However, both systems are designed so that the greatest rewards are only achievable by massive multiplayer effort. and at that point, all the players who have real lives drop out.
This is my biggest concern with WoW. I bought two copies of the game so that I can play with my girlfriend. We are both at level 29 after about a month of casual play. I like the casual play aspect and the quests are fun because they are something that we can do together for an hour or two before bed a couple of nights a week. I fear the endgame tho. Every single one of my friends with a level 60 character who plays the game only plays the game. They are in guilds and those guilds expect them to be online for raiding on a set schedule. They spend 2-3 hours in a single freakin instance, and most of the time don't even get any gear out of it because they haven't earned enough DKP... whatever the fuck DKP is. Unfortunately for me, I have a life outside of WoW, but I can relate to being a junky. I used to put in 8-12 hour days playing Quake 3 and Rocket Arena competitively, but still... Q3 doesn't have anything on the level of the DKP system and the crack of Blues and Purples. I don't even want to think about 60+ PvP against guys who have been 60+ for a year and have all of the gear.
There's one problem with your idea. As soon as the game world is offloaded to the client you are going to have huge problems with hackers. You would need a whole application layer of checks and balances to ensure that the servants were serving up legit content.
Being able to access documents via the web from anywhere needs to be as easy as possible for regular joe's, otherwise they have no reason to leave MS Office
And with Micosoft SharePoint server (SharePortal Server), you will be able to access your documents from anywhere via the web.
not to self: if robbed, use crow bar to force open window before calling the police.
You aren't kidding. I had my laptop stolen out of my car that was parked in my driveway. I left the window rolled down an inch for some ventilation because it was really hot outside. There wasn't any sign of breaking and entering so the police refused to file a report, and that meant I couldn't get the loss covered by my insurance.
Another time I got into a traffic accident and the police wouldn't respond unless there was an injury, or there was more than $500 worth of damage to public property.
Moral of the two stories? If you need the police to take your side, you better make damn sure that you have some broken stuff.
[flamebait]This is great and something slashdotters can appreciate and relate to. The article has a online journalist with a bachelors degree going up against a Harvard PhD. It reminds me a lot of all of the home users and part time Dreamweaver users (I mean... web "programmers") commenting on the suitability of Linux and Apple products for enterprise wide use.[/flamebait]
So what if the movie industry claims they won't be able to impliment HD, becasue it is not true.
Manufactureres will make DVD/Blu-ray/whatever players for computers. No one can stop that.
I think you missed the point I was trying to make. I'm not always completely clear in what I communicate. The movie industry is saying, "We are protecting our content. We want you to help us protect our content (and if you don't, we'll sue the hell out of you for enabling piracy)." Microsoft said, "Okay, no problem. We'll make Media Player DRM compatible and setup the OS so that only devices with signed drivers will play your content."
What do you mean when you say "Manufactureres will make DVD/Blu-ray/whatever players for computers."? Of course they will make the DRIVES that read the disks. But that is only part of the equation. The device driver still needs to interact with the OS, and Microsoft will only sign drivers that impliment DRM.
I can almost guarantee that when Apple decides that they want people to be able to natively play HD-DVDs and Blu-Ray discs on their Macs, Apple will have to sign the same sort of deal with Hollywood, and they will have to impliment similar DRM.
That's interesting information. Thanks for sharing. It definitely sucks to see things like that happening. What could very well happen is that kind of thing will backfire on them. People want computers to be simple to use, and they want to be able to share things with their friends. Proprietary standards make that difficult to do. Sometimes I wonder what the hell Microsoft is thinking. There are so many viable standards already out there, and their operating systems and applications already have enough bugs and problems to keep the coders busy for ages, it just seems stupid to waste time coming up with new products when they could be fixing the old ones.
If you want to work on your own schedule, you should be freelancing or consulting.
And then when you become a consultant you can find out what real work is. Unlike a paid employee, the people who are paying you as a consultant expect results that are better than the results they would get from their inhouse people.
I ran into a similar situation at one of my clients. They are a small lighting manufacturer and they run their entire business on an old dBase database. Their old Novell server bit the dust so they bit the bullet and went Win2K3 server and Windows XP on the desktops. The dBase app works okay with SP1, but as soon as you put SP2 (or any number of post SP1 hotfixes) on the box, the dBase app will fail to run with an NTDVM 16-bit subsystem error.
they are also breaking dozens of other standards that people are less cognizant of. MP3, MPEG, PDF, PNG, JPEG, etc. are all being quietly pushed out by bundled, proprietary alternatives while the pressure is on Web and Office formats.
Do you have some evidence of this? I'm interested to know how Microsoft is "breaking" something like the JPEG standard.
For the longest time one of the big complaints against Microsoft has been their closed nature and their lack of interaction with developers outside of their own organization. Now they are opening up, or at least they are presenting the appearence of opening up. Only the Mozilla guys will be able to report on how open they really are. But whether or not they truly open up, by appearing to open up, they win points with corporate America. They are handing a poison pill to everyone they invite to their campus. If anyone refuses the invitation, Microsoft can later point at them and say, "We offered you the opportunity and you declined. You're the one who doesn't want to make the effort to have your product work on our OS." On another level, they can appear to be friendly and looking out for the consumer, and they can paint the OSS world as a hostile place.
In my opinion, I think that Microsoft seriously does see the hand-writing on the wall and they do want to do more to ensure that their OS supports the programs that people want to use. Microsoft is going to trumpet their low support costs and ease of managability (think SMS, Group Policy, etc). They are going to trumpet the fact that they are the standard, and they are going to portray any group who doesn't want to work with the standard as being back-asswards and wasting time unnecessarily reinventing the wheel.
On another level, Microsoft is trying to avoid what happened to Novell in the 1990s. Netware was a great operating system but it got to the point where they barely had any third party support. The same thing could happen to Microsoft if enough developers decide that using Microsoft dev tools is a PITA and if enough developers decide that coding to the Microsoft OS is a PITA. The one incentive that Microsoft has left is their market penetration. They can still play the economic card, and that card is, "If you develop for the MS platform, you will have a market share of XX. And by the way, that market is already used to paying out the nose for software, so you stand to make money. Now do you want that, or do you want to go to the OSS world where everyone is doing it on the cheap with razor thin margins?" And if you think about it, that's a very strong position to come from. If you're trying to make money, do you want to go with the company that has already made itself (and numerous third parties) griploads of cash, or do you want to go with the other guys who are trying to redo what Microsoft has already done, but do it "less expensively and better"? I'm of the opinion that unless the OSS world comes out with some killer functionality that operates EXCLUSIVELY outside of Windows, they're never going to win. Given how much Microsoft has been investing in intellectual property, and given how much they have already developed (OS, Office, Exchange, accounting packages, CRM packages... basically all the tools that a business needs to function), it's going to be hard to end-run around the monopoly.
The one ray of hope is "standards" but as we've all seen, Microsoft will just ignore a standard until enough people want to use it. Then they'll offer support for it. You're seeing it now with IE7. For the longest time, MS didn't give two shits. Now enough web devs have complained loudly enough and they're finally getting what they want. IE7 might not nail it, but I'm willing to be IE7 SP3, or IE8 will. The problem with using a standard to fight Microsoft is that standards are very rarely proprietary. And as we've seen with the W3C, even "standards" are often times still works in progress.
You know you're in trouble when Consumer Reports is pointing out that your software is worthless. As just about every/.er knows, pattern / signature based detection is all too easily circumvented. Unfortunately it's pretty much all we have. It has been my experience that enabling Heuristic based detection (in Symantec Corporate AV) at any level other than the default just leads to too many false positives.
"Easy things. Exercise... learn to relax, learn meditation, learn breathing exercises, participate in your religion -- all of those things are very effective stress managers.""
Lets see... Taoist based kung fu
Exercise - Check
Relax - Got tai chi? - Check
Meditation - Check
Breathing Exercises - Check
Participate in your religion - Check
Maybe I am on the right path afterall. This computer stuff is for the birds. It wrecks the body (got carpal tunnel) and stresses you out. After spending too much time in front of a computer, Taoism is a great balance. Now if I could only get RealWorldExp (tm) transfered into my WoW character for all the time I spend at the temple. Maybe something where every gate opened = 1 talent point. =)
I'm guessing that as I/we get older, we'll look for games where we can take our time too.
Agreed. I'm only 28 and have been gaming since I was about 8 (F15 Strike Eagle, Gunship and all those other Microprose games). Now that I'm playing WoW, I'm just taking my time going through the quests and marvelling at how FREAKING BIG the game is. Even without monsters, I'm sure it would take you a good hour or two to cover the entire game on foot.
The issue is that Bush won't be removed from office. The guy's father was the head of the CIA. His family has ties with huge corporations and powerful people across the globe. The man walks on water as far as a good portion of the country is concerned because he represents "Christian values" in this heathen country filled with people who want freedom and not God driven decrees of right and wrong.
Ironically, one of your "solutions", Antivirus Software (a.k.a. stopgap measure or snake oil depending on your inclination), is probably the reason things are as bad as they are. Rather than closing holes, AV just stomps the critters that run in through them. If users had insisted on fixes and security rather than installing Norton Antivirus (and considering it "fixed", things probably wouldn't be nearly so bad as they are. It would also be nice if the economic disincentive for insecurity would lie with the vendors where it belongs, not with each and every user.
Following that type of logic, it could be said that seatbelts and airbags are a stopgap measure to deal with traffic fatalities. They fool people into thinking that it is actually safe to drive 2+ tons of metal at close to triple digit speeds.
Regarding laptops and college kids... there are a couple of girls in my neighborhood who have laptops that were given to them by their parents when they went to school. Of course they are from the various major manufacturers (Dell, HP, etc) and all are running Windows. With the latest version Windows Defender, Symantec AV (corporate) and Automatic Updates set to install automatically their computers are just fine. They use Kazaa and Limewire and all that crap. They tell me that Symantec AV is often times popping up warnings about things it catches. They use MySpace and various social sites, AOL IM, Trillian, etc. Yet some how their computers are okay. Hmmmmmmmmm.
I'm just wondering why more applications aren't packaged pre-installed on data keys.I have a data key with all of the sysinternals utilities on it that I use in conjunction with the Ultimate Boot CD when I need to troubleshoot and repair Windows boxen. It would be cool to have full blown applications on a key, but until Microsoft does away with the registry and until applications stop looking there for config information, the idea of apps on a data key is a pipe dream. =/
I know you were trying to be funny, but to be fair,
To be fair to me and to put the jab at my driving abilities into perspective, a few weeks ago I was driving around with my girlfriend in the car. I stopped at a stop sign and there were some kids on the corner. Even though it was my turn to go, I didn't go because I noticed one of the kids was into an animated conversation with her friend... it was like she didn't have time to talk because she needed to go somewhere. Not two seconds after my girlfriend got frustrated and said, "Honey, it's your turn to go."... the girl spun around and darted across the street right in front of my car.
So, I'm conscious of the world around me when I'm driving, especially little kids with the propensity to not look before leaping... even if it costs me a few seconds of my precious time. =)
One such "tool" that would work great on a virtual machine because the host machine rejects it is a virus. With all benefits you get some drawbacks.
Granted. Yet in the case of the host machine identifying a security tool as something that needs to be quarantined, the VM is a great way to go. I can still have my secured OS, and run all of my security tools without having to degrade the security of the host.
Slashdot Mirror
This is my biggest concern with WoW. I bought two copies of the game so that I can play with my girlfriend. We are both at level 29 after about a month of casual play. I like the casual play aspect and the quests are fun because they are something that we can do together for an hour or two before bed a couple of nights a week. I fear the endgame tho. Every single one of my friends with a level 60 character who plays the game only plays the game. They are in guilds and those guilds expect them to be online for raiding on a set schedule. They spend 2-3 hours in a single freakin instance, and most of the time don't even get any gear out of it because they haven't earned enough DKP... whatever the fuck DKP is. Unfortunately for me, I have a life outside of WoW, but I can relate to being a junky. I used to put in 8-12 hour days playing Quake 3 and Rocket Arena competitively, but still... Q3 doesn't have anything on the level of the DKP system and the crack of Blues and Purples. I don't even want to think about 60+ PvP against guys who have been 60+ for a year and have all of the gear.
There's one problem with your idea. As soon as the game world is offloaded to the client you are going to have huge problems with hackers. You would need a whole application layer of checks and balances to ensure that the servants were serving up legit content.
And with Micosoft SharePoint server (SharePortal Server), you will be able to access your documents from anywhere via the web.
if robbed, use crow bar to force open window before calling the police.
You aren't kidding. I had my laptop stolen out of my car that was parked in my driveway. I left the window rolled down an inch for some ventilation because it was really hot outside. There wasn't any sign of breaking and entering so the police refused to file a report, and that meant I couldn't get the loss covered by my insurance.
Another time I got into a traffic accident and the police wouldn't respond unless there was an injury, or there was more than $500 worth of damage to public property.
Moral of the two stories? If you need the police to take your side, you better make damn sure that you have some broken stuff.
[flamebait]This is great and something slashdotters can appreciate and relate to. The article has a online journalist with a bachelors degree going up against a Harvard PhD. It reminds me a lot of all of the home users and part time Dreamweaver users (I mean... web "programmers") commenting on the suitability of Linux and Apple products for enterprise wide use.[/flamebait]
Manufactureres will make DVD/Blu-ray/whatever players for computers. No one can stop that.
I think you missed the point I was trying to make. I'm not always completely clear in what I communicate. The movie industry is saying, "We are protecting our content. We want you to help us protect our content (and if you don't, we'll sue the hell out of you for enabling piracy)." Microsoft said, "Okay, no problem. We'll make Media Player DRM compatible and setup the OS so that only devices with signed drivers will play your content."
What do you mean when you say "Manufactureres will make DVD/Blu-ray/whatever players for computers."? Of course they will make the DRIVES that read the disks. But that is only part of the equation. The device driver still needs to interact with the OS, and Microsoft will only sign drivers that impliment DRM.
I can almost guarantee that when Apple decides that they want people to be able to natively play HD-DVDs and Blu-Ray discs on their Macs, Apple will have to sign the same sort of deal with Hollywood, and they will have to impliment similar DRM.
That's interesting information. Thanks for sharing. It definitely sucks to see things like that happening. What could very well happen is that kind of thing will backfire on them. People want computers to be simple to use, and they want to be able to share things with their friends. Proprietary standards make that difficult to do. Sometimes I wonder what the hell Microsoft is thinking. There are so many viable standards already out there, and their operating systems and applications already have enough bugs and problems to keep the coders busy for ages, it just seems stupid to waste time coming up with new products when they could be fixing the old ones.
And then when you become a consultant you can find out what real work is. Unlike a paid employee, the people who are paying you as a consultant expect results that are better than the results they would get from their inhouse people.
Can you share anything to back up that statement?
I ran into a similar situation at one of my clients. They are a small lighting manufacturer and they run their entire business on an old dBase database. Their old Novell server bit the dust so they bit the bullet and went Win2K3 server and Windows XP on the desktops. The dBase app works okay with SP1, but as soon as you put SP2 (or any number of post SP1 hotfixes) on the box, the dBase app will fail to run with an NTDVM 16-bit subsystem error.
Do you have some evidence of this? I'm interested to know how Microsoft is "breaking" something like the JPEG standard.
In my opinion, I think that Microsoft seriously does see the hand-writing on the wall and they do want to do more to ensure that their OS supports the programs that people want to use. Microsoft is going to trumpet their low support costs and ease of managability (think SMS, Group Policy, etc). They are going to trumpet the fact that they are the standard, and they are going to portray any group who doesn't want to work with the standard as being back-asswards and wasting time unnecessarily reinventing the wheel.
On another level, Microsoft is trying to avoid what happened to Novell in the 1990s. Netware was a great operating system but it got to the point where they barely had any third party support. The same thing could happen to Microsoft if enough developers decide that using Microsoft dev tools is a PITA and if enough developers decide that coding to the Microsoft OS is a PITA. The one incentive that Microsoft has left is their market penetration. They can still play the economic card, and that card is, "If you develop for the MS platform, you will have a market share of XX. And by the way, that market is already used to paying out the nose for software, so you stand to make money. Now do you want that, or do you want to go to the OSS world where everyone is doing it on the cheap with razor thin margins?" And if you think about it, that's a very strong position to come from. If you're trying to make money, do you want to go with the company that has already made itself (and numerous third parties) griploads of cash, or do you want to go with the other guys who are trying to redo what Microsoft has already done, but do it "less expensively and better"? I'm of the opinion that unless the OSS world comes out with some killer functionality that operates EXCLUSIVELY outside of Windows, they're never going to win. Given how much Microsoft has been investing in intellectual property, and given how much they have already developed (OS, Office, Exchange, accounting packages, CRM packages... basically all the tools that a business needs to function), it's going to be hard to end-run around the monopoly.
The one ray of hope is "standards" but as we've all seen, Microsoft will just ignore a standard until enough people want to use it. Then they'll offer support for it. You're seeing it now with IE7. For the longest time, MS didn't give two shits. Now enough web devs have complained loudly enough and they're finally getting what they want. IE7 might not nail it, but I'm willing to be IE7 SP3, or IE8 will. The problem with using a standard to fight Microsoft is that standards are very rarely proprietary. And as we've seen with the W3C, even "standards" are often times still works in progress.
F-Prot has been the software to beat ever since NuKE and YAM were putting out virii.
You know you're in trouble when Consumer Reports is pointing out that your software is worthless. As just about every /.er knows, pattern / signature based detection is all too easily circumvented. Unfortunately it's pretty much all we have. It has been my experience that enabling Heuristic based detection (in Symantec Corporate AV) at any level other than the default just leads to too many false positives.
Lets see... Taoist based kung fu
Exercise - Check
Relax - Got tai chi? - Check
Meditation - Check
Breathing Exercises - Check
Participate in your religion - Check
Maybe I am on the right path afterall. This computer stuff is for the birds. It wrecks the body (got carpal tunnel) and stresses you out. After spending too much time in front of a computer, Taoism is a great balance. Now if I could only get RealWorldExp (tm) transfered into my WoW character for all the time I spend at the temple. Maybe something where every gate opened = 1 talent point. =)
Interesting that you found Unitarian Universalism. My parents are both UU's and I wasn't exactly raised UU, but I'm definitely fimilar with it.
Agreed. I'm only 28 and have been gaming since I was about 8 (F15 Strike Eagle, Gunship and all those other Microprose games). Now that I'm playing WoW, I'm just taking my time going through the quests and marvelling at how FREAKING BIG the game is. Even without monsters, I'm sure it would take you a good hour or two to cover the entire game on foot.
You're rather generous. =) I'd give me +0.25 insightful and -1.00 flamebait for the God decree comment.
The issue is that Bush won't be removed from office. The guy's father was the head of the CIA. His family has ties with huge corporations and powerful people across the globe. The man walks on water as far as a good portion of the country is concerned because he represents "Christian values" in this heathen country filled with people who want freedom and not God driven decrees of right and wrong.
Following that type of logic, it could be said that seatbelts and airbags are a stopgap measure to deal with traffic fatalities. They fool people into thinking that it is actually safe to drive 2+ tons of metal at close to triple digit speeds.
Regarding laptops and college kids... there are a couple of girls in my neighborhood who have laptops that were given to them by their parents when they went to school. Of course they are from the various major manufacturers (Dell, HP, etc) and all are running Windows. With the latest version Windows Defender, Symantec AV (corporate) and Automatic Updates set to install automatically their computers are just fine. They use Kazaa and Limewire and all that crap. They tell me that Symantec AV is often times popping up warnings about things it catches. They use MySpace and various social sites, AOL IM, Trillian, etc. Yet some how their computers are okay. Hmmmmmmmmm.
I'm just wondering why more applications aren't packaged pre-installed on data keys.I have a data key with all of the sysinternals utilities on it that I use in conjunction with the Ultimate Boot CD when I need to troubleshoot and repair Windows boxen. It would be cool to have full blown applications on a key, but until Microsoft does away with the registry and until applications stop looking there for config information, the idea of apps on a data key is a pipe dream. =/
To be fair to me and to put the jab at my driving abilities into perspective, a few weeks ago I was driving around with my girlfriend in the car. I stopped at a stop sign and there were some kids on the corner. Even though it was my turn to go, I didn't go because I noticed one of the kids was into an animated conversation with her friend... it was like she didn't have time to talk because she needed to go somewhere. Not two seconds after my girlfriend got frustrated and said, "Honey, it's your turn to go." ... the girl spun around and darted across the street right in front of my car.
So, I'm conscious of the world around me when I'm driving, especially little kids with the propensity to not look before leaping... even if it costs me a few seconds of my precious time. =)
http://www.getlaid.com/
Granted. Yet in the case of the host machine identifying a security tool as something that needs to be quarantined, the VM is a great way to go. I can still have my secured OS, and run all of my security tools without having to degrade the security of the host.
And for when you need to ESN swap those pesky G3 flips.