What's amusing is that you seem to have an unprovable belief that religion is a disease to be cured is somehow obvious.
The fact that a majority of the people on Earth disagree with you demonstrates not only that it isn't obvious, but that you are probably just as irrational in your beliefs as those people are in theirs. But at least they have the intellectual honesty to admit it's faith.
I'm not remotely religious, but I'm also not so disingenuous that I'd dismiss a majority of humanity as somehow suffering from a disease that needs to be cured. For many people faith fills a void; I think rather than the idea that faithless people are somehow evil, faith helps people who might otherwise be evil because they need some system larger than themselves to believe in do good things. Why would something that prevents a lot of people who would otherwise do things harmful to the species need to be cured?
Or (insert idea here) - the number one rule of alien life is that it will be alien. We human beings on Earth have a hard enough time understanding people who merely have different cultural underpinnings in their world view; imagine what a fundamentally different biology would yield for misunderstandings.
The only thing I see being similar regardless of the origin of species would be that the other intelligences we meet will be the survivors of an extremely long competition with other species on their world, whatever that means.
Even if you posited a 10000 year development time before a colony could successfully send out just 1 other colonizer, and another 10000 year development time before it could send out another, you still wind up filling up the galaxy REALLY fast. Even if 9/10 of those colonies fail to sprout (so let's call it, effectively, 100k years per new colony), in just over 5 million years (a cosmic blink of an eye) you have over 10^15 colonies. Even if it was 1 in 100 colonies that succeeded, you're still just talking about 50 million years.
Look at human history over the last 5000 years - we've gone from pre-technological to being on the verge of being able to break out of our solar system (relatively speaking, assuming we survive, we should be able to get out of town within the next 100000 years if we aren't dead). A colony on a future world would have all that technology and knowledge already developed - I'm going to say that, if we do get to another world, it'll take us WAY less time to fill it up and move on than it will take us to do this.
Unless you think those random bits of organic gunk might grow up to be a threat to you someday. Best to destroy or co-opt them while it's still trivial to do, rather than wait for a potential rival to grow strong feisty.
Just because human beings think so short term that we imagine there's "plenty of room for everybody" doesn't mean that every other species, especially one advanced enough that an individual member (if they have individual members) could conceive realistically of being alive 5, 10 or 20 billion years from now.
Personally, I think Hawking is being paranoid, but to say he's a moron outright dismisses the #1 certainty about alien life - that it will be alien. That means it may not behave in a way that we think is sensible.
The problem with the "core" of Windows is that it's not based on open standards and in a world where MSFT is no longer going to be the de facto standard, they will wind up being pushed off to irrelevancy.
It would be much, much better for them as a business, long term, to basically break the whole "Windows" concept up into a bunch of widgets that people can pick, ala carte, to add to whatever OS they choose to run. For example, MSFT did a great job getting game developers on board with Direct X, and as such, gaming is a compelling reason for many people to have Windows on a machine. But it's becoming less and less compelling as other alternatives become more refined and polished - and in 5 or 10 years I can easily imagine that alternatives for gaming (things like Cedega or other projects) will become much, much, MUCH more polished and viable, to the point where it won't be worth maintaining a seperate OS or machine just for gaming for many people.
Like I said, it's an exit strategy for when the competition eventually and inevitably catches up to them. Better to have a plan than to be caught flat footed, and from everything I've seen, Ballmer has less vision than Mr. Magoo.
And you're demonstrating a complete willingness to suspend rational thinking about the realities of professional writing.
Most things that are written are absolute shit. Even most things that are published are absolute shit. The odds of your husband writing the next LoTR, Dune or even Twilight are phenomenally slim. He's spent 10 years of his life on this, tweaking it and refining it, and I'm going to say that I *still* smell a dog, regardless of how many "classic" cases you want to throw out there, and regardless of your statement that "most" published works take 5+ years to complete.
Dune is *not* good prose. Tolkien is *not* good prose. What they were was groundbreaking in the way they made a complete universe in a genre which was notorious, at the time, for lacking depth and consistency (think of pulps). Were those works published - assuming they could be - today, for the first time, they would likely pass quickly into obscurity because the writing is *really* awful. So with regards to your husband, him taking 10 years to create a world (nothing groundbreaking there, anymore, thanks to the authors you cite) is almost certainly just going to yield a mediocre thing at best, and I won't even give it being groundbreaking any kind of real probability.
It's great that you believe in him, but don't expect everyone else - especially random internet strangers like me - to believe for a second that he's likely to put out anything that's even adequate. I will tell you what, though - right here, right now, I will happily make a wager: You let us know when your husband's work is published (if it ever is) and I will happily, cheerfully, admit I'm wrong, buy a copy, go to a book signing (traveling, if need be, to do so) and literally eat a crow sandwich. If you lose the bet, well, that's punishment enough, I guess.
Recognizing that the marketplace is changing and that while Windows is dominant NOW, things are rapidly moving towards an OS agnostic world that uses open standards.
The people who, 20 years ago, were terrified of trying anything new are generally filtering out of the workplace and have been (and continue to be) replaced with people who grew up with computers as everyday things and aren't afraid to try something different. I can only imagine that as younger people who grew up with computers being completely ubiquitous, and with the stuff they use built on open standards, this will only accelerate.
Fear of change and a fundamental lack of understanding of tech were their bread and butter, but that is going to end, and soon, and they've done nothing to position themselves for the sea change that will be coming. They've been so intent on holding on their old (and, it must be said, profitable) way of doing business that when things do change they'll have to move faster than they ever have to adapt.
The marketplace has changed, too. It used to be that companies would try to compete with MSFT and get wiped out (bought or just crushed); now there are companies that exist solely to help their customers migrate away from MSFT products, or that develop tech that allow people to host their legacy apps on non-MSFT platforms.
Ballmer has been a caretaker CEO at best. MSFT is in a worse position, now, than they were when he took over, relative to the rest of the market. They've got massive resources and a really huge influence, but they're going to need to reinvent themselves in the same kind of way IBM did if they want to continue to be relevant.
They have 90% of the market now, but it won't stay that way. They should be figuring out an exit plan from the current business model and slowly move out of it as their dominance slowly gets eroded anyway. Basically a plan B is needed, and it really doesn't seem like they have one.
It would be interesting if they went the OS X route and went with the *nix (whatever) underpinnings and their stuff atop that. They'd get over a lot of core issues with the OS that people complain about, improve compatibility (which they may hate now, but they'll want it in the future as people become more OS agnostic).
The thing they have to offer - the thing they've done right with Windows - is gaming. An OS X-like operating system with whatever libraries I needed to play whatever games? That doesn't need to be installed only on one manufacturer's hardware?
Like I said, they won't be dominant forever and they need to embrace the new realities of their market rather than continually trying to force the market to be what it was in the 80's and 90's.
Grandiose ideas about the quality or potential impact of your husband's work aside, the fact that you invoke Tolkien as if he were some great writer is telling. Those books aren't exactly notable because they have good prose - it was the universe creation that was something new and different at the time. It has since been done again and again, and also better, in that not only have other fictional universes chock full of detail been created, but the stories told in them were definitely more robust, and the prose with which those stories were told also vastly improved over Tolkien's works. To say nothing of the vast changes in the publishing world that have also taken place in that time, as well as in the perceived social acceptability of people creating those kinds of works.
I actually hope that the work your husband is creating does turn out to be fabulous, but statistically speaking, it's 10 years spent on a hobby, not 10 years spent on the creation of a new masterpiece. Like I said - I smell a dog.
Through the majority of human history, infant mortality was staggeringly high, even among the most developed nations. Medical treatment was as likely to kill you as whatever you were being treated for. Social and legal justice were nonexistent.
Just because something was one way throughout history does not mean that it should continue to be that way. There are places that are good to work, many of them. There's no inherent reason work NEEDS to suck, so why should it? Honestly, I think many places suck to work at because the people there seem to just blindly adhere to the idea that it should suck, or else it would be called "play."
You work for maybe 1/4th of your life - why shouldn't people try to make it enjoyable?
Have you considered that your husband simply may not be a very good writer?
My father has spent 40 years on his hobby, which is a biography of Lord Byron. He has spent an absurd amount of money on travel, owns (of course) everything the man wrote, but also damn near everything written about the man, to the man, possibly read by the man, and other people in his circle. It's his second job, basically.
About the time I turned 12 or 13, my father would give me drafts to read and comment on. Some of those drafts were older than I was, and had never been read by anyone but him because he didn't feel that my mother or my older siblings would "get" it. Throughout my life (I'm almost 40) he has, from time to time, given me revisions and edits, complete re-writes of entire sections, etc.
So I can say this with authority: My father is a fucking AWFUL writer. He's a TERRIBLE biographer. I love him, but good lord, his efforts here suck in a way that few other things in the universe are capable of sucking. The massive amount of time spent on a project says dick about the quality, and more about the obsessiveness of the person working on it.
We live in a world where Cat Warriors or other inane shit like that can be published - if your husband has needed 10 years to work on his book and hasn't been able to find a publisher, I'm thinking it's a dog.
I like losing at things I'm good at, because it usually means I wound up learning something new.
If I win at something I'm good at, well, I expected to win, and often haven't learned anything new.
The best situation, of course, is when I encounter something new and learn then and there how to handle it and still win. Still, it doesn't making losing less fun.
I think micro-managing in WoW groups is not limited to tanks (and, in fact, a good tank should NOT micromanage - just get involved when people aren't doing their "jobs" rather than tell them how to do what they're already doing well, you know?)
And I definitely wasn't trying to say that there's no valid reason to leave a team - just that in the vast majority of cases, the people making the cost/benefit analysis are doing so under REALLY poor circumstances.
Leaving a group before they've had a chance to show good or bad = dumb choice because you *will* have the same consequences as if you had a bad group. Leaving a group after 3 wipes, unless you were the cause of the wipes, is probably a good idea unless you're learning content (in which case wipes are expected) because 3 wipes has almost certainly cost you more than just leaving in the first place would have. For tanks and healers (who have generally pretty quick queue times) this is almost always gonna be a no-brainer. For DPS, who on some servers/battlegroups might have wait times over 30 minutes, this could be a case of bird in the hand vs. 2 in the bush.
Personally, I'm with you on the random group feature being most fun when people are on par (or, better yet, less than on par, gear-wise) to the content: that's where you can actually see a meaningful difference from skill. When people are at or slightly above the gear threshold, the only difference skill will make is how quick you burn everyone down or how little healing you need, or how little thought needs to go into an encounter. That's not very fun to me - I prefer to get my butt kicked when I'm playing games (or at least have getting my butt kicked be possible) because then at least I know I'm playing at or above my level:)
That's rather a bad analogy because it implies that a relationship where someone was contracted to do work for pay was suddenly, retroactively, changed to where they might not get that pay. In the case of crowdsourcing, nobody was guaranteed to get paid so if people don't want to risk working for nothing they don't have to partake - they know going into it that they might not get paid.
Honestly, if a designer isn't able to persuade their clients why their design is better than whatever the client could get from crowdsourcing, they aren't a very good designer and should be out of the business. Good business design should communicate a clear idea - a designer that cannot articulate the value of their own product sure as hell won't be able to articulate the value of what their clients have.
It is EMPHATICALLY a good thing that there is this kind of pressure on the lower end of the market. The shitty, incapable designers who aren't able to communicate their value to clients will be out of business, while the ones who are able to show their value will still find work. The only people it's bad for are the hacks who can't do their job, and I don't exactly have a lot of sympathy for people who think they should get paid well for bad work...
A friend of mine is pretty good at pretty much everything she tried her hand at, but was having trouble finding something that really grabbed her. She went to a kind of career counselor for adults, ran through a battery of aptitude tests etc., and got a list of career suggestions. 90% of them were things she had thought of or tried before, but the remaining items were all new to her - she just hadn't ever thought of them as possible career choices. Fast-forward 8 years and she's working in atmospheric science and loving it, despite it being something she *never* would have thought of doing.
If only as a way of giving you other options when you aren't entirely sure what you want to do, it can be helpful. Lots of people stumble into careers they love by accident.
I just want people who can learn from their experiences - ANY experiences - and work on a team - ANY team, and I'm with you on that.
People who can learn from even the most unlikely sources are generally going to be the people worth hiring. Sneering at the lessons people have learned because of the way that lesson was learned might want to think twice about their sense of superiority...
The people in this thread talking about WoW players being fat losers with no lives or redeeming qualities or skills might want to think back about 25 years ago to a time when people who spent much time on their computers were widely derided as being fat losers with no lives or redeeming qualities or skills. It's just a stupid attitude to have.
The "weakest link" in a group is actually often going to be the person who looks at the group and quickly comes to the judgment that it will fail and then leaves based on metrics like Gear Score or "LOL Pally only has 25khp!" Or quitting because not everyone has the achievement for whatever it is that's about to be done.
That person is basically saying that they are incapable of running a dungeon without everyone being INSANELY overgeared for it and they are not willing to take any risks in an environment where the absolute worst thing you're risking is about 10-15 minutes of your time. Further, they're also poor judges of risk/reward: if you drop out of a random group before a certain amount of time is up, you can't join another random group for a bit, so they traded being in a group that might or might not be good (and losing 10-15 minutes of their time) for DEFINITELY not being in a group (and losing 10-15 minutes of their time).
Finally, though this is not always the case it seems to often be the case, these people are the ones who, when they are on a team they will behave like prima donnas. If it's a tank, anyone who doesn't behave exactly as the tank wants will be votekicked or the tank will just drop group because they can get an instant queue (once their timeout is over). If it's a healer, they'll bitch and moan and possibly drop group, but in any case it's not so great for team cohesion. If it's a DPS role, well, they'll just call people scrubs, and behave like they're incredibly important despite the fact that they can be instantly replaced.
So, if you want a bunch of people who will quit at the first sign of adversity, are lousy at assessing risk vs. reward, are unwilling to take on new challenges or risks, are deadly to team morale and cohesion, and who generally rely on expending VASTLY more resources on a project than the goals of the project merit in order for it to have any "success" then yes, by all means, pick people who's judgment has been "honed" by the random group tool in WoW.
Mind you, I personally like the tool because I'm 99.9% of the time playing a tank, so I have instant queues. I also know how to play tanks well, and can adapt my tanking style to handle teammates who are poorly geared or overgeared (which has its own problems) and of whatever skill level. The only time it gets dicey is if I have a bad (read: does not know how or is unwilling to manage their heals effectively so minimize the windows where a string of unlucky numbers can cause a wipe) healer, but even then I'll take a minute to ask them if they want advice to make things go more smoothly.
I will say that in general, guilds in WoW are not really my favorite thing, BUT I have learned some valuable lessons from being guilded and having to manage that:
- Don't have preconceived ideas of how people might behave or how mature they might be based on demographics. I've had remarkably mature teenagers in guilds where the 45 year olds behaved like colicky infants most of the time.
- Many people say things quickly that *can* be taken in a bad way and lead to an argument. Instead, take a moment before getting angered and ask them what they REALLY meant, because most people aren't actually hostile dickbags - they're just poor communicators.
- Any reward allocation system, regardless of how fair it seems on paper, regardless of people agreeing to bide by its rules, will be complained about the first time those rules work against one person's favor and towards another.
- In a performance based environment, it helps to have concrete displays of performance metrics and to provide small incentives to encourage competition between people who are in the same role. Do not make the incentives TOO big because then you will have people screwing others to get their win.
- People who are inflexible are almost always going to drag your team down. The inability to adapt to new situations or take failure as a learning experience is a HORRIBLE trait, and unless there is some kind of massive and nearly impossible to replace positive that kind of person brings to your team, dump them if they can't change their ways after getting feedback.
There's a difference between dropping money on fun things and spending money to fund what are called good ideas by many and certainly could have HUGE returns (albeit at fairly high risk) and that governments are not doing.
... And I was under the impression Boeing wouldn't even get out of bed for that much, you know?
On the subject of money... There are people who are billionaires to the point where they could easily drop 5, 10 billion bucks on space - why hasn't anyone REALLY wealthy done that?
I'm going to guess that you've tried therapy to get over it, but in case you haven't, there are some treatments that can be quite effective in countering phobias. A few people I know who would have full-blown panic attacks in certain situations (driving, flying, seeing certain animals, and in one case a needle phobia) have been successfully treated and it does seem to be life changing for them. If it's as bad as you say - and it sounds like it's pretty bad for you - it might be worth checking out if you haven't.
I don't find it self-serving because, as was pointed out, making a AAA game to be a competitor to them costs a FUCKTON of money; anyone who has that kind of money and wants to make games is going to do it anyway if that's what they want to do. And their advice might, actually, help other game makers.
If they wanted to be self-serving they would have said "by all means, please, competitors, spend tons of money on games where you're extremely likely to fail unless you get incredibly, phenomenally lucky!"
Personally, I think their advice is very good - if I were going to try to maximize risk vs. reward, it's a no-brainer that I'd try to create an inexpensive game and focus on the "cheap" stuff (creative stories and gameplay are more difficult to get right than graphics, but actually less expensive to develop, and will DEFINITELY help sell more games through word of mouth than pretty pictures ever will at this point in time). Worst case scenario, I invest $X in development costs and come up with a game that fails to deliver; best case scenario I invest $X in development costs and come up with a game that winds up being heralded as groundbreaking and kickstarts a genre. Contrast that with AAA development where I invest 10-30X as much $$$ and I have the same odds of success - why would I spend 10 to 30x as much money when I have roughly the same risk of launching a game that fails?
Maybe 5 years ago I would have said it's possible to create a smash hit game on graphics and heavy marketing, but I just don't think that's likely now. The AAA titles are too expensive for most people to think of them as impulse buys, gamers are savvier about reading between the lines with regards to hype, and in the case of a complete newcomer to the AAA scene, unlikely to buy until lots of reviews are out, and even then to rent or buy used instead of new.
People have created things - beautiful, wonderful, amazing things - throughout history, many of them without any kind of promise of compensation for what they have created. They created because they *needed* to.
Someone who has a brilliant idea but doesn't bring it to fruition because of fears of piracy is an idiot, and their idea is likely not terribly brilliant.
I buy a game that has DRM - it takes me maybe 2 hours to go to the store, get it, come home, and install it... And it doesn't work because the DRM sees something on my system it does not like.
VS
I torrent a game that has DRM - it takes me maybe 30 minutes to download it and install it... And it works just fine because the DRM has been removed by the pirates.
Paying for things is only easier when the company providing those things is not treating paying customers like criminals. Piracy is easier every other time because, amusingly, by acting like a criminal you aren't being treated like one.
Or done what many other forums have done to great effect:
1 forum ID per paying account, period, and it can't be changed, and then ban like crazy when people troll.
You want to troll? Ok - say goodbye to your ability to post on the forums. Want to troll in-game? Ok - say goodbye to your ability to talk to other people except through local chat.
When you can make free accounts, and as many of them as you want, or you can hide behind alts or whatever, and there are no consequences to you as a result, people will troll. When you have to pay for the privilege, most people stop doing it. When you have to pay and there's a very real probability that you'll be caught and banned, the rest of them will keep doing it for the 5 minutes it takes before they're kicked off.
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What's amusing is that you seem to have an unprovable belief that religion is a disease to be cured is somehow obvious.
The fact that a majority of the people on Earth disagree with you demonstrates not only that it isn't obvious, but that you are probably just as irrational in your beliefs as those people are in theirs. But at least they have the intellectual honesty to admit it's faith.
I'm not remotely religious, but I'm also not so disingenuous that I'd dismiss a majority of humanity as somehow suffering from a disease that needs to be cured. For many people faith fills a void; I think rather than the idea that faithless people are somehow evil, faith helps people who might otherwise be evil because they need some system larger than themselves to believe in do good things. Why would something that prevents a lot of people who would otherwise do things harmful to the species need to be cured?
Or (insert idea here) - the number one rule of alien life is that it will be alien. We human beings on Earth have a hard enough time understanding people who merely have different cultural underpinnings in their world view; imagine what a fundamentally different biology would yield for misunderstandings.
The only thing I see being similar regardless of the origin of species would be that the other intelligences we meet will be the survivors of an extremely long competition with other species on their world, whatever that means.
Even if you posited a 10000 year development time before a colony could successfully send out just 1 other colonizer, and another 10000 year development time before it could send out another, you still wind up filling up the galaxy REALLY fast. Even if 9/10 of those colonies fail to sprout (so let's call it, effectively, 100k years per new colony), in just over 5 million years (a cosmic blink of an eye) you have over 10^15 colonies. Even if it was 1 in 100 colonies that succeeded, you're still just talking about 50 million years.
Look at human history over the last 5000 years - we've gone from pre-technological to being on the verge of being able to break out of our solar system (relatively speaking, assuming we survive, we should be able to get out of town within the next 100000 years if we aren't dead). A colony on a future world would have all that technology and knowledge already developed - I'm going to say that, if we do get to another world, it'll take us WAY less time to fill it up and move on than it will take us to do this.
Unless you think those random bits of organic gunk might grow up to be a threat to you someday. Best to destroy or co-opt them while it's still trivial to do, rather than wait for a potential rival to grow strong feisty.
Just because human beings think so short term that we imagine there's "plenty of room for everybody" doesn't mean that every other species, especially one advanced enough that an individual member (if they have individual members) could conceive realistically of being alive 5, 10 or 20 billion years from now.
Personally, I think Hawking is being paranoid, but to say he's a moron outright dismisses the #1 certainty about alien life - that it will be alien. That means it may not behave in a way that we think is sensible.
The problem with the "core" of Windows is that it's not based on open standards and in a world where MSFT is no longer going to be the de facto standard, they will wind up being pushed off to irrelevancy.
It would be much, much better for them as a business, long term, to basically break the whole "Windows" concept up into a bunch of widgets that people can pick, ala carte, to add to whatever OS they choose to run. For example, MSFT did a great job getting game developers on board with Direct X, and as such, gaming is a compelling reason for many people to have Windows on a machine. But it's becoming less and less compelling as other alternatives become more refined and polished - and in 5 or 10 years I can easily imagine that alternatives for gaming (things like Cedega or other projects) will become much, much, MUCH more polished and viable, to the point where it won't be worth maintaining a seperate OS or machine just for gaming for many people.
Like I said, it's an exit strategy for when the competition eventually and inevitably catches up to them. Better to have a plan than to be caught flat footed, and from everything I've seen, Ballmer has less vision than Mr. Magoo.
And you're demonstrating a complete willingness to suspend rational thinking about the realities of professional writing.
Most things that are written are absolute shit. Even most things that are published are absolute shit. The odds of your husband writing the next LoTR, Dune or even Twilight are phenomenally slim. He's spent 10 years of his life on this, tweaking it and refining it, and I'm going to say that I *still* smell a dog, regardless of how many "classic" cases you want to throw out there, and regardless of your statement that "most" published works take 5+ years to complete.
Dune is *not* good prose. Tolkien is *not* good prose. What they were was groundbreaking in the way they made a complete universe in a genre which was notorious, at the time, for lacking depth and consistency (think of pulps). Were those works published - assuming they could be - today, for the first time, they would likely pass quickly into obscurity because the writing is *really* awful. So with regards to your husband, him taking 10 years to create a world (nothing groundbreaking there, anymore, thanks to the authors you cite) is almost certainly just going to yield a mediocre thing at best, and I won't even give it being groundbreaking any kind of real probability.
It's great that you believe in him, but don't expect everyone else - especially random internet strangers like me - to believe for a second that he's likely to put out anything that's even adequate. I will tell you what, though - right here, right now, I will happily make a wager: You let us know when your husband's work is published (if it ever is) and I will happily, cheerfully, admit I'm wrong, buy a copy, go to a book signing (traveling, if need be, to do so) and literally eat a crow sandwich. If you lose the bet, well, that's punishment enough, I guess.
I'll add a biggie:
Recognizing that the marketplace is changing and that while Windows is dominant NOW, things are rapidly moving towards an OS agnostic world that uses open standards.
The people who, 20 years ago, were terrified of trying anything new are generally filtering out of the workplace and have been (and continue to be) replaced with people who grew up with computers as everyday things and aren't afraid to try something different. I can only imagine that as younger people who grew up with computers being completely ubiquitous, and with the stuff they use built on open standards, this will only accelerate.
Fear of change and a fundamental lack of understanding of tech were their bread and butter, but that is going to end, and soon, and they've done nothing to position themselves for the sea change that will be coming. They've been so intent on holding on their old (and, it must be said, profitable) way of doing business that when things do change they'll have to move faster than they ever have to adapt.
The marketplace has changed, too. It used to be that companies would try to compete with MSFT and get wiped out (bought or just crushed); now there are companies that exist solely to help their customers migrate away from MSFT products, or that develop tech that allow people to host their legacy apps on non-MSFT platforms.
Ballmer has been a caretaker CEO at best. MSFT is in a worse position, now, than they were when he took over, relative to the rest of the market. They've got massive resources and a really huge influence, but they're going to need to reinvent themselves in the same kind of way IBM did if they want to continue to be relevant.
They have 90% of the market now, but it won't stay that way. They should be figuring out an exit plan from the current business model and slowly move out of it as their dominance slowly gets eroded anyway. Basically a plan B is needed, and it really doesn't seem like they have one.
It would be interesting if they went the OS X route and went with the *nix (whatever) underpinnings and their stuff atop that. They'd get over a lot of core issues with the OS that people complain about, improve compatibility (which they may hate now, but they'll want it in the future as people become more OS agnostic).
The thing they have to offer - the thing they've done right with Windows - is gaming. An OS X-like operating system with whatever libraries I needed to play whatever games? That doesn't need to be installed only on one manufacturer's hardware?
Like I said, they won't be dominant forever and they need to embrace the new realities of their market rather than continually trying to force the market to be what it was in the 80's and 90's.
So you think your husband is the next Tolkien?
Grandiose ideas about the quality or potential impact of your husband's work aside, the fact that you invoke Tolkien as if he were some great writer is telling. Those books aren't exactly notable because they have good prose - it was the universe creation that was something new and different at the time. It has since been done again and again, and also better, in that not only have other fictional universes chock full of detail been created, but the stories told in them were definitely more robust, and the prose with which those stories were told also vastly improved over Tolkien's works. To say nothing of the vast changes in the publishing world that have also taken place in that time, as well as in the perceived social acceptability of people creating those kinds of works.
I actually hope that the work your husband is creating does turn out to be fabulous, but statistically speaking, it's 10 years spent on a hobby, not 10 years spent on the creation of a new masterpiece. Like I said - I smell a dog.
Through the majority of human history, infant mortality was staggeringly high, even among the most developed nations. Medical treatment was as likely to kill you as whatever you were being treated for. Social and legal justice were nonexistent.
Just because something was one way throughout history does not mean that it should continue to be that way. There are places that are good to work, many of them. There's no inherent reason work NEEDS to suck, so why should it? Honestly, I think many places suck to work at because the people there seem to just blindly adhere to the idea that it should suck, or else it would be called "play."
You work for maybe 1/4th of your life - why shouldn't people try to make it enjoyable?
Have you considered that your husband simply may not be a very good writer?
My father has spent 40 years on his hobby, which is a biography of Lord Byron. He has spent an absurd amount of money on travel, owns (of course) everything the man wrote, but also damn near everything written about the man, to the man, possibly read by the man, and other people in his circle. It's his second job, basically.
About the time I turned 12 or 13, my father would give me drafts to read and comment on. Some of those drafts were older than I was, and had never been read by anyone but him because he didn't feel that my mother or my older siblings would "get" it. Throughout my life (I'm almost 40) he has, from time to time, given me revisions and edits, complete re-writes of entire sections, etc.
So I can say this with authority: My father is a fucking AWFUL writer. He's a TERRIBLE biographer. I love him, but good lord, his efforts here suck in a way that few other things in the universe are capable of sucking. The massive amount of time spent on a project says dick about the quality, and more about the obsessiveness of the person working on it.
We live in a world where Cat Warriors or other inane shit like that can be published - if your husband has needed 10 years to work on his book and hasn't been able to find a publisher, I'm thinking it's a dog.
I like losing at things I'm good at, because it usually means I wound up learning something new.
If I win at something I'm good at, well, I expected to win, and often haven't learned anything new.
The best situation, of course, is when I encounter something new and learn then and there how to handle it and still win. Still, it doesn't making losing less fun.
I think micro-managing in WoW groups is not limited to tanks (and, in fact, a good tank should NOT micromanage - just get involved when people aren't doing their "jobs" rather than tell them how to do what they're already doing well, you know?)
And I definitely wasn't trying to say that there's no valid reason to leave a team - just that in the vast majority of cases, the people making the cost/benefit analysis are doing so under REALLY poor circumstances.
Leaving a group before they've had a chance to show good or bad = dumb choice because you *will* have the same consequences as if you had a bad group. Leaving a group after 3 wipes, unless you were the cause of the wipes, is probably a good idea unless you're learning content (in which case wipes are expected) because 3 wipes has almost certainly cost you more than just leaving in the first place would have. For tanks and healers (who have generally pretty quick queue times) this is almost always gonna be a no-brainer. For DPS, who on some servers/battlegroups might have wait times over 30 minutes, this could be a case of bird in the hand vs. 2 in the bush.
Personally, I'm with you on the random group feature being most fun when people are on par (or, better yet, less than on par, gear-wise) to the content: that's where you can actually see a meaningful difference from skill. When people are at or slightly above the gear threshold, the only difference skill will make is how quick you burn everyone down or how little healing you need, or how little thought needs to go into an encounter. That's not very fun to me - I prefer to get my butt kicked when I'm playing games (or at least have getting my butt kicked be possible) because then at least I know I'm playing at or above my level :)
That's rather a bad analogy because it implies that a relationship where someone was contracted to do work for pay was suddenly, retroactively, changed to where they might not get that pay. In the case of crowdsourcing, nobody was guaranteed to get paid so if people don't want to risk working for nothing they don't have to partake - they know going into it that they might not get paid.
Honestly, if a designer isn't able to persuade their clients why their design is better than whatever the client could get from crowdsourcing, they aren't a very good designer and should be out of the business. Good business design should communicate a clear idea - a designer that cannot articulate the value of their own product sure as hell won't be able to articulate the value of what their clients have.
It is EMPHATICALLY a good thing that there is this kind of pressure on the lower end of the market. The shitty, incapable designers who aren't able to communicate their value to clients will be out of business, while the ones who are able to show their value will still find work. The only people it's bad for are the hacks who can't do their job, and I don't exactly have a lot of sympathy for people who think they should get paid well for bad work...
For some people they can be helpful.
A friend of mine is pretty good at pretty much everything she tried her hand at, but was having trouble finding something that really grabbed her. She went to a kind of career counselor for adults, ran through a battery of aptitude tests etc., and got a list of career suggestions. 90% of them were things she had thought of or tried before, but the remaining items were all new to her - she just hadn't ever thought of them as possible career choices. Fast-forward 8 years and she's working in atmospheric science and loving it, despite it being something she *never* would have thought of doing.
If only as a way of giving you other options when you aren't entirely sure what you want to do, it can be helpful. Lots of people stumble into careers they love by accident.
I just want people who can learn from their experiences - ANY experiences - and work on a team - ANY team, and I'm with you on that.
People who can learn from even the most unlikely sources are generally going to be the people worth hiring. Sneering at the lessons people have learned because of the way that lesson was learned might want to think twice about their sense of superiority...
The people in this thread talking about WoW players being fat losers with no lives or redeeming qualities or skills might want to think back about 25 years ago to a time when people who spent much time on their computers were widely derided as being fat losers with no lives or redeeming qualities or skills. It's just a stupid attitude to have.
And full-on developer tools for free. Not an incentive for 99% of the Mac userbase, but I find it really nice.
The "weakest link" in a group is actually often going to be the person who looks at the group and quickly comes to the judgment that it will fail and then leaves based on metrics like Gear Score or "LOL Pally only has 25khp!" Or quitting because not everyone has the achievement for whatever it is that's about to be done.
That person is basically saying that they are incapable of running a dungeon without everyone being INSANELY overgeared for it and they are not willing to take any risks in an environment where the absolute worst thing you're risking is about 10-15 minutes of your time. Further, they're also poor judges of risk/reward: if you drop out of a random group before a certain amount of time is up, you can't join another random group for a bit, so they traded being in a group that might or might not be good (and losing 10-15 minutes of their time) for DEFINITELY not being in a group (and losing 10-15 minutes of their time).
Finally, though this is not always the case it seems to often be the case, these people are the ones who, when they are on a team they will behave like prima donnas. If it's a tank, anyone who doesn't behave exactly as the tank wants will be votekicked or the tank will just drop group because they can get an instant queue (once their timeout is over). If it's a healer, they'll bitch and moan and possibly drop group, but in any case it's not so great for team cohesion. If it's a DPS role, well, they'll just call people scrubs, and behave like they're incredibly important despite the fact that they can be instantly replaced.
So, if you want a bunch of people who will quit at the first sign of adversity, are lousy at assessing risk vs. reward, are unwilling to take on new challenges or risks, are deadly to team morale and cohesion, and who generally rely on expending VASTLY more resources on a project than the goals of the project merit in order for it to have any "success" then yes, by all means, pick people who's judgment has been "honed" by the random group tool in WoW.
Mind you, I personally like the tool because I'm 99.9% of the time playing a tank, so I have instant queues. I also know how to play tanks well, and can adapt my tanking style to handle teammates who are poorly geared or overgeared (which has its own problems) and of whatever skill level. The only time it gets dicey is if I have a bad (read: does not know how or is unwilling to manage their heals effectively so minimize the windows where a string of unlucky numbers can cause a wipe) healer, but even then I'll take a minute to ask them if they want advice to make things go more smoothly.
I will say that in general, guilds in WoW are not really my favorite thing, BUT I have learned some valuable lessons from being guilded and having to manage that:
- Don't have preconceived ideas of how people might behave or how mature they might be based on demographics. I've had remarkably mature teenagers in guilds where the 45 year olds behaved like colicky infants most of the time.
- Many people say things quickly that *can* be taken in a bad way and lead to an argument. Instead, take a moment before getting angered and ask them what they REALLY meant, because most people aren't actually hostile dickbags - they're just poor communicators.
- Any reward allocation system, regardless of how fair it seems on paper, regardless of people agreeing to bide by its rules, will be complained about the first time those rules work against one person's favor and towards another.
- In a performance based environment, it helps to have concrete displays of performance metrics and to provide small incentives to encourage competition between people who are in the same role. Do not make the incentives TOO big because then you will have people screwing others to get their win.
- People who are inflexible are almost always going to drag your team down. The inability to adapt to new situations or take failure as a learning experience is a HORRIBLE trait, and unless there is some kind of massive and nearly impossible to replace positive that kind of person brings to your team, dump them if they can't change their ways after getting feedback.
There's a difference between dropping money on fun things and spending money to fund what are called good ideas by many and certainly could have HUGE returns (albeit at fairly high risk) and that governments are not doing.
... And I was under the impression Boeing wouldn't even get out of bed for that much, you know?
On the subject of money... There are people who are billionaires to the point where they could easily drop 5, 10 billion bucks on space - why hasn't anyone REALLY wealthy done that?
I'm going to guess that you've tried therapy to get over it, but in case you haven't, there are some treatments that can be quite effective in countering phobias. A few people I know who would have full-blown panic attacks in certain situations (driving, flying, seeing certain animals, and in one case a needle phobia) have been successfully treated and it does seem to be life changing for them. If it's as bad as you say - and it sounds like it's pretty bad for you - it might be worth checking out if you haven't.
I don't find it self-serving because, as was pointed out, making a AAA game to be a competitor to them costs a FUCKTON of money; anyone who has that kind of money and wants to make games is going to do it anyway if that's what they want to do. And their advice might, actually, help other game makers.
If they wanted to be self-serving they would have said "by all means, please, competitors, spend tons of money on games where you're extremely likely to fail unless you get incredibly, phenomenally lucky!"
Personally, I think their advice is very good - if I were going to try to maximize risk vs. reward, it's a no-brainer that I'd try to create an inexpensive game and focus on the "cheap" stuff (creative stories and gameplay are more difficult to get right than graphics, but actually less expensive to develop, and will DEFINITELY help sell more games through word of mouth than pretty pictures ever will at this point in time). Worst case scenario, I invest $X in development costs and come up with a game that fails to deliver; best case scenario I invest $X in development costs and come up with a game that winds up being heralded as groundbreaking and kickstarts a genre. Contrast that with AAA development where I invest 10-30X as much $$$ and I have the same odds of success - why would I spend 10 to 30x as much money when I have roughly the same risk of launching a game that fails?
Maybe 5 years ago I would have said it's possible to create a smash hit game on graphics and heavy marketing, but I just don't think that's likely now. The AAA titles are too expensive for most people to think of them as impulse buys, gamers are savvier about reading between the lines with regards to hype, and in the case of a complete newcomer to the AAA scene, unlikely to buy until lots of reviews are out, and even then to rent or buy used instead of new.
Bullshit.
People have created things - beautiful, wonderful, amazing things - throughout history, many of them without any kind of promise of compensation for what they have created. They created because they *needed* to.
Someone who has a brilliant idea but doesn't bring it to fruition because of fears of piracy is an idiot, and their idea is likely not terribly brilliant.
Except when it is neither faster nor easier.
I buy a game that has DRM - it takes me maybe 2 hours to go to the store, get it, come home, and install it... And it doesn't work because the DRM sees something on my system it does not like.
VS
I torrent a game that has DRM - it takes me maybe 30 minutes to download it and install it... And it works just fine because the DRM has been removed by the pirates.
Paying for things is only easier when the company providing those things is not treating paying customers like criminals. Piracy is easier every other time because, amusingly, by acting like a criminal you aren't being treated like one.
Or done what many other forums have done to great effect:
1 forum ID per paying account, period, and it can't be changed, and then ban like crazy when people troll.
You want to troll? Ok - say goodbye to your ability to post on the forums. Want to troll in-game? Ok - say goodbye to your ability to talk to other people except through local chat.
When you can make free accounts, and as many of them as you want, or you can hide behind alts or whatever, and there are no consequences to you as a result, people will troll. When you have to pay for the privilege, most people stop doing it. When you have to pay and there's a very real probability that you'll be caught and banned, the rest of them will keep doing it for the 5 minutes it takes before they're kicked off.