I played SWG some... And maybe it's because I was burned out on MMOG's in general at the time, but I never could escape feeling like it was essentially AO with a Star Wars license. The combat was as mindless as any other MMOG (although EQ2 and WoW at least have a bit more interaction than hitting a button and walking away). The crafting system was there, but not worthwhile, at least until you've spent tons of time doing it. I'm looking forward to a sci-fi based MMOG done right. Preferably a Shadowrun theme...
On the assumption that most of your problems were caused by data becoming corrupted, why not use Knoppix (or some similar CD-based distro of your choice)? Throw in some decent surge supressors for the worst of the fluctuations. You won't have to worry about the cost of getting UPS's going, and your core OS will be good. No reason students can't save data to a hard drive on it.
What if it takes resource handling out of the picture? For example, each player gets number of points to spend churning out units. As you (or members of your allied forces) capture towers, or enemy tower, or what have you, all the players on one side get more points to spend. You can work it similar to the way Planet Side handles capturing things, i.e. you can capture a technology building and equip your units with better weapons. Or capture an airport and suddenly you get longer range, better air-based weaponry. Get everybody to sign on as one team or another, plus the option to have guilds below that, and now you've got people working in unison to control a game map. Everybody can build their own units, and throw them around at will. Heck, even have them choose a unit type, so player A only builds infantry for example. Force interaction between the players. Say you can't take over a tower or building without infantry, and there's specialty infantry that's good against tanks. Again, essentially Planet Side moved from FPS to RTS. Can't be more laggy than Planet Side (or at least than Planet Side used to be, haven't played in a while).
I doubt it. They're probably hired as "independant contractors" so it becomes their responsibility to pay federal income taxes. The business that hires 'em doesn't have to worry about withholding tax dollars.
I'm not wild about lazy unmotivated citizens taking up slots in college either. But I don't think it's our responsibility to pay for undocumented students any more than I expect to be able to head over to Finland for free education in their colleges. Much as I'd like to...
All things considered, and I'm sure I'll get flamed for it, if they're undocumented they probably shouldn't have access to the same opportunities at public expense. I realize they're incredibily bright, but let them get documentation allowing them to be in the country legally before we spend public money on them. Private money is another matter, obviously, but they shouldn't have access to some of the federally and state funded programs that citizens (or documented persons) have access to.
It's already out there to some degree. When I went to get a car loan, I got a "special deal" from the finance company because I had a degree. As near as I could tell from the paperwork, they didn't care so much what your degree was in or the earning power associated with it. But they did verify the degree, and I got a better rate on the loan for it.
You're right. Rockstar can't afford to hire them. As ramped up as some Senators appear to be to go after 'em, the thought of having it online and "encouraging violence against specific others and not just random people" is probably frightening to their lawyers. And even if they liked the idea, and wanted to hire 'em, it probably increases the liability Rockstar faces. But then...I'm not a lawyer. Most of my soul is still intact:)
That's good to hear. When I was doing IT work in Kentucky (yes, they have computers there), everything was mandated by the state. All the law firms did their thing in Wordperfect, because it's the only format the state bar would accept. They were loosing up some when I left the state, so I don't know where they stand now. The odd thing was the state bar was basically alone in their use of Wordperfect, the other state agencies required Word documents.
We can blame suicides on Lethal Weapon movies, random spearings (although I don't know how many people are killed with spears in the US these days) on Passion of the Christ. Gun violence and road rage on the Mad Max movies. We can blame it all on Mel Gibson. And then the atheists can blame it all on religion because Mel Gibson has religious beliefs! It's even better than a trifecta!
Good point. I should've been more clear. I worked at a theater in high school, and parents found out that the ticket guy sold their kids a ticket for an R-rated movie. Bitched loudly enough that the manager fired 'em. Obviously sneaking into a movie is a bit different.
Parents don't want to hear bad things about their kids.
I'd say this is the single biggest problem. Parents want to believe their child is special, in way that goes beyond "Hey, it's my kid." And instead of listening to objective data like poor grades and trying to figure out the root cause, they complain about the teachers. Or the material. Sure, some kids get poor grades because they're bored and they stop working. Some get 'em because they have issues (medical or otherwise) that need to be addressed. Still others are just stupid. Sorry, but somebody has to score less than 100 on an IQ test.
I've seen it, and it was interesting. The only flaw that came out of the movie was an explicit link between availability of firearms and an increase in violence. As I recall the movie points out that more Canadians, as a percentage, own firearms than are owned in the United States. The Canadian Firearm Centre has a document that claims that almost 23% of Canadian owned firearms, with numbers approaching 70% is certain provinces. Granted, the information is somewhat dated in the document I found (1991).
There are typically much larger issues than the availability of firearms or violence in movies, music or TV that lead to violent outbursts. I believe that focusing ones attention on firearms (or movies, TV, what have you) allows people to stop trying to fix the real underlying problems. In my opinion, it's like applying a band aid to an arterial wound.
The difference is that if you sneak into an R rated movie, some ticket clerk loses his job. If you sell a firearm to a minor, you go to jail. If a crime is commited with the firearm, there's a chance that you'll be held partially responsible for the crime. Regardless, you'll lose whatever license you had to sell firearms. And then we get back to the classic argument about not holding firearms responsible for the crimes. Gun crime is rising in Britain, at least according the BBC, and they've had strong bans on firearms ownership for years.
It may make Blizzard's overall upgrade time longer, but it would significantly decrease player (customer) downtimes during it.
I don't know that it would help the problems much. Customers who have characters on one realm would still be out of luck, and might not enjoy the notion of playing on a different server. Couple that with Blizzard locking out servers after a certain load boundry is hit, and suddenly a lot of your servers are going to be unavailable anyway. As much as I hate the everything down at once mentality, it's probably the most cost effective way for 'em. Certainly you don't get the debugging time you might after seeing how some servers react under load, but customers will complain about "beta testing released software" regardless.
I have to disagree. I've played other MMORPGS, and haven't found one that's as much fun as WoW. I'll be the first to admit that it's not very different from other MMORPGS in terms of overall strategy, but then if you reduce any RPG online or not to its core they're all basically the same. You kill things for levels and loot. That's all there is to it. Your ideal party has someone that can heal, someone that can take a bunch of damage, and at least one person that can crank out damage.
WOW is at least more fun than some others to go through the motions in. As for the outages, they've had their share. But nothing that other MMOGs haven't gone through.
I used to do support for a lot of smaller banks in a rural area in the US. If you walked in, said you were from their support company, looked the part and needed to "check on something while you were in the area" they tended not to give you a second glance. You were their outsourced IT guy coming in to check on things. In the years of supporting smaller banks and branches of banks, I only had one instance where someone called the shop to verify I was supposed to be there. And that was after I'd already left.
Slashdot Mirror
I can verify that an Associates was all it took, the didn't care about a Bachelors or better.
I played SWG some... And maybe it's because I was burned out on MMOG's in general at the time, but I never could escape feeling like it was essentially AO with a Star Wars license. The combat was as mindless as any other MMOG (although EQ2 and WoW at least have a bit more interaction than hitting a button and walking away). The crafting system was there, but not worthwhile, at least until you've spent tons of time doing it. I'm looking forward to a sci-fi based MMOG done right. Preferably a Shadowrun theme...
On the assumption that most of your problems were caused by data becoming corrupted, why not use Knoppix (or some similar CD-based distro of your choice)? Throw in some decent surge supressors for the worst of the fluctuations. You won't have to worry about the cost of getting UPS's going, and your core OS will be good. No reason students can't save data to a hard drive on it.
What if it takes resource handling out of the picture? For example, each player gets number of points to spend churning out units. As you (or members of your allied forces) capture towers, or enemy tower, or what have you, all the players on one side get more points to spend. You can work it similar to the way Planet Side handles capturing things, i.e. you can capture a technology building and equip your units with better weapons. Or capture an airport and suddenly you get longer range, better air-based weaponry. Get everybody to sign on as one team or another, plus the option to have guilds below that, and now you've got people working in unison to control a game map. Everybody can build their own units, and throw them around at will. Heck, even have them choose a unit type, so player A only builds infantry for example. Force interaction between the players. Say you can't take over a tower or building without infantry, and there's specialty infantry that's good against tanks. Again, essentially Planet Side moved from FPS to RTS. Can't be more laggy than Planet Side (or at least than Planet Side used to be, haven't played in a while).
I doubt it. They're probably hired as "independant contractors" so it becomes their responsibility to pay federal income taxes. The business that hires 'em doesn't have to worry about withholding tax dollars.
I'm not wild about lazy unmotivated citizens taking up slots in college either. But I don't think it's our responsibility to pay for undocumented students any more than I expect to be able to head over to Finland for free education in their colleges. Much as I'd like to...
All things considered, and I'm sure I'll get flamed for it, if they're undocumented they probably shouldn't have access to the same opportunities at public expense. I realize they're incredibily bright, but let them get documentation allowing them to be in the country legally before we spend public money on them. Private money is another matter, obviously, but they shouldn't have access to some of the federally and state funded programs that citizens (or documented persons) have access to.
It's already out there to some degree. When I went to get a car loan, I got a "special deal" from the finance company because I had a degree. As near as I could tell from the paperwork, they didn't care so much what your degree was in or the earning power associated with it. But they did verify the degree, and I got a better rate on the loan for it.
You're right. Rockstar can't afford to hire them. As ramped up as some Senators appear to be to go after 'em, the thought of having it online and "encouraging violence against specific others and not just random people" is probably frightening to their lawyers. And even if they liked the idea, and wanted to hire 'em, it probably increases the liability Rockstar faces. But then...I'm not a lawyer. Most of my soul is still intact :)
That's good to hear. When I was doing IT work in Kentucky (yes, they have computers there), everything was mandated by the state. All the law firms did their thing in Wordperfect, because it's the only format the state bar would accept. They were loosing up some when I left the state, so I don't know where they stand now. The odd thing was the state bar was basically alone in their use of Wordperfect, the other state agencies required Word documents.
We can blame suicides on Lethal Weapon movies, random spearings (although I don't know how many people are killed with spears in the US these days) on Passion of the Christ. Gun violence and road rage on the Mad Max movies. We can blame it all on Mel Gibson. And then the atheists can blame it all on religion because Mel Gibson has religious beliefs! It's even better than a trifecta!
Good point. I should've been more clear. I worked at a theater in high school, and parents found out that the ticket guy sold their kids a ticket for an R-rated movie. Bitched loudly enough that the manager fired 'em. Obviously sneaking into a movie is a bit different.
Parents don't want to hear bad things about their kids.
I'd say this is the single biggest problem. Parents want to believe their child is special, in way that goes beyond "Hey, it's my kid." And instead of listening to objective data like poor grades and trying to figure out the root cause, they complain about the teachers. Or the material. Sure, some kids get poor grades because they're bored and they stop working. Some get 'em because they have issues (medical or otherwise) that need to be addressed. Still others are just stupid. Sorry, but somebody has to score less than 100 on an IQ test.
I've seen it, and it was interesting. The only flaw that came out of the movie was an explicit link between availability of firearms and an increase in violence. As I recall the movie points out that more Canadians, as a percentage, own firearms than are owned in the United States. The Canadian Firearm Centre has a document that claims that almost 23% of Canadian owned firearms, with numbers approaching 70% is certain provinces. Granted, the information is somewhat dated in the document I found (1991).
There are typically much larger issues than the availability of firearms or violence in movies, music or TV that lead to violent outbursts. I believe that focusing ones attention on firearms (or movies, TV, what have you) allows people to stop trying to fix the real underlying problems. In my opinion, it's like applying a band aid to an arterial wound.
The difference is that if you sneak into an R rated movie, some ticket clerk loses his job. If you sell a firearm to a minor, you go to jail. If a crime is commited with the firearm, there's a chance that you'll be held partially responsible for the crime. Regardless, you'll lose whatever license you had to sell firearms. And then we get back to the classic argument about not holding firearms responsible for the crimes. Gun crime is rising in Britain, at least according the BBC, and they've had strong bans on firearms ownership for years.
The only problem is that kids under 16 can't buy guns. Other than that, you're dead on!
It may make Blizzard's overall upgrade time longer, but it would significantly decrease player (customer) downtimes during it.
I don't know that it would help the problems much. Customers who have characters on one realm would still be out of luck, and might not enjoy the notion of playing on a different server. Couple that with Blizzard locking out servers after a certain load boundry is hit, and suddenly a lot of your servers are going to be unavailable anyway. As much as I hate the everything down at once mentality, it's probably the most cost effective way for 'em. Certainly you don't get the debugging time you might after seeing how some servers react under load, but customers will complain about "beta testing released software" regardless.
I have to disagree. I've played other MMORPGS, and haven't found one that's as much fun as WoW. I'll be the first to admit that it's not very different from other MMORPGS in terms of overall strategy, but then if you reduce any RPG online or not to its core they're all basically the same. You kill things for levels and loot. That's all there is to it. Your ideal party has someone that can heal, someone that can take a bunch of damage, and at least one person that can crank out damage. WOW is at least more fun than some others to go through the motions in. As for the outages, they've had their share. But nothing that other MMOGs haven't gone through.
I used to do support for a lot of smaller banks in a rural area in the US. If you walked in, said you were from their support company, looked the part and needed to "check on something while you were in the area" they tended not to give you a second glance. You were their outsourced IT guy coming in to check on things. In the years of supporting smaller banks and branches of banks, I only had one instance where someone called the shop to verify I was supposed to be there. And that was after I'd already left.