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Comment Re:UO wasn't that much fun really (Score 1) 480

If you don't think raiding is important and, even if you did want to raid, your work schedule won't allow you to participate in a particular guild's raids, why do you care whether or not they'd want you in the guild? Don't you get it? It's like complaining that a particular chess team won't let you join just because you can't attend any of their competitions and you actually prefer backgammon, anyway. Or complaining that a competitive racing team won't let you join just because your only bike is a Huffy that you ride 2-3 miles around the neighborhood every other weekend.

I was the recruiter for an uberguild back in the EQ days. It was amazing how many people had your attitude. Loathed raiding, raiders, and our obviously crippled personalities and inadequate lives, but felt insulted that they wouldn't be invited into the group they hated.

Comment COCOMO II (Score 1) 483

NASA recommends (almost requires) the COCOMO model. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COCOMO I think the COCOMO model is used by the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) at Carnegie Mellon University as part of the Capability Maturity Model (CMM). As said in MANY of these posts, proper specifications/requirements are needed to estimate anything. My company uses it exclusively and we have been proven quite accurate over the course of many projects. http://sunset.usc.edu/csse/research/COCOMOII/cocomo_main.html

Comment Re:Still not a problem. (Score 1) 811

It's nice to say that the OP should get the roommate out of the house for activities, but I don't know if it's possible.

When I was in the worst part of my EQ addiction, I did still hold down a job. But I also kept playing *while a friend came to my apartment, cleaned my kitchen for me, and made me dinner.* I just couldn't find a good time to log off.

People invited me out all the time, but the thing was, in every case I already had in-game plans. "Sorry, I already told Foo that I was going to Dungeon X with him that day."

Comment Re:router. (Score 1) 811

Hopefully you've got a router. Using the built-in firewall, block the ports that the game requires. on and off for five minutes at a time. So he has to keep logging in and never makes any progress (well, even less than normal...), but doesn't realize you're fiddling with it.

If you can't place a linux box as router without being suspicious, you might be able set up a cron job on cheapo laptop you connect to automatically keep changing the commodity router's settings.

Aside from moral qualms about screwing with the guy, this actually isn't a bad idea. I was finally able to kick EQ when I moved into a new place that was supposed to have some sort of decent bandwidth, but didn't. 80 person raids, including raid spam, plus modem meant that if I ever turned to look at what was going on, I got disco'd. Constant disconnects broke my will to play pretty quickly.

Comment Re:Advertiser-paid services aren't going away. (Score 1) 290

People now use google for searches because it's familiar and a habit. But it's not the first search engine to dominate the market. For a long time, altavista was the familiar habit. When google appeared, it took a while for people to decide, "Hey, this is a lot better; I'm going to switch from using altavista to using google." But who uses altavista now? (Apparently it does still exist; I just checked.)

It's not nearly as hard to switch search engines as it is desktop applications or operating systems. It's not enough to be the familiar habit; you need to keep providing good service, too.

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