Liam
Perhaps Liam would be so kind as to point us all towards this mythical Government programme that gives car grants to immigrants. Otherwise we might be forced to call BS on his Daily Mail rantings.
153 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Mar 2007
There just aren't 900000 people in Britain who want to play this game and are willing and able to pirate it online. Not a chance. It's a B-list game for a specialised audience. Even if you are going to pirate a real time strategy game you'd go for better-known and higher-rated (see gamerankings.com) games like Warcraft 3 or Dawn of War.
I bought a copy of E2160 at launch (got the special edition with the LED in the cover), and would have been overjoyed if any of my mates had wanted to play it - they're all welcome to borrow my copy and crack it. Now I'm bored with it I'd be perfectly happy to give any of them my copy for free. Yet, out of the 10 or so of my friends who play PC games one other bought his own copy and the rest were utterly disinterested. The idea that a milllion Brits wanted to play this game is ridiculous - are there even that many real time strategy players in the country?
Either their number is massively wrong, or there are a million people who for some mystifying reason download every game that gets commercial release (and therefore don't possibly have the time to play most of them).
Life science researchers also shun LaTeX for MS Word, have never heard of Firefox, and in at least one instance I'm aware of, are still using Zip disks and sneakernet to move their files around the lab, and do so quite happily. Many life scientists(which is the population the article is talking about) are also quite suspicious of any statistical treatment of data more advanced than standard deviation, think microarrays are a fad that'll soon pass with no lasting importance, and extol the virtues of using CsCl to purify DNA.
Their behavior isn't a comment on Web2.0. Most grew up in an era when having an IT person on the team wasn't even a concept. Most software running our instrumentation was written in Visual Basic by the weird brother of one of the employees at the company and only runs under NT. Every tried to do something with the standard tool used by most of my colleagues, Reference Manager? The UI is from windows 3.1, and has probably stayed that way because focus group members raise hell every time a button gets moved.
Seriously, though, Connotea is a fantastic tool, and one that people are starting to pick up on more rapidly. The Digg clone, DissectMedicine is less used, and the "MySpace for Scientists", Nature Network, is expanding to more areas. Nature blogs about it here: http://blogs.nature.com/wp/nascent/2006/04/web_20_in_science.html
Here's the list of the initiatives, which this article fails to mention: http://www.nature.com/launchpad/index.html