* Huge: you could burn 200 hours going through the sidequests and other neat encounters (like the Twisted Rune door you had to have a Rogue Stone to get through) * NPC Banter: From Viconia's jokes about Minsc's "fingerpainted face" to Edwin's snide remarks, to the inanity of Jan Jensen, there were a LOT of classic and hilarious characters. Reading the NPC-to-NPC banter was more fun than talking to them yourself. * Multipath: lots of opportunities to be evil, and a lot of moral ambiguity. * Soloable: for the maniac, this game was possible to solo; you could leave the party behind. Over time as I replayed I solo'd with a Sorceror and with a Kensai/Wizard multiclass. Fun stuff. * Epic: the storyline was huge, and tough to beat, especially when you factor in the expansion back. * Mods: There are add-ons galore. New NPCs, tougher big boss encounters (many of which were done by David Gaider, one of the designers), even huge chunks of new content (look for Return to Windspear, for example)
Plus, there's a real thread that runs from BG1 to BG2 to ToB. You can play through all 3. There's a hack now that lets you "play" BG1 using the BG2 engine so you can play the class kits added in BG2, but in BG1.
This game remains a legend. It will undoubtedly stand the test of time and sit alongside classics like the Gold Box games, Ultima VII, Eye of the Beholder, and others. It's sad that Bioware is not involved in NWN2 (although Obsidian should do well), because it would have been nice to see them really take THAT engine and enhance it and apply it to yield the sort of improvement that BG1->BG2 showed. (Not that NWN doesn't have a certain niche all to itself, but it had a lot of weaknesses... BGII did not)
As Greg Kasavin of Gamespot said, "It's a definitive role-playing experience, and the only reason it can't be called the best game in its class is because in a sense there's nothing available that compares to it."
Baldur's Gate II is NOT abandonware, and you should still be buying it in stores. It doesn't require an emulator, it's still fun, and it's available with it's expansion pack for a mere $20. The devs worked incredibly hard on the game - just RTFA.
I bought an Overdrive PC Torque.SLI a while back. I talked with Mario there, who actually talked me down off a higher end processor, telling me he could hook me up with a slightly lower end, $800 cheaper processor but get far more overclocking out of it than the faster process.
It's fast as hell, and when it had a stability issue due to the overclocking (yes, it was pushing it), he helped tweak it to where it was rock solid.
If you're going to pay this much for a computer, get someone who actually knows how to squeeze the maximum out of it, if you don't have the time or ability to do it yourself.
Or, possibly, you need a sense of humor. Although the assumptions are actually almost certainly both right the conclusion is wrong for other reasons, which is why the whole thing is tongue in cheek.
I wonder how long it would take us to devolve via natural selection. Since there is an inverse relationship between education level and child rearing, then if one assumes more intelligent people tend to have higher educations and that higher intelligence when breeding contributes to intellectual evolution, then we may well be devolving because stupid people disproportionately reproduce. Of course, we'll probably genetically engineer our own brainpower up before too long, and solve that problem while opening up a whole new can of worms.
Haha. On any given day, on Slashdot, anyone is watching, eh?
I was actually thinking of a certain hotmail engineer, or another friend developing a commercial antispam toaster based on research one webmail provider had with a hundred-million-per-day-plus spam problem. Both have the mail chops to probably independantly benchmark the services on proposed hardware, catch gotchas, and okay a design in a 30 hr timeframe.
(1) Plan an server setup which can handle the load. The requirements may change, but one million users is a fair bit. How much average incoming and outgoing emails is that? Figure that out, using a network sniffer or sniffers on existing traffic if need be (although logs should work). Then use this to calculate a number of servers needed for an outgoing smtp farm, an incoming MX farm. Figure out how much storage space is to be provided per user, and then figure out how you want that storage space to be accessible. Probably your best bet is to have a round-robin DNS farm of imap/pop servers which proxy connections based on the users login to a backend farm of actual mailservers responsible for storage. Plan the ability to move users from server to server to rebalance as needed. Outgoing smtp is a lot easier since you're not really storing things long term. Plan a web farm for webmail. (And pick software) Don't forget to plan some sort of backup, and make sure your system is flexible as far as email retention; chances are the email retention policy will change at some point and your setup should be able to change with it.
(2) Test. For each server, hammer it. Test it's load under as close to real world circumstances as you can. Then create unreal punishing loads and see how it handles it. Plan in advance for how your server farm handles something like virus-generated mass emails causing 1000% spikes in load.
(3) Using your testing results, spec out the actual hardware. RAID, cheap hardware, redundancy, etc. If you have control over the network choice, plan a location with multiple fiber trunks coming into the building and provider redundancy. Remember backhoes in concert? Don't get hit by that. Plan for server failures, drive failures, network failures, power failures, and security compromises.
(4) Deploy! If you did the rest right, this is the easy part. You'll have redundant network connections, HSRP, redundant switches, a proxy farm, an imap/pop farm the proxies connect to, an smtp farm for outgoing emails, and a web server farm for serving up webmail (depending on how you choose to architect the disk space, the web farm and the pop/imap farm may be one and the same; depends on how you set things up.)
Here's a starter link to a setup which is smaller but, in principle, fairly similar:
Finally, if you don't want to screw it up, ask someone who has done it before. Paying someone $300/hr for a 10-30 hour review of your plan is dirt cheap compared to horking the setup. Someone who has worked in huge email environments (a la, hotmail) could show you gotchas before they bite you. (If you need help figuring out who to ask, I could even point you to some of the appropriate people)
Dunno. I still play on UltimateBet, and still win; but unless they combat the bot issue, they'll dry out. People want confidence they are playing other people, not against computer programs. It's already hard enough with Pokertracker, screen statistics overlays, etc; a full bot?
I wonder when the next wave will hit - when someone starts gaming the throng of bots by taking advantage of their decision making algorithm.
Common Sense is sometimes violated egregiously by one side or another, and then this is raised as an issue. If a security researcher sends one email to some ill-checked "bugs@" address and gets no response, then just releases a couple weeks later, that's irresponsible.
When someone emails a vendor many times at many addresses, finally gets a response where they tell him, "We're looking into it", and then proceeds to cease communicating for 45 days, that's irresponsible by the vendor, and the researcher has every right (and some would say, a responsibility) to publish.
Where's the middle ground? Well, it's a wide open space. Those without bad ulterior motives (ie, publicity-hungry or vendor-hating researchers, or head-in-sand or deny-first-ask-questions-later vendors) don't really have much difficulty negotiating the middle ground, because there's a lot of room. The problem, of course, is that the only time you *hear* about disclosure issues is when someone is being a muttonhead - either vendors trying to keep secrets, or researchers who feel no sense of responsibility or make the most token efforts to make contact. For the rest, there's little debate, because it's just easy to do it right.
A salary survey is nigh useless to begin with, and this one seems to be worse than normal. "Average salary" - what's that? Median or mean? Where's the standard deviation? What does 'broad spectrum of organizations' mean? Is it geographically diverse?
Here's another hint: a survey requires people who answer surveys. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that people making on the high end do not generally go out of their way to answer salary surveys, whereas people paid average or less than average might be a bit prone to worrying about their salary and therefore filling out surveys and looking them up.
Want to make more money? Instead of asking what other people make, ask yourself:
* What can I do that other people (or most other people) can't? What makes me good? What's my strength? How can I be better? * How much is what I'm doing worth? How can I use my skills to create a larger value for a company or client? * How can I leverage my work to produce more? * What have I done that has exceeded expectations, that could not have been predicted and is a boon for whoever pays me?
If you have already come up with good answers for the questions above, you're probably making way more than the average already.
Be in good financial shape. People living paycheck to paycheck hurt themselves because they end up afraid to take risks. Save up a large cushion of living expenses - while 4-6 months is a normal financial planner's estimate, make sure you can get an additional 12 month's worth by the time that 6 is up. With the 18 month cushion you can afford to try a lot of other things.
Finally, if you don't like what you're making, consider doing something else. A friend of mine is making over $20/hr plus benefits reading gas meters. If I was getting paid a lousy $50k to program, I'd have taken a job at his place and spent my day walking around outside. If you find yourself on the low rung, maybe this is just not what you're meant to be doing.
Note to flash guy: you're an ass and a publicity hound.
(1) Your game has a URL tag on it, so it's impossible for fuddrucker's to represent it as their own.
(2) Fuddrucker's accounted for only a small portion of total hits, and yet you're complaining about the bandwidth usage?
(3) Despite the evidence that the link was not particularly stressful nor malicious in any way, you went way out of your way to do something incredibly malicious back.
Um. How many copies do you think blizzard expected to sell? Do you think that their financial plans for the game were contingent on it being the most successful MMO ever? Not likely.
WoW has been a runaway hit, on a level that I doubt even the most pie-in-the-sky dreamer did not imagine. I'm not a fan; I played it for a couple months, got bored by what felt like repetitive and uninspired play, and quit. But there is no question that WoW is the breakaway hit of recent memory.
Not only is it surely profitable (the development cost was $72M; large, but not really when you think of 4M people buying a box and paying a monthly fee), it is, as the article said, a cash cow. This is the "wildest dreams" scenario.
There are millions of people now with iPods, right? This is definitely big enough that the government could smack the labels over it if they are colluding.
cute theory, but no
on
When Pigs Wifi
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· Score: 2, Insightful
The problem with trying to turn technologies like these into utilities is that:
(1) They are still young an evolving. Wi-fi is getting faster, working from greater distances, and getting better security with successive iterations. Commercial broadband providers are testing second-gen broadband technologies which are far faster than the first.
(2) A public utility is stagnant. To provide something like water or electricity ubiquitously they are often monopolies, heavily regulated, and on extremely small profit margins. Bureaucracy adds to this stagnation.
Combine these, and you see that turning something into a utility is the death of innovation.
Not only that, but it looks like she's filing the suit on her behalf as well as that of everyone deceived into buying a game that should have been rating AO. If she's suing on behalf of a group, shouldn't this be a class action suit? If not, she better not get much out of it.
It probably intends to become a class action suit. She files as an individual, her lawyer gets press and gets 9 more claimants, then requests the court to certify the "victims" as a class; then other law firms jump on the bandwagon in a mad scramble to recruit grandmothers everywhere who bought M17+ games for their young relatives, thinking it was just plain honest fun like cop-killing and never expected something like sex; finally, a lead plaintiff is selected and they're off to the races.
I think Rand came nowhere near it. Rand seems to have a complete inability to understand altruism, or the idea of helping others at all. Its throughout her writings that she has no respect for the idea. Her "enlightened self-interest" basicly means "fuck everyone else, I got mine". Itt would eb very interesting to see Rand get a psychological evaluation (ok, she's dead, a bit hard)- I wouldn't be surprised at all to find she was a sociopath.
Have you actually read The Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged? "Fuck everyone else, I got mine" doesn't really come anywhere near her philosophy. It was more like, "Everyone being self-serving ultimately leads to the greatest good, because we only get what we want by producing for others." Unless you're self-sufficient, and that's basically no one now, you get what you want through trade. The surest way to get what you want and need is to aggressively pursue your self-interest. Since people spending time working hard are far more productive than people who spend their time niggling over what society "owes" them, the net sum of productivity is drastically higher and society as a whole benefits. Her protagonists are generous. Howard Roark uses his talents to build incredibly cheap, effective, quality low-income housing; Hank Reardon is generous with his relatives. But in the former case, Roark's work is perverted by meddlers crusading for "more, more", refusing to accept his work as it is, wrecking the project and taking things back to where they were: a project they can't afford, a project of lesser utility, and ultimately a failure. And Reardon's relatives hound him relentlessly, yammering about his social duties. He's creating a bold new railway system enabling massive increases in transportation efficiency and leading to the employ of thousands, but they ride him about his greed and his uncaring until he finally throws them out. But both of them start working for the greater good. Rand's lesson isn't that generosity or charity is bad; it's that when honest generosity and charity cross with greed and corruption, such virtues are likely to be perverted. Roark's housing project and Reardon's family are just two examples of people doing good who had their good deeds demolished by unproductive self-righteous busybodies.
Rand's characters and stories are meant to be larger than life and iconoclastic. They have heroic characters with heroic talents. But they illustrate the nature of man astutely quite often.
Now there may well be a minority of people whom she does describe. But by and large, she's off the mark by a mile. The typical do-gooder isn't doing somethign because it makes him feel good- he's doing it because he thinks he's doing the right thing. He beleives it 100%. Its like religious zealots who try to convert everyone- they believe they are saving your soul. Assuming that they aren't what they claim to be wil cause you to entirely mispredict them.
That depends on the type of do-gooding. For people who are following Hillary's "for the children" crusade against violence and sex in video games, it falls into a combination of:
(1) People too lazy to take care of their own children and think the government should protect them from everything (2) People who are so horrified by sexual content of any kind that they will try to ban anything, anywhere, any time. They've been fighting for laws to keep alcohol out of stores, pasties on nipples at tittie bars, and making it illegal to show porn without getting a credit card first. In other words, they're people with a strong feeling of moral superiority; or a terrible fear of certain vices which manifests as moral superiority. (3) Demoagogues like Hillary, or GWB & Karl Rove. They're there to capitalize on this mass of uncritical thought and feeling, to channel it into action. "Sexual content in video games! To arms!"; let's not stop and actually think about what we're crusading for or against. It's a bit like GWB and his "Wherever people stand for liberty, we stand with you
There's not really a mystery here. Rockstar put in a sex minigame. A hacker unlocked it. It was not accessible without a patch or hack, which probably violates the EULA.
Also, what is the big deal here? The game was already rated 'M for Mature'; that's 17+, according to the ESRB. In a majority of states, you can already play the sex mini-game legally in real life. Is there some reason sex should be legal at 16, but a sex-themed video game should be illegal until you're 18?
You will be in absolute awe at Dreamcatcher, then. Shadowlords is quite good, but Dreamcatcher raised the bar to a level I have yet to see matched. (Although I have yet to play Rick Burton's modules because I'm hoping the third and final one will be out before I do)
Jumping into game design professionally is probably the only thing that could lure me away from my more mundane but lucrative work. But an MMO requires an absolutely insane amount of capital to build and market. In order to make the game at all, I'd need either some seriously loaded angel investors, or the backing of a huge publisher like SOE or NCSoft. I don't see them as all that crazy to stake millions on an unknown; maybe my hobbyist work creating games could get me in the door somewhere as an associate designer and lead to such a creation, but I'm not really willing to take an enormous pay cut and add a huge commute to my day just for that... otherwise, I'd have probably applied at NCSoft USA, since I'm in Austin. I did actually trade a couple emails with Richard Garriott right when he started Destination games, but the staff he referred me to for further talks didn't follow up (twice), and since I was wallowing in high-flying stock options at the time, I decided to just let it go.
That said, Bioware is getting a nice secondary revenue stream for NWN in the form of their premium modules. This 3 years after the game was released! And they're doing it all with digital distribution. That could certainly get the attention of people in the gaming industry. Guild Wars is proving you don't need a fee to make an MMO; Bioware is proving you can sell content online for a game. Probably the next step is to make it so third parties can "publish" their own games. Say, I make an NWN module, I can sell it for $8, and Bioware gets a cut as the middleman, Atari and then WotC get a cut as publisher/licensor, and I keep the rest. In such a scenario, I can see third parties investing to create content like models and textures, music, etc, creating an unparalleled diversity. Unknowns would start by giving away freebie modules and work their way up to pay-to-play if they could handle it.
I know I'd pay money for more NWN modules from Adam Miller, who created some fantastic work for NWN. I bought the Bioware premium mods when they went on sale. I think the future of "add-ons" to games is a lot larger than the future of simple pay-to-play models... it's hard for a lot of people to feel like they're paying for much when they pay $15/mo and all they get is access to a server and maybe some tech support. Servers are cheap; $15/mo is gravy. Whereas content is an easy sell; when you pay $30 for an expansion to a game, you *know* what you're getting.
But NWN has already done it. It has a toolset that lets you construct and script (in a remarkably C-influenced language) to your heart's content. You "paint" down tiles, write dialogue in an editor, etc. Then you can start up the server, people can join your game. You, meanwhile, connect with DM client. It gives you an invisible DM avatar that moves at high speed, and a radial menu that let's you quickly "possess" any NPC and use it's attacks or speak as it. Meanwhile, you have a "creator" menu which can spawn placeables (like furniture or rocks), creatures (monsters or allied NPCs), items. Using scripts you can launch dynamic visual effects with the avatar (say, having an earthquake shake the ground as you spawn some placeable boulders to block the PCs path in a cave). There's also a selector and to let you move NPCs around from area or area, move PCs, kill things off, remove encounter triggers, and so on. And that's just the inherent stuff; using scripts attached to custom coded wands and dialogues you can do literally anything the engine can do. On Arabel, we did things like script DM wands that would clone a PC so we could attack them with their mirror self (in one memorable quest, we had pcs lost in a maze with random teleporters splitting up the party, and then clones of their party members showed up to "re-unite" with them; then at vulnerable moments, the clones would turn on them).
Now, NWN is less sophisticated than some MMOs - City of Heroes, most notably, is truly a completely 3D world. But the truth is, MOST MMOs are really 2d games rendered in 3D graphics. If there's only one "plane" upon which your character walks, then the game is effectively 2D for most considerations. World of Warcraft has water that makes this slightly untrue, and City of Heroes has full blown flight and superleaping and the vertical is a huge factor in combat, but look at Guild Wars... you can't go down a mildly graded hill unless they set up the walkmesh that way.
Anyhow, you can make things as fixed or as loose as you like with NWN, and I think the whole concept is equally applicable to MMOs, or to a hybrid MMO that combined an official world serve with a moddable user-usable server.
I co-founded and coded 100k lines of C for Avendar: The Crucible of Legends. I think they've remained steady now for about 7 years of uptime as far as players. But it's true - the admins get to know you, the players really know each other, and you can actually engender a lot more character vs character conflict without anonymous asses ruining the process as would happen in an MMO.
I also scripted and built for an NWN persistent world, City of Arabel. It was and remains one of the most popular PWs for NWN - pretty much pegged to capacity in prime time (and sometimes way beyond prime time) for the past 3 years. One of the reasons PWs get so popular and remain so is that the smaller playerbase allows you to develop intimate plots and interactions between characters. With just 50-55 players at peak, spread across a level range, Arabel resembles a tabletop D&D game as much as it resembles an MMO.
Moreover, one thing MMOs have really lacked is personalization. You don't interact in a dynamic manner with NPCs of note, gods, and GMs do not set up and run quests. That's decidedly untrue in the smaller scale games. For Arabel, for example, and other NWN PWs, it's common to have DMs running quests. I used to start all sorts of things - evil mage kidnaps PC, and her friends assemble a group to rescue her; a city official from Arabel requests help to accomplish some task; an earthquake opens a gateway down to undiscovered caverns where riled-up elementals guard ancient catacombs; a mage in town loses control of a summoning circle and demons begin to pour through onto the Material Plane. What made these events special is that everyone participating in them was experiencing them for the first (and generally only) time. This isn't like an MMO where you can hit a database to figure out how to solve the quest that's bothering you or find where to get the phat loot.
I think there's a big future for an MMO with a dual-subscription model, where there's a customized service that gives you unique opportunities to adventure and emulate the tabletop sort of experience. Or perhaps a game will come out like NWN, where there's a client, a toolset, a DM client, and an "official" persistent world that plays like an MMO, but also you can use the tools to create your own. Imagine if players could craft their own city areas and script their own quests in City of Heroes or World of Warcraft. Imagine having a small WoW server with a few GMs that were out to customize play like a traditional DM, and only 40 players on at a time.
Slashdot Mirror
Let's see.
* Huge: you could burn 200 hours going through the sidequests and other neat encounters (like the Twisted Rune door you had to have a Rogue Stone to get through)
* NPC Banter: From Viconia's jokes about Minsc's "fingerpainted face" to Edwin's snide remarks, to the inanity of Jan Jensen, there were a LOT of classic and hilarious characters. Reading the NPC-to-NPC banter was more fun than talking to them yourself.
* Multipath: lots of opportunities to be evil, and a lot of moral ambiguity.
* Soloable: for the maniac, this game was possible to solo; you could leave the party behind. Over time as I replayed I solo'd with a Sorceror and with a Kensai/Wizard multiclass. Fun stuff.
* Epic: the storyline was huge, and tough to beat, especially when you factor in the expansion back.
* Mods: There are add-ons galore. New NPCs, tougher big boss encounters (many of which were done by David Gaider, one of the designers), even huge chunks of new content (look for Return to Windspear, for example)
Plus, there's a real thread that runs from BG1 to BG2 to ToB. You can play through all 3. There's a hack now that lets you "play" BG1 using the BG2 engine so you can play the class kits added in BG2, but in BG1.
This game remains a legend. It will undoubtedly stand the test of time and sit alongside classics like the Gold Box games, Ultima VII, Eye of the Beholder, and others. It's sad that Bioware is not involved in NWN2 (although Obsidian should do well), because it would have been nice to see them really take THAT engine and enhance it and apply it to yield the sort of improvement that BG1->BG2 showed. (Not that NWN doesn't have a certain niche all to itself, but it had a lot of weaknesses... BGII did not)
As Greg Kasavin of Gamespot said, "It's a definitive role-playing experience, and the only reason it can't be called the best game in its class is because in a sense there's nothing available that compares to it."
Well put.
Baldur's Gate II is NOT abandonware, and you should still be buying it in stores. It doesn't require an emulator, it's still fun, and it's available with it's expansion pack for a mere $20. The devs worked incredibly hard on the game - just RTFA.
I bought an Overdrive PC Torque.SLI a while back. I talked with Mario there, who actually talked me down off a higher end processor, telling me he could hook me up with a slightly lower end, $800 cheaper processor but get far more overclocking out of it than the faster process.
It's fast as hell, and when it had a stability issue due to the overclocking (yes, it was pushing it), he helped tweak it to where it was rock solid.
If you're going to pay this much for a computer, get someone who actually knows how to squeeze the maximum out of it, if you don't have the time or ability to do it yourself.
Those were *hilarious*, though.
"What's the matter with you people?! Haven't you ever seen a bandicoot before?"
Or, possibly, you need a sense of humor. Although the assumptions are actually almost certainly both right the conclusion is wrong for other reasons, which is why the whole thing is tongue in cheek.
I wonder how long it would take us to devolve via natural selection. Since there is an inverse relationship between education level and child rearing, then if one assumes more intelligent people tend to have higher educations and that higher intelligence when breeding contributes to intellectual evolution, then we may well be devolving because stupid people disproportionately reproduce. Of course, we'll probably genetically engineer our own brainpower up before too long, and solve that problem while opening up a whole new can of worms.
Haha. On any given day, on Slashdot, anyone is watching, eh?
I was actually thinking of a certain hotmail engineer, or another friend developing a commercial antispam toaster based on research one webmail provider had with a hundred-million-per-day-plus spam problem. Both have the mail chops to probably independantly benchmark the services on proposed hardware, catch gotchas, and okay a design in a 30 hr timeframe.
But hey, how did the umich upgrade turn out?
(1) Plan an server setup which can handle the load. The requirements may change, but one million users is a fair bit. How much average incoming and outgoing emails is that? Figure that out, using a network sniffer or sniffers on existing traffic if need be (although logs should work). Then use this to calculate a number of servers needed for an outgoing smtp farm, an incoming MX farm. Figure out how much storage space is to be provided per user, and then figure out how you want that storage space to be accessible. Probably your best bet is to have a round-robin DNS farm of imap/pop servers which proxy connections based on the users login to a backend farm of actual mailservers responsible for storage. Plan the ability to move users from server to server to rebalance as needed. Outgoing smtp is a lot easier since you're not really storing things long term. Plan a web farm for webmail. (And pick software) Don't forget to plan some sort of backup, and make sure your system is flexible as far as email retention; chances are the email retention policy will change at some point and your setup should be able to change with it.
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(2) Test. For each server, hammer it. Test it's load under as close to real world circumstances as you can. Then create unreal punishing loads and see how it handles it. Plan in advance for how your server farm handles something like virus-generated mass emails causing 1000% spikes in load.
(3) Using your testing results, spec out the actual hardware. RAID, cheap hardware, redundancy, etc. If you have control over the network choice, plan a location with multiple fiber trunks coming into the building and provider redundancy. Remember backhoes in concert? Don't get hit by that. Plan for server failures, drive failures, network failures, power failures, and security compromises.
(4) Deploy! If you did the rest right, this is the easy part. You'll have redundant network connections, HSRP, redundant switches, a proxy farm, an imap/pop farm the proxies connect to, an smtp farm for outgoing emails, and a web server farm for serving up webmail (depending on how you choose to architect the disk space, the web farm and the pop/imap farm may be one and the same; depends on how you set things up.)
Here's a starter link to a setup which is smaller but, in principle, fairly similar:
http://www.itd.umich.edu/umce/features/2004/cyrus
Finally, if you don't want to screw it up, ask someone who has done it before. Paying someone $300/hr for a 10-30 hour review of your plan is dirt cheap compared to horking the setup. Someone who has worked in huge email environments (a la, hotmail) could show you gotchas before they bite you. (If you need help figuring out who to ask, I could even point you to some of the appropriate people)
It's almost like a dupe. Or a Slashdot pop quiz.
Dunno. I still play on UltimateBet, and still win; but unless they combat the bot issue, they'll dry out. People want confidence they are playing other people, not against computer programs. It's already hard enough with Pokertracker, screen statistics overlays, etc; a full bot?
I wonder when the next wave will hit - when someone starts gaming the throng of bots by taking advantage of their decision making algorithm.
Common Sense is sometimes violated egregiously by one side or another, and then this is raised as an issue. If a security researcher sends one email to some ill-checked "bugs@" address and gets no response, then just releases a couple weeks later, that's irresponsible.
When someone emails a vendor many times at many addresses, finally gets a response where they tell him, "We're looking into it", and then proceeds to cease communicating for 45 days, that's irresponsible by the vendor, and the researcher has every right (and some would say, a responsibility) to publish.
Where's the middle ground? Well, it's a wide open space. Those without bad ulterior motives (ie, publicity-hungry or vendor-hating researchers, or head-in-sand or deny-first-ask-questions-later vendors) don't really have much difficulty negotiating the middle ground, because there's a lot of room. The problem, of course, is that the only time you *hear* about disclosure issues is when someone is being a muttonhead - either vendors trying to keep secrets, or researchers who feel no sense of responsibility or make the most token efforts to make contact. For the rest, there's little debate, because it's just easy to do it right.
Focus more on making sure the stuff that comes out based on its IP doesn't suck, and spend less time filing frivolous lawsuits.
A salary survey is nigh useless to begin with, and this one seems to be worse than normal. "Average salary" - what's that? Median or mean? Where's the standard deviation? What does 'broad spectrum of organizations' mean? Is it geographically diverse?
Here's another hint: a survey requires people who answer surveys. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that people making on the high end do not generally go out of their way to answer salary surveys, whereas people paid average or less than average might be a bit prone to worrying about their salary and therefore filling out surveys and looking them up.
Want to make more money? Instead of asking what other people make, ask yourself:
* What can I do that other people (or most other people) can't? What makes me good? What's my strength? How can I be better?
* How much is what I'm doing worth? How can I use my skills to create a larger value for a company or client?
* How can I leverage my work to produce more?
* What have I done that has exceeded expectations, that could not have been predicted and is a boon for whoever pays me?
If you have already come up with good answers for the questions above, you're probably making way more than the average already.
Be in good financial shape. People living paycheck to paycheck hurt themselves because they end up afraid to take risks. Save up a large cushion of living expenses - while 4-6 months is a normal financial planner's estimate, make sure you can get an additional 12 month's worth by the time that 6 is up. With the 18 month cushion you can afford to try a lot of other things.
Finally, if you don't like what you're making, consider doing something else. A friend of mine is making over $20/hr plus benefits reading gas meters. If I was getting paid a lousy $50k to program, I'd have taken a job at his place and spent my day walking around outside. If you find yourself on the low rung, maybe this is just not what you're meant to be doing.
Note to flash guy: you're an ass and a publicity hound.
(1) Your game has a URL tag on it, so it's impossible for fuddrucker's to represent it as their own.
(2) Fuddrucker's accounted for only a small portion of total hits, and yet you're complaining about the bandwidth usage?
(3) Despite the evidence that the link was not particularly stressful nor malicious in any way, you went way out of your way to do something incredibly malicious back.
How... bad.
The article said the game is hugely popular; not that we should be playing.
Personally, I want to know how many of the 4 million accounts are chinese gold farmers who will move on to other games as demand for gold dries up.
Um. How many copies do you think blizzard expected to sell? Do you think that their financial plans for the game were contingent on it being the most successful MMO ever? Not likely.
WoW has been a runaway hit, on a level that I doubt even the most pie-in-the-sky dreamer did not imagine. I'm not a fan; I played it for a couple months, got bored by what felt like repetitive and uninspired play, and quit. But there is no question that WoW is the breakaway hit of recent memory.
Not only is it surely profitable (the development cost was $72M; large, but not really when you think of 4M people buying a box and paying a monthly fee), it is, as the article said, a cash cow. This is the "wildest dreams" scenario.
Let's not forget they're working diligently to make sure you cannot rip and copy a CD. (ObJibeAtRIAA: Is it any wonder their sales keep going down?)
There are millions of people now with iPods, right? This is definitely big enough that the government could smack the labels over it if they are colluding.
The problem with trying to turn technologies like these into utilities is that:
(1) They are still young an evolving. Wi-fi is getting faster, working from greater distances, and getting better security with successive iterations. Commercial broadband providers are testing second-gen broadband technologies which are far faster than the first.
(2) A public utility is stagnant. To provide something like water or electricity ubiquitously they are often monopolies, heavily regulated, and on extremely small profit margins. Bureaucracy adds to this stagnation.
Combine these, and you see that turning something into a utility is the death of innovation.
Not only that, but it looks like she's filing the suit on her behalf as well as that of everyone deceived into buying a game that should have been rating AO. If she's suing on behalf of a group, shouldn't this be a class action suit? If not, she better not get much out of it.
It probably intends to become a class action suit. She files as an individual, her lawyer gets press and gets 9 more claimants, then requests the court to certify the "victims" as a class; then other law firms jump on the bandwagon in a mad scramble to recruit grandmothers everywhere who bought M17+ games for their young relatives, thinking it was just plain honest fun like cop-killing and never expected something like sex; finally, a lead plaintiff is selected and they're off to the races.
I think Rand came nowhere near it. Rand seems to have a complete inability to understand altruism, or the idea of helping others at all. Its throughout her writings that she has no respect for the idea. Her "enlightened self-interest" basicly means "fuck everyone else, I got mine". Itt would eb very interesting to see Rand get a psychological evaluation (ok, she's dead, a bit hard)- I wouldn't be surprised at all to find she was a sociopath.
Have you actually read The Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged? "Fuck everyone else, I got mine" doesn't really come anywhere near her philosophy. It was more like, "Everyone being self-serving ultimately leads to the greatest good, because we only get what we want by producing for others." Unless you're self-sufficient, and that's basically no one now, you get what you want through trade. The surest way to get what you want and need is to aggressively pursue your self-interest. Since people spending time working hard are far more productive than people who spend their time niggling over what society "owes" them, the net sum of productivity is drastically higher and society as a whole benefits. Her protagonists are generous. Howard Roark uses his talents to build incredibly cheap, effective, quality low-income housing; Hank Reardon is generous with his relatives. But in the former case, Roark's work is perverted by meddlers crusading for "more, more", refusing to accept his work as it is, wrecking the project and taking things back to where they were: a project they can't afford, a project of lesser utility, and ultimately a failure. And Reardon's relatives hound him relentlessly, yammering about his social duties. He's creating a bold new railway system enabling massive increases in transportation efficiency and leading to the employ of thousands, but they ride him about his greed and his uncaring until he finally throws them out. But both of them start working for the greater good. Rand's lesson isn't that generosity or charity is bad; it's that when honest generosity and charity cross with greed and corruption, such virtues are likely to be perverted. Roark's housing project and Reardon's family are just two examples of people doing good who had their good deeds demolished by unproductive self-righteous busybodies.
Rand's characters and stories are meant to be larger than life and iconoclastic. They have heroic characters with heroic talents. But they illustrate the nature of man astutely quite often.
Now there may well be a minority of people whom she does describe. But by and large, she's off the mark by a mile. The typical do-gooder isn't doing somethign because it makes him feel good- he's doing it because he thinks he's doing the right thing. He beleives it 100%. Its like religious zealots who try to convert everyone- they believe they are saving your soul. Assuming that they aren't what they claim to be wil cause you to entirely mispredict them.
That depends on the type of do-gooding. For people who are following Hillary's "for the children" crusade against violence and sex in video games, it falls into a combination of:
(1) People too lazy to take care of their own children and think the government should protect them from everything
(2) People who are so horrified by sexual content of any kind that they will try to ban anything, anywhere, any time. They've been fighting for laws to keep alcohol out of stores, pasties on nipples at tittie bars, and making it illegal to show porn without getting a credit card first. In other words, they're people with a strong feeling of moral superiority; or a terrible fear of certain vices which manifests as moral superiority.
(3) Demoagogues like Hillary, or GWB & Karl Rove. They're there to capitalize on this mass of uncritical thought and feeling, to channel it into action. "Sexual content in video games! To arms!"; let's not stop and actually think about what we're crusading for or against. It's a bit like GWB and his "Wherever people stand for liberty, we stand with you
There's not really a mystery here. Rockstar put in a sex minigame. A hacker unlocked it. It was not accessible without a patch or hack, which probably violates the EULA.
Also, what is the big deal here? The game was already rated 'M for Mature'; that's 17+, according to the ESRB. In a majority of states, you can already play the sex mini-game legally in real life. Is there some reason sex should be legal at 16, but a sex-themed video game should be illegal until you're 18?
You will be in absolute awe at Dreamcatcher, then. Shadowlords is quite good, but Dreamcatcher raised the bar to a level I have yet to see matched. (Although I have yet to play Rick Burton's modules because I'm hoping the third and final one will be out before I do)
Jumping into game design professionally is probably the only thing that could lure me away from my more mundane but lucrative work. But an MMO requires an absolutely insane amount of capital to build and market. In order to make the game at all, I'd need either some seriously loaded angel investors, or the backing of a huge publisher like SOE or NCSoft. I don't see them as all that crazy to stake millions on an unknown; maybe my hobbyist work creating games could get me in the door somewhere as an associate designer and lead to such a creation, but I'm not really willing to take an enormous pay cut and add a huge commute to my day just for that... otherwise, I'd have probably applied at NCSoft USA, since I'm in Austin. I did actually trade a couple emails with Richard Garriott right when he started Destination games, but the staff he referred me to for further talks didn't follow up (twice), and since I was wallowing in high-flying stock options at the time, I decided to just let it go.
That said, Bioware is getting a nice secondary revenue stream for NWN in the form of their premium modules. This 3 years after the game was released! And they're doing it all with digital distribution. That could certainly get the attention of people in the gaming industry. Guild Wars is proving you don't need a fee to make an MMO; Bioware is proving you can sell content online for a game. Probably the next step is to make it so third parties can "publish" their own games. Say, I make an NWN module, I can sell it for $8, and Bioware gets a cut as the middleman, Atari and then WotC get a cut as publisher/licensor, and I keep the rest. In such a scenario, I can see third parties investing to create content like models and textures, music, etc, creating an unparalleled diversity. Unknowns would start by giving away freebie modules and work their way up to pay-to-play if they could handle it.
I know I'd pay money for more NWN modules from Adam Miller, who created some fantastic work for NWN. I bought the Bioware premium mods when they went on sale. I think the future of "add-ons" to games is a lot larger than the future of simple pay-to-play models... it's hard for a lot of people to feel like they're paying for much when they pay $15/mo and all they get is access to a server and maybe some tech support. Servers are cheap; $15/mo is gravy. Whereas content is an easy sell; when you pay $30 for an expansion to a game, you *know* what you're getting.
But NWN has already done it. It has a toolset that lets you construct and script (in a remarkably C-influenced language) to your heart's content. You "paint" down tiles, write dialogue in an editor, etc. Then you can start up the server, people can join your game. You, meanwhile, connect with DM client. It gives you an invisible DM avatar that moves at high speed, and a radial menu that let's you quickly "possess" any NPC and use it's attacks or speak as it. Meanwhile, you have a "creator" menu which can spawn placeables (like furniture or rocks), creatures (monsters or allied NPCs), items. Using scripts you can launch dynamic visual effects with the avatar (say, having an earthquake shake the ground as you spawn some placeable boulders to block the PCs path in a cave). There's also a selector and to let you move NPCs around from area or area, move PCs, kill things off, remove encounter triggers, and so on. And that's just the inherent stuff; using scripts attached to custom coded wands and dialogues you can do literally anything the engine can do. On Arabel, we did things like script DM wands that would clone a PC so we could attack them with their mirror self (in one memorable quest, we had pcs lost in a maze with random teleporters splitting up the party, and then clones of their party members showed up to "re-unite" with them; then at vulnerable moments, the clones would turn on them).
Now, NWN is less sophisticated than some MMOs - City of Heroes, most notably, is truly a completely 3D world. But the truth is, MOST MMOs are really 2d games rendered in 3D graphics. If there's only one "plane" upon which your character walks, then the game is effectively 2D for most considerations. World of Warcraft has water that makes this slightly untrue, and City of Heroes has full blown flight and superleaping and the vertical is a huge factor in combat, but look at Guild Wars... you can't go down a mildly graded hill unless they set up the walkmesh that way.
Anyhow, you can make things as fixed or as loose as you like with NWN, and I think the whole concept is equally applicable to MMOs, or to a hybrid MMO that combined an official world serve with a moddable user-usable server.
I co-founded and coded 100k lines of C for Avendar: The Crucible of Legends. I think they've remained steady now for about 7 years of uptime as far as players. But it's true - the admins get to know you, the players really know each other, and you can actually engender a lot more character vs character conflict without anonymous asses ruining the process as would happen in an MMO.
I also scripted and built for an NWN persistent world, City of Arabel. It was and remains one of the most popular PWs for NWN - pretty much pegged to capacity in prime time (and sometimes way beyond prime time) for the past 3 years. One of the reasons PWs get so popular and remain so is that the smaller playerbase allows you to develop intimate plots and interactions between characters. With just 50-55 players at peak, spread across a level range, Arabel resembles a tabletop D&D game as much as it resembles an MMO.
Moreover, one thing MMOs have really lacked is personalization. You don't interact in a dynamic manner with NPCs of note, gods, and GMs do not set up and run quests. That's decidedly untrue in the smaller scale games. For Arabel, for example, and other NWN PWs, it's common to have DMs running quests. I used to start all sorts of things - evil mage kidnaps PC, and her friends assemble a group to rescue her; a city official from Arabel requests help to accomplish some task; an earthquake opens a gateway down to undiscovered caverns where riled-up elementals guard ancient catacombs; a mage in town loses control of a summoning circle and demons begin to pour through onto the Material Plane. What made these events special is that everyone participating in them was experiencing them for the first (and generally only) time. This isn't like an MMO where you can hit a database to figure out how to solve the quest that's bothering you or find where to get the phat loot.
I think there's a big future for an MMO with a dual-subscription model, where there's a customized service that gives you unique opportunities to adventure and emulate the tabletop sort of experience. Or perhaps a game will come out like NWN, where there's a client, a toolset, a DM client, and an "official" persistent world that plays like an MMO, but also you can use the tools to create your own. Imagine if players could craft their own city areas and script their own quests in City of Heroes or World of Warcraft. Imagine having a small WoW server with a few GMs that were out to customize play like a traditional DM, and only 40 players on at a time.