What's Myspace?

The "facsimile" will start to reach the end of it's life as people find less practical use for it. This technology will replaced with what is known as "electronic mail" (or "e-mail" in technical circles) which is basically a form of mail, but electronic. The emergence of "mobile telephony" will start to rise as well - allowing people to communicate in real time in voice while out and about.

If "free for 10 days" was enough of a taster to hook in millions of players, then logically "free until level 20" will do even more of the same.

I'd heard these type of claims before, I'd love for it to be true, but I find it VERY hard to believe.

Gameplay/playability is always more important than graphics. It has ALWAYS been the playability of a game that's made the big hits. The graphics are just an extra bonus. In fact most of the games that have a short playtime are the ones with the exceptionally great graphics. It's playability > graphics. With FPS's, the older ones were just as fun if not more fun than the most cutting edge ones. It's nice to have photorealistic graphics, but I know for a fact that CoD is no more fun for me than Unreal Tournament, and I've put way more hours into UT. Think about all the big epic hits over time, Sierra Quest series, Monkey Island, Zelda, Mario Bros, Sonic, Street Fighter 2, WoW etc, in almost all cases there are alternatives with better graphics but the gameplay/playability just aren't as good which is why they fell behind.

I always chuckle when I hear of people disabling JavaScript in this day and age. Reminds me of a guy from an old job who used to disable images in his broswer, saying they were unnecessary bloat that weren't important and shouldn't be a part of the web.

I make the serious assertion that the people who've been raging about JavaScript in this thread (mostly 'Anonymous Coward') actually don't know JavaScript well enough to understand how powerful it can really be. It's style of inheritance (not classical class based) is unusual to get used to, but actually very powerful. I can honestly say I only know a few developers who I'd consider 'experts' in JavaScript. The high majority of web developers do not have a thorough understanding of it.

Yes, a LOT of web programmers highly overestimate their SQL skill. I've worked at a couple of companies who place a lot of importance on it. At my last workplace, if an interviewee couldn't make sense of (for example) a 50 line T-SQL query with, 5 inner joins, 5 left joins, a sub query, some case statements, grouping, ordering and a COALESCE() function here or there, they wouldn't even be considered. Almost all web programmers are able to "interact with a standard relational database" at a basic level. But they're completely unskilled at the more advanced stuff. I've seen this time and time again at work, and on irc & forums - even people who are very smart/efficient with their language of choice, can be really poor with SQL, and they don't even know it. The reason they don't know it is because you can "get by" with minimal sql knowledge, by writing inefficient round-about, bad code to deal with the data and achieve the same end result (but just with far uglier, less efficient code)

It's probably not such a bad idea really. Microsoft are seen as boring, stagnant, and not making any particularly exciting moves in terms of new ideas & new products. Second Life is terrible these days, boring, clunky, ugly and crap, but the fundamental idea is pretty incredible - if Microsoft could take what's there and build upon it/somethow breath some life into it, I reckon it could have some serious potential, a second life if you will. It'll be spare change for MS, so not such a bad gamble IMO.

No, 'acting like a know-it-all' is that all-too-common, elitist, egotistical, whiney, snide attitude that many nerds tend to exhibit. A nerd who is able to communicate in a socially acceptable and 'normal' manner is a lot more valuable than an awkward whiney stubborn tryhard who always has to be heard. Sometimes less is more, and it's better to just keep your mouth shut. I completely agree with the original point - the MOST important thing is not to act like a know-it-all. Show some common sense. Don't act like you're better than others. Be humble. People like an easy going person more than an uptight weirdo. Wait until you settle in and get to know the system and people before you start suggesting improvements. My work has fired the last 2 developers that exhibited that know-it-all type of personality, and I was glad to see them go. In one of the cases I laughed until my throat hurt.