Its a dangerous legal road for the game company to involve itself directly with exchanging real money for virtual items. What happens when somebody claims their "uber sword of chopping" disappeared due to a bug? Does the game company have the manpower to investigate all the lost or claimed lost possessions for 200,000 subscribers? Right now the game company can say tough luck, but once they admit there is real value its a much tougher legal arguement. You can also have situations where people sue due to devaluation of their property. Imagine they nerf your "uber axe," or make it easier to acquire and now people will only pay $5 instead of $200. You now open yourself up to legal action. There a number of other situations like server crashes, hacked characters, or duping, that would have much more legal implications once the company releases their complete ownership over all properties and enters into "contracts" by selling or supporting the sale of the property.
You can no more "disclaim" your right to own property than you can "disclaim" your right to be alive
There is precidence to signing away your rights to intellectual property that you create. When you work for a company in an engineering/scientist capacity, you typically sign paperwork stating that all inventions, ideas, derived from your work is the property of the company. Also, work for hire situations typically have you sign away rights to the property before you have created it.
In the US there are strict rules about who gets salary and who doesn't. People like you described who screw X into Y are non-exempt hourly workers. They are more like extensions of the machines on the assembly line, they are not allowed to use their own judgement, they are just performing a specific task, usually exactly according to a written specification (if the company follows ISO rules). If the assembly line breaks down, they still just sit idle but get their hourly wage. Companies get into alot of trouble for unpaid overtime Salaried employees are those whose job functions are more intellectual and difficult to quantify. How many hours does it take to design a new widget? You get your salary no matter how many hours you work, the only exceptions are personal absences, or medical absence where the company has an alternate compensation plan (ie short term disability plan). So if I go to work one hour a day each week, I still get my full salary. In my work at least, if you are scheduled for more than 12 hours (ie supervising 12-hour shift workers) then you are given overtime for the extra scheduled hours because your job expectation exceeds the 40 hour work week. Programmers, should be salaried employees, but they also should have insight and input into resourcing expectations. I'm an R&D engineer, and part of my job is to estimate how many hours it will take to complete a project I am given. Of course I have a knowledgable manager, so I can't go way over on my estimate. Programmers if they are exempt should have the same input. In the end it works out best, since management has a good grasp on resourcing, and the employee works a good amount of hours. I usually work between 45-50 hours because I set an aggressive schedule. Of course there are those 80-85 hour weeks because of the unexpected, but I am never in one of those constant 70-80 week grinds.
You have admitted to never playing an MMO, I have played several MMO and spent thousands of hours on EQ, AC, AC2, DAoC, and SWG. You do make good observations, and I agree with what you think should be in a good MMO, there are some points I disagree with you on though. No, they've tried to make every single player think they're the center of the universe and its most important person, Some MMORPGs are like this, but most are intent on trying to immerse you in a world/universe. The best way I have heard Star Wars Galaxies described is: do not play if you want to become a master jedi, play it if you want to be Tauntaun handler number 5. Most MMORPGs you do not feel like you are the most important person in the world. Yet you can still consider yourself a hero. There are many heroes in a well designed living world. Heroes along the lines of slaying the fearsome robber baron and saving the poor town, rather than saving the whole universe from a godly powered necromancer. Single-player games already have dynamically generated quests based on the overall situation, and have had a long time. Quite a few strategy game has them. First there is a difference between random mission generation and dynamic mission generation. UFO is more of a random mission generation (while taking into account the location of the encounter, city or country), Falcon like you described is dynamic mission generation where what happened the mission before affects the next mission. They already have linear dynamic mission generation in games like Planetside, and random mission generation in EQ, AO, and SWG. What you seem to be looking for is dynamic mission generation in a story driven game. Dynamic mission generation is something much easier to do in an action driven game than in a story driven game. In action games you just generate a random new map, say "its the next zone closest to the enemy base" and let the killing begin. In story driven game you have to create a well though out story about the reprecussions of the winner, populate the world with suitable NPCs, and program in new dialogue, and create new quests. For Planetside you have constant dynamic content (like what you described). For Star Wars Galaxies, or Asheron's Call 2 which are story driven, the dynamic content comes out once a month, and that only pertains to a specific thread in the universe. Most of the universe is static (through respawns) because it would take too much manpower like you mentioned in your previous post to constantly update multiple story lines, and the technology isn't there to be able to simulate the implications of each and every NPC interaction/mission If each and every player has to be the one to actually destroy the Death Star, then this will never happen, because such a world would be internally inconsistant. If, on the other hand, they will be satisfied with having merely contributed to the destruction of the Death Star, then this is easy. I agree, not everybody can be the super hero. But even in your example the game breaks down because of its MM nature. A universe changing event like destruction of the death star should be something that happens once a month, just to give time to fill in story lines and plan new content. So to accomplish this with an average of 10 players destroying tie fighters at a given time (very conservative estimate) and an average of 10 minutes per "destroy mission", you would run through 43,200 missions in a month. I don't remember seeing 43,200 tie fighter squadrons and death star towers in Star Wars. Having a living breating "world engine" as you described is what developers are working towards. The genre is still very young, and with each iteration they get better. AO introduced instanced quests, games like Second Life are pioneering player driven content creation, and SWG looked at purely player driven economies.
Its interesting to read the message boards and see everyone complain about how all the classes are broken and whatnot. It seems everyone has a different idea of what each class should be like, and none of those ideas correspond to what the developers have implemented Yes that kind of stuff happens all the time. But there is no excuse to have at launch, literally broken classes. Commando and Bounty Hunter couldn't be completed on some servers until several months after launch no matter what because a particular rare resource didn't show up. Not to mention skills that didn't work at all. SWG now is completed, lots of content, most things working right, and in the end its another average MMORPG with a good community.
I was lucky enough to be in beta 2 & 3. The thing I remembered most was a couple weeks before launch somebody named "Swiggy" managed to crash the server for 3 days. It was amazing that when the launch date was announced, pretty much everybody in beta said, It's not ready, entire classes were broken, others overpowered. Even post launch some servers had significant downtime and bugs like all of somebody's stuff disappearing, dupe bugs, and my favorite all the buildings on one planet relocated to the middle of the planet map overnight. I took 2 weeks off from work to play, it was very fun, even fighting all the annoying bugs, then I ran out of content about 3 months in. SWG has a great crafting and world system, there just isn't enough to really do. I just sat there with 30 million credits, nothing to spend it on, and nothing really to do except just make more credits that I couldn't spend. It was the first MMORPG that I felt like I beat the game. It's sad, the game really had potential, I log in from time to time (my friend kept my account alive) and they've added alot of stuff, but I'm too psyched about EQ2 to rejoin SWG.
I loved to play VGA planets 3.0 back around 1995. The game had a simple interface, but the gamplay could get very complex. Then they added features, hyperspace jumps, gambling ships... eventually the game became just bloated with complexity. Also look at the Civilizaion line of games. Civilization is a classic, civ2 for me hit the sweetspot, not much more complex than the original, but a few helpful tweaks. Then Civ3 added more resources and culture, and is much more complex and less fun to play. Then there is Civ:Call to Power, which totally crosses the line of complexity to where the game isn't fun. Slavery, lawyers filing injunctions, corporate franchises in enemy cities? Developers definately need to evaluate whether the complexity they add enriches the experience, or just makes it more difficult.
I have been living in cube hell for the past 4 years since I graduated. There are parts that are more difficult, and some that are easier than school.
College isn't like high school, there is nobody looking over your shoulder, just like your job. Mom & Dad are hundreds of miles away, and professors could care less what you do. If you don't learn to organize and manage yourself, you end up flunking or dropping out (25% of students) and many who do graduate had to learn the hard way after suffering bad grades their first 2 years. You think they let things slide in college? I've had a professor give me a 0 on a test because I was in the hospital. They don't care about you, neither does anybody else in school. In work you can have somebody cover a presentation for you, and the project managers don't care, they just care about the info; in school you have no help. "Assignments" in college are different than in highschool also. For engineering you are expected to design things. You are given the "Assignment" like design a golf putter, or wake board. You then have to put together from different classes, and different experiences mechanical designs, and material sets to solve the problem. Then you actually go through the process of building, and compete against other teams. My job "assignments" are similar, design a process to do X within certain parameters. Many employers actually do evaluate colleges. They rank the schools, and recruit more heavily at places like MIT, Ga Tech, Berkely, and UIC. After the slots are filled from those candidate pools, then the few positions left go to the next level schools like Michigan, Florida, UCSD. Yes not all college experience is the same, and the employers take that into account. The problem I run into with alot of people who are strictly experienced, is they have a very focused skill set. If I want to hire somebody to just do database stuff, sure its good to hire an experienced database person. But If I need them to do database and maybe some USB driver work on a different project, alot of pure experienced people can't handle such different work.
don't think terrorists are going to hijack an airplane and fly it into a building again because they know we won't fall for that one twice Why not, terrorism is highly symbolic, there was a reason the world trade center was targetted (as it was in 1993). What better way to say "you can't stop us" than hijacking another plane.
A college degree proves that you were attentive enough to pass some tests and do assignments, not that you can drudge through the daily grind of a job. Work is pretty much the same, you are given assignments, you complete assignments. All that having work experience shows is you've done enough to not get fired. And college can definately be a drudge, you don't get paid, you stay up late nights studying, and your diet consists of ramen and Dr. Pepper... perfect training for the real world. Most certainly it does not tell someone that you can learn anymore efficiently than a person who doesn't have a degree. If the job position never changes, then its no problem. But in a changing environment, having people who can quickly understand new concepts is important. A degree gives an employer an idea on your knowledge base and how well you learn. Somebody who hasn't completed college, could understand a new concept in 10 minutes or 10 years, but you have nothing to baseline against.
Credibility, people KNOW I can do this for a living. They dont have to worry about weather I can actually do the work.
What a college degree gives you though is more flexibility. You have proven you can do a particular job and do it well, but it is much more difficult for you to find a job that might require things outside your current skillset. A college degree shows employers you are able to expand your knowledge outside your core competency. Several awards from my employer. In college you can get your name on publications, get rewards from companies in the form of scholarships, and research grants (and companies do keep in mind who they gave money to when they are hiring) Real Life experience.
You can also get alot of experience in school if you're willing to put in the time. You have 16-20 hours a week of class, which leaves you plenty of time for hands on activities like helping grad students with research, taking a job running one of the campus networks, getting involved in a technical club (like solar powered car), etc. Friends You can get those in college too, and there are more women;) Proffesional contacts. Tons and Tons of them. You can get an excellent network in college, internships, co-ops (definately a foot in the door), contacts in companies who donate to your research, and alumni And I dont have 60k in debt, and wont be paying off school bills for the rest of my life Yes it is true:(
The IRS already allows the net cost of stock options to be deducted from corporate taxes at time of excercise. What the expensing would do is actually give a second tax break to corporations since there would be cost impact at time of issuance.
I ask you, what would happen if you could go to wal-mart and charge it, but nothing would show up on your credit card statement? Actually in your example you wouldn't get a bill for the products, but what would happen is on your paycheck instead of making $20 an hour you only make $19.90. When a stock option is excercized, the company increases the amount of stock in the market, so the EPS will decrease accordingly.
Therefore that difference should be listed as a liability and booked as an expense at the time of the exercise The problem is that the proposed rules would have have options expensed at issuance. The Black-Scholes model which is used, basically makes a guess at the future worth of the stock options so they can be expensed. The expensing as you propose where the cost is determined at the time of excercise is already in place for tax reporting purposes.
I get the feeling the MMOs are the gaming industry equivalent of the.COM companies in the 90s, and we're starting to see the fallout (no pun inteded), with all the announced cancellations. Once UO and Everquest hit it big, so many game companies drooled at the cash cow of MMOs. So they all scrambled to create their own MMOs to grab a piece of the market. I mean Motor City Online? Browsing this list of just RPG related MMOs to be released, it looks like too many companies are just grasping at straws. Is there a huge pirate afficionado market just clamoring for an MMORPG to meet their needs? Do we really need another MMO in a high fantasy setting... or 10 more? These are the most expensive games to develop, and the most difficult to attract players to. These are the types of games that can destroy companies. I am just worried that like in the.COM era, alot of money is being thrown at alot of doomed projects. You are basically playing the MMO lotto, unless you have a solid license like matrix online, a rabid community asking for a game like City of Heroes; and even then MMO players have become very picky and if the game isn't that good you will have problems like Star Wars Galaxies.
MMORPGs ideally are like creating a universe. They try to be "world engines," like you described. Unfortunately a fully fleshed out constantly changing world is one of the holy grails of MMORPGs and hasn't been achieved yet. What you describe is what the developers have been trying to do; Unfortunately the current technology only allows for static worlds with disjointed quests.
To give you an idea of how it works, imagine the first star wars movie. One of the "quests" was to fly down the trench and destroy the death star. Well a player can do that "quest", and then the next day the death star comes back and the next player can try the do the same "quest." At best the devs can rack up the tally of successful and unsuccessful attempts and at the end of the month the plot is incrimented forward with either the death star still there or destroyed. Someday the universe would be seamless, where players have direct impact on the universe, but the amount of content and technology required to accomplish it is just out of reach right now.
Now, continuing this reasoning, could superhero A sue superhero B for copyright infringement? Or does superhero law decree that they must fight to the death? Or... some... third option.
I believe precidence was established in the 1994 case of "The Tick vs The Tick". A fight was staged between the two, and the winner kept the moniker "The Tick," while the loser went back to being known as "Barry"
Consumer: So which router should I get
Best buy guy: You definately should get x, the letter is umm, a speed rating, like on car tires Consumer: Will it work with my existing system Best buy guy: Yes it works on the 802.11 standard
Private spaceflight was vaporware also until this last week. It was interesting to read articles on how the projects have evolved until we got to this point. I don't mind having 1% of all/. stories dealing with the evolution of near future technology.
Multiplayer FPS have only been around for 11 years (DOOM). For the most part the games have been designed for the single player experience, multiplayer was not an important part up until 5 years ago. The genre is very young. Professional sports didn't become multi-billion dollar operations in 5 years. There are stories of pro football players having second jobs to survive during the early years.
That said, there are issues with computer games which will need to be dealt with for the popularity to rise to those of sports: 1. High Turnover - As soon as CS2 or something better comes along, everybody will drop CS. Major sports don't have as significant change. You then establish a player legacy, the best will remain the best, people follow careers and teams. If suddenly they changed basketball to have 15' baskets the game breaks, its no longer about players who dunk, its about the purest shooters. The technology needs to get to a point where one game can have decades long legacy. 2. Following the action - the technology needs to be developed for good spectator views. There just hasn't been any focus for developers to work on this. Hockey is a sport that suffers on TV because its hard to follow the action. If things aren't presented well, it just becomes confusing. 3. Widespread play - People like to watch what they play. There is a small population that has a good computer, broadband access, and enough money to dish out on a $50 game. Compare that to spending $20 on a football/basketball/soccerball and going out to the park. As technology becomes more widespread the number of people interested in FPS games will rise and so will the fan base.
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Its a dangerous legal road for the game company to involve itself directly with exchanging real money for virtual items.
What happens when somebody claims their "uber sword of chopping" disappeared due to a bug? Does the game company have the manpower to investigate all the lost or claimed lost possessions for 200,000 subscribers? Right now the game company can say tough luck, but once they admit there is real value its a much tougher legal arguement.
You can also have situations where people sue due to devaluation of their property. Imagine they nerf your "uber axe," or make it easier to acquire and now people will only pay $5 instead of $200. You now open yourself up to legal action.
There a number of other situations like server crashes, hacked characters, or duping, that would have much more legal implications once the company releases their complete ownership over all properties and enters into "contracts" by selling or supporting the sale of the property.
You can no more "disclaim" your right to own property than you can "disclaim" your right to be alive
There is precidence to signing away your rights to intellectual property that you create.
When you work for a company in an engineering/scientist capacity, you typically sign paperwork stating that all inventions, ideas, derived from your work is the property of the company. Also, work for hire situations typically have you sign away rights to the property before you have created it.
In the US there are strict rules about who gets salary and who doesn't.
People like you described who screw X into Y are non-exempt hourly workers. They are more like extensions of the machines on the assembly line, they are not allowed to use their own judgement, they are just performing a specific task, usually exactly according to a written specification (if the company follows ISO rules). If the assembly line breaks down, they still just sit idle but get their hourly wage. Companies get into alot of trouble for unpaid overtime
Salaried employees are those whose job functions are more intellectual and difficult to quantify. How many hours does it take to design a new widget? You get your salary no matter how many hours you work, the only exceptions are personal absences, or medical absence where the company has an alternate compensation plan (ie short term disability plan). So if I go to work one hour a day each week, I still get my full salary.
In my work at least, if you are scheduled for more than 12 hours (ie supervising 12-hour shift workers) then you are given overtime for the extra scheduled hours because your job expectation exceeds the 40 hour work week.
Programmers, should be salaried employees, but they also should have insight and input into resourcing expectations. I'm an R&D engineer, and part of my job is to estimate how many hours it will take to complete a project I am given. Of course I have a knowledgable manager, so I can't go way over on my estimate. Programmers if they are exempt should have the same input. In the end it works out best, since management has a good grasp on resourcing, and the employee works a good amount of hours. I usually work between 45-50 hours because I set an aggressive schedule. Of course there are those 80-85 hour weeks because of the unexpected, but I am never in one of those constant 70-80 week grinds.
Video games should only be played by true professionals, there is just such a high level of danger involved.
Just look at this list of injuries:
dizziness, altered vision, muscle twitches, loss of awareness, disorientation, motion sickness, Eye Strain, Back Injury, Photosensitive Seizures, hand-arm vibration syndrome, blisters, friction burns, lacerations, carpal-tunnel, "Nintendo Thumb", bruises, electric shock, the many horrors of DDR, and now heart attacks.
In the wrong hands video game consoles, and computers running video games are death machines!
You have admitted to never playing an MMO, I have played several MMO and spent thousands of hours on EQ, AC, AC2, DAoC, and SWG. You do make good observations, and I agree with what you think should be in a good MMO, there are some points I disagree with you on though.
No, they've tried to make every single player think they're the center of the universe and its most important person,
Some MMORPGs are like this, but most are intent on trying to immerse you in a world/universe. The best way I have heard Star Wars Galaxies described is: do not play if you want to become a master jedi, play it if you want to be Tauntaun handler number 5.
Most MMORPGs you do not feel like you are the most important person in the world. Yet you can still consider yourself a hero. There are many heroes in a well designed living world. Heroes along the lines of slaying the fearsome robber baron and saving the poor town, rather than saving the whole universe from a godly powered necromancer.
Single-player games already have dynamically generated quests based on the overall situation, and have had a long time. Quite a few strategy game has them.
First there is a difference between random mission generation and dynamic mission generation. UFO is more of a random mission generation (while taking into account the location of the encounter, city or country), Falcon like you described is dynamic mission generation where what happened the mission before affects the next mission.
They already have linear dynamic mission generation in games like Planetside, and random mission generation in EQ, AO, and SWG. What you seem to be looking for is dynamic mission generation in a story driven game. Dynamic mission generation is something much easier to do in an action driven game than in a story driven game. In action games you just generate a random new map, say "its the next zone closest to the enemy base" and let the killing begin. In story driven game you have to create a well though out story about the reprecussions of the winner, populate the world with suitable NPCs, and program in new dialogue, and create new quests.
For Planetside you have constant dynamic content (like what you described). For Star Wars Galaxies, or Asheron's Call 2 which are story driven, the dynamic content comes out once a month, and that only pertains to a specific thread in the universe. Most of the universe is static (through respawns) because it would take too much manpower like you mentioned in your previous post to constantly update multiple story lines, and the technology isn't there to be able to simulate the implications of each and every NPC interaction/mission
If each and every player has to be the one to actually destroy the Death Star, then this will never happen, because such a world would be internally inconsistant. If, on the other hand, they will be satisfied with having merely contributed to the destruction of the Death Star, then this is easy.
I agree, not everybody can be the super hero. But even in your example the game breaks down because of its MM nature. A universe changing event like destruction of the death star should be something that happens once a month, just to give time to fill in story lines and plan new content. So to accomplish this with an average of 10 players destroying tie fighters at a given time (very conservative estimate) and an average of 10 minutes per "destroy mission", you would run through 43,200 missions in a month. I don't remember seeing 43,200 tie fighter squadrons and death star towers in Star Wars.
Having a living breating "world engine" as you described is what developers are working towards. The genre is still very young, and with each iteration they get better. AO introduced instanced quests, games like Second Life are pioneering player driven content creation, and SWG looked at purely player driven economies.
Its interesting to read the message boards and see everyone complain about how all the classes are broken and whatnot. It seems everyone has a different idea of what each class should be like, and none of those ideas correspond to what the developers have implemented
Yes that kind of stuff happens all the time. But there is no excuse to have at launch, literally broken classes. Commando and Bounty Hunter couldn't be completed on some servers until several months after launch no matter what because a particular rare resource didn't show up. Not to mention skills that didn't work at all.
SWG now is completed, lots of content, most things working right, and in the end its another average MMORPG with a good community.
I was lucky enough to be in beta 2 & 3. The thing I remembered most was a couple weeks before launch somebody named "Swiggy" managed to crash the server for 3 days. It was amazing that when the launch date was announced, pretty much everybody in beta said, It's not ready, entire classes were broken, others overpowered. Even post launch some servers had significant downtime and bugs like all of somebody's stuff disappearing, dupe bugs, and my favorite all the buildings on one planet relocated to the middle of the planet map overnight.
I took 2 weeks off from work to play, it was very fun, even fighting all the annoying bugs, then I ran out of content about 3 months in. SWG has a great crafting and world system, there just isn't enough to really do. I just sat there with 30 million credits, nothing to spend it on, and nothing really to do except just make more credits that I couldn't spend. It was the first MMORPG that I felt like I beat the game.
It's sad, the game really had potential, I log in from time to time (my friend kept my account alive) and they've added alot of stuff, but I'm too psyched about EQ2 to rejoin SWG.
I loved to play VGA planets 3.0 back around 1995. The game had a simple interface, but the gamplay could get very complex. Then they added features, hyperspace jumps, gambling ships... eventually the game became just bloated with complexity.
Also look at the Civilizaion line of games. Civilization is a classic, civ2 for me hit the sweetspot, not much more complex than the original, but a few helpful tweaks. Then Civ3 added more resources and culture, and is much more complex and less fun to play. Then there is Civ:Call to Power, which totally crosses the line of complexity to where the game isn't fun. Slavery, lawyers filing injunctions, corporate franchises in enemy cities?
Developers definately need to evaluate whether the complexity they add enriches the experience, or just makes it more difficult.
I have been living in cube hell for the past 4 years since I graduated. There are parts that are more difficult, and some that are easier than school.
College isn't like high school, there is nobody looking over your shoulder, just like your job. Mom & Dad are hundreds of miles away, and professors could care less what you do. If you don't learn to organize and manage yourself, you end up flunking or dropping out (25% of students) and many who do graduate had to learn the hard way after suffering bad grades their first 2 years. You think they let things slide in college? I've had a professor give me a 0 on a test because I was in the hospital. They don't care about you, neither does anybody else in school. In work you can have somebody cover a presentation for you, and the project managers don't care, they just care about the info; in school you have no help.
"Assignments" in college are different than in highschool also. For engineering you are expected to design things. You are given the "Assignment" like design a golf putter, or wake board. You then have to put together from different classes, and different experiences mechanical designs, and material sets to solve the problem. Then you actually go through the process of building, and compete against other teams. My job "assignments" are similar, design a process to do X within certain parameters.
Many employers actually do evaluate colleges. They rank the schools, and recruit more heavily at places like MIT, Ga Tech, Berkely, and UIC. After the slots are filled from those candidate pools, then the few positions left go to the next level schools like Michigan, Florida, UCSD. Yes not all college experience is the same, and the employers take that into account.
The problem I run into with alot of people who are strictly experienced, is they have a very focused skill set. If I want to hire somebody to just do database stuff, sure its good to hire an experienced database person. But If I need them to do database and maybe some USB driver work on a different project, alot of pure experienced people can't handle such different work.
don't think terrorists are going to hijack an airplane and fly it into a building again because they know we won't fall for that one twice
Why not, terrorism is highly symbolic, there was a reason the world trade center was targetted (as it was in 1993). What better way to say "you can't stop us" than hijacking another plane.
A college degree proves that you were attentive enough to pass some tests and do assignments, not that you can drudge through the daily grind of a job.
Work is pretty much the same, you are given assignments, you complete assignments. All that having work experience shows is you've done enough to not get fired. And college can definately be a drudge, you don't get paid, you stay up late nights studying, and your diet consists of ramen and Dr. Pepper... perfect training for the real world.
Most certainly it does not tell someone that you can learn anymore efficiently than a person who doesn't have a degree.
If the job position never changes, then its no problem. But in a changing environment, having people who can quickly understand new concepts is important. A degree gives an employer an idea on your knowledge base and how well you learn. Somebody who hasn't completed college, could understand a new concept in 10 minutes or 10 years, but you have nothing to baseline against.
I guess posting your website on /. counts as a Free Denial of Service(FreeDOS) attack?
Credibility, people KNOW I can do this for a living. They dont have to worry about weather I can actually do the work. ;) :(
What a college degree gives you though is more flexibility. You have proven you can do a particular job and do it well, but it is much more difficult for you to find a job that might require things outside your current skillset. A college degree shows employers you are able to expand your knowledge outside your core competency.
Several awards from my employer.
In college you can get your name on publications, get rewards from companies in the form of scholarships, and research grants (and companies do keep in mind who they gave money to when they are hiring)
Real Life experience.
You can also get alot of experience in school if you're willing to put in the time. You have 16-20 hours a week of class, which leaves you plenty of time for hands on activities like helping grad students with research, taking a job running one of the campus networks, getting involved in a technical club (like solar powered car), etc.
Friends
You can get those in college too, and there are more women
Proffesional contacts. Tons and Tons of them.
You can get an excellent network in college, internships, co-ops (definately a foot in the door), contacts in companies who donate to your research, and alumni
And I dont have 60k in debt, and wont be paying off school bills for the rest of my life
Yes it is true
The IRS already allows the net cost of stock options to be deducted from corporate taxes at time of excercise. What the expensing would do is actually give a second tax break to corporations since there would be cost impact at time of issuance.
I ask you, what would happen if you could go to wal-mart and charge it, but nothing would show up on your credit card statement?
Actually in your example you wouldn't get a bill for the products, but what would happen is on your paycheck instead of making $20 an hour you only make $19.90. When a stock option is excercized, the company increases the amount of stock in the market, so the EPS will decrease accordingly.
Therefore that difference should be listed as a liability and booked as an expense at the time of the exercise
The problem is that the proposed rules would have have options expensed at issuance. The Black-Scholes model which is used, basically makes a guess at the future worth of the stock options so they can be expensed. The expensing as you propose where the cost is determined at the time of excercise is already in place for tax reporting purposes.
I get the feeling the MMOs are the gaming industry equivalent of the .COM companies in the 90s, and we're starting to see the fallout (no pun inteded), with all the announced cancellations. .COM era, alot of money is being thrown at alot of doomed projects.
Once UO and Everquest hit it big, so many game companies drooled at the cash cow of MMOs. So they all scrambled to create their own MMOs to grab a piece of the market. I mean Motor City Online?
Browsing this list of just RPG related MMOs to be released, it looks like too many companies are just grasping at straws. Is there a huge pirate afficionado market just clamoring for an MMORPG to meet their needs? Do we really need another MMO in a high fantasy setting... or 10 more?
These are the most expensive games to develop, and the most difficult to attract players to. These are the types of games that can destroy companies. I am just worried that like in the
You are basically playing the MMO lotto, unless you have a solid license like matrix online, a rabid community asking for a game like City of Heroes; and even then MMO players have become very picky and if the game isn't that good you will have problems like Star Wars Galaxies.
MMORPGs ideally are like creating a universe. They try to be "world engines," like you described. Unfortunately a fully fleshed out constantly changing world is one of the holy grails of MMORPGs and hasn't been achieved yet. What you describe is what the developers have been trying to do; Unfortunately the current technology only allows for static worlds with disjointed quests.
To give you an idea of how it works, imagine the first star wars movie. One of the "quests" was to fly down the trench and destroy the death star. Well a player can do that "quest", and then the next day the death star comes back and the next player can try the do the same "quest." At best the devs can rack up the tally of successful and unsuccessful attempts and at the end of the month the plot is incrimented forward with either the death star still there or destroyed.
Someday the universe would be seamless, where players have direct impact on the universe, but the amount of content and technology required to accomplish it is just out of reach right now.
Now, continuing this reasoning, could superhero A sue superhero B for copyright infringement? Or does superhero law decree that they must fight to the death? Or... some... third option.
I believe precidence was established in the 1994 case of "The Tick vs The Tick".
A fight was staged between the two, and the winner kept the moniker "The Tick," while the loser went back to being known as "Barry"
Consumer: So which router should I get
Best buy guy: You definately should get x, the letter is umm, a speed rating, like on car tires
Consumer: Will it work with my existing system
Best buy guy: Yes it works on the 802.11 standard
Recording Industry Administrators of America
Private spaceflight was vaporware also until this last week. It was interesting to read articles on how the projects have evolved until we got to this point. /. stories dealing with the evolution of near future technology.
I don't mind having 1% of all
Multiplayer FPS have only been around for 11 years (DOOM). For the most part the games have been designed for the single player experience, multiplayer was not an important part up until 5 years ago. The genre is very young. Professional sports didn't become multi-billion dollar operations in 5 years. There are stories of pro football players having second jobs to survive during the early years.
That said, there are issues with computer games which will need to be dealt with for the popularity to rise to those of sports:
1. High Turnover - As soon as CS2 or something better comes along, everybody will drop CS. Major sports don't have as significant change. You then establish a player legacy, the best will remain the best, people follow careers and teams. If suddenly they changed basketball to have 15' baskets the game breaks, its no longer about players who dunk, its about the purest shooters. The technology needs to get to a point where one game can have decades long legacy.
2. Following the action - the technology needs to be developed for good spectator views. There just hasn't been any focus for developers to work on this. Hockey is a sport that suffers on TV because its hard to follow the action. If things aren't presented well, it just becomes confusing.
3. Widespread play - People like to watch what they play. There is a small population that has a good computer, broadband access, and enough money to dish out on a $50 game. Compare that to spending $20 on a football/basketball/soccerball and going out to the park. As technology becomes more widespread the number of people interested in FPS games will rise and so will the fan base.
Maybe we'll find out with PSP and its use of Universal Media Disc (UMD)
I've been to Malaysia, and you can just walk into the mall and buy a copy of Windows XP for 4 ringgits ($1)... oh you said licensed copy.