The problem with this is that such a system can and will lead to unplayable characters, which lead to dissatisfied customers, which lead to revenue loss
No problem. You can rebalance for a 5% charge. Transfer (say) 10 levels of experaince from pool a to b, for a half a level hit.
From purely technical side, the more free the system is, the harder it is to balance. There are bound to be some killer skill combos, and with millions of people playing the game, they will be found. At that point you face a decision: will you balance the game difficulty against these combos, making it essentially unplayable without very careful character planning, or will you balance it against Joe Average, making these combos essentially cheat codes ?
Good point. Something that of course came to mind, because no MMO is balanced. Every MMO has its power classes.
One way I invision dealing with it is a sliding scale. Imagine a three axis coordianate system. One axis is melee power, which would be a function of both armor class (plate, chain, leather, silk) and combat prowess. The second axis is healing ability, the third axis spell damage. Now this does not accommodate for the benefits gained by a buffing class, for example, but it is a start. On those three axes we can plot a surface as a function of f(melee, healing, spell). Towards the extremities of each axis the power of the other two axis is severly reduced. Towards the middle of the graph you can have moderate levels of all three. Kinda hard to visualize without a picture, but this forms a sliding scale by which you can modify skills. Pick the x coordinate with respect to melee ability, then you can slide along the surface with your spell damage and heal ability. It's a concave curve so as you get better at one you get progressively worse at the other. Pick your poison. In this way, all your spells can be 'good', and pure casters will be awesome, but hybrids will take a penalty in the form of a damage/heal reduction coefficient pulled off this graph (for instance). (Confusing I'm sure, but look at it this way along the scale: top end you have a warrrior, all melee, no spell damage or heals. Then towards the middle you have a druid, OK heals and spell damage, and towards the low end you have a warlock/necromancer, all out DPS. You can kind of see where a paladin might fit in between the druid and the warrior. I don't claim this scale is ideal, just a 2 minute sketch. But a scale could be made and implemented)
This will make the above problem even worse.
See: Everquest, Diablo II (hardcore is quite popular, played it for years, you die you lose your character, with items)
Good luck getting anyone to do any instances or elite quests whatsoever in a game where you can solo easily if dying gives you an xp penalty.
Everquest. Been doing it since 1999. Was king of the hill at the time and paved the way for bigger and better. It is still holding strong, releasing its 14th expansion in November.
Honestly, no xp loss for death is one of the very reasons that wow is so much more popular than eq.
I'm not sure. I keep hearing my friends bitch about how much you have to pay to repair epic gear. Now consider the time it takes to farm multiple gold (hunter friend of mine says 2 gold to fully repair his gun) to time lost when you take an experiance hit. Now consider the fact that clerics and necromancers can resurrect in Everquest and restore 93% of your experiance. How much is 7% of a death? About 1 kill in a group, if even. So yes, 1 death = 1 kill to restore the experiance lost.
As someone who quit 3 months after the game came out, immediately after hitting the level cap, you really aren't qualified to make any determinations as to what would be best for the game. Obviously you thought leveling was the entire game, and missed out on the real game. Granted, back then level 60 wasn't as good as it became later, or any where near as good as level cap at 70, but then again you wouldn't know that, now would you?
There was nothing to do at 60, yeah. But the real reason I quit was game mechanics. I played both betas as two different classes, horde and alliance. I played a third class on release. I had no less than 10 friends jump ship (from EQ and AO) with me to play WoW, we grouped together and kept tabs on each other to see how each class played.The game mechanics were not diverse enough for me. I still do keep tabs so I might have a better perspective than you think:) three of those friends still play to this day, and we hang out on a regular basis. And my wife continued to play as recently as last year.
This game has always, and will always begin at level cap.
That's a paradigm I'd like to see challenged. If I had half a million dollars...
No, not at all, but only US citizens can get a security clearance. The college is known for having a high percentile of Indian students here on student visa, and in this part of the country (Alabama) you don't have many citizens of Indian descent. It also happen to be a smaller engineering college so you tend to get to know people... what I was saying was, since immigrants/foreign workers cannot acquire a security clearance, there are far less of them in Aerospace. Hope that came out clearer, and apologize for any confusion.
Highly doubtful. Check out Nokia's stock ticker... just the value of Nokia's stock is 98% of Google's stock, not to mention Nokia holds a lot more **physical** assets than Google. Similar cash-at-hand, much more revenue per year. If Google would want to make a purchase of Nokia (Nokia being a healthy company), they would have to up the ante and offer the stockholders **more** than the company is worth. Sure, they can take out a loan, but they would essentially run the company dry. The interest on a few hundred billion dollars (Nokia's stock alone is worth 120B, Google's cash-at-hand is less than a tenth of that) a year would be billions of dollars a year. Google can't afford that. To put it another way, their revenue last year was 13B. The interest on a loan for Nokia would probably run a third to half that.
I know. It's too late for Blizzard, they are a lost cause.
But I don't think its impossible for a new studio to think small. See, profit = net - costs of operating. So if you can minimize your operating cost, you can profit with a much smaller number of users, or more users at a lower subscription rate. So instead of shooting straight for millions of users, shoot for a more moderate level, reduce costs accordingly and you can survive with a smaller player base.
People (here, notably) keep preaching gameplay trumps graphics. It wouldn't be impossible to make a game with great gameplay that appeals to the masses, but I really think you can carve out a dedicated fanbase with a more specific, more intense, perhaps more difficult gameplay. Might have to sacrifice some things like x million users or glitzy graphics to stay in budget for a MMO of 10,000 or 100,000 users... but I think it might be worth doing.
I'm not convinced that having more and more options is better, anyway.
It wouldn't have to be overly complex. You start out as a man, woman or orc. You have four bubbles on your stat sheet which have to total to 100%: one is experiance, one is healing, one is spell damage, the other melee damage, the fifth is personal enhancement. You can change at any time, from kill to kill, etc. Pick what you want to do.
Of course WoW would never go it. You'd quickly disenchant your least-common-denominator player, of which most of their players are it seems.
It makes it more stressful and gives a penalty for death, but meaningful? I'm unconvinced.
After a long, hard dungeon crawl, yea, I think it does. Especially if you have been in the place where you come out a night with negative XP. You tend to learn your class **very** quickly. I can remember a number of instances from back in 2002 when I was in a bind but was able to pull out and survive, sometimes miraculously. I'm not sure I can remember that many newbie instances from my paladin in WoW, and that was a number of years later.
My personal opinion is, MMO's shouldn't design for the masses. WoW is just that - a MMO for the lowest common denominator. MMO's **should** strive for something unique. Design for 50k, 100k or 500k players. You don't have to break WoW to compete. Come up with something unique. It's sad but (most of the new MMO's) feel like we are back playing FPS's in the late 90's: it's essentially all the same game, just a slightly different skin.
I'm not for sure myself, I do have a few ideas, but I believe there is a distinction to be made between the initial post and the reply. The initial post stated, "Do they feel that all of that [1-70] is throw-away?, to which the reply came that leveling would be quicker, essentially saying yes, leveling is a throw-away.
I haven't played WoW since 3 months after the release, I can't speak to the game as it is today (I hit 60 and got bored. Sold my accout and came back to EQ). Actually right now I'm playing a lowbie in Everquest with my wife. That is meaningful to me (1) because it is with my wife and (2) because I'm revisiting old content I haven't seen in 5+ years. I do think leveling in EQ means more because you can lose it along the way (death = xp loss).
I have thought of some ways to make it more meaningful, and most do revolve around experiance, using and losing it. Basically make it a commodity, something to buy and sell (both between yourself and the character sheet, and yourself and the open market) instead of a percentage ticker to keep you out of level 70 content:)
1) xp funnel into abilities, not just raw levels. Instead of randomly skilling up when you use abilities, you have to funnel a portion of your XP torwards. The more you funnel, the better you get (the less goes to actual leveling, player level). and the more damage you can do at lower levels. You can then strike a balance between speed of leveling and how much damage you put out. You could then make the system totally de-classed and have different pools to dump XP into, by picking the right ratios then existing classes will naturally arise.
2) xp loss on death. You break it you buy it.
3) stuff based on expending experiance. In Everquest, the necromancer class could resurrect one soul by slaying another. They would have to kill one player (over level 46) and store their soul in an 'essence emerald' (EE) and then they could spend it in a resurrection spell to rez another player of any level. (there were other spells/quests that required EE's too) Anyways long story short, experience should be able to be funneled into other resources. Some examples I can think would work: (1) resurrection (EQ did it) (2) major instant hit potions (EQ did it, and didn't D&D have certain spells that required experiance to scribe or cast? been waaay too long) (3) item enhancement (get a bonus to the stats on your gear)
4) alternate advancement experiance. In Everquest you can funnel your experiance into an alternate pool and spend it on abilities, similar to talents, except there are like 2,000 points now to be spent on hundreds of abilities. Some have prereqs but they are all permenant. Kinda similar to dumping experiance into skills, except these generally either (1) (mostly) provided passive bonuses like enhanced run speed or DPS or (2) gave you a special ability.
I mention Everquest a lot, I know, but I think they did some good things wrt to experience and how they handle it. I think you can take it further in a MMO and make it a real commodity second to gold/plat itself
The support structure of the previously mentioned distro.
So Debian will provide free over-the-phone technical support for free copies provided to Dell, 24/7? Or for copies as cheap as Windows ($10ish for XP)? Somehow I doubt it. And somehow I doubt Dell would want to outsource their support to the OS company. They don't do it with Windows, why do it with linux?
Believe me, if there were a dollars and cents angle, someone would be all over this. There just isn't.
If you read the article on Friday, Novell has gained more market share since joining Microsoft then they had in years past. $100M in new business. All in all, may have been a good trade.
*Shrug* I was skeptical of Vista at first, but I had pre-purchased a 1 gig stick of RAM (it only came with 512, but RAM is cheap and I do engineering programming so I knew it'd be needed). Installed XP side by side. Ran some speed tests (compiling code in c++, running Everquest, etc.) and the results were virtually identical. Kept Vista. I was impressed. For a $350 notebook (price at store, no mail-in rebates) running on a frickin gimp sempron it was pretty snappy.
Fuck glitzy graphics, my computer is for getting work done (except when I'm writing sim visualizations, then I'm writing the graphics... and the geforce 6100 card doesn't hurt).
Given product A and product B with identical features and a nearly 100% difference in price, how much of the market do you think is made up of value shoppers, and how much is brand shoppers?
A value shopper will purchase a computer with Windows installed and a support contract because at the current price of commodity hardware, it is cheaper to have someone else pre-install Windows than it is for you to track down, install and configure your own operating system. And because they value technical support (quality may be another issue but its that or nothing in some cases if you don't have geeky friends). Time is money.
Picture a commodity market, if box A does web browsing, email blah blah blah (as you pointed out in you original post) and box B does the same + shiney Windows sticker + 100% retail markup.
If you have to assemble box A and download the distro from online, you will probably skew people to box b.
Now balance the price of a $10 distro and existing support structure versus a (free) operating system that (1) needs to be tailored to the hardware being sold, (2) cut and stamped with the distributers' logos and most importantly and expensively (3) implement a support structure (call center / dialogs / online support / etc.) to handle Linux. It just isn't worth $10/machine to do all that.
Compaq (which is part of HP now) laptops do not. I had to roll my own when I go my laptop, but it took about a half hour burning to 2 DVD's. But yes, gotta call BS on the rest of his post.
In my mechanical/Aerospace engineering classes (I'm working on my Ph.D.) they are dominated by white students.
I believe a big part of that is due to the fact that most aerospace jobs - in defense, virtually all, some (not many) at NASA - require security clearances. So why start what you can't begin? There were a lot more indian students in particular at the undergraduate level.
I'm taking a CFD class right now, 8 students, 1 Indian student, 1 oriental student. Don't know citizenship status. Rest of us are caucasian. The semester before, Hypersonic Aerodynamics, all caucasian and african-american. Semester before, Aerothermodynamics, all caucasian and african-american. The same trend was readily apparent for my graduate work as well.
I know there are a lot more foreign students in the CS department. I don't think its an american vs. foreigner thing, I think it is a type of engineering thing.
OK so keep 2 of those CD's as your 'safety net' and aggressively invest the rest of it. If you are under 40 you don't have much to lose.
I have most of my money in an agressive allocation fund with my investment company, and the historical return rate is 11%. Last year was over 16%. I've broke double digits this year despite the doom&gloom you hear everyone talking about. There's no reason to keep all your money in CD's.
And if you are older, go for a less agressive investment scheme, and net 8-9%. Compounded, you will notice the difference in a few years. 100k in anything the FDIC can insure is crazy talk...
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a 40 year old virgin (laptop collector)?
The problem with this is that such a system can and will lead to unplayable characters, which lead to dissatisfied customers, which lead to revenue loss
No problem. You can rebalance for a 5% charge. Transfer (say) 10 levels of experaince from pool a to b, for a half a level hit.
From purely technical side, the more free the system is, the harder it is to balance. There are bound to be some killer skill combos, and with millions of people playing the game, they will be found. At that point you face a decision: will you balance the game difficulty against these combos, making it essentially unplayable without very careful character planning, or will you balance it against Joe Average, making these combos essentially cheat codes ?
Good point. Something that of course came to mind, because no MMO is balanced. Every MMO has its power classes.
One way I invision dealing with it is a sliding scale. Imagine a three axis coordianate system. One axis is melee power, which would be a function of both armor class (plate, chain, leather, silk) and combat prowess. The second axis is healing ability, the third axis spell damage. Now this does not accommodate for the benefits gained by a buffing class, for example, but it is a start. On those three axes we can plot a surface as a function of f(melee, healing, spell). Towards the extremities of each axis the power of the other two axis is severly reduced. Towards the middle of the graph you can have moderate levels of all three. Kinda hard to visualize without a picture, but this forms a sliding scale by which you can modify skills. Pick the x coordinate with respect to melee ability, then you can slide along the surface with your spell damage and heal ability. It's a concave curve so as you get better at one you get progressively worse at the other. Pick your poison. In this way, all your spells can be 'good', and pure casters will be awesome, but hybrids will take a penalty in the form of a damage/heal reduction coefficient pulled off this graph (for instance). (Confusing I'm sure, but look at it this way along the scale: top end you have a warrrior, all melee, no spell damage or heals. Then towards the middle you have a druid, OK heals and spell damage, and towards the low end you have a warlock/necromancer, all out DPS. You can kind of see where a paladin might fit in between the druid and the warrior. I don't claim this scale is ideal, just a 2 minute sketch. But a scale could be made and implemented)
This will make the above problem even worse.
See: Everquest, Diablo II (hardcore is quite popular, played it for years, you die you lose your character, with items)
Good luck getting anyone to do any instances or elite quests whatsoever in a game where you can solo easily if dying gives you an xp penalty.
:) three of those friends still play to this day, and we hang out on a regular basis. And my wife continued to play as recently as last year.
Everquest. Been doing it since 1999. Was king of the hill at the time and paved the way for bigger and better. It is still holding strong, releasing its 14th expansion in November.
Honestly, no xp loss for death is one of the very reasons that wow is so much more popular than eq.
I'm not sure. I keep hearing my friends bitch about how much you have to pay to repair epic gear. Now consider the time it takes to farm multiple gold (hunter friend of mine says 2 gold to fully repair his gun) to time lost when you take an experiance hit. Now consider the fact that clerics and necromancers can resurrect in Everquest and restore 93% of your experiance. How much is 7% of a death? About 1 kill in a group, if even. So yes, 1 death = 1 kill to restore the experiance lost.
As someone who quit 3 months after the game came out, immediately after hitting the level cap, you really aren't qualified to make any determinations as to what would be best for the game. Obviously you thought leveling was the entire game, and missed out on the real game. Granted, back then level 60 wasn't as good as it became later, or any where near as good as level cap at 70, but then again you wouldn't know that, now would you?
There was nothing to do at 60, yeah. But the real reason I quit was game mechanics. I played both betas as two different classes, horde and alliance. I played a third class on release. I had no less than 10 friends jump ship (from EQ and AO) with me to play WoW, we grouped together and kept tabs on each other to see how each class played.The game mechanics were not diverse enough for me. I still do keep tabs so I might have a better perspective than you think
This game has always, and will always begin at level cap.
That's a paradigm I'd like to see challenged. If I had half a million dollars...
No, not at all, but only US citizens can get a security clearance. The college is known for having a high percentile of Indian students here on student visa, and in this part of the country (Alabama) you don't have many citizens of Indian descent. It also happen to be a smaller engineering college so you tend to get to know people... what I was saying was, since immigrants/foreign workers cannot acquire a security clearance, there are far less of them in Aerospace. Hope that came out clearer, and apologize for any confusion.
Highly doubtful. Check out Nokia's stock ticker ... just the value of Nokia's stock is 98% of Google's stock, not to mention Nokia holds a lot more **physical** assets than Google. Similar cash-at-hand, much more revenue per year. If Google would want to make a purchase of Nokia (Nokia being a healthy company), they would have to up the ante and offer the stockholders **more** than the company is worth. Sure, they can take out a loan, but they would essentially run the company dry. The interest on a few hundred billion dollars (Nokia's stock alone is worth 120B, Google's cash-at-hand is less than a tenth of that) a year would be billions of dollars a year. Google can't afford that. To put it another way, their revenue last year was 13B. The interest on a loan for Nokia would probably run a third to half that.
I know. It's too late for Blizzard, they are a lost cause.
... but I think it might be worth doing.
But I don't think its impossible for a new studio to think small. See, profit = net - costs of operating. So if you can minimize your operating cost, you can profit with a much smaller number of users, or more users at a lower subscription rate. So instead of shooting straight for millions of users, shoot for a more moderate level, reduce costs accordingly and you can survive with a smaller player base.
People (here, notably) keep preaching gameplay trumps graphics. It wouldn't be impossible to make a game with great gameplay that appeals to the masses, but I really think you can carve out a dedicated fanbase with a more specific, more intense, perhaps more difficult gameplay. Might have to sacrifice some things like x million users or glitzy graphics to stay in budget for a MMO of 10,000 or 100,000 users
I'm not convinced that having more and more options is better, anyway.
It wouldn't have to be overly complex. You start out as a man, woman or orc. You have four bubbles on your stat sheet which have to total to 100%: one is experiance, one is healing, one is spell damage, the other melee damage, the fifth is personal enhancement. You can change at any time, from kill to kill, etc. Pick what you want to do.
Of course WoW would never go it. You'd quickly disenchant your least-common-denominator player, of which most of their players are it seems.
It makes it more stressful and gives a penalty for death, but meaningful? I'm unconvinced.
After a long, hard dungeon crawl, yea, I think it does. Especially if you have been in the place where you come out a night with negative XP. You tend to learn your class **very** quickly. I can remember a number of instances from back in 2002 when I was in a bind but was able to pull out and survive, sometimes miraculously. I'm not sure I can remember that many newbie instances from my paladin in WoW, and that was a number of years later.
My personal opinion is, MMO's shouldn't design for the masses. WoW is just that - a MMO for the lowest common denominator. MMO's **should** strive for something unique. Design for 50k, 100k or 500k players. You don't have to break WoW to compete. Come up with something unique. It's sad but (most of the new MMO's) feel like we are back playing FPS's in the late 90's: it's essentially all the same game, just a slightly different skin.
I'm not for sure myself, I do have a few ideas, but I believe there is a distinction to be made between the initial post and the reply. The initial post stated, "Do they feel that all of that [1-70] is throw-away?, to which the reply came that leveling would be quicker, essentially saying yes, leveling is a throw-away.
:)
I haven't played WoW since 3 months after the release, I can't speak to the game as it is today (I hit 60 and got bored. Sold my accout and came back to EQ). Actually right now I'm playing a lowbie in Everquest with my wife. That is meaningful to me (1) because it is with my wife and (2) because I'm revisiting old content I haven't seen in 5+ years. I do think leveling in EQ means more because you can lose it along the way (death = xp loss).
I have thought of some ways to make it more meaningful, and most do revolve around experiance, using and losing it. Basically make it a commodity, something to buy and sell (both between yourself and the character sheet, and yourself and the open market) instead of a percentage ticker to keep you out of level 70 content
1) xp funnel into abilities, not just raw levels. Instead of randomly skilling up when you use abilities, you have to funnel a portion of your XP torwards. The more you funnel, the better you get (the less goes to actual leveling, player level). and the more damage you can do at lower levels. You can then strike a balance between speed of leveling and how much damage you put out. You could then make the system totally de-classed and have different pools to dump XP into, by picking the right ratios then existing classes will naturally arise.
2) xp loss on death. You break it you buy it.
3) stuff based on expending experiance. In Everquest, the necromancer class could resurrect one soul by slaying another. They would have to kill one player (over level 46) and store their soul in an 'essence emerald' (EE) and then they could spend it in a resurrection spell to rez another player of any level. (there were other spells/quests that required EE's too) Anyways long story short, experience should be able to be funneled into other resources. Some examples I can think would work: (1) resurrection (EQ did it) (2) major instant hit potions (EQ did it, and didn't D&D have certain spells that required experiance to scribe or cast? been waaay too long) (3) item enhancement (get a bonus to the stats on your gear)
4) alternate advancement experiance. In Everquest you can funnel your experiance into an alternate pool and spend it on abilities, similar to talents, except there are like 2,000 points now to be spent on hundreds of abilities. Some have prereqs but they are all permenant. Kinda similar to dumping experiance into skills, except these generally either (1) (mostly) provided passive bonuses like enhanced run speed or DPS or (2) gave you a special ability.
I mention Everquest a lot, I know, but I think they did some good things wrt to experience and how they handle it. I think you can take it further in a MMO and make it a real commodity second to gold/plat itself
Google couldn't afford Nokia if they wanted them.
OK, so they have made the mid-leveling shorter, but they haven't made it any more meaningful.
eeeeeeh, it'll lower the resale value...
meh, its only the size of a womp rat.
The support structure of the previously mentioned distro.
So Debian will provide free over-the-phone technical support for free copies provided to Dell, 24/7? Or for copies as cheap as Windows ($10ish for XP)? Somehow I doubt it. And somehow I doubt Dell would want to outsource their support to the OS company. They don't do it with Windows, why do it with linux?
Believe me, if there were a dollars and cents angle, someone would be all over this. There just isn't.
If you read the article on Friday, Novell has gained more market share since joining Microsoft then they had in years past. $100M in new business. All in all, may have been a good trade.
Dude, the keyboard isn't flat, it is an oblate spheroid. Flat keyboard are so 1490's :)
OK that late in life you have a point. But I wouldn't have all my eggs in one basket ... diversify your products!
*Shrug* I was skeptical of Vista at first, but I had pre-purchased a 1 gig stick of RAM (it only came with 512, but RAM is cheap and I do engineering programming so I knew it'd be needed). Installed XP side by side. Ran some speed tests (compiling code in c++, running Everquest, etc.) and the results were virtually identical. Kept Vista. I was impressed. For a $350 notebook (price at store, no mail-in rebates) running on a frickin gimp sempron it was pretty snappy.
... and the geforce 6100 card doesn't hurt).
Fuck glitzy graphics, my computer is for getting work done (except when I'm writing sim visualizations, then I'm writing the graphics
Given product A and product B with identical features and a nearly 100% difference in price, how much of the market do you think is made up of value shoppers, and how much is brand shoppers?
A value shopper will purchase a computer with Windows installed and a support contract because at the current price of commodity hardware, it is cheaper to have someone else pre-install Windows than it is for you to track down, install and configure your own operating system. And because they value technical support (quality may be another issue but its that or nothing in some cases if you don't have geeky friends). Time is money.
Picture a commodity market, if box A does web browsing, email blah blah blah (as you pointed out in you original post) and box B does the same + shiney Windows sticker + 100% retail markup.
If you have to assemble box A and download the distro from online, you will probably skew people to box b.
Now balance the price of a $10 distro and existing support structure versus a (free) operating system that (1) needs to be tailored to the hardware being sold, (2) cut and stamped with the distributers' logos and most importantly and expensively (3) implement a support structure (call center / dialogs / online support / etc.) to handle Linux. It just isn't worth $10/machine to do all that.
Compaq (which is part of HP now) laptops do not. I had to roll my own when I go my laptop, but it took about a half hour burning to 2 DVD's. But yes, gotta call BS on the rest of his post.
In my mechanical/Aerospace engineering classes (I'm working on my Ph.D.) they are dominated by white students.
I believe a big part of that is due to the fact that most aerospace jobs - in defense, virtually all, some (not many) at NASA - require security clearances. So why start what you can't begin? There were a lot more indian students in particular at the undergraduate level.
I'm taking a CFD class right now, 8 students, 1 Indian student, 1 oriental student. Don't know citizenship status. Rest of us are caucasian. The semester before, Hypersonic Aerodynamics, all caucasian and african-american. Semester before, Aerothermodynamics, all caucasian and african-american. The same trend was readily apparent for my graduate work as well.
I know there are a lot more foreign students in the CS department. I don't think its an american vs. foreigner thing, I think it is a type of engineering thing.
(1). There is some sane talk beyond Google and Apple worship. Just not nearly as much as there used to be. I miss the old days.
... sorry, just not a fan of GPLv3.
(2). 'And lo: I have reserved for you seven thousand who have yet to suck the cock of RMS'
OK so keep 2 of those CD's as your 'safety net' and aggressively invest the rest of it. If you are under 40 you don't have much to lose.
...
I have most of my money in an agressive allocation fund with my investment company, and the historical return rate is 11%. Last year was over 16%. I've broke double digits this year despite the doom&gloom you hear everyone talking about. There's no reason to keep all your money in CD's.
And if you are older, go for a less agressive investment scheme, and net 8-9%. Compounded, you will notice the difference in a few years. 100k in anything the FDIC can insure is crazy talk
good luck! NetwurX was a startup when I joined (about 6 months fresh, we worked out of the owners' basement) ... its fun but a lot of work.
congratulations on breaking slashdot