Two accounts, and I wasn't planning on sinking any more money in until this fall at the earliest. My goal was to keep my own account between $10-15 per month, and I'll be back on track shortly. I have $50 worth of points just sitting in my account, waiting for sales on the content that I haven't already purchased. The "lure in new players" approach worked quite well. The problem is, so did more recent approach of "piss them off by associating with internet marketing scumbags".

I have watched my brother-in-law play WoW and many other MMOs, and they don't appeal to me at all, with the cartoony graphics and gameplay. The only thing that got me playing was the connection to something I enjoyed playing 20 years ago. When I stop playing DDO, I'll probably go back to Freeciv.

Turbine's in dire financial straits. I have no insider information, but it's pretty obvious.

Obvious to who? There have been regular updates to DDO on schedule since going free to play, and their revenue went up by 500% since going free to play. The number of subscribers has doubled, and I don't think that even includes the pay-to-play people such as me, who spend as much or more each month on buying content packs as a subscriber would. As long as they keep releasing content, they'll keep the revenue stream alive from people like me.

LOTRO is the second most popular US MMO, and it has some great expansions, including the new Moria one that just came out... It's like World of Warcraft only done *right*. But that's not going to last, for the same reason AC and DDO died.

{princess bride}Truly, you have a dizzying intellect.{/princess bride}

DDO went free after it slowly decayed. It's probably on the downswing from that huge influx right now.

Don't think so. But then, why look for real numbers when you can just spout FUD and pull stuff out of your ass.

What Turbine needs to do is make a new "boxed collection" every 6 months and sell it in stores for $20. That would keep the new players flowing in and might -- MIGHT -- save them.

You might not have heard, but brick and mortar games stores already have a few nails in the coffin, and could soon go the way of the arcade, the video store, and the buggy whip manufacturer. Ever heard of Steam?

And I have no doubt this spyware thing is a misunderstanding or exaggeration of the facts.

Just by viewing a page on a Turbine site, DDO players have confirmed (by inspecting packets) that the account name and email address were transmitted from the "Offer Wall" page. Add the pre-fetching comment here, and you might be able to see the problem. Sure, my password and credit card were not transmitted, and I only browse with NoScript, but I am probably not representative of the most vulnerable portions of the player base.

The last time I played D&D was over 20 years ago. The rules have changed significantly since AD&D (DDO is based on 3.5), and none of the minutia remained in my memory.

I didn't have a detailed pre-existing mental picture of how the game should work when I downloaded it last year and started playing. Instead, the game met and exceeded my hazy recollections, and then some. I don't have to use my imagination for the video game version, but the convenience of assembling a group, the ability to play anytime, and the variety offered by the character building and development process made it a very fun experience for me. Having a consistent DM who didn't entirely suck (my experience in the past) also helped.

I can relate to your experience. I only ever made it half-way through the first LoTR movie before turning it off in disgust, and will never watch the rest, or the remaining movies by Peter Jackson. I had read the books so many times that the movie was an immense let-down. It didn't even come close to the story as pictured in my mind, and I chose to remain with my mental images of Middle Earth, rather than somebody else's bastardization.

Due to the outcry from their customers, Turbine has taken the Offer Wall down while they sort out the issues that arose due to the half-assed broken way they implemented this lame idea.

I am probably part of the target audience they hoped to attract when they went free to play - someone who hadn't played an MMO before, who had played a bit of pen and paper way back when, and who has disposable income that they are willing to spend if the game is fun enough. So far, it has worked well - I have spent $200 on the game in the past five months on my account and my son's account.

I don't want to deal with a company that I cannot trust, or leave my credit card information in their hands. I absolutely do NOT trust lowlife criminal scum like SuperRewards, and by extension, I do not trust any company that has any dealings with them whatsoever. That means you, Turbine.

I know better than to take any of those offers, but Turbine royally screwed up in their implementation. Even viewing the list of offers on the Turbine site meant that my email address and account name for login was likely transmitted to those parasitic bottom-feeders.

I'll still be playing the game as I bought a ton of content that I have yet to explore, but I will be getting Turbine to remove my credit card info from their billing system if this isn't fixed, and a formal apology issued to their customers by next week. I seriously love this game - it is a ton of fun, many of the players are older, and I don't have to worry about most forms of griefing or PvP emphasis that has kept me away from the entire MMO genre so far. I get to explore instanced dungeons in a small group, and have only explored less than a quarter of the content.

Time to turn the heat up to eleven - DDO players haven't killed it for good yet, or received a formal apology for this privacy breach. Group seppuku by the PHBs who thought up this scheme would be an entirely acceptable response at this time, and would go a long ways towards restoring confidence in the company.

Further update from Turbine's Community Relations Senior Manager:

http://forums.ddo.com/showpost.php?p=2893059&postcount=116

"We’re currently investigating the reports of privacy concerns with our new Offer Wall. That feedback has been escalated to our partners for deeper investigation. Until that investigation is complete we’ve taken the Super Rewards option out of the Offer Wall. We’ll let you know when we have more information!"

http://forums.ddo.com/showpost.php?p=2893072&postcount=123

"That is the only answer I have for you at this time - until we have more information (and we're actively pursuing it), we're taking the Offer Wall down. I'm sorry I don't have anything more concrete than that yet!"

Time to turn the heat up to eleven - we haven't killed it for good yet, or received a formal apology. Group seppuku by the marketing department and PHBs who thought up this scheme would be an entirely acceptable response at this time.

I know better than to take any of those offers, but Turbine royally screwed up in their implementation. Even viewing the list of offers on the Turbine site meant that my email address and account name got for login was transmitted to those parasites.

Since DDO went free to play, Turbine has received over $200 from my son and me. I'll still be playing the game, but I will be getting Turbine to remove my credit card info from their billing system if this isn't fixed, and a formal apology issued to their customers by next week.

Turbine, Powered by their fans. Right.

I don't think that Miguel is all that popular. The last time I saw a long thread with him here, he suffered pretty badly. Making mono a dependency in Gnome exposes the project to unnecessary risk.

I respect Stallman far more than de Icaza, both for his thoughts and his actions over the years. Stallman is often taken out of context, but he is very consistent, and his statements almost always make sense years later - sometimes prophetically so.

There are a group of people (mostly affiliated with corporations) who have a hate-on for Stallman, because he values his principles more than he does development speed, ease of use, profits, or being able to use the latest shiny thing from MS.

Been using it since way back around M8, when it was still the Mozilla Suite. Thanks to the Seamonkey crew for keeping it alive. Firefox hasn't been faster in a long time, and the menus and configurability of Seamonkey offer far more configuration options. I deny cookies as my default, and allowing session cookies for a given site is a PITA on Firefox that requires diving through the preferences. In Seamonkey, it's right there in a menu, takes under a second. At the risk of starting a flamewar, Firefox reminds me a bit of Gnome - no options, because the developers don't think you can handle them. Seamonkey is a bit more like KDE - enough options in the dialogs to tweak it to your satisfaction.

I use both, but make sure that Seamonkey is installed on the machines that I spend a lot of time using. I haven't checked in a while to see if it still has about:kitchensink and the Book of Mozilla, but I loved having a browser that included everything and the kitchen sink.

We already know, as there are manual snow course surveys and snow pillows all over the place. Here is a list of 400 or so (some are historic and no longer sampled) snow courses in BC. Many of those get visited every two or four weeks from Jan-Feb through June each year.

I've done the surveys, and you need to measure both snow depth, and moisture content. The process of manual measurement hasn't changed in decades - you drop a metal tube into the ground, pull it up, dig out the soil, measure the weight of the snow that the tube collected, and the depth of the snow. Of the two numbers, the overall moisture content is of greater interest. I hardly even look at snow depth when trying to decide if the water systems I run are facing a drought - the moisture content compared to historic trends is what matters most.

Even then, snow depth is only a guide. If you get high evaporation rates during spring freshet, or lots of wind and moisture loss, what appears to be a healthy snowpack in April can turn into near-record low runoff by June. This year that is exactly what happened in my region. We had a good snowpack, with normal amounts of water equivalent in April, but by June, very little runoff to the reservoirs had taken place. This mostly affected the low and mid elevation watersheds in the Okanagan. The really high elevation watersheds such as Mission Creek had normal runoff, while adjacent watersheds such as Mill and Hydraulic Creeks ended up with varying levels of drought.

More data is always a good thing, but the moisture content matters more than the depth. And even if the data looks promising, that can change in a matter of weeks. You never really know for sure how much water you're going to get until the reservoirs stop filling.

Anecdote for you - not Linux specific, but it relates to software familiarity.

I had a summer student doing some basic GIS work for me this year. Bright guy, third year civil engineering student, familiar with Autocad.

We tried a few different open source gis packages. Based on ease of use, features, and what we needed, I had already narrowed down the likely candidates to QGis and Openjump. QGis has an interface reminiscent of Arcview, which I used for a few projects back in the late 90s. Openjump has an interface that is more cad-like.

I preferred and was more productive in QGis. He preferred and was more productive in Openjump. He used Openjump, which was fine with me - it got the job done.

Experience has provided me with some skepticism regarding the intelligence of crowds. This Sidewiki would be like having a running commentary on the web, written by the same type of people who write Youtube comments and -1 rated comments on Slashdot.

Thanks, but no thanks. Hope that one dies in beta, unless they figure out how to filter out the crap, and bring the valuable contributions to the top. They could start by testing their filters on Youtube.

I haven't used Access since Office 97 or 2000. Base is pretty close in features to those, but I don't think it is up to the latest versions of Access. I'm using Base at work for asset inventory reporting and water quality database (replacing excel, which is all that the techs have used in the past).

I haven't been able to get the Sun report builder extension working yet in either Linux or Windows, but that is about the only piece that is missing. I can generate reports, but the graphing crashes, and that is what I want.

If it was important enough to me, I'd just install Pentaho and use that for reports, but I don't really need the reporting tools yet. They should be more stable by the time I need them.