac isn't for you. If you use your computer to get things done and occasionally play a game, the Mac is perfectly viable. I can't make it any plainer than that.
What happens next, when EA writes its own clone of Steam, without which no EA titles will run? And when Activision writes its clone? And Sony writes its clone? And the MPAA writes its clone and bundles it with Windows Media Player 16.666? And RIAA writes its clone as a part of theyTunes 2.0?
You buy a Mac and a Playstation 2. Seriously, with crap like this I'll take the fewer games on my computer. Sure, only 20% of the games for Windows get ported over, but they're pretty much the top of a saturated pile. Furthermore, anything that's missing I can usually get for the PS2 with a lot less hassle, not to mention a trade in value when I'm done. (Sure, it might drop down to as low as 3 bucks, but hey - that's more than zero.)
After all, between a family and a job I'm not buying all that many games anymore as it is. Any gametype that can't be played well on the PS2 has a couple of Mac games, and vice versa. There may only be a handful, but you only need one good one. For example, Mac users will have little choice in MMORPG, but with one choice being Blizzard's World of Warcraft I really don't see a reason to complain.
Is there any reason to expect that the number of job opportunities in this area are going to increase in the coming years?
I imagine this would depend on whether the crime rate is rising or falling. Good luck getting a consistent answer to that. Every study will measure it differently, and the results will be used/reported depending on the answers wanted by whomever is quoting them.
I end up giving my better half a running commentary of dodgy science as we watch.
And they keep watching with you? That's my trick to get out of watching something; a couple of minutes and it's 'Fine, I'll watch in the other room!"
Granted, it's not like shows I like have never done this (I've always wondered how Star Fleet computers can reconstruct an entire face from an ear and an eyebrow), but I just ignore it then. If I don't like what I'm watching, nitpicking is the entertainment.
Unfortunately not. I was looking forward to writing my own 'geeks for weed' jokes or maybe something about outsourcing to Canada, but it turns out that while THC can reduce pressure it also reduces blood flow through the optic nerve which is apparently not good for glaucoma.
Reference 1
Reference 2
Reference 3
Oh well.
I've been in since April, and I can't think of anything the rabbits would drop that crafting requires. And if you weren't catching any fish, I'm guessing you were fishing in to high of an area for your skill level. It levels pretty smoothly in the right area. Though there are NO crafts that require fishing to level up with, so I have no idea why everyone felt they had to fish instead of trying to buy it from the auction house and didn't just go out and kill things.
I don't know what kind of person WANTS to wander all over Dwarf-Land looking for +2 Balls of Twine but from talking to the Diablo and Warcraft fans I met at that LAN party, it doesn't seem like much of Blizzard's fan base is going to appreciate the final WoW product.
Firstly, all crafting is voluntary and for fun. If you don't enjoy it, don't do it - there isn't anything crafting gets you that is required to progress that you couldn't buy off someone willing to spend the time. Secondly, the servers being overloaded from 500,000 trying to constantly play suggest you may have a very small sampling of Blizzard's fan base that doesn't scale to do projections very well.
The fact remains that MMORPG's are not for everyone, including some fans of previous Blizzard games. The general rule of thumb is if you wouldn't want to play a regular paper & pencil RPG, you probably won't like a Massive Online version either. It definitely sounds like the group you were watching is not the target audience, and the is nothing wrong with that on either side.
I'm running on a 800 g3 ibook and its playable, but not really.
You can try adding memory, but it isn't going to get better. From Requirements:
933 MHz or higher G4 or G5 processor.
512 MB RAM or higher. DDR RAM recommended.
I think it's playable with slightly less, but they are essentially covering their butts. I've been playing since April on a 1Ghz Powerbook with 512MB, and the performance is a lot better now. It still bogs down in certain areas, but is pretty good overall.
... nobody is going to be switching over to MSN Search from Google anytime soon.
Not until the next Service Packs make it the default search engine, anyway.
... paleontology graduate student Jacqueline M. Kozisek ...
Did it occur to her to ask an entomologist? From Wikipedia In the autumn, young queens mate with male drone bees and hibernate over the winter in a warm area. Oftentimes, a queen will burrow into the ground to keep herself from freezing. In the spring, a queen awakens and finds a suitable place to create her hive, and then builds wax pots in which to lay her fertilized eggs from the previous winter. The eggs that hatch are female workers, and in time they populate the hive.
I am not an entomologist, but even I can postulate a) they are triggered out of hibernation by temperature, so they just stayed until the earth heated up. Winters around here (Western Penn) can spend quite some time around and below freezing, but the ground stays near freezing. All it would have taken would have been a relative hardy handful to survive; if they haven't changed much since then it's not like they were cross breeding like crazy. Heck, for all we know there were thousands of bee types beforehand and these are the only ones that could survive being frozen as queens.
It's almost as if this paleontologist didn't know queen bees hibernate, even for tropical bees. (See here. I will give her credit for an original approach, but even if I'm way off base (which I'll admit) it took me 2 minutes to find 'hibernate in winter' in reference to bumblebees. It may just be the article left out her accounting for this fact, but if she found out about it hopefully she can address whether or not they could have hibernated long enough.
Ok, I know I'm rambling so I'll make my point: while the temperatures were shown to kill off flying bees, I'm curious whether she was aware of the hibernation possibility and accounted for whether the temperatures were low enough, long enough to kill them as well.
The $50 upfront pays for the past ~4 years of development, printing, boxes, advertising, etc.
The $15/month goes towards active storage, backups, GM/support, internet fees, and, most importantly, active development and fixes.
Here comes the math: Over one year, WoW would cost $50 + $15x12 or $230, which would break down to just over $20 a month if you only play one year. How much do you spend on movie/game rentals, concerts, books, or whatever entertainment you do in a month? Hell, one nice dinner with drinks could cost 20 bucks. If you end up playing just 5 hours a week, you're active entertainment cost is $1/hour. Given that a movie cost $7-$10 for ~2 hours, and you aren't in charge, it works out pretty well.
Sorry for that math rant, but it's kind of pointless to say 'can't justify the cost' if you don't actually do the math.
This is almost certainly true. The last download breaks the install file into four CD-friendly chunks, and is almost certainly what's been sent off to be burned. We already know there are a couple of features to be patched in in the upcoming week or so, but in theory it will be a 'small' patch. I think I read that some of the features exist in the installation, but aren't enabled and would just need final values when ready. (e.g. For the missing talents, they already know what they will look like and be called and the animation files are in, it's just a matter of setting the values representing Cool Down time, Cast Time, Level, Damage, etc. they decide on from internal testing.)
I'm also in closed beta.
They test everything in house, and they've had these talents for some time. They will get a tweak if in two weeks it's obviously unbalanced, but it's not as if they just came off the blackboard yesterday.
Again, they've tested Battlegrounds internally. Basically most of the testing here is for PvP balancing, which we've been doing for months.
Hero classes aren't until level 60. They have a couple of months. (I'm not getting into a power leveler vs. casual player tangent, but keeping a casu
Racial traits are in in internal builds and have been for a while; they've been commented on the boards by Blizzard employees.
They've said repeatedly on the boards that they weren't sure if they would show raid content in the Beta, as they want to keep it as a surprise.
Trades skills, warlock pets, Horde content, unfinished quests - going to play the 'internal build' card again.
Before I get labeled a Blizzard apologist, I too was surprised at the suddenness of this announcement, though I'm starting to think they've known for a while but didn't want people to slow their testing with a possible character wipe coming. But on the flipside, with 90% of an intended release done having your internal testers testing the last 10% is not that bad. You have thousands test everything until you get to the point where what you are changing can actually be tested by dozens effectively. Then you release it with a couple of weeks left to check for gross problems, and you're done.
I will agree that there are a couple of things that didn't get done (e.g. weather), but I think the few things that you've listed that are needed by launch will be there.
Actually, it will test two areas. 1) Whether their servers are ready, since conceivably the Open Beta will be larger then the Stress Test. 2) It let's in a LOT more system configurations who will let them know if there are any glitches they hadn't caught yet.
Also, come to think of it, it will provide a test for their GM's/support staff; no one is paying so they have a little leeway, but it will help them judge what to expect when people get in who haven't been playing for months on end, or even following the boards to know the answers to 'simple' questions.
Where have you stalled? What side are you on? I've been playing in Closed Beta since March, and I didn't start 'stalling' until the late 20's, but back then they simply hadn't done the zones I needed to quest in yet. Quests are pretty steady, though sometimes you have to go to entirely new areas to get more that are your level if you rush through some with higher level players.
Frankly, one night of playing an MMORPG is not enough time to judge anything, let alone make recommendations. Why not let them play and judge for themselves? Maybe it's just not your kind of game if you can't get past one night; it's meant to last months if not years of playtime after all.
Taxi Driver isn't a very exciting title either, is it?
You think that's bad? What about The Godfather? Come on, a movie about some old guy you barely know that sends you bizarre Christmas presents? Please. At least Showgirls sounds exciting.
I think part of the occurrence with TS2 was that Disney views animation sequels as direct-to-video cash cows. Unlike other animation sequels Pixar went all out on it and convinced Disney to move it to theatres, but it was still not counted as a 'feature' but as a 'sequel' for contractual purposes.
This article confirms that it originally was a direct-to-video project, as does this one. I thought Pixar had to fight harder, but I may have just read a biased story at the time. There was a story during the contract 'negotiations' that Disney would develop Toy Story 3 on it's own, but I don't know if that's still true. Probably, though; they own all the characters from the original contracts and aren't ones to not milk something to death.