Then make your own god-damn installer. You can handle "interacting services" gracefully; you can check for dependencies and resolve them directly from within the installer, and as for "XML files edited", please, even I, as a total installer noob, can write code to parse a damn XML and put whatever values need to be in there. I tell you why you don't bother building or configuring an installer: so that you can charge your customers money for the product installation too. And big money, that is, under the umbrella that "it's a complex thing".
I've been playing on Miller, the worst affected server, and last night was as smooth as butter. ProSiebenSat only own the servers, SOE are the ones actually running them. That's like blaming Amazon AWS for the Minecraft Login Servers having a bug in them.
Untrue. ProSiebenSat-whatever is the game publisher for EU. You need one of their accounts to play the game if you're from EU. In the US, SOE kept publishing ownership.
Also, You like World of Tanks? That's the definition of Pay-to-win. You're directly paying for things that improve your power - like the best Ammo - that you cannot unlock through normal play.
Untrue. It used to be true (premium ammo for gold only) until patch 0.8.1 - which came out two months ago. Now everything except premium tanks can be obtained without paying a dime.
In Planetside 2, yes, you can buy weapons, but you can't buy the upgrades, or the utility slots, for cash, you need to play the game and get Certs - which can also be used to unlock all the weapons.
Untrue:) Last time I checked (yesterday night, EU time) pretty much ALL upgrades I could find could be bought for cash. Especially weapon attachments, which I was interested to obtain, e.g. 100 certs or 75 credits for this, 1000 certs or 750 credits for that and so on. I was yet to see ONE item that you could only get through certs only.
Are you in an outfit? Are you just rushing the Crown to try and farm, and just getting mown down? Dying every 20 seconds? Are you hacking terminals, or pushing capture points? or are you hanging back and sniping people?
No, I'm just trying to understand the game. The problem I have is inconsistency in performance. I get a flying thingie (sorry, can't remember names off the top of my head) and go for an enemy aircraft, then it disappears, only to plop back into existence a couple seconds later in a different place. I see a dude zipping by in an ATV, now he's on the road, boom, he's 20 feet in the air, bang, he's on the road again. These issues will keep me from throwing as much as a dime at the game as long as they're visible. Maybe your server is great; mine (Cobalt) is only good when there's less than 10 players around. Bring more and you're in for a lagfest.
And yes, i am bad at twitch FPS games, but that's not the problem. I know I'm pretty bad and there's no rush; in all honesty, I didn't even know you could upgrade stuff until two days ago. The problem is that this game, because it was rushed into existence, feels half-baked.
Don't. It's a fucking crap at the moment. EU client didn't work at all for 48 hours after launch, The ProSiebenSat.1 Eu publisher (the fuck sort of name they chose?) is unresponsive to any requests, any sizable battle is fucking full of teleporting players and flying tanks and glitches and huge lag, your pods get constantly dropped inside ENEMY's base (what the fuck, guys) and the grind is exceptionally long. I spent about 6 hours in the game and got maybe 75 upgrade points (and most upgrades START at 50-100 points). but hey, you can buy the all FOR CASH. The only MMOG that really appeals to me even after close to two years is World of Tanks. And they have their issues too, however the game is a lot more mature than it used to be at go-live. Maybe PlanetSide 2 will come to mature two years from now, if it survives. Well, i guess it will, since people managed to suffocate the purchase server too.
Actually, I wasn't. I was gathering feedback from users and then I had to put together presentations based on all the data. It was NOT funny, considering our CEO himself was pushing towards OpenOffice. I never said it's software's fault. I merely point out that a combination of people, process and tools can make the switch very difficult at best. But hey, let's be ironic, 'cause this would indeed help a lot. Pfft.
There's another part here that plays a great deal: what do your customers use? If your customers use mainly Microsoft Office, it's close to impossible to use OpenOffice internally, because conversions between formats are fugly and PDF can only go that far. But for a state-owned organization this may mean nothing, because they mostly provide public services which don't bring revenue, but quite the other way around.
...And for some reason my post above has been marked Troll. Rogue moderators? Listen, the same principle applies for any change, so if a company wants to migrate from OpenOffice to Microsoft Office, they'll be in the same boat and experience the same shit. Just so it's clear that I'm not taking sides here.
If I had a dime for each time I heard any of these mindless assumptions, backed up by nothing else than a retarded "gut feeling"... I'd probably have enough to buy Oracle, Apple and Microsoft combined.
Network admin: there shouldn't be any outage. Result: 6 hours outage happens.
Project Manager: there shouldn't be any cost increase. Result: cost is tripled.
VP: We shouldn't have any issues with this product. Result: product bombs.
Et caetera.
Look, if you start anything with "shouldn't", you're in deep shit. Research is key and assumption of/preparation for the worst is key to a successful transition. No change is flawless, and if it is, then it's a fucking miracle.
To the point now: Whenever you deal with such a large change (OS+office productivity suite) for such a large number of people (in the neighborhood of thousands) there WILL be a LARGE dip in productivity. Unless they were producing almost nothing in the first place, which, considering we're talking about city administration here, is very likely.
In my company, we did have a pilot project which aimed at switching from Microsoft Office to OpenOffice. The results were... disastrous. Some reasons: - Support Personnel had to be trained to be proficient in solving OpenOffice issues experienced by users; - All support documentation needed to be re-created for OpenOffice; - We had literally thousands of "How to" requests per week, all related to OpenOffice (e.g. "how do I apply the corporate template to this presentation"); - The company specific presentation master template had to be created from scratch (and looked ugly even after a month's worth of work); - Turned out that almost half of all Excel spreadsheets used by employees relied on macros to automate stuff. Furthermore, many of those macros were designed around integration with Outlook (e.g. automatically send e-mails from Excel); - When expanding Excel issues to include formulas present in existing files, it all became a fucking nightmare.
At that point we pulled the plug, because the project itself far exceeded the worse expectations in term of costs and time spent (which became additional cost, of course).
Generally speaking, for small companies (less than 10 employees), a conversion is largely painless. But the larger the company is, the less likely it is to switch successfully.
You got the story wrong. It implies that Winnie the Pooh is a pirate and a skilled criminal. To which I totally agree. Throw that dangerous, child-friendly badonkadonk in jail! And kill him with fire!
With me not being from the US, I can tell you with certainty that you're wrong. Also, from my point of view, anyone who's remotely interested in politics is automatically suspect of missing that gene.
Oh my god. being from Romania, I had to look up KKK on the web. Yeah, blame me for being ignorant, but really, I could as well blame you for being a stereotypical prick. Oh well, nobody's perfect:)
It is actually taking 8 minutes:) and not because my machine is slow, but because there's literally dozens of background applications that run on startup (mail server, web server, FTP server, some corporate apps, development environments, etc). I use my main PC for lots of stuff. Also, uptime. If you run a server of any kind, you can't really afford to dual-boot.
Truth be told, I don't know. I use Windows primarily with some Linux VMs in it, so Borderlands 2 runs just fine. If VMs evolved that much, then all one needs is enough RAM. Which VM software are you using?
License costs, hatred towards Microsoft, I-am-1337 feeling, lack of RAM, habit to name a few. Also it makes little sense to spend 95% of your time in a guest OS if the bulk of your work is done there. Not to mention that if you run some heavy stuff on your Linux-based OS (e.g a large DB or e-mail server) it makes really no sense to have a 16 GB RAM machine with Windows and ru n a 15 GB Linux guest on it.
Not really, no. As Virtual Machine support becomes better and host machines become faster, it's *new* games that are a showstopper, not older games from 2+ years ago which can be run in a VM. But so far there's no VM that can properly run Borderlands 2, for example. Dual boot allows you to run only one operating system at a time, that doesn't work for me. With Windows as host OS and Linux as guest OS, I can suspend the guest and be gaming in 20 seconds. Compared to shutdown+restart+boot_the_other_OS procedure, it takes 1/20th of the time. Using dual-boot for gaming is like sex with an inflatable doll: by the time you finish inflating it, your boner turned into a wiener for a while already, you're tired and your mood is shitty.
Luckily, as an US citizen, I wouldn't have to resist the urge, nor would I be subjected to such a situation. From this perspective, the US of A is like that bully who terrorized the neighborhood for ages, and now hides in an absurdly secured house because every community member fucking hates his guts and plots for revenge. Well played!
Slashdot Mirror
Then make your own god-damn installer.
You can handle "interacting services" gracefully; you can check for dependencies and resolve them directly from within the installer, and as for "XML files edited", please, even I, as a total installer noob, can write code to parse a damn XML and put whatever values need to be in there.
I tell you why you don't bother building or configuring an installer: so that you can charge your customers money for the product installation too. And big money, that is, under the umbrella that "it's a complex thing".
You can strafe now in light, fast tanks: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-vr_QkvJd8k
Yeah, sorry, I knew that, but it's still sounding ridiculous. I would have suggested ProSat 71 :)
I've been playing on Miller, the worst affected server, and last night was as smooth as butter. ProSiebenSat only own the servers, SOE are the ones actually running them. That's like blaming Amazon AWS for the Minecraft Login Servers having a bug in them.
Untrue. ProSiebenSat-whatever is the game publisher for EU. You need one of their accounts to play the game if you're from EU. In the US, SOE kept publishing ownership.
Also, You like World of Tanks? That's the definition of Pay-to-win. You're directly paying for things that improve your power - like the best Ammo - that you cannot unlock through normal play.
Untrue. It used to be true (premium ammo for gold only) until patch 0.8.1 - which came out two months ago. Now everything except premium tanks can be obtained without paying a dime.
In Planetside 2, yes, you can buy weapons, but you can't buy the upgrades, or the utility slots, for cash, you need to play the game and get Certs - which can also be used to unlock all the weapons.
Untrue :)
Last time I checked (yesterday night, EU time) pretty much ALL upgrades I could find could be bought for cash. Especially weapon attachments, which I was interested to obtain, e.g. 100 certs or 75 credits for this, 1000 certs or 750 credits for that and so on. I was yet to see ONE item that you could only get through certs only.
Are you in an outfit? Are you just rushing the Crown to try and farm, and just getting mown down? Dying every 20 seconds? Are you hacking terminals, or pushing capture points? or are you hanging back and sniping people?
No, I'm just trying to understand the game. The problem I have is inconsistency in performance. I get a flying thingie (sorry, can't remember names off the top of my head) and go for an enemy aircraft, then it disappears, only to plop back into existence a couple seconds later in a different place. I see a dude zipping by in an ATV, now he's on the road, boom, he's 20 feet in the air, bang, he's on the road again. These issues will keep me from throwing as much as a dime at the game as long as they're visible. Maybe your server is great; mine (Cobalt) is only good when there's less than 10 players around. Bring more and you're in for a lagfest.
And yes, i am bad at twitch FPS games, but that's not the problem. I know I'm pretty bad and there's no rush; in all honesty, I didn't even know you could upgrade stuff until two days ago. The problem is that this game, because it was rushed into existence, feels half-baked.
Don't. It's a fucking crap at the moment. EU client didn't work at all for 48 hours after launch, The ProSiebenSat.1 Eu publisher (the fuck sort of name they chose?) is unresponsive to any requests, any sizable battle is fucking full of teleporting players and flying tanks and glitches and huge lag, your pods get constantly dropped inside ENEMY's base (what the fuck, guys) and the grind is exceptionally long. I spent about 6 hours in the game and got maybe 75 upgrade points (and most upgrades START at 50-100 points). but hey, you can buy the all FOR CASH.
The only MMOG that really appeals to me even after close to two years is World of Tanks. And they have their issues too, however the game is a lot more mature than it used to be at go-live. Maybe PlanetSide 2 will come to mature two years from now, if it survives. Well, i guess it will, since people managed to suffocate the purchase server too.
Actually, I wasn't. I was gathering feedback from users and then I had to put together presentations based on all the data. It was NOT funny, considering our CEO himself was pushing towards OpenOffice.
I never said it's software's fault. I merely point out that a combination of people, process and tools can make the switch very difficult at best. But hey, let's be ironic, 'cause this would indeed help a lot. Pfft.
There's another part here that plays a great deal: what do your customers use? If your customers use mainly Microsoft Office, it's close to impossible to use OpenOffice internally, because conversions between formats are fugly and PDF can only go that far. But for a state-owned organization this may mean nothing, because they mostly provide public services which don't bring revenue, but quite the other way around.
Yeah, on paper. And your theory has at least 20 problems when translated into practice. But, you know, it doesn't matter. It looks FINE on paper.
I'm glad they do. In German. Which I don't speak.
...And for some reason my post above has been marked Troll.
Rogue moderators?
Listen, the same principle applies for any change, so if a company wants to migrate from OpenOffice to Microsoft Office, they'll be in the same boat and experience the same shit. Just so it's clear that I'm not taking sides here.
Training costs shouldn't be high.
costs shouldn't be high.
shouldn't
If I had a dime for each time I heard any of these mindless assumptions, backed up by nothing else than a retarded "gut feeling"... I'd probably have enough to buy Oracle, Apple and Microsoft combined.
Network admin: there shouldn't be any outage.
Result: 6 hours outage happens.
Project Manager: there shouldn't be any cost increase.
Result: cost is tripled.
VP: We shouldn't have any issues with this product.
Result: product bombs.
Et caetera.
Look, if you start anything with "shouldn't", you're in deep shit. Research is key and assumption of/preparation for the worst is key to a successful transition. No change is flawless, and if it is, then it's a fucking miracle.
To the point now: Whenever you deal with such a large change (OS+office productivity suite) for such a large number of people (in the neighborhood of thousands) there WILL be a LARGE dip in productivity. Unless they were producing almost nothing in the first place, which, considering we're talking about city administration here, is very likely.
In my company, we did have a pilot project which aimed at switching from Microsoft Office to OpenOffice. The results were... disastrous. Some reasons:
- Support Personnel had to be trained to be proficient in solving OpenOffice issues experienced by users;
- All support documentation needed to be re-created for OpenOffice;
- We had literally thousands of "How to" requests per week, all related to OpenOffice (e.g. "how do I apply the corporate template to this presentation");
- The company specific presentation master template had to be created from scratch (and looked ugly even after a month's worth of work);
- Turned out that almost half of all Excel spreadsheets used by employees relied on macros to automate stuff. Furthermore, many of those macros were designed around integration with Outlook (e.g. automatically send e-mails from Excel);
- When expanding Excel issues to include formulas present in existing files, it all became a fucking nightmare.
At that point we pulled the plug, because the project itself far exceeded the worse expectations in term of costs and time spent (which became additional cost, of course).
Generally speaking, for small companies (less than 10 employees), a conversion is largely painless. But the larger the company is, the less likely it is to switch successfully.
You got the story wrong. It implies that Winnie the Pooh is a pirate and a skilled criminal. To which I totally agree. Throw that dangerous, child-friendly badonkadonk in jail! And kill him with fire!
With me not being from the US, I can tell you with certainty that you're wrong.
Also, from my point of view, anyone who's remotely interested in politics is automatically suspect of missing that gene.
Oh my god. being from Romania, I had to look up KKK on the web. Yeah, blame me for being ignorant, but really, I could as well blame you for being a stereotypical prick. :)
Oh well, nobody's perfect
After watching human beings for over 3 decades, that gene is rare. Very rare.
Thank you for this nice, well-written post.
Rebooting to a different OS might mean shutting down services that you need to keep up, for example a webserver or a mail server.
It is actually taking 8 minutes :) and not because my machine is slow, but because there's literally dozens of background applications that run on startup (mail server, web server, FTP server, some corporate apps, development environments, etc). I use my main PC for lots of stuff. Also, uptime. If you run a server of any kind, you can't really afford to dual-boot.
Truth be told, I don't know. I use Windows primarily with some Linux VMs in it, so Borderlands 2 runs just fine. If VMs evolved that much, then all one needs is enough RAM. Which VM software are you using?
Mark the above funny! You, sir, made me laugh.
License costs, hatred towards Microsoft, I-am-1337 feeling, lack of RAM, habit to name a few. Also it makes little sense to spend 95% of your time in a guest OS if the bulk of your work is done there. Not to mention that if you run some heavy stuff on your Linux-based OS (e.g a large DB or e-mail server) it makes really no sense to have a 16 GB RAM machine with Windows and ru n a 15 GB Linux guest on it.
Not really, no. As Virtual Machine support becomes better and host machines become faster, it's *new* games that are a showstopper, not older games from 2+ years ago which can be run in a VM. But so far there's no VM that can properly run Borderlands 2, for example.
Dual boot allows you to run only one operating system at a time, that doesn't work for me. With Windows as host OS and Linux as guest OS, I can suspend the guest and be gaming in 20 seconds. Compared to shutdown+restart+boot_the_other_OS procedure, it takes 1/20th of the time.
Using dual-boot for gaming is like sex with an inflatable doll: by the time you finish inflating it, your boner turned into a wiener for a while already, you're tired and your mood is shitty.
You are right. But it means it's better for the Average Joe.
Sorry mate, I'm only a bastard if I start the whole thing. The other dude started it, I'm just playing along :)
Luckily, as an US citizen, I wouldn't have to resist the urge, nor would I be subjected to such a situation. From this perspective, the US of A is like that bully who terrorized the neighborhood for ages, and now hides in an absurdly secured house because every community member fucking hates his guts and plots for revenge. Well played!
I would have laughed my ass of, after yelling BOOM by surprise.
Priceless, therefore worth a short arrest session, tee hee.