No, it *was* it just isn't anymore. Maybe that means it hasn't been doing a great job for a few months or the like, but certainly for a couple of years it was the way to go.

And it's still a good idea. Even if it's only the bad (or old) viruses being caught, it's still better than nothing, or something that users can't figure out and don't keep up to date which would be equally bad.

Fine

But for

Skype works about as well for multi person chat as it does for two.

No, it's a failure because the producers of the game thought that the first 100 hours of play experience mattered more than the next 900.

SWTOR sold about 2 million copies in its first 2 months, it's down around a 10th of that in players. People wanted the game to be good. It definitely made improvements, but they made enough basically bad choices that it wasn't worth putting up with for 75 or 80% of their playerbase. That wasn't EA's money pile, that was bad design, and when those people left their non-chalant guildmates left with them.

A new armour model is new content. A new line of dialogue is new content.

They *could* put SGR dialogue on existing things. But that would then only effect new characters or they'd need a system to go back and redo existing plot with a character. And it requires basically redoing huge amounts of dialogue. A gay flirt option doesn't do any good if it doesn't actually create a story branch. That means new dialogue, new cinematics etc. Adding it for existing characters may mean you need to divorce a current romance (whole new dialogue for the rest of the game to have your divorced spouse on your ship).

uh...you need to script and record that dialogue, build in game scenes where appropriate. That costs money. A lot of it.

It's not that it cannot be done, but it's a lot of money and developer time.

That's on a new character.

You don't replay the same (story) content on the same character.

And most players don't want to keep making new characters. Also, the leveling curve is short enough a lot of people already full leveled one of each.

Same gender relationships are new content to TOR. New content goes in new places. Trying to back add it into existing content would be a nightmare. It's not that Markab is the 'gay'planet, it's that it's the first planet going forward that supports what they are calling SGR. And all future planets likely will as well.

There are two basic problems with trying to add SGR into existing content

First: Cost. TOR has been an epic financial failure. Trying to rehire a bunch of voice actors, add in appropriate points for them to have SGR dialogue etc. is a lot of work, and importantly:

Second: What do you do for characters that have already done the content you're changing? For good or ill, your character has made a series of choices throughout the game that set the state of that characters relationships (notably with companions). Building huge content branches where you can either change after the fact, or only effect new characters is certainly possible, but it's a lot of work for content a lot of players aren't going to see.

Besides that, as was said, BioWare didn't really understand just what it was getting itself into with an MMO, and discovering after the fact that this is going to take a lot longer than they thought necessarily means making some compromises. And the longer it goes on without SGR the harder it becomes to fix because there will be more players who've gone through the existing content because they've given up waiting on the developers.

yes, but not really relevant if you're only rarely ever writing anything to the disk at all. Yes, when you do write 1GB of changes it pushes data around to the most suitable sector for it, but you have to have data you are trying to write at all for that to be relevant.

All of my SSD's (and I've got 6 around here right now) started with about 0.1% of sectors not working, and have gradually crept up since then to somewhere around 0.4%. That seems to be pretty normal.

How often do you really rewrite most of the contents of a drive though? With a 60 or 120 gig drive the vast majority of your space is going to be taken up by relatively static programs (OS and productivity programs themselves), give or take patch cycles that change some of the stuff. With a 960 gig drive now you're looking at a significant amount of user data, so that might not survive as long, but most drives can also detect a failed sector and turn it off so it might be that you start to see see the effective capacity of the drive shrinking.

It's sized for people who don't want to think about what to store on the drive and can pay 12x the price of a regular drive the do that, or for people who need to work on large files at high speed. In the same way the market for 64 Gig of ram machines is low but high value. People who want that performance will pay for it.

I agree with a couple of other people though, I think the way this makes the most sense to go is mainstream commercial drives with a fast SSD cache and slower magnetic tap drive, and they could be cheap, but I could be wrong, in 6 or 7 years SSD's could be just double the price of magnetic drives and that makes high capacity appealing for the convenience if nothing else.

SSD speeds require there to be *some* free space on the drive, but that's not an issue so much in the 240 Gig + drives because you can easily find a few GB to leave free.

Careful how you define 'course'.

Typical tuition here is 7k-11k for a local student for 10 courses lasting 12 weeks each (4 month courses, 12 weeks of instruction + exams). If a 'course' is actually an 8 month then 1400 dollars per course is about right.

Now the catch: Tuition for a foreign student is 20k/year. Ah ha. That's why the chinese market is so interesting. UC is a very prestigious school if you're in india or china, because even bad north american universities are way better than most of the schools in china or india (in terms of prestige anyway). And you could pay 7k per course and not have to fly half way around the world to do so.

The article talks about a pre-calculus course worth 4 credits. according to http://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/senate/manual/rpart3.html 1 has

"The value of a course in units shall be reckoned at the rate of one unit for three hours' work per week per term on the part of a student, or the equivalent."

http://senate.ucsc.edu/manual/santacruz-division-manual/part-two-regulations/section-three-ug-program/chapter-ten-requirementsfordegrees/index.html

Says 180 credits to graduate. So you need 45 credits per year. This would put their costs at 16k/year in tuition. Still cheaper than foreign student tuition (and no living costs), but not as lucrative as being a local resident going to school. Which seems exactly like the market it was aimed at.

The most dominant factor in crime, including murders are poverty and corrupt police forces (as in, what we're seeing in india where reporting a rape to the police can get you raped, and justice is so wildly perverted by bribes, and a lack of bribes that it's hard to know who to trust).

Well that and demographics, since it's mostly 15-30 year olds committing crime, so Japan's crime is actually pretty close to the EU and US average for people in the 15-30 bracket, just they have a much older population on average.

Gun control mitigates the damage criminals do, and significantly raises the difficulty of getting enraged and killing someone with a particularly lethal weapon at hand. The UK and germany for example have much higher violent crime rates than the US (and a lot of that is stabbings, and football hooliganism), but much lower murder rates because criminals in those places try and stab rather than shoot.

If they can't afford windows they can't afford hardware for playing most games on, and that's not a segment I would target anyway. Nor am I interested in targeting a game to pirates.

It's not that they don't exist. It's that they're the ones most capable of sorting out their own setup and having multiple computers etc. Because there aren't a lot of technically inept people running linux as a desktop at home.

If you make a 'linux' version of your game, for how many of your customers is the fastest solution to their problem to just use windows or a particular linux version? How many of those customers can manage that on their own? With linux, the answer is all of them. If you're a linux user and want to play a game you try it under wine and if that doesn't work you use a windows machine. For the technically illiterate... those are the ones we want to get money from and who need the most development support time.

But, and it's a big but, windows 8 is horrid. It's horrid to use, but more importantly on the business side of things, it's horrid to software developers. We do not want to support it. If consumers decide to adopt it in droves (or the same basic business problems are in Windows 9 and it is adopted in droves) we have a problem. But I'd rather not be scrambling to make a linux version after I've discovered that consumers are fleeing windows to android/linux tablets and desktops or god knows what. Then you're way behind the curve and trying to play catch up, and that's a bad place to be.

Ah but these things are fixed costs. And a tiny fraction of a huge number can itself be more money than a lot of games get.

1% of blizzards 10 million subs would be more than the last 2 games I worked on sold.. combined. (And those have 5-7 person dev teams, that pay decent salary to everyone).

Also, blizzard has enough people who are CS geeks, who read /. and are linux nerds that it probably works fine for them. Whether or not it is immediately worth it to spend a couple of hundred thousands dollars to a few million on a linux version is harder to say, but they have money they can afford to waste (after all, Activision make a lot of games, some of which flop, it happens, and those all waste piles of money too). Everyone in the industry right now is looking at how to get away from Windows if MS is really going to be committed to the windows 8 store and 'app' lockin to the windows store.

Steam IS DRM.

And I think the point is that they should stop.

If you want to have an ad on your site you should take responsibility for it. That doesn't mean you can't have an advertising company supply you with ads, but I'm getting google supplied adds on LordLimecat.com you're not taking responsibility for what you're showing me, or how that information is being used to track me across sites.

Admittedly, it's an idealistic pipe dream. But I think that's the point he's trying to make.