*rabble rabble* Climate change denier! *rabble rabble*

"Encrypted passwords" is just a lay man's term for hashing and salting. I don't think anyone would be silly enough to use encryption for this.

Sounds very inefficient and expensive to me.

Well, I ride a motorcycle so it's easy. I certainly won't argue against the fact that I statistically has a much larger chance of dying (especially on a motorcycle), but I still feel much safer when I'm the one in control. I guess I'm a job for a shrink :)

It's not just about overall statistics.

I feel more safe driving myself since I like being the one in control. When I fly I put my life in the hands of a huge number of people I don't know; mechanics, pilots, air controllers. Heck, even terrorists who might decide to blow up the plane and I can't do anything about it.

When I'm driving myself, I've personally checked the brakes and all the other essential safety mechanisms. I know that if I hit a tree it's my own fault. Sure, some random asshole might do something unexpected in the traffic, maybe involving me in a serious accident, but even in that case I know I'd still have a slight chance of avoiding the situation if I'm alert and doing my best.

For the record, I don't mind flying that much, I'm just slightly uncomfortable putting my life in the hands of other people to such a degree.

I doubt this is going to be a major cause of future security problems.

As far as I'm aware, WebGL is only allowing shaders to be specified in GLSL which is a pretty high level shading language. Obviously there's no such thing as pointers, and unlike something like javascript there's no interaction with complex objects. Shaders form a very clean and thin interface, basically just being a bunch of floating point vector operations. The only complex objects you're really going to interact with is various texture samplers.

It's easy to make a dangerous bug in a javascript interface to a complete HTML DOM object (or whatever else you can do in javacript these days), it's much harder to make a dangerous bug in a function that calculates a dot product. Sure, shaders are more complicated than that, but you get the drift.

Diablo is clearly heavily inspired by roguelikes, but there's really not that much of the original gameplay left. It would be like if I made a real-time strategy game with units like "pawn", "queen", and "king" and said it was a chesslike.

I don't understand all the e-hate directed at Blizzard for this in these comments.

In order for the game to be viable for competitive play, the game needs to be extremely balanced. If it wasn't the case, Blizzard would lose the favor of a huge number of competitively minded players plus the whole of Korea :P.

Keep in mind that the title of this slashdot news post is clearly designed to troll you. Multiplayer SC2 is fun because it's so balanced. The skill cap of SC2 is insanely high because of it. If you want to play with "fun" units, there are loads of special unbalanced units in the singleplayer campaign. Furthermore, there's a huge number of custom maps with custom units available on battle.net.

Even if you for some reason don't like SC2 multiplayer, the singleplayer campaign still offers as much content as any similarly priced PC game.

My assembler comes with a clutch.

Seen from a technical point of view, first person shooters are some of the easiest games to make, provided you're using an existant engine. The bulk of the man hours needed goes into making graphical content like textures, maps, models, and animations.

Provided your team got an efficient pipeline for producing art assets, stocked with skilled artists, there's really not that many things which can delay the project unexpectedly.

On the other hand, if the project involves building an entire engine from scratch (like in the case of Half Life 2) you got yourself an endless source of unexpected bugs and problems you'll need to deal with. It's much easier to predict how much work is needed to create a model of a zombie than to predict how long it will take to code a core component of a game engine.

Can someone name me some actual real world, large software projects based on functional programming? (Projects led by university professors don't count.) Dismissing OO completely because it is "anti-modular and anti-parallel by its very nature" seems kinda strange to me. I write parallel and modular OO software all the time... Maybe it's just me misunderstanding something.

Your colleague should have kept a small shrubbery at the side of her desk to cushion falling objects (assuming that's the morale of the article).

I'm pretty sure that it was a different kind of people who played EverQuest. The appeal of WoW is just so much broader. I'd say the current WoW has more in common with FarmVille than Everquest :P.

You're right, as far as I know, none of these "failed" WoW-killers actually turned out as big financial losses. They usually start out with a huge amount of preorders and a couple of months of insane growth, mostly from WoW-players who are tired of the game and want to try something new. But after a few months these people often realize how good WoW actually is and go back to play that again (or quit MMORPGs completely). I've seen it so many times.

I'm not sure what it is going to take to keep these players hooked more than a few months, but sure, if some company figures it out then they might win over Blizzard in the long (very long) run.

Indeed.

As you say, people usually quit in groups because nobody wants to play anymore if all their friends have stopped.

Basically my entire guild quit the game shortly after WOTLK was released, but for every people who stops playing, either a new casual player wants to try the game or an old WoW veteran is drawn back by nostalgia. If you check out the WoW subscription numbers, they've been remarkably stable since WOTLK.

Another thing we shouldn't forget is how much we've changed ourselves. Personally I like to complain about how WoW isn't like in the "good old days", but thinking about it, it's probably mainly because I'm out-MMORPG'd. When I finally cancel my WoW account (probably soon since I'm not really playing the game anymore), I don't think I'll go on to another MMORPG, and I believe a lot of other players feel the same way.

More than 10 million people are playing World of Warcraft, all with social connections within the game.

Sure, maybe in a few years only 5 million people will be playing, but it will probably still be the biggest MMORPG out there.

Of course the game isn't going to live forever, but the idea of Guild Wars 2 "beating" WoW is just absurd.