* If that link doesn't take you to #22, look at the 22nd post, quoted here:
Let's see... A CCP employee joined DS1 and gives himself Director roles without warning The CEO of DS1 files a petition asking why this occured when he sees it in the audit logs The petition is instantly deleted
I dunno. Sounds pretty fishy to me. Faith in ISD to give us a straight answer? laffo
edit, taken from the in game bio of the DS1 CEO
Quote:Statement on dev misconduct:
for the record, Darkstar1 has 3 pos in game only, both are and have always worked fine and have never been petitioned by anyone in the corp for not working, the statement given by CCP is incorrect and simply not true,
LUCASWV, - CEO of Darkstar1
POS = Player Owned Structure, the thing that they petitioned to have fixed, and later claimed not to have done so.
And that's sad. Aside from the fact that a sibling post has already noted that you probably are a goon yourself, Here's a comparison:
CCP:
1 year ago, had a developer use dev tools to gain a slight advantage. Was disciplined, perhaps not harshly enough.
Goons:
Created a story about a developer joining their corporation to spy on them.
Write an "open letter", and spam links to this open letter over 4,000 times in a weekend.
Claim to have filed a petition to find out why a developer joined their corporation, and that the petition was closed immediately.
They are confronted by CCP who say that the developer joined their corporation in order to fix an issue with an in-game structure which was not behaving, as per a petition filed by a Goon member. CCP also has no record of any additional petition ever being filed, and asks Goons to come up with a petition number, the account name of the person who filed it, or a date it was filed on, and the Goons cannot do so.
The Goons OUTRIGHT LIE* and say that no petition asking for help with their structure was ever filed, and that their structures have ALWAYS been working properly.
CCP shows the goons the screenshots of their internal database of petitions, including where the Goons filed the petition asking for help with the structure. CCP also notes that the purposeful fabrication of allegations of wrongdoing and the libel which the goons have used over the past weekend in a coordinated effort to smear CCP and waste their time amount to legally actionable infractions.
The Goons respond by bombing the eve-online forums with spam, trolling posts, flamebaiting, improper conduct, profanity, in line pictures, and other such garbage.......
Yeah, I'd trust a goon, too. They've got everyone's best interest at heart, and they're a group of moral leaders in the online community./sarcasm.
The T20 incident happened more than six months before the "whistleblower" outed him. By the way, that person used illegal methods (he hacked an alliances' website) to gather damning evidence against T20. So, yeah, he's a paragon of morality, and the ends justify the means, but whatever.
AT THE TIME it was discovered that T20 had spawned items to help his in-game alliance, he was disciplined. The senior board members were out of town at the time that this happened, and the people in charge that were in town at the time of the incident took all the action they could. They knew they must act quickly, they knew he must be punished, and they knew that they did not have the authority to fire a senior developer who was a founding member of the company. They did what they could.
Six months later, when T20 was outed and everything came to light outside of the company, everyone made a stink about it. But, unfortunately, even if T20 should have been fired, he wasn't. And it's not fair to punish someone twice for one infraction - once at the time, and once six months later after everyone who was directly involved had already gotten over it and moved on.
So, yes, CCP saw this as an internal matter originally, and I'm not sure that they should have, but whatever. They acted in the best way they could at the time and given the circumstances. It just turns out that it wasn't good enough for the members of a community who have a forum named "Fuck You and Die" and a forum named "General Bull Shit". Kugutsman was 2nd in command of Sniggerdly corp, and a member of the SA forums, and allied with the Goons in game.
So CCP will now never get the trust of the gaming world back, and it really sucks for them. You're right, if the Goons had brought this crap up without the previous SNAFU, it would have been ignored. But, CCP is in an impossible situation right now, and it's not entirely of their own making. The Goons are ruining eve-online, and that's the sad part. They're paying money to ruin a company and a game and make it less fun for the rest of us that play.
Perhaps in the same way that any other company ignores people who accuse them of wearing bacon necklaces?
I mean, it looks like there's no substance to these allegations. That's probably why they were being ignored. If I went up to people on the street and asked them "Do you wear necklaces made of bacon?", they'd ignore me. But, if I had the entire population of the SomethingAwful forums corner one person and ask them repeatedly "Do you wear a necklace of bacon?!? LOLERCAUST!! YOU MuStAnSwEr or yur HIDING stufz!" - after the 4000th time, the person would eventually get cross and scream at the top of their lungs "THE ANSWER IS NO, AND YOU'RE BUGGING THE SHIT OUT OF ME, LET ME GET ON WITH MY LIFE".
This is what CCP has done. Goons wanted to create drama, CCP knows there's no substance to it, so they ignore. Goons order an all out assault on CCP, and CCP has to waste their time answering. Congratulations, Goons have wasted all of our time, and in the process have tarnished CCP's image even further.
Yeah, except - let's assume that the accusations are false, as CCP state.
CCP employees have spent their entire long, holiday weekend researching and compiling data and screenshots to prove themselves. On top of that, the Goons have created a MASSIVE forum assault, to the point that the signal-to-noise ratio on the Eve-online forums is so bad as to make them difficult to read. There have been, just today, thousands of posts which have had to be moderated for being trolling, flaming, flamebait, against the forum rules, using dis-allowed methods (bypassing the profanity filters, making posts with alts, posting pictures inline, etc).
The Goons' posts are immature, off color, and they have been told repeatedly to stop. Yet they persist, spamming the forums with their garbage. They have wasted the time of the company and have honestly made the community a difficult place to be a member of - I am embarrassed to say that I play eve now, because people associate it with 1.) CCP favoritism (not true), and 2.) the attitude and intelligence level of the Goons (SomethingAwful is not a paragon of IQ points, that's for damn sure).
THIS is why CCP are frustrated, and if they're sounding a little cross, it's because essentially there are hundreds (probably thousands, I don't know how many accounts to take out because people have alts, but there are 4,000 people in Goonswarm) of people who are PAYING A GAME TO FUCK WITH CCP and to RUIN THE EXPERIENCE FOR THE REST OF US. I'd be pissed too, if I were CCP.
I still love playing eve, I just don't recruit people anymore. Not because I think CCP did anything wrong, but because I don't want to pull people into the Goon's drama-bomb bullshit. Honestly the game was more fun a year ago before the rise of the Goons.
We have one of those "$50,000 SANs". Actually, with the expansion, ours cost closer to $110,000, but whatever. For one, it's got more drives (I think we're up to 30). For two, they're 10k RPM SCSI drives. For three, it's fibrechannel, and all the servers that it's connected to get full speed access to the drives. For four, we have a service level agreement with Dell/EMC (It's an EMC array, rebranded under Dell's name) that says if we have a dead drive, we get a dell service hobbit on site within 4 hours with a new drive. We also get high level support from them for things like firmware upgrades (we had to go through that recently to install the expansion).
The grandparent is exactly correct: fast, reliable, and cheap storage - you only get to pick two.
We picked fast and reliable. You picked reliable and cheap. There's nothing wrong with either decision, but please don't tell me that a $3000 solution would have done everything that we needed.
The top 3/4 you fill with charcoal, and the bottom 1/4 is separated by a grate. You wad up some newspaper in the bottom section, set the thing down in your grill, or on an upside down galvanized tub, or wherever is safe, and you stick a match in the bottom and light the charcoal. In about 20 minutes, you'll have nuclear charcoal, hot enough to literally grill directly on the coals if you blow the ash away first (hair dryer?). Try it with fajita steak (slice across the grain).
Also, I'd like to add - "CHARCOAL" not charcoal briquettes. They're probably 1/3 to 1/2 sand and additives. Get some natural charcoal, made from wood burned in a low oxygen enviromnent.
My university appearantly sells the stuff. 's where I've gotten mine from. It burns hot as hell, you miss the extra chemical flavors from bag charcoal briquettes, and it adds a very nice smoky flavor.
Yeah, I know. The problem with rainchecks was 1.) sometimes the add said no rainchecks, and people would get even more accusatory about bait and switch, and 2.) inventory people were responsible for rainchecks, but never had any time to do it. I wouldn't be surprised if there were still rainchecks that I wrote in 2001 in that store.
It's different in audio or appliances - there's a lot of down time, time to clean your department, do your paperwork, read tech manuals, etc. In computers, it was gogogogogogogogogo from the moment the doors opened. And then you run into the 7 bosses problem - I had 7 bosses when I worked there, and each was pulling me in a different direction. The personel guy always wanted us to leave when we were scheduled to leave, closing routine be damned (aaah, DTL's) so we didn't get any overtime. The sales managers always wanted us to stay and work with customers as long as they needed. The inventory managers always wanted us to stock all our products, check our signage, etc (so his people didn't have to).
If they don't give you enough time to do everything that you're responsible for, rainchecks fall by the wayside. Basically it was a bad place to work - if you didn't get to something, you couldn't tell Boss X that Boss Y said you should leave to not get overtime - you were just expected to work miracles.
Well, we did some of that, but honestly part of the blame lies with the corporate offices - they fostered this sort of rivalry between stores in the same districts. It should have been just a friendly rivalry, but it ended up being the one thing that got supervisors and managers promoted - your numbers compared to other people in the district.
So what it comes down to is that another store had very little reason to help you out, because why hold an item for a customer who is coming when you could sell it to one of the people in line already at the store.
Not when I worked there, they didn't. I started working there in I think late 1998, then I went to college for a year in 1999-2000, then came back and worked full time 2000-late 2001 before I decided I couldn't waste my life in retail and went back to school.
But, when I started working there, even though amazon.com and numerous other tech websites were up and running full tilt, the best buy website had all of "put in your zip code to find the store nearest you". It was a big deal when they went live with the website, they had all these grandiose plans about buying online, picking up in the store, but their inventory system at the time couldn't handle it (it can now). The inventory used to only update overnight (not real time) so people used to go onto the website and buy something, and select "pick up in store". The inventory people would get paged with the SKU number of whatever they were supposed to pick up and hold for the person coming in to pick it up. Sucks if the website told them it was available and we sold 'em all.
The website pricing thing I'm pretty sure was a new deal. Or at least new ish. I don't think they had the ability to do something like that back when I worked there - I think they were just patting themselves on the back over having a website. Plus, we didn't have in store internet when I was there, except for the computer repair guys (before they were geek squad) had a dial up connection for downloading drivers and stuff.
I've personally since working there used their website to buy stuff, but I've also had problems with it (order UT2004 collector's pack with the extra DVD and the free headset, get the jerkaround that it would come back in stock, then it's not ever going to be in stock, we jerked you around, and the normal non-collectors is more expensive).
Oh, right, totally. I'm not saying that the corporate offices weren't out to screw the consumer (or the best buy employee, for that matter). All I was saying is that the people in the store, while I'm sure we weren't entirely blameless, didn't have anything personally to do with it. I'm serious when I say we had customers who really sounded like it was personally our fault.
I mean, we didn't even order the stock for the store. It was all handled by inventory systems. We just had to deal with whatever showed up.
It's not something that's easy to explain to people, but I know what you're talking about. I live there, too (well, I live in southwest Virginia). How do I put this into words?
The Appalachian mountains have a mothering affect.
I was born here, in the Smokies in Tennessee, but I lived my life from 3 months to 15 years in a flat flood plain on the Mississippi River, and the next 6 in DC Suburbia. When I moved here, I mean, it would have been easy to go about life and never go outside, but when you take a step back and really look out - this is the most beautiful place on earth. Seriously, moving here is like waking up one day and realizing that things really are ok. I have never felt more "at home" than in these hills. They are like old friends.
And the people that live here - we're roughnecks, miners, farmers, workers, hillbillies. We drink rye whiskey and we get fresh eggs - if not from our backyard, from our neighbors'. The people here are registered "leave-me-the-hell-alone-ocrats". They take no shit, but if you're a friend in need, they'll give you their last cup of flour to help.
I know it sounds corny, and someone can cue the Banjer music any time (I'd like to request some Fire on the Mountain, or Li'l Liza Jane). It's hard to explain, but I don't think I can move away.
I know what you mean, friend. I know what you mean.
Sorry but even though I'm a liberal, I can't vote green. Can't do it. Because I'm a realist.
Want to know the solution to most of the world's environmental problems, as well as energy problems, foreign relations problems, middle east unrest, etc?
Nuclear power.
Nuclear power isn't clean, but it's a hell of a lot cleaner than coal or oil. We have nuclear fuel here, in America, in abundance. The fix for a good number of the world's problems (and especially the US's problems) is to convert everything we can to electricity generated by nuclear power as soon as possible.
We will reduce our greenhouse emissions. We will reduce our dependence on foreign energy (we buy oil from venezuela, the middle east, and coal from south africa in abundance). We should develop electric (non-hybrid) cars. Besides, most hybrids don't get much better gas mileage than my 1996 Honda. By eliminating our need for Saudi oil, we eliminate our need to stay in the country, and thus eliminate the REASON WHY TERRORISTS HATE US.*
Want to solve the world's problems? MORE nuclear power. Tightly regulated, government controlled, price-fixed nuclear power is the ONLY remaining savior of this planet. But... you can't hug your children with nuclear arms. Three eyed fish named blinky, Three mile island, Chernobal, Chernobal, Chernobal. That's why I can't vote green.
~Wx.
*Welcome to the one thing that our amazing war time president cannot seem to do. He sees "The turrists attack us, so we'll attack them." He NEVER THINKS TO ASK WHY. Why do they hate us? THEY HATE US CAUSE OF OUR FREEDOMS!!!. Are you sure? Isn't there more to it? WELL THEY HATE CHRISTIANS. Um.... ok.
Al Quaeda's one major claim is that they are fighting because they want foreign, non-believing non-muslims out of their holy land. That's the major thing. They also want us to stop unilaterally supporting every action Israel takes, and stop vetoing every unanimously passed UN censure resolution against Israel, but we'll get there in time. No oil needs? No reason to be in the Muslim holy land. Less pissed off terrorists. When will we get it? Fundies are all the same - they want to be left alone. There are always some on any side of the aisle who want to bring down the evil empire, but most want to be left alone to practice their own brand of weird shit.
That said, I think we need more choices. A choice between two parties doesn't adequately represent the range of views in the American electorate. Paul certainly looks more credible than any third-party candidate in recent memory. Unfortunately, the sort of government Paul wants is a radical return to a prewar ideal that may be impossible to achieve, given the fact that government is the largest employer in the United States.
Which is why we should enact my law. It's a two-tiered election system.
Problem: Right now your options are to hold your nose when you go into the voting booth and vote for the crook or the idiot. But hey, you pick the lesser of two evils, and you have to vote for him, cause if you vote for Nader or Perot, you're going to lose the election to the crook (or idiot).
Solution: Run off elections. Open a general election to candidates from ANY political party, and people will be able to truly vote their conscience. Your hot button is the environment? Vote for the green party. Your big thing is free trade? Vote libertarian. Your one plank is abortion? Vote for the evangelical. Then, we take the top two plurality winners and run them off in a national election.
Guys, brick-and-mortar store is NOT the internet. They don't have a huge warehouse to store thousands of units. It was worse when BBY sold CRT monitors, but even with LCD monitors, what you see on the shelves and in the overhead bins is everything they've got. The "warehouse" in the back of the store I worked at was for furniture and big screen projection TV's - everything else was kept on the sales floor.
You can't walk into a store and say "I want X" and get it if they don't have any. It doesn't work that way, any more than you can go into JC Penny's and say you want a pair of jeans in a certain size and have them magically appear. On top of that, if you didn't get whatever was in the sales circular on Sunday, it was probably because other people got there before you. In several years of working there, I only remember a few times when we had zero of an item that was put on sale. Usually it all came in on the previous week's truck. In fact, you can still go into a best buy on a Saturday morning (after a Friday truck delivery) and look around - if you see that they have 30 car subwoofers stacked up on the shelf and that they're normal price, it's a good bet that they're going on sale the next day when the Sunday ad comes out. Smart shoppers would even buy one then and then bring the receipt and ad into the store in the next week for a refund of the difference.
Not that I give a damn about their business practices, but I used to be a sales associate at Best Buy, in the computer department.
You have to trust me when I say this: The people in the store have NOTHING to do with this. We never hid sales items.
Here's the real story. Every Friday or Saturday, we'd get the weekly ad which went live on Sunday. In my store, we got two trucks a week, Wednesday and Friday, after close of business. Sometimes they were 48', sometimes 53'. If we didn't have the ad by Friday night, we could usually tell which stick of ram would be on sale because we got a box of it, probably 20 units or more. As I recall, there were usually three brands - kingston, ValURam, and one other that I forget. Every week, one of the 256 MB sticks would be on sale, and usually a laptop stick as well (I worked there around 2000-2001). So, when we knew, we'd stock as much of it as possible to have it close on hand.
With no exceptions, on Sunday morning at open of business (11 am), the first people in the store would be headed straight for the computer department counter, to buy all the ram they could. Usually, it said something like "limit 2 per" on the ad, but when it didn't say that, boy was it not a fun day to hand out the ram. Anyway, by 6 pm - close of business - on Sunday, all the ram was gone. We of course still had the two other brands in the same size which were $20 more. But, by Tuesday, the customers were incensed about the lack of advertised items.
I cannot count the times I was accused by outraged, misinformed customers of bait-and-switch when I'd show them what we happened to have in stock, be it ram or computers. No, sir, I'm sorry that we don't have any more of the $350 E-Machine computer in stock. Perhaps when you see a computer deal that's insanely cheap, you shouldn't presume that you are the only person within 50 miles that will want to purchase it. Yes, sir, we did have them in stock. Yes, sir, we got a shipment of 30 of them last Friday, and we anticipate getting another 15 Wednesday, and probably some more this Friday. No sir, I can't hold one for you.
Whatever. Ask me anything you want, I worked there long enough to know how almost everything works. I'll reply truthfully.
I'm not here to read -1 comments. The highest a post can be moderated to without an actual moderator giving it points is +2. This is not including zoo.pl bonuses. A while ago (long before the zoo), I set my default to "Nested, Oldest first, +3 threshold". I've never looked back. The signal to noise ratio is excellent, the commentary is sound, the jokes are funny, and no one gets through to my screen (except some random zoo.pl friends) without an ACTUAL HUMAN deciding their content is worthy of my eyes.
Now, when I got to a new browser and I don't have my slashdot cookie, I'm relatively ticked off, and I very quickly log in, so that I get my settings.
Remember kids, for a better slashdot experience, "+3, Nested, Oldest first". Leave the moderating to the eager beavers, I ain't got time for your goatseman and your hot GNAA grits.
And I've heard they've basically done the same thing with the Narbacular Drop group - they liked what they saw, they hired them, and said "instead of silly quake-1 era graphics, do that with our engine, and we'll call it Portal and release it with Episode Two".
God, I can't wait. Seriously, I'm buying Episode Two just for Portal. It's the first FPS I've looked forward to in ages.
Yes, welcome to "CORE CPI", which is a bullshit term which basically means "if we ignore the shit that everyone needs, and that's spiraling out of control, we can give you better news about inflation."
Consumer price index = all the stuff that the parent poster mentions - it's an index of goods from plasma TV's, to the cost of health care, to the cost of rent, to the cost of dinner at the sizzler. It's a somewhat reasonable representation of the "cost of life". Not great, but OK.
Then, someone noticed that petrol prices here are have quadrupled in the past 5 years, and along with them the prices of goods that must be transported regularly, like produce and meat, going up to reflect the increased cost in distribution. So they came up with the CoreCPI, which is the Consumer Price Index, minus food and energy (gas) related costs. So, no accounting for houses heated by oil, no accounting for $3.50/gallon gas, no accounting for food costs doubling.
Well, no shit, sherlock. If you take out the stuff that's inflating, the inflation rate looks pretty solid. Put that stuff back in, and the inflation rate over the last 8 months according to CPI not CCPI is more like 6.5% annually. That doesn't sound bad, but hell, that's a lot. Especially when you factor in things like my government job giving me a 2% COLA every year means I have like 4% less purchasing power than I did the previous year.
Exactly. This is what people just can't wrap their heads around at Microsoft.
Microsoft has enough CASH ASSETS to draw interest from that - BASED ON THE INTEREST, they could never sell another copy of office or windows or any other product ever again, and continue to pay all non-executive employees at their current payrate until their expected retirement date.
Furthermore, from what I understand if it *is* your phone they're listening in on, and they want to use it against you, you can't tell anyone about the specifics of your case. You can't call the media and say "the government is investigating me on this bullshit charge and I didn't do anything wrong - in fact they illegally listened to my phone" because you are ordered to keep the particulars secret or whatever.
Slashdot Mirror
* If that link doesn't take you to #22, look at the 22nd post, quoted here:
POS = Player Owned Structure, the thing that they petitioned to have fixed, and later claimed not to have done so.
~Wx
And that's sad. Aside from the fact that a sibling post has already noted that you probably are a goon yourself, Here's a comparison:
CCP:
1 year ago, had a developer use dev tools to gain a slight advantage. Was disciplined, perhaps not harshly enough.
Goons:
Created a story about a developer joining their corporation to spy on them.
Write an "open letter", and spam links to this open letter over 4,000 times in a weekend.
Claim to have filed a petition to find out why a developer joined their corporation, and that the petition was closed immediately.
They are confronted by CCP who say that the developer joined their corporation in order to fix an issue with an in-game structure which was not behaving, as per a petition filed by a Goon member. CCP also has no record of any additional petition ever being filed, and asks Goons to come up with a petition number, the account name of the person who filed it, or a date it was filed on, and the Goons cannot do so.
The Goons OUTRIGHT LIE* and say that no petition asking for help with their structure was ever filed, and that their structures have ALWAYS been working properly.
CCP shows the goons the screenshots of their internal database of petitions, including where the Goons filed the petition asking for help with the structure. CCP also notes that the purposeful fabrication of allegations of wrongdoing and the libel which the goons have used over the past weekend in a coordinated effort to smear CCP and waste their time amount to legally actionable infractions.
The Goons respond by bombing the eve-online forums with spam, trolling posts, flamebaiting, improper conduct, profanity, in line pictures, and other such garbage.
Yeah, I'd trust a goon, too. They've got everyone's best interest at heart, and they're a group of moral leaders in the online community.
~Wx
The T20 incident happened more than six months before the "whistleblower" outed him. By the way, that person used illegal methods (he hacked an alliances' website) to gather damning evidence against T20. So, yeah, he's a paragon of morality, and the ends justify the means, but whatever.
AT THE TIME it was discovered that T20 had spawned items to help his in-game alliance, he was disciplined. The senior board members were out of town at the time that this happened, and the people in charge that were in town at the time of the incident took all the action they could. They knew they must act quickly, they knew he must be punished, and they knew that they did not have the authority to fire a senior developer who was a founding member of the company. They did what they could.
Six months later, when T20 was outed and everything came to light outside of the company, everyone made a stink about it. But, unfortunately, even if T20 should have been fired, he wasn't. And it's not fair to punish someone twice for one infraction - once at the time, and once six months later after everyone who was directly involved had already gotten over it and moved on.
So, yes, CCP saw this as an internal matter originally, and I'm not sure that they should have, but whatever. They acted in the best way they could at the time and given the circumstances. It just turns out that it wasn't good enough for the members of a community who have a forum named "Fuck You and Die" and a forum named "General Bull Shit". Kugutsman was 2nd in command of Sniggerdly corp, and a member of the SA forums, and allied with the Goons in game.
So CCP will now never get the trust of the gaming world back, and it really sucks for them. You're right, if the Goons had brought this crap up without the previous SNAFU, it would have been ignored. But, CCP is in an impossible situation right now, and it's not entirely of their own making. The Goons are ruining eve-online, and that's the sad part. They're paying money to ruin a company and a game and make it less fun for the rest of us that play.
~Wx
Perhaps in the same way that any other company ignores people who accuse them of wearing bacon necklaces?
I mean, it looks like there's no substance to these allegations. That's probably why they were being ignored. If I went up to people on the street and asked them "Do you wear necklaces made of bacon?", they'd ignore me. But, if I had the entire population of the SomethingAwful forums corner one person and ask them repeatedly "Do you wear a necklace of bacon?!? LOLERCAUST!! YOU MuStAnSwEr or yur HIDING stufz!" - after the 4000th time, the person would eventually get cross and scream at the top of their lungs "THE ANSWER IS NO, AND YOU'RE BUGGING THE SHIT OUT OF ME, LET ME GET ON WITH MY LIFE".
This is what CCP has done. Goons wanted to create drama, CCP knows there's no substance to it, so they ignore. Goons order an all out assault on CCP, and CCP has to waste their time answering. Congratulations, Goons have wasted all of our time, and in the process have tarnished CCP's image even further.
~Wx
Yeah, except - let's assume that the accusations are false, as CCP state.
CCP employees have spent their entire long, holiday weekend researching and compiling data and screenshots to prove themselves. On top of that, the Goons have created a MASSIVE forum assault, to the point that the signal-to-noise ratio on the Eve-online forums is so bad as to make them difficult to read. There have been, just today, thousands of posts which have had to be moderated for being trolling, flaming, flamebait, against the forum rules, using dis-allowed methods (bypassing the profanity filters, making posts with alts, posting pictures inline, etc).
See for example:
http://myeve.eve-online.com/ingameboard.asp?a=cha
The Goons' posts are immature, off color, and they have been told repeatedly to stop. Yet they persist, spamming the forums with their garbage. They have wasted the time of the company and have honestly made the community a difficult place to be a member of - I am embarrassed to say that I play eve now, because people associate it with 1.) CCP favoritism (not true), and 2.) the attitude and intelligence level of the Goons (SomethingAwful is not a paragon of IQ points, that's for damn sure).
THIS is why CCP are frustrated, and if they're sounding a little cross, it's because essentially there are hundreds (probably thousands, I don't know how many accounts to take out because people have alts, but there are 4,000 people in Goonswarm) of people who are PAYING A GAME TO FUCK WITH CCP and to RUIN THE EXPERIENCE FOR THE REST OF US. I'd be pissed too, if I were CCP.
I still love playing eve, I just don't recruit people anymore. Not because I think CCP did anything wrong, but because I don't want to pull people into the Goon's drama-bomb bullshit. Honestly the game was more fun a year ago before the rise of the Goons.
~Wx
Solly Chollie.
We have one of those "$50,000 SANs". Actually, with the expansion, ours cost closer to $110,000, but whatever. For one, it's got more drives (I think we're up to 30). For two, they're 10k RPM SCSI drives. For three, it's fibrechannel, and all the servers that it's connected to get full speed access to the drives. For four, we have a service level agreement with Dell/EMC (It's an EMC array, rebranded under Dell's name) that says if we have a dead drive, we get a dell service hobbit on site within 4 hours with a new drive. We also get high level support from them for things like firmware upgrades (we had to go through that recently to install the expansion).
The grandparent is exactly correct:
fast, reliable, and cheap storage - you only get to pick two.
We picked fast and reliable. You picked reliable and cheap. There's nothing wrong with either decision, but please don't tell me that a $3000 solution would have done everything that we needed.
You can't have all three.
~Wx
Basically, you pretty much have to have a charcoal chimney.
http://www.weber.com/bbq/img/accessories/allfuel_
The top 3/4 you fill with charcoal, and the bottom 1/4 is separated by a grate. You wad up some newspaper in the bottom section, set the thing down in your grill, or on an upside down galvanized tub, or wherever is safe, and you stick a match in the bottom and light the charcoal. In about 20 minutes, you'll have nuclear charcoal, hot enough to literally grill directly on the coals if you blow the ash away first (hair dryer?). Try it with fajita steak (slice across the grain).
~Wx
Also, I'd like to add - "CHARCOAL" not charcoal briquettes. They're probably 1/3 to 1/2 sand and additives. Get some natural charcoal, made from wood burned in a low oxygen enviromnent.
My university appearantly sells the stuff. 's where I've gotten mine from. It burns hot as hell, you miss the extra chemical flavors from bag charcoal briquettes, and it adds a very nice smoky flavor.
~Wx.
Yeah, I know. The problem with rainchecks was 1.) sometimes the add said no rainchecks, and people would get even more accusatory about bait and switch, and 2.) inventory people were responsible for rainchecks, but never had any time to do it. I wouldn't be surprised if there were still rainchecks that I wrote in 2001 in that store.
It's different in audio or appliances - there's a lot of down time, time to clean your department, do your paperwork, read tech manuals, etc. In computers, it was gogogogogogogogogo from the moment the doors opened. And then you run into the 7 bosses problem - I had 7 bosses when I worked there, and each was pulling me in a different direction. The personel guy always wanted us to leave when we were scheduled to leave, closing routine be damned (aaah, DTL's) so we didn't get any overtime. The sales managers always wanted us to stay and work with customers as long as they needed. The inventory managers always wanted us to stock all our products, check our signage, etc (so his people didn't have to).
If they don't give you enough time to do everything that you're responsible for, rainchecks fall by the wayside. Basically it was a bad place to work - if you didn't get to something, you couldn't tell Boss X that Boss Y said you should leave to not get overtime - you were just expected to work miracles.
~Wx
Well, we did some of that, but honestly part of the blame lies with the corporate offices - they fostered this sort of rivalry between stores in the same districts. It should have been just a friendly rivalry, but it ended up being the one thing that got supervisors and managers promoted - your numbers compared to other people in the district.
So what it comes down to is that another store had very little reason to help you out, because why hold an item for a customer who is coming when you could sell it to one of the people in line already at the store.
~W
Not when I worked there, they didn't. I started working there in I think late 1998, then I went to college for a year in 1999-2000, then came back and worked full time 2000-late 2001 before I decided I couldn't waste my life in retail and went back to school.
But, when I started working there, even though amazon.com and numerous other tech websites were up and running full tilt, the best buy website had all of "put in your zip code to find the store nearest you". It was a big deal when they went live with the website, they had all these grandiose plans about buying online, picking up in the store, but their inventory system at the time couldn't handle it (it can now). The inventory used to only update overnight (not real time) so people used to go onto the website and buy something, and select "pick up in store". The inventory people would get paged with the SKU number of whatever they were supposed to pick up and hold for the person coming in to pick it up. Sucks if the website told them it was available and we sold 'em all.
The website pricing thing I'm pretty sure was a new deal. Or at least new ish. I don't think they had the ability to do something like that back when I worked there - I think they were just patting themselves on the back over having a website. Plus, we didn't have in store internet when I was there, except for the computer repair guys (before they were geek squad) had a dial up connection for downloading drivers and stuff.
I've personally since working there used their website to buy stuff, but I've also had problems with it (order UT2004 collector's pack with the extra DVD and the free headset, get the jerkaround that it would come back in stock, then it's not ever going to be in stock, we jerked you around, and the normal non-collectors is more expensive).
~Wx.
Oh, right, totally. I'm not saying that the corporate offices weren't out to screw the consumer (or the best buy employee, for that matter). All I was saying is that the people in the store, while I'm sure we weren't entirely blameless, didn't have anything personally to do with it. I'm serious when I say we had customers who really sounded like it was personally our fault.
I mean, we didn't even order the stock for the store. It was all handled by inventory systems. We just had to deal with whatever showed up.
~Wx
It's not something that's easy to explain to people, but I know what you're talking about. I live there, too (well, I live in southwest Virginia). How do I put this into words?
The Appalachian mountains have a mothering affect.
I was born here, in the Smokies in Tennessee, but I lived my life from 3 months to 15 years in a flat flood plain on the Mississippi River, and the next 6 in DC Suburbia. When I moved here, I mean, it would have been easy to go about life and never go outside, but when you take a step back and really look out - this is the most beautiful place on earth. Seriously, moving here is like waking up one day and realizing that things really are ok. I have never felt more "at home" than in these hills. They are like old friends.
And the people that live here - we're roughnecks, miners, farmers, workers, hillbillies. We drink rye whiskey and we get fresh eggs - if not from our backyard, from our neighbors'. The people here are registered "leave-me-the-hell-alone-ocrats". They take no shit, but if you're a friend in need, they'll give you their last cup of flour to help.
I know it sounds corny, and someone can cue the Banjer music any time (I'd like to request some Fire on the Mountain, or Li'l Liza Jane). It's hard to explain, but I don't think I can move away.
I know what you mean, friend. I know what you mean.
~Wx
Sorry but even though I'm a liberal, I can't vote green. Can't do it. Because I'm a realist.
Want to know the solution to most of the world's environmental problems, as well as energy problems, foreign relations problems, middle east unrest, etc?
Nuclear power.
Nuclear power isn't clean, but it's a hell of a lot cleaner than coal or oil. We have nuclear fuel here, in America, in abundance. The fix for a good number of the world's problems (and especially the US's problems) is to convert everything we can to electricity generated by nuclear power as soon as possible.
We will reduce our greenhouse emissions. We will reduce our dependence on foreign energy (we buy oil from venezuela, the middle east, and coal from south africa in abundance). We should develop electric (non-hybrid) cars. Besides, most hybrids don't get much better gas mileage than my 1996 Honda. By eliminating our need for Saudi oil, we eliminate our need to stay in the country, and thus eliminate the REASON WHY TERRORISTS HATE US.*
Want to solve the world's problems? MORE nuclear power. Tightly regulated, government controlled, price-fixed nuclear power is the ONLY remaining savior of this planet. But... you can't hug your children with nuclear arms. Three eyed fish named blinky, Three mile island, Chernobal, Chernobal, Chernobal. That's why I can't vote green.
~Wx.
*Welcome to the one thing that our amazing war time president cannot seem to do. He sees "The turrists attack us, so we'll attack them." He NEVER THINKS TO ASK WHY. Why do they hate us? THEY HATE US CAUSE OF OUR FREEDOMS!!!. Are you sure? Isn't there more to it? WELL THEY HATE CHRISTIANS. Um.... ok.
Al Quaeda's one major claim is that they are fighting because they want foreign, non-believing non-muslims out of their holy land. That's the major thing. They also want us to stop unilaterally supporting every action Israel takes, and stop vetoing every unanimously passed UN censure resolution against Israel, but we'll get there in time. No oil needs? No reason to be in the Muslim holy land. Less pissed off terrorists. When will we get it? Fundies are all the same - they want to be left alone. There are always some on any side of the aisle who want to bring down the evil empire, but most want to be left alone to practice their own brand of weird shit.
Nuclear power, folks. Save the world.
That said, I think we need more choices. A choice between two parties doesn't adequately represent the range of views in the American electorate. Paul certainly looks more credible than any third-party candidate in recent memory. Unfortunately, the sort of government Paul wants is a radical return to a prewar ideal that may be impossible to achieve, given the fact that government is the largest employer in the United States.
Which is why we should enact my law. It's a two-tiered election system.
Problem: Right now your options are to hold your nose when you go into the voting booth and vote for the crook or the idiot. But hey, you pick the lesser of two evils, and you have to vote for him, cause if you vote for Nader or Perot, you're going to lose the election to the crook (or idiot).
Solution: Run off elections. Open a general election to candidates from ANY political party, and people will be able to truly vote their conscience. Your hot button is the environment? Vote for the green party. Your big thing is free trade? Vote libertarian. Your one plank is abortion? Vote for the evangelical. Then, we take the top two plurality winners and run them off in a national election.
~Wx
Guys, brick-and-mortar store is NOT the internet. They don't have a huge warehouse to store thousands of units. It was worse when BBY sold CRT monitors, but even with LCD monitors, what you see on the shelves and in the overhead bins is everything they've got. The "warehouse" in the back of the store I worked at was for furniture and big screen projection TV's - everything else was kept on the sales floor.
You can't walk into a store and say "I want X" and get it if they don't have any. It doesn't work that way, any more than you can go into JC Penny's and say you want a pair of jeans in a certain size and have them magically appear. On top of that, if you didn't get whatever was in the sales circular on Sunday, it was probably because other people got there before you. In several years of working there, I only remember a few times when we had zero of an item that was put on sale. Usually it all came in on the previous week's truck. In fact, you can still go into a best buy on a Saturday morning (after a Friday truck delivery) and look around - if you see that they have 30 car subwoofers stacked up on the shelf and that they're normal price, it's a good bet that they're going on sale the next day when the Sunday ad comes out. Smart shoppers would even buy one then and then bring the receipt and ad into the store in the next week for a refund of the difference.
~Wx
Not that I give a damn about their business practices, but I used to be a sales associate at Best Buy, in the computer department.
You have to trust me when I say this: The people in the store have NOTHING to do with this. We never hid sales items.
Here's the real story. Every Friday or Saturday, we'd get the weekly ad which went live on Sunday. In my store, we got two trucks a week, Wednesday and Friday, after close of business. Sometimes they were 48', sometimes 53'. If we didn't have the ad by Friday night, we could usually tell which stick of ram would be on sale because we got a box of it, probably 20 units or more. As I recall, there were usually three brands - kingston, ValURam, and one other that I forget. Every week, one of the 256 MB sticks would be on sale, and usually a laptop stick as well (I worked there around 2000-2001). So, when we knew, we'd stock as much of it as possible to have it close on hand.
With no exceptions, on Sunday morning at open of business (11 am), the first people in the store would be headed straight for the computer department counter, to buy all the ram they could. Usually, it said something like "limit 2 per" on the ad, but when it didn't say that, boy was it not a fun day to hand out the ram. Anyway, by 6 pm - close of business - on Sunday, all the ram was gone. We of course still had the two other brands in the same size which were $20 more. But, by Tuesday, the customers were incensed about the lack of advertised items.
I cannot count the times I was accused by outraged, misinformed customers of bait-and-switch when I'd show them what we happened to have in stock, be it ram or computers. No, sir, I'm sorry that we don't have any more of the $350 E-Machine computer in stock. Perhaps when you see a computer deal that's insanely cheap, you shouldn't presume that you are the only person within 50 miles that will want to purchase it. Yes, sir, we did have them in stock. Yes, sir, we got a shipment of 30 of them last Friday, and we anticipate getting another 15 Wednesday, and probably some more this Friday. No sir, I can't hold one for you.
Whatever. Ask me anything you want, I worked there long enough to know how almost everything works. I'll reply truthfully.
~Wx
It's mostly getting rid of the goatse trolls.
I'm not here to read -1 comments. The highest a post can be moderated to without an actual moderator giving it points is +2. This is not including zoo.pl bonuses. A while ago (long before the zoo), I set my default to "Nested, Oldest first, +3 threshold". I've never looked back. The signal to noise ratio is excellent, the commentary is sound, the jokes are funny, and no one gets through to my screen (except some random zoo.pl friends) without an ACTUAL HUMAN deciding their content is worthy of my eyes.
Now, when I got to a new browser and I don't have my slashdot cookie, I'm relatively ticked off, and I very quickly log in, so that I get my settings.
Remember kids, for a better slashdot experience, "+3, Nested, Oldest first". Leave the moderating to the eager beavers, I ain't got time for your goatseman and your hot GNAA grits.
~Wx
And I've heard they've basically done the same thing with the Narbacular Drop group - they liked what they saw, they hired them, and said "instead of silly quake-1 era graphics, do that with our engine, and we'll call it Portal and release it with Episode Two".
God, I can't wait. Seriously, I'm buying Episode Two just for Portal. It's the first FPS I've looked forward to in ages.
~W
Yes, welcome to "CORE CPI", which is a bullshit term which basically means "if we ignore the shit that everyone needs, and that's spiraling out of control, we can give you better news about inflation."
Consumer price index = all the stuff that the parent poster mentions - it's an index of goods from plasma TV's, to the cost of health care, to the cost of rent, to the cost of dinner at the sizzler. It's a somewhat reasonable representation of the "cost of life". Not great, but OK.
Then, someone noticed that petrol prices here are have quadrupled in the past 5 years, and along with them the prices of goods that must be transported regularly, like produce and meat, going up to reflect the increased cost in distribution. So they came up with the CoreCPI, which is the Consumer Price Index, minus food and energy (gas) related costs. So, no accounting for houses heated by oil, no accounting for $3.50/gallon gas, no accounting for food costs doubling.
Well, no shit, sherlock. If you take out the stuff that's inflating, the inflation rate looks pretty solid. Put that stuff back in, and the inflation rate over the last 8 months according to CPI not CCPI is more like 6.5% annually. That doesn't sound bad, but hell, that's a lot. Especially when you factor in things like my government job giving me a 2% COLA every year means I have like 4% less purchasing power than I did the previous year.
~Wx
Exactly. This is what people just can't wrap their heads around at Microsoft.
Microsoft has enough CASH ASSETS to draw interest from that - BASED ON THE INTEREST, they could never sell another copy of office or windows or any other product ever again, and continue to pay all non-executive employees at their current payrate until their expected retirement date.
I mean, that's a boatload of cash.
~Wx
Furthermore, from what I understand if it *is* your phone they're listening in on, and they want to use it against you, you can't tell anyone about the specifics of your case. You can't call the media and say "the government is investigating me on this bullshit charge and I didn't do anything wrong - in fact they illegally listened to my phone" because you are ordered to keep the particulars secret or whatever.
~Wx
Mhmmm.... are you sure it doesn't just add your IP to an
Cause I'm pretty sure that's what it does.
Aaah, yes, the old "killall doesn't take any arguments in Solaris" trick.
That one has bit me, too, but never on a server where it was a big deal. And soon enough, I started using killproc.