So I gotta wonder... will they make the mistake of giving the player too much too soon?
Another reason Final Fantasy 7 was wonderful was because it was incremental in expansion. I remember the feeling of amazement when I stepped out of Midgar for the first time and realized that the entire world was not within that city. But it sure felt like it!
And then the world got small really fast. Especially when you got the airship.
I just hope they don't fall in love with their expansive world and then try to give it to everyone without properly pacing it. But I also hope they don't force a player to sit through 10 hours of gameplay before seeing the world just to force a sense of pace.
They've been generally good about pacing in the past. I'm just worried about when they start talking about a single fantasy world lasting a decade...:\
When I was down there, myself (Army) and one of the civilians who ran the camp help desk would setup monthly LAN parties in one of the tents. We took a couple of backup switches, some of the briefing projectors, and several power strips and took over the MWR (Morale Welfare Recreation) tent for a night.
I was on a transient camp in Kuwait that funneled Soldiers from all countries into Iraq, so there wasn't much of an infrastructure for these guys to get together for some gaming. We basically just told everyone a couple days in advance, so anyone who was on camp would get a chance to come game for several hours.
I travelled between camps a lot with my job, but I was always asking around about what sort of similar events were available on the other camps, and very rarely did I actually find anything similar.
The issue is, mainly, it takes a decently ranking person to sign a memorandum to allow people to leave a camp. When you begin coordinating events like this, if you don't have that support from higher, then each camp is on their own to create an infrastructure for these types of events. Needless to say, this doesn't happen. You'd be amazed how out of several thousand people, only one or two might be willing and have the ability to setup something like this, and then they gotta actually THINK of doing it.
I really like how these guys are getting this going. Hopefully someone doesn't forget to mail them some model trees and shrubs, cuz otherwise every battle will be on a sand table:\
they probably have one person responding to emails. another person is answering phones. everyone else is busy trying to figure out what information got stolen, how it got stolen, and how to keep it from being stolen again.
I'm not entirely sure this qualifies as an MMOG, as those tend to have persistant universes, yeah? I think this is more of a cooperative online game. otherwise yahoo poker would be an MMOG.
You honestly think that's the most prevalent mode of transportation in Iraq? Sure for us, the American Soldiers, but for the Iraqis, cars are still the number one choice. Use some common sense.
Oh, and for the bad guys, trucks and vans are pretty helpful. Trucks can have mounted 50cals or mortar launchers, and vans can carry teams or sets of IED's.
You could do the childish thing and make a big board that displays the worst worker in the office. You could even make it a dart board and the center of the target is the guy's future pink slip. Or you could just talk to them and allude to potential future cutbacks in manpower. Remind them that this is the real IT world, not that big bubblegum era back in the late 90's.
These are called "negative reinforcement", and as a Soldier, I see this all the goddamn time. It's the easy method of dealing with motivational issues.
The more difficult, but often far more rewarding alternative is to build pride in the company. Now please bear with me as I'm going to make some comparisons to the military, but it does make sense.
When a Soldier is told that he's doing things for his country, that doesn't motivate him, especially when he's not even living in that country anymore. The same goes for your company. You can try to motivate your people by building their pride in the overall company, but if this isn't a small company then you probably have offices in other cities or states, and the company is large enough that they don't know all the faces that they service. This makes pride in the company difficult to achieve and they will sacrifice integrity in the pride they have in the company.
When you tell a Soldier that they should take pride in the mission, then all they see is the mission getting accomplished, not the methods used to get there. Many times this leads to compromises in personal integrity or the integrity of the office to reach a goal. Within your staff, you'll notice that they may feel that the customers are taken care of, so who honestly cares about some stupid log system just so the people that are already disconnected from them can now nitpick on their work habits? They will get the job done, but they will avoid the ticket system and compromise the integrity of the boss/employee relationship. This hurts pride in the job.
When a Soldier feels that they are doing their job so that the people on their fire team don't die, then they feel a sense of pride and brotherhood, and are far less likely to sacrifice integrity of the team with which they have grown close to.
So don't isolate them against each other. Don't isolate them from the company a lot, but it's alright if you do a little. You can isolate them from you, but only in that way that makes a boss a boss while still being able to maintain that direct relationship and most likely friendship. Focus on making the job something they do together and that they try to help each other improve on. I know it's not life or death for IT personnel, but you can still find the same levels of motivation if you build them up properly.
I believe you missed the point of the Vista article. They make Dvorak's articles all big and obvious for two reasons. First, people who enjoy his articles haven't yet figured out that those miniature headlines are actually links to full articles. Second, they want to make sure that everyone gets a regulated selection of a couple of sentences from his garbage articles to prevent accidental ingestion of an entire screen's worth before realizing who the author is.
Linus Torvalds was accused of stealing IP from Microsoft in an interview earlier today. In response he proceeded to hurl a chair at the nearest computer running Windows.
I've used the freezer solution many times myself as well. It works about 75% of the time in my experience, and only lasts for one more boot, but generally that's enough to let the user backup their data. In a work environment with no backup solution for employee's desktops, this is helpful.
What about all the companies that enforce power management settings across their network that remove standby mode etc? And that's just one large example of all of the little situations which would partially negate this ignorantly large savings estimation.
Not saying it wouldn't help, but you don't force something like this down on a 5 year old OS. Now if they included some sort of detection system in Vista that adjusted accordingly, then that would be helpful for the next gen.
I remember one of the characters in the movie Go speaking in regards to the younger generation not understanding the value of proper work ethic. He gave the example of back in the day being able to get promoted based on you being better than the guy above you. Today however, everyone bumbles along until the guy above them falls on his ass, and surprise! you're now on top.
I've also noticed a trend in America where people seem to be promoted over and over and over due to their skill in an area until they finally reach a point where they no longer excel, and are either fired, or quit from exhaustion.
This has bled over into the military side as well. I'm in the Army these days, and I notice a huge push for people to make it to the management levels. When people approach me about it (monthly now), they state all sorts of reasons like "more money", and "you can get out of mandatory things this way", but rarely do I ever hear "you would make a great leader of soldiers and would really help some of these people grow."
My point is, it seems like America as a whole is missing some of the core values that the older generations appear to have had.
I know it seems a bit immature, but I've seen some crazy things done with Lego Mindstorms, from building a disk array to a robot that cleans rooms and such. It should provide a good entry level system for you to learn how to at least *think* like a roboticist.
Any tech support for an MMO could, in my opinion, be handled via message boards. Everything should be handled on the website. Not only would the community be supporting itself in some regards, but any official tech support team members could be easily added/replaced as needed. This also eliminates the need for any official tech support office, unless you wish to bring a couple in-house just to administrate the whole process.
This does require a little more attention be paid to security, however. Not just security of the accounts, but security of the community. Thats a different topic though, more relating to message board management.
What worries me is EA has this tendency to lock out certain content from all but one port, so each port has some sort of unique aspect. They try to build it up as if they added something just for this one port, but it seems more likely to me that limits were imposed on the other ports instead. Depends on if you want to see it in a good light or a bad one though. What it all comes down to for me though is why would I want to buy a game 3 different times just to see the whole game?
You would spend $50 to $75 on a $5 bargain bin DVD so that you can have a lesser quality movie. At what point is this a deal? Especially when you can buy the dvd and rip it to a memory stick already... Oh wait wasn't this why the UMD failed in the first place?
At least it's on memory stick right out of the box now, so you can try to get it on your computer through a stick reader. Odds are it's locked though so without some cracking tool it'd be useless to the people who just want a no-hassle solution.
Here comes sony again trying to create a demand for something they think is a good thing to supply. Too bad nobody is listening...
The military is becoming so dependant on the internet that when the net goes down, many combat support units are unable to do large portions of their job effectively. Combat support does not include the guys kicking in doors for launching artillery rounds downrange. It's all the guys who make ID cards and fill out insurance forms and fix the soldiers financial problems and such. Without the internet we can't connect to the databases we need to get to in order to modify Soldier's data.
Now this doesn't mean we can't do the job at all. It just means we have to switch back to the old paper and mail methods. This is significantly slower obviously, but it works.
It's interesting to me how the military doesn't do this for money, but rather for this idea that a Soldier's life is at stake. So does that mean that these companies that abandon paper methods don't take their work as seriously as the Army? Or just that the risk of saving money by abandoning these methods is worth it in the long run?
Does a day without net really matter? Or as the parent post mentioned, do months really matter?
Seems like a good plan. They hold off on production, and at release come up with less supply than demand, and hopefully the lack of supply causes news stories to artificially inflate the demand.
Now what I think will hurt them the most is when people see the $800 price tag on ebay, and say "I'm waiting a couple months so I can buy it at a normal retail price." like they did on their last two consoles.
So instead of an "effect" we now have a Slashdot "Attack" which has been apparently aimed at taking down their website. What a joke. Someone at Slashdot may want to send these guys an email letting them know that this isn't a DDoS!
The site I've used for the last couple years on every fresh install is The Elder Geek. He lays out every service, what it's used for, and whether he recommends it be disabled or not.
The site also has a lot of other valuable information about the innerworkings of XP.
I suppose it makes no difference what brand you use, but the marketing implications of this are phenomenal. Imagine having bandaids that don't glow but actually light themselves!
Add a nifty strobe effect and you'll have the perfect rave accessories anytime you fall off your bike!
Slashdot Mirror
So I gotta wonder... will they make the mistake of giving the player too much too soon?
:\
Another reason Final Fantasy 7 was wonderful was because it was incremental in expansion. I remember the feeling of amazement when I stepped out of Midgar for the first time and realized that the entire world was not within that city. But it sure felt like it!
And then the world got small really fast. Especially when you got the airship.
I just hope they don't fall in love with their expansive world and then try to give it to everyone without properly pacing it. But I also hope they don't force a player to sit through 10 hours of gameplay before seeing the world just to force a sense of pace.
They've been generally good about pacing in the past. I'm just worried about when they start talking about a single fantasy world lasting a decade...
When I was down there, myself (Army) and one of the civilians who ran the camp help desk would setup monthly LAN parties in one of the tents. We took a couple of backup switches, some of the briefing projectors, and several power strips and took over the MWR (Morale Welfare Recreation) tent for a night.
:\
I was on a transient camp in Kuwait that funneled Soldiers from all countries into Iraq, so there wasn't much of an infrastructure for these guys to get together for some gaming. We basically just told everyone a couple days in advance, so anyone who was on camp would get a chance to come game for several hours.
I travelled between camps a lot with my job, but I was always asking around about what sort of similar events were available on the other camps, and very rarely did I actually find anything similar.
The issue is, mainly, it takes a decently ranking person to sign a memorandum to allow people to leave a camp. When you begin coordinating events like this, if you don't have that support from higher, then each camp is on their own to create an infrastructure for these types of events. Needless to say, this doesn't happen. You'd be amazed how out of several thousand people, only one or two might be willing and have the ability to setup something like this, and then they gotta actually THINK of doing it.
I really like how these guys are getting this going. Hopefully someone doesn't forget to mail them some model trees and shrubs, cuz otherwise every battle will be on a sand table
they probably have one person responding to emails. another person is answering phones. everyone else is busy trying to figure out what information got stolen, how it got stolen, and how to keep it from being stolen again.
I'm not entirely sure this qualifies as an MMOG, as those tend to have persistant universes, yeah? I think this is more of a cooperative online game. otherwise yahoo poker would be an MMOG.
You honestly think that's the most prevalent mode of transportation in Iraq? Sure for us, the American Soldiers, but for the Iraqis, cars are still the number one choice. Use some common sense.
Oh, and for the bad guys, trucks and vans are pretty helpful. Trucks can have mounted 50cals or mortar launchers, and vans can carry teams or sets of IED's.
FTA: "I recently needed to rewrite a web site so it works on firefox too..."
I'd take what this guy has to say with a large grain of salt if this is how he treats his sites.
You could do the childish thing and make a big board that displays the worst worker in the office. You could even make it a dart board and the center of the target is the guy's future pink slip. Or you could just talk to them and allude to potential future cutbacks in manpower. Remind them that this is the real IT world, not that big bubblegum era back in the late 90's. These are called "negative reinforcement", and as a Soldier, I see this all the goddamn time. It's the easy method of dealing with motivational issues. The more difficult, but often far more rewarding alternative is to build pride in the company. Now please bear with me as I'm going to make some comparisons to the military, but it does make sense. When a Soldier is told that he's doing things for his country, that doesn't motivate him, especially when he's not even living in that country anymore. The same goes for your company. You can try to motivate your people by building their pride in the overall company, but if this isn't a small company then you probably have offices in other cities or states, and the company is large enough that they don't know all the faces that they service. This makes pride in the company difficult to achieve and they will sacrifice integrity in the pride they have in the company. When you tell a Soldier that they should take pride in the mission, then all they see is the mission getting accomplished, not the methods used to get there. Many times this leads to compromises in personal integrity or the integrity of the office to reach a goal. Within your staff, you'll notice that they may feel that the customers are taken care of, so who honestly cares about some stupid log system just so the people that are already disconnected from them can now nitpick on their work habits? They will get the job done, but they will avoid the ticket system and compromise the integrity of the boss/employee relationship. This hurts pride in the job. When a Soldier feels that they are doing their job so that the people on their fire team don't die, then they feel a sense of pride and brotherhood, and are far less likely to sacrifice integrity of the team with which they have grown close to. So don't isolate them against each other. Don't isolate them from the company a lot, but it's alright if you do a little. You can isolate them from you, but only in that way that makes a boss a boss while still being able to maintain that direct relationship and most likely friendship. Focus on making the job something they do together and that they try to help each other improve on. I know it's not life or death for IT personnel, but you can still find the same levels of motivation if you build them up properly.
Yeah. And one of them is quitting soon (with vague rumors of running for president), while the other will just throw his chair at the unimpressed.
I believe you missed the point of the Vista article. They make Dvorak's articles all big and obvious for two reasons. First, people who enjoy his articles haven't yet figured out that those miniature headlines are actually links to full articles. Second, they want to make sure that everyone gets a regulated selection of a couple of sentences from his garbage articles to prevent accidental ingestion of an entire screen's worth before realizing who the author is.
Linus Torvalds was accused of stealing IP from Microsoft in an interview earlier today. In response he proceeded to hurl a chair at the nearest computer running Windows.
I've used the freezer solution many times myself as well. It works about 75% of the time in my experience, and only lasts for one more boot, but generally that's enough to let the user backup their data. In a work environment with no backup solution for employee's desktops, this is helpful.
What about all the companies that enforce power management settings across their network that remove standby mode etc? And that's just one large example of all of the little situations which would partially negate this ignorantly large savings estimation.
Not saying it wouldn't help, but you don't force something like this down on a 5 year old OS. Now if they included some sort of detection system in Vista that adjusted accordingly, then that would be helpful for the next gen.
I remember one of the characters in the movie Go speaking in regards to the younger generation not understanding the value of proper work ethic. He gave the example of back in the day being able to get promoted based on you being better than the guy above you. Today however, everyone bumbles along until the guy above them falls on his ass, and surprise! you're now on top.
I've also noticed a trend in America where people seem to be promoted over and over and over due to their skill in an area until they finally reach a point where they no longer excel, and are either fired, or quit from exhaustion.
This has bled over into the military side as well. I'm in the Army these days, and I notice a huge push for people to make it to the management levels. When people approach me about it (monthly now), they state all sorts of reasons like "more money", and "you can get out of mandatory things this way", but rarely do I ever hear "you would make a great leader of soldiers and would really help some of these people grow."
My point is, it seems like America as a whole is missing some of the core values that the older generations appear to have had.
I know it seems a bit immature, but I've seen some crazy things done with Lego Mindstorms, from building a disk array to a robot that cleans rooms and such. It should provide a good entry level system for you to learn how to at least *think* like a roboticist.
Any tech support for an MMO could, in my opinion, be handled via message boards. Everything should be handled on the website. Not only would the community be supporting itself in some regards, but any official tech support team members could be easily added/replaced as needed. This also eliminates the need for any official tech support office, unless you wish to bring a couple in-house just to administrate the whole process.
This does require a little more attention be paid to security, however. Not just security of the accounts, but security of the community. Thats a different topic though, more relating to message board management.
What worries me is EA has this tendency to lock out certain content from all but one port, so each port has some sort of unique aspect. They try to build it up as if they added something just for this one port, but it seems more likely to me that limits were imposed on the other ports instead. Depends on if you want to see it in a good light or a bad one though. What it all comes down to for me though is why would I want to buy a game 3 different times just to see the whole game?
So the quantity of fud is directly proportional to the amount of sony hardware available?
You would spend $50 to $75 on a $5 bargain bin DVD so that you can have a lesser quality movie. At what point is this a deal? Especially when you can buy the dvd and rip it to a memory stick already... Oh wait wasn't this why the UMD failed in the first place?
At least it's on memory stick right out of the box now, so you can try to get it on your computer through a stick reader. Odds are it's locked though so without some cracking tool it'd be useless to the people who just want a no-hassle solution.
Here comes sony again trying to create a demand for something they think is a good thing to supply. Too bad nobody is listening...
Surely the works of Homer, or even Shakespeare are older than at least most of the employees at Microsoft.
In any case, I suppose this will give Microsoft the ability to sue the hell out of SCO for writing any emails to IBM ever.
The military is becoming so dependant on the internet that when the net goes down, many combat support units are unable to do large portions of their job effectively. Combat support does not include the guys kicking in doors for launching artillery rounds downrange. It's all the guys who make ID cards and fill out insurance forms and fix the soldiers financial problems and such. Without the internet we can't connect to the databases we need to get to in order to modify Soldier's data.
Now this doesn't mean we can't do the job at all. It just means we have to switch back to the old paper and mail methods. This is significantly slower obviously, but it works.
It's interesting to me how the military doesn't do this for money, but rather for this idea that a Soldier's life is at stake. So does that mean that these companies that abandon paper methods don't take their work as seriously as the Army? Or just that the risk of saving money by abandoning these methods is worth it in the long run?
Does a day without net really matter? Or as the parent post mentioned, do months really matter?
I'm no economics major or anything, but doesn't that go against the whole thing where Bush gets money from oil?
Seems like a good plan. They hold off on production, and at release come up with less supply than demand, and hopefully the lack of supply causes news stories to artificially inflate the demand.
Now what I think will hurt them the most is when people see the $800 price tag on ebay, and say "I'm waiting a couple months so I can buy it at a normal retail price." like they did on their last two consoles.
Surprise! The console price isn't dropping!
So instead of an "effect" we now have a Slashdot "Attack" which has been apparently aimed at taking down their website. What a joke. Someone at Slashdot may want to send these guys an email letting them know that this isn't a DDoS!
The site I've used for the last couple years on every fresh install is The Elder Geek. He lays out every service, what it's used for, and whether he recommends it be disabled or not. The site also has a lot of other valuable information about the innerworkings of XP.
I suppose it makes no difference what brand you use, but the marketing implications of this are phenomenal. Imagine having bandaids that don't glow but actually light themselves!
Add a nifty strobe effect and you'll have the perfect rave accessories anytime you fall off your bike!