Again, to be honest, what is your setup? 5 RedHat systems? 100? 1000? What enterprise-level software were they running? Oracle? SAP? Did you have to deal with user-level issues regarding particular client software?
My responsibility extends to both sides of the fence (servers and desktops) for thousands of machines. The software they use is disparate and spread out across the globe.
I don't mean this as an offense (as we do have RedHat admins in our enterprise), but the majority of Linux machines out there were fairly simple to patch because there wasn't much going on with them. Most of our RedHat admins just have a bunch of Apache servers. The ones that had a large number of servers were using them as basic clusters -- timezone issues wouldn't be a problem anyway. The Windows boxes were handling things like procurement and payroll, with client software to match - stuff that relied on time values in multiple locations and had a much bigger matrix of patches and potential conflicts. When all your server does is serve a few pages or render some basic results, it doesn't really matter when it's patched.
If you haven't been following the mayhem, the original DST patch for Windows XP/2003 came out very late last year. That was coupled with a call to edit the timezone files manually in 2000. Fine.
Then Microsoft released another update in January, replacing the existing. That had to be regression tested and rolled out. Then they released a cumulative update with that and a new fix for a specific timezone (think it was Nova Scotia - can't remember). Fine.
Then, Exchange team came out and said "Guess what, now you need to update your servers as well." But you also need to update Outlook, because if you tell Exchange to fix calendars it'll screw them up in other countries that *aren't* changing this Sunday.
All the while, people are creating appointments that will become off by an hour when the time switches over. The Outlook update has gone through multiple revisions and just got a silent installer about a week ago. The earlier you did the system patch, the more likely appointments will be off.
On top of this, Blackberry and Treos didn't get their patches until late, and you need to do those AFTER the Exchange/Outlook patches. So we had to wait for MS to sort this nonsense out.
And I'm just talking messaging here. This doesn't even begin to go into the other software that's affected.
These last 2 weeks have been crazy. Monstrous. Patches for Windows, patches for Exchange, patches for Outlook, patches for Java, patches for Oracle, patches for Act, patches for Blackberries, patches for Treos, patches for that weird-ass cell the COO uses and no one else does. Patches to replace patches. Patches to undo the damage other patches have made. I firmly place blame on the software companies for waiting this long to sort things out, but this says it all: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/914387 NINETEEN REVISIONS. That's the most for an MS KB article ever.
Yes, there are zero-day vulnerabilities out there. However, considering the potential trainwreck that's going to happen Monday, no admin in their right mind would install new patches on Tuesday. No admin worth their salt would do so anyway: usually you wait a few days for the early adopters to fish out the bugs and MS to release any new versions. You let your security hardware and software (which has barely needed to be patched) deal with any potential problems. That's just smart business sense.
For those of you admining a handful of servers, serving basic stuff like webpages, laughing at the work some people have to do for this, that's great. Enjoy yourselves. For the rest of us with a real workload: hundreds of servers and tens of thousands of desktops, all with software on top of software that may or may not be compatible with each other patchwise, this last few weeks have been a living hell. A couple people getting their Word documents hosed is nothing compared to payroll systems not working, trade systems coughing up blood, etc. I'll hand that responsibility off to Symantec and friends -- I've got more important stuff to worry about.
That's funny, I have something I don't understand either: why bother?
People were using the original Xbox as a media center. I never understood why.
For the amount of money it costs to get an Xbox 360 with an HD, you can build your own media PC with off the shelf parts and run whatever OS you like. You don't have to worry about coding around 3 cores or that the Xbox 360 looks terrible in most home theater setups. You don't have to worry about accidentally updating firmware and crippling functionality. Just build you own box (mine is slim and almost impossible to see), throw a massive HD and tuner card in there and you're done.
People who hack these things have way too much time on their hands -- there's seriously no point in messing around with this kind of crap when you can build a completely "open" (at least more open that Xbox 360) PC for free. (And no, not even for the "really nice video card" -- most people are never going to use it in Linux and there's better cards available for free.
Go to Mac because of possible saved money having to deal with less viruses/crap/user error? Some money saved.
Retrain hundreds of administrators in your company to support thousands of users who have only known Windows in their life? Suffer when Macs don't quite fit into the broken LDAP/kerberos infrastructure that is Active Directory and you get all kinds of strange errors? Having to deal with random Office files not opening properly, WebEx not working right for the executives, etc.
REALLY fucking expensive.
Techheads look at just one part of the picture: Macs = less viruses and less support costs. They don't look at the bigger picture. Trust us, my company replaced one of our sub-company's entire desktop environment with hundreds of Macs and virtualization software. Totally failed experiment.
On average it takes a player 15 days (days, not hours) of game time to get from 1-60. It probably takes about 2 additional days to get from 61-70 (not enough data has been collected). While that seems high, if you break it out over weeks since the game started, that's about 3-4 hours a week -- not a huge amount (people easily watch that much TV in a week, or go to a movie or ballgame).
The running gag is that anyone can get to 70 in Wow. And that's true -- it just takes time. In previous games, you'd hit a glass barrier where grouping and raids would be required to progress. In Wow you can go all the way alone just playing by yourself when you want. That's a major improvement.
As the other replier pointed out, training is free. You get flight form and the ability to ride any regular flying mount when you train at 68. Outside this, there's another great benefit: Druid flight form is instant cast. It's also immune to polymorph and breaks certain snares. That means, at any given time (even falling hundreds of feet) a Druid can shift and fly away. It's an invaluable addition to their repertoire.
Casual/hardcore is difficult to define. Me personally, I play maybe 1-2 hours a session maybe 2-3 days a week. I consider that pretty casual. Some people make it a point to play every night for hours on end.
1 hour a week (what you're describing) seems really REALLY casual. Like "10 minutes of Tetris" casual. I'm not saying that's necessarily bad, but yeah, it's going to take you a while to get anywhere in this style of game at that rate.
That said, Blizzard has been really good about letting both styles of play develop. If you have only 20 minutes to play you CAN get somewhere, even if it's just raising your XP bar up a bit or getting some leather to make a new hat. Previous games in this genre would require a commitment -- with Wow the commitment is optional.
Why not cater to the hardcore market? Blizz does, to a degree. However, I'd venture to say the bulk of those 8 million accounts have never raided, have never seen Naxx, etc. Most people have families and careers and, like you, can only devote a couple hours of time to the game a week (if that). Blizzard gets the same fee regardless, so it's good to cater to both. (Arguably, they make more money off you, because you don't chewing up server processing and bandwidth all the time).
It's interesting, because the "casual/hardcore" definition has been debated for awhile. Some people contend that if you simply raid (play with 40 other players, now 25) you're hardcore. Others claims it's the amount of time devoted to the game.
For outsiders looking in (like yourself) it's convenient to view all Wow players as addicted basement-dwellers. That's blatantly incorrect. The reality is that most players play infrequently, have career and families to worry about, and their Wow schedule is dictated by their life schedule (not the other way around). You don't get to 8 million+ players with just the hardcore.
I myself consider myself casual. I'll log in maybe 1-2 hours a couple days a week. Others make it a point to log in every day for many hours, but they are the minority. (Again, it's convenient for you to tout otherwise, because you don't know any better - similar to when the media lambastes "video games" everytime a kid shoots another kid and they need something to blame it on).
For me, the expansion has been a blessing because a lot of content can be fitted into my small window of time available. Again, most players are like me. To paraphrase Wow regulars, "l2understand".
I'm a casual player as well and curious as to what you've been smoking.
My only character in the game was a level 60. I haven't done any of the new races (I heard they're well designed and beautiful). From level 60-70, I've probably gone on 20 small-man dungeon runs (5 players) and done about 400-500 quests. I've levelled up my leatherworking and saved money for my epic flying mount (Druids get the regular one for free). Even when I play totally solo, the new content has kept me enthralled.
Will you enjoy the game more if you level to 60 and find a few friends to play with. Yes. Is that hard? No. If you're still struggling to get to 60 (again, not hard) you're going to see generic content -- nothing from 20-60 has changed. For every other casual player who's at 60, the expansion has been a blessing with loads of new content and lots of upgrades.
I think Slashdot wants the community to foam at the mouth about the *potential* breach of privacy Wikipedia could be involved in by revealing the poster (or, at least, revealing where the poster posted from). Of course, Slashdot is relying on the fact that most people won't RTFA and see that Wikipedia hasn't even been formerly notified by the lawyer brigade. Never mind that the IP is freely available on the Wikipedia page's history. So, in short: Slashdot wants Slashdotters to foam at the mouth so they get more pageviews. Pretty common tactic.
Reread what I wrote. Those were considered "state of the art". They still had a heavy text component because it was hard to relay a convincing/emotional story with 256 colors.
Twenty years ago I remember an 80-character email program my school used that required remembering about 40 shortcuts. None of them were displayed. You could work on one email at a time -- that's it. There was no GUI email program with easy to understand menus. There was no way to work on more than one email at a time. You were fortunate if you got copy and paste.
Twenty years ago I remember the "media" I "collected". Amazing 256-color graphic files. Mostly of stupid things like bowls of fruit (porn really wasn't all it was cracked up to be at the time). No pictures of family and friends in high detail. No means of easily storing said photos for extended periods of time.
Twenty years ago I remember when a "state of the art" game was one that wasn't entirely text-based. When an adventure game's inventory had a max of 16 items and enemies were scripted (and therefore dumb as bricks). No photorealistic visuals to draw you in. No fairly natural AI to breathe life to the world. And certainly no way to play with thousands of others at the same time.
My point?
All of these changes have been the result of higher memory, faster processors, etc. Yes, we use a bigger memory footprint nowadays. So what? Isn't broadening the appeal of the PC (families storing photos and grandmothers that can actually work the email program) worth it? Yes, the fundamental operations haven't changed (write email, send email, etc). Big deal. Call that a testament to stellar original design than a foible of modern design.
Fact of the matter is I *can* do more, much more, than I could with my PC from 20 years ago. And I can do it in an easier way (blame Vista/OS X all you want -- they're still better UIs than what we used in '87). That's called "progress", regardless if the memory footprint grows or not (and the fundamental tenants of computing stay largely the same).
I've made that point, actually, a million times to them. "Hope I don't get hit by a truck tomorrow." Their response is "Make sure you document all procedures and workflows. That way someone else can take over when you leave."
Of course, that's moronic. There aren't many that admin a group of sites like this, particularly alone. But they don't want to hear that.
As for how they amassed their fortune, beats me. I assume at some point they had competent management. I consider this position a means to a goal, not the top of the ladder, so I don't typically spend too much time thinking about it.
The differences between the MacBook and MacBook Pro are very few and certainly not worth the $.
Fwa? When I was purchasing my first Mac in years I did a comparison between the two. At this point I wouldn't touch the MacBook with a 10-foot pole.
The MacBook Pro has:
* Faster processors. * Larger screens at better resolutions. * Faster RAM. Support for more RAM. Better amount of RAM in default configuration. * Faster bus. * Option for a faster DVD writer. * Non-crappy onboard graphics. * More ports, more options. * A better design (in my opinion -- things like the lighted keyboard are surprisingly useful).
If you're a college kid with empty pockets I'm sure the MacBook is fine. If you want to do real work, you need a MacBook Pro.
Reread what I wrote. There are 300 recognized "noteworthy events" (management nomenclature, not mine). Those are events defined as important enough that they warrant a notification email -- not that I receive 300 messages a day. Typically, I probably receive about 10-20 a day, most of them minor (but enough to warrant at least some attention).
And, it was the exception, not the rule, to get paged about a failure of any kind after hours.
Hardware failure, in particular, is inevitable. You mean to tell me, across 200 servers, that you never received a notification than a hard drive failed somewhere after hours? That an HBA crapped out? As I mentioned, each box has about 10 "important" pieces of hardware in it. The odds that something will fail across 2000 pieces of hardware on occasion are pretty good.
Or, rather, did you NOT KNOW there was a failure? In my situation, I like to know these things even if they don't have an immediate effect on our output. Does a hard drive failure on a node necessitate a disaster? No. But 3 or more drives failing will. In the meantime, there's going to be IO considerations/barriers on that node that will effect cluster performance. I like to be aware of that.
Oh, I'm one of those CIO/CTO people you aspire to be, so while I may sound like a pompous prick to you by delivering news you need to hear in a terse way, it doesn't change the fact that you should be able to tune your environment such that you don't get called after hours on a regular basis about failures. And I can tell you, that until you grok that, you're chances of making it to the C-level aren't good.
I'm not sure where you're getting "regular failures" from. Reread my original posts. I said that if my Blackberry's light is blinking after hours, I check it. You said you don't (how a CIO/CTO gets away with this and is not considered "irresponsible" is beyond me -- but I digress).
That doesn't mean my Blackberry's light always blinks after hours. It doesn't mean we have failures every night. Typically at least one piece of hardware craps out every 2 weeks across the 200 nodes. As I said, it's inevitable that hardware fails on occasion.
In terms of pompousness, I've met a lot of great directors/CIOs/CTOs that have provided valuable opinions without attempting to be condescending. I learn from them, not from a random Slashdot poster.
Finally, as for C-level, buddy, way beyond that. Although my hope is to get past "levels" completely and guide people formerly in my position without appearing as an ass.
Well, first, I'd rather not be a sysadmin by trade. I'd rather be a director or move towards CTO/CIO, which is why I'm focusing my time on education/networking. By and large, a monkey could do my position (or a senior sysadmin -- or anyone who would write "peer-reviewed papers on the subject). It's the technological equivalent of being an automechanic, and anyone who writes about them would be better served writing about Joe at the local garage (might want to consider a career change, bud).
That said, I get alerts based on very specific events. The issue is that I'm motoring 10, 20-node clusters -- 200 machines with probably in the neighborhood of 2000 "important" pieces of hardware that can fail. Let me clarify what I mean by "monitoring" -- I'm the only one who does it. I'm the one who not only gets the alerts but has to head down to one of four sites to repair the nodes. I'm also in charge of optimizing and occasionally tightening the code that runs them. I'm also in charge of security (the IP on these boxes is worth about 1 billion). In any sanely run company, I would at least have 1 underling, so when a hard drive failed in node 18 of cluster 6, I could push a button and say "Johnny, go ship out a drive to the Canada site". Instead, I have to hop on a plane and remember my passport. Braindead way of doing things? Absolutely. I've argued that many times with management. But budgets are budgets and they'd rather pay one lackey a nice salary then 4 lackeys (one for each site).
As it stands right now, I have multiple scripts that weed out largely unnecessary alerts. Node 4 of cluster 2 is at 90% CPU? Don't care. However, there's only so much one can weed out if you're the only admin. I need to know when critical hardware on any of the 200 nodes fail. I need to know when a node or cluster is pinned at 100% for an extended period of time. I need to know when a competitor might be trying to break into one of the boxes. I need to know if it's safe to bring down half a cluster for a code change (which I usually have to write myself). What is your solution when you have 1 admin and about 300 recognized noteworthy events in this type of environment? "Ignore your Blackberry?"
In short, I need to act as a responsible employee, as I have no one else to fall back on to do the same. If that means checking my Blackberry on occasion, so be it. If your response is "Your job sucks," well, I agree. Most do. And I doubt I'll be here much longer.
Bottom line, though, if the alternative is losing cluster time, losing a site, or losing a couple hundred million worth of IP, I'll take a minor inconvenience of checking a blinking light.
P.s. Calling someone a "bad admin" when you know nothing about the environment, workload, etc. is bad form. My statement that you don't seem to be a sysadmin still stands -- you seem more to be a pompous prick.
I have a blackberry. I do not have any audio/vibro "you have mail" announcement enabled (nor do I on my desktop computer's email app). When I get home at the end of the day, guess what? I stop looking at it! Wow! What a concept, huh? But wait, what if it's really urgent? Well, then the blackberry makes a ringing noise and I talk to the person on the other end. Translated: If they really want to get hold of me RIGHT THIS VERY MINUTE, then they'll call when I don't answer their email.
You're obviously not a sysadmin.
I have all my systems email me if something goes wrong....Which means, if I don't get the email, things just get worse and worse and someone finally calls me and tells me the users are irate. (Or worse, the system degrades to the point that it'll take me 2x or 3x as long to bring it back up then if I had gotten the email in the first place)....Which means, if I don't monitor these emails, users can't get their work done. Following this, the boss gets pissed....Which means, if I don't check my Blackberry, my boss could fire me.
We're given these things under the assumption that we'll use them. While I agree that the situation has gone too far -- and I'd very much like to stick my Blackberry in a potato, and launch said potato out of some PVC pipes -- that's not how things work today. I don't have my servers call me when there's a problem (how irritating would that be, getting ringed every so often because some log was full?) The altnerative is to suffer the pain of the little blinking light.
Many people don't "help make the world better" -- ever. Think about it: what have you actually done to "make the world better" today? Name one thing. I'll wait.
What people consider "bettering the world" is largely subjective. I'm sure George Bush honestly thought he was bettering the world when he started the Iraq war. What's "good" for the world is individually defined.
Whether or not playing these games is a waste of one's time is another discussion altogether.
Fact of the matter is, if they weren't playing these games, most of these people would be watching TV. Or maybe sleeping. You can't naturally assume that the two choices for them are "play games" and "better the world". Doing so is overly simplistic and utterly moronic.
I disagree somewhat on some of your points and completely on some others.
* Art direction should have gone to Okami, no question. But Twilight Princess really isn't the shiznet Nintendo fans are making it out to be. I'm not talking on a technical level (which we all knew Zelda couldn't compete in), but in terms of pure art. A couple of green/purple on black textures? Bland grasses and forests? It honestly looked like they kept the exact same aesthetic as N64 (which was ok a decade ago, but fairly plain now). For a good example of great artwork with low polys, check out Burning Crusade.
* Bender, er... Marcus was a great character. He didn't need to have an over-elaborate back story -- texture was added in the delivery. John Di Maggio did a great job bringing him to life.
* "Outstanding achievement in visual engineering" means "pretty graphics on a technical level" (not hard to figure out, actually). Gears of War pretty much ran away with this. They set a bar that has yet to be topped on any console or the PC.
1.) You obviously know nothing about advertising. If you worked in the industry, you would realize that $2 million *IS* a substantial amount of money for a marketing program that probably cost Turner originally less than $50k.
Advertising is all about get your work in front of as many eyes of the target demographic as possible for the cheapest possible money. Considering most younger males don't watch Fox News for their terror alerts (and the whole situation still hasn't been covered on the Daily Show) this was wasted money. The only people "on the fringe" that really noticed were those that saw the ads physically in the cities before they were taken down. The majority in the demographic probably thought to themselves "AQTF. Cool." The rest looked at a pixelated video game character giving them the finger and shrugged it off.
No matter what way you slice it, it's wasted money.
2.) While I agree that our "Department of Homeland Security" has helped with anything but, the whole "asphyxiation" thing is a complete urban legend. Trust me, the US government doesn't need Slashdotters spreading lies about their incompetence -- they're more than enough incompetent alone.
Joe Terrorist: "Well, let me just root around MA for a good pizza place... hello there! What's this?"
Terrorists know their targets way, WAY before they ever go to Google Maps (IF they go to Google Maps). The only time someone would search for aerial photos is if they knew what they were targetting and wanted a better view. They don't just spin the globe randomly.
Searching the entire world for pixelated pictures, obviously, would take forever. No one has that kind of time (not even Joe Terrorist). The smart ones would simply look up the nuclear plants in the phone book.
Damn fanboys, it's like they think Blizzard redefined the whole genre or something.
They only made the genre accessible to millions, polished it to a sheen and made it feasible for a player to spend hundreds of hours in game and still have new experiences (instead of killing the same spawn over and over again). No, that's not "redefining" by any stretch of the imagination -- no sir.
Slashdot Mirror
Again, to be honest, what is your setup? 5 RedHat systems? 100? 1000? What enterprise-level software were they running? Oracle? SAP? Did you have to deal with user-level issues regarding particular client software?
My responsibility extends to both sides of the fence (servers and desktops) for thousands of machines. The software they use is disparate and spread out across the globe.
I don't mean this as an offense (as we do have RedHat admins in our enterprise), but the majority of Linux machines out there were fairly simple to patch because there wasn't much going on with them. Most of our RedHat admins just have a bunch of Apache servers. The ones that had a large number of servers were using them as basic clusters -- timezone issues wouldn't be a problem anyway. The Windows boxes were handling things like procurement and payroll, with client software to match - stuff that relied on time values in multiple locations and had a much bigger matrix of patches and potential conflicts. When all your server does is serve a few pages or render some basic results, it doesn't really matter when it's patched.
If you haven't been following the mayhem, the original DST patch for Windows XP/2003 came out very late last year. That was coupled with a call to edit the timezone files manually in 2000. Fine.
Then Microsoft released another update in January, replacing the existing. That had to be regression tested and rolled out. Then they released a cumulative update with that and a new fix for a specific timezone (think it was Nova Scotia - can't remember). Fine.
Then, Exchange team came out and said "Guess what, now you need to update your servers as well." But you also need to update Outlook, because if you tell Exchange to fix calendars it'll screw them up in other countries that *aren't* changing this Sunday.
All the while, people are creating appointments that will become off by an hour when the time switches over. The Outlook update has gone through multiple revisions and just got a silent installer about a week ago. The earlier you did the system patch, the more likely appointments will be off.
On top of this, Blackberry and Treos didn't get their patches until late, and you need to do those AFTER the Exchange/Outlook patches. So we had to wait for MS to sort this nonsense out.
And I'm just talking messaging here. This doesn't even begin to go into the other software that's affected.
You obviously don't work in an enterprise.
These last 2 weeks have been crazy. Monstrous. Patches for Windows, patches for Exchange, patches for Outlook, patches for Java, patches for Oracle, patches for Act, patches for Blackberries, patches for Treos, patches for that weird-ass cell the COO uses and no one else does. Patches to replace patches. Patches to undo the damage other patches have made. I firmly place blame on the software companies for waiting this long to sort things out, but this says it all: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/914387 NINETEEN REVISIONS. That's the most for an MS KB article ever.
Yes, there are zero-day vulnerabilities out there. However, considering the potential trainwreck that's going to happen Monday, no admin in their right mind would install new patches on Tuesday. No admin worth their salt would do so anyway: usually you wait a few days for the early adopters to fish out the bugs and MS to release any new versions. You let your security hardware and software (which has barely needed to be patched) deal with any potential problems. That's just smart business sense.
For those of you admining a handful of servers, serving basic stuff like webpages, laughing at the work some people have to do for this, that's great. Enjoy yourselves. For the rest of us with a real workload: hundreds of servers and tens of thousands of desktops, all with software on top of software that may or may not be compatible with each other patchwise, this last few weeks have been a living hell. A couple people getting their Word documents hosed is nothing compared to payroll systems not working, trade systems coughing up blood, etc. I'll hand that responsibility off to Symantec and friends -- I've got more important stuff to worry about.
That's nothing to worry about. The scary part is people will still know your Reputation and Specialization. *cough*
"But there's one thing I don't understand"
That's funny, I have something I don't understand either: why bother?
People were using the original Xbox as a media center. I never understood why.
For the amount of money it costs to get an Xbox 360 with an HD, you can build your own media PC with off the shelf parts and run whatever OS you like. You don't have to worry about coding around 3 cores or that the Xbox 360 looks terrible in most home theater setups. You don't have to worry about accidentally updating firmware and crippling functionality. Just build you own box (mine is slim and almost impossible to see), throw a massive HD and tuner card in there and you're done.
People who hack these things have way too much time on their hands -- there's seriously no point in messing around with this kind of crap when you can build a completely "open" (at least more open that Xbox 360) PC for free. (And no, not even for the "really nice video card" -- most people are never going to use it in Linux and there's better cards available for free.
Go to Mac because of possible saved money having to deal with less viruses/crap/user error? Some money saved.
Retrain hundreds of administrators in your company to support thousands of users who have only known Windows in their life? Suffer when Macs don't quite fit into the broken LDAP/kerberos infrastructure that is Active Directory and you get all kinds of strange errors? Having to deal with random Office files not opening properly, WebEx not working right for the executives, etc.
REALLY fucking expensive.
Techheads look at just one part of the picture: Macs = less viruses and less support costs. They don't look at the bigger picture. Trust us, my company replaced one of our sub-company's entire desktop environment with hundreds of Macs and virtualization software. Totally failed experiment.
On average it takes a player 15 days (days, not hours) of game time to get from 1-60. It probably takes about 2 additional days to get from 61-70 (not enough data has been collected). While that seems high, if you break it out over weeks since the game started, that's about 3-4 hours a week -- not a huge amount (people easily watch that much TV in a week, or go to a movie or ballgame).
The running gag is that anyone can get to 70 in Wow. And that's true -- it just takes time. In previous games, you'd hit a glass barrier where grouping and raids would be required to progress. In Wow you can go all the way alone just playing by yourself when you want. That's a major improvement.
As the other replier pointed out, training is free. You get flight form and the ability to ride any regular flying mount when you train at 68. Outside this, there's another great benefit: Druid flight form is instant cast. It's also immune to polymorph and breaks certain snares. That means, at any given time (even falling hundreds of feet) a Druid can shift and fly away. It's an invaluable addition to their repertoire.
Casual/hardcore is difficult to define. Me personally, I play maybe 1-2 hours a session maybe 2-3 days a week. I consider that pretty casual. Some people make it a point to play every night for hours on end.
1 hour a week (what you're describing) seems really REALLY casual. Like "10 minutes of Tetris" casual. I'm not saying that's necessarily bad, but yeah, it's going to take you a while to get anywhere in this style of game at that rate.
That said, Blizzard has been really good about letting both styles of play develop. If you have only 20 minutes to play you CAN get somewhere, even if it's just raising your XP bar up a bit or getting some leather to make a new hat. Previous games in this genre would require a commitment -- with Wow the commitment is optional.
Why not cater to the hardcore market? Blizz does, to a degree. However, I'd venture to say the bulk of those 8 million accounts have never raided, have never seen Naxx, etc. Most people have families and careers and, like you, can only devote a couple hours of time to the game a week (if that). Blizzard gets the same fee regardless, so it's good to cater to both. (Arguably, they make more money off you, because you don't chewing up server processing and bandwidth all the time).
It's interesting, because the "casual/hardcore" definition has been debated for awhile. Some people contend that if you simply raid (play with 40 other players, now 25) you're hardcore. Others claims it's the amount of time devoted to the game.
For outsiders looking in (like yourself) it's convenient to view all Wow players as addicted basement-dwellers. That's blatantly incorrect. The reality is that most players play infrequently, have career and families to worry about, and their Wow schedule is dictated by their life schedule (not the other way around). You don't get to 8 million+ players with just the hardcore.
I myself consider myself casual. I'll log in maybe 1-2 hours a couple days a week. Others make it a point to log in every day for many hours, but they are the minority. (Again, it's convenient for you to tout otherwise, because you don't know any better - similar to when the media lambastes "video games" everytime a kid shoots another kid and they need something to blame it on).
For me, the expansion has been a blessing because a lot of content can be fitted into my small window of time available. Again, most players are like me. To paraphrase Wow regulars, "l2understand".
I'm a casual player as well and curious as to what you've been smoking.
My only character in the game was a level 60. I haven't done any of the new races (I heard they're well designed and beautiful). From level 60-70, I've probably gone on 20 small-man dungeon runs (5 players) and done about 400-500 quests. I've levelled up my leatherworking and saved money for my epic flying mount (Druids get the regular one for free). Even when I play totally solo, the new content has kept me enthralled.
Will you enjoy the game more if you level to 60 and find a few friends to play with. Yes. Is that hard? No. If you're still struggling to get to 60 (again, not hard) you're going to see generic content -- nothing from 20-60 has changed. For every other casual player who's at 60, the expansion has been a blessing with loads of new content and lots of upgrades.
I think Slashdot wants the community to foam at the mouth about the *potential* breach of privacy Wikipedia could be involved in by revealing the poster (or, at least, revealing where the poster posted from). Of course, Slashdot is relying on the fact that most people won't RTFA and see that Wikipedia hasn't even been formerly notified by the lawyer brigade. Never mind that the IP is freely available on the Wikipedia page's history. So, in short: Slashdot wants Slashdotters to foam at the mouth so they get more pageviews. Pretty common tactic.
Reread what I wrote. Those were considered "state of the art". They still had a heavy text component because it was hard to relay a convincing/emotional story with 256 colors.
Twenty years ago I remember an 80-character email program my school used that required remembering about 40 shortcuts. None of them were displayed. You could work on one email at a time -- that's it. There was no GUI email program with easy to understand menus. There was no way to work on more than one email at a time. You were fortunate if you got copy and paste.
Twenty years ago I remember the "media" I "collected". Amazing 256-color graphic files. Mostly of stupid things like bowls of fruit (porn really wasn't all it was cracked up to be at the time). No pictures of family and friends in high detail. No means of easily storing said photos for extended periods of time.
Twenty years ago I remember when a "state of the art" game was one that wasn't entirely text-based. When an adventure game's inventory had a max of 16 items and enemies were scripted (and therefore dumb as bricks). No photorealistic visuals to draw you in. No fairly natural AI to breathe life to the world. And certainly no way to play with thousands of others at the same time.
My point?
All of these changes have been the result of higher memory, faster processors, etc. Yes, we use a bigger memory footprint nowadays. So what? Isn't broadening the appeal of the PC (families storing photos and grandmothers that can actually work the email program) worth it? Yes, the fundamental operations haven't changed (write email, send email, etc). Big deal. Call that a testament to stellar original design than a foible of modern design.
Fact of the matter is I *can* do more, much more, than I could with my PC from 20 years ago. And I can do it in an easier way (blame Vista/OS X all you want -- they're still better UIs than what we used in '87). That's called "progress", regardless if the memory footprint grows or not (and the fundamental tenants of computing stay largely the same).
I've made that point, actually, a million times to them. "Hope I don't get hit by a truck tomorrow." Their response is "Make sure you document all procedures and workflows. That way someone else can take over when you leave."
Of course, that's moronic. There aren't many that admin a group of sites like this, particularly alone. But they don't want to hear that.
As for how they amassed their fortune, beats me. I assume at some point they had competent management. I consider this position a means to a goal, not the top of the ladder, so I don't typically spend too much time thinking about it.
Fwa? When I was purchasing my first Mac in years I did a comparison between the two. At this point I wouldn't touch the MacBook with a 10-foot pole.
The MacBook Pro has:
* Faster processors.
* Larger screens at better resolutions.
* Faster RAM. Support for more RAM. Better amount of RAM in default configuration.
* Faster bus.
* Option for a faster DVD writer.
* Non-crappy onboard graphics.
* More ports, more options.
* A better design (in my opinion -- things like the lighted keyboard are surprisingly useful).
If you're a college kid with empty pockets I'm sure the MacBook is fine. If you want to do real work, you need a MacBook Pro.
Hardware failure, in particular, is inevitable. You mean to tell me, across 200 servers, that you never received a notification than a hard drive failed somewhere after hours? That an HBA crapped out? As I mentioned, each box has about 10 "important" pieces of hardware in it. The odds that something will fail across 2000 pieces of hardware on occasion are pretty good.
Or, rather, did you NOT KNOW there was a failure? In my situation, I like to know these things even if they don't have an immediate effect on our output. Does a hard drive failure on a node necessitate a disaster? No. But 3 or more drives failing will. In the meantime, there's going to be IO considerations/barriers on that node that will effect cluster performance. I like to be aware of that.
I'm not sure where you're getting "regular failures" from. Reread my original posts. I said that if my Blackberry's light is blinking after hours, I check it. You said you don't (how a CIO/CTO gets away with this and is not considered "irresponsible" is beyond me -- but I digress).
That doesn't mean my Blackberry's light always blinks after hours. It doesn't mean we have failures every night. Typically at least one piece of hardware craps out every 2 weeks across the 200 nodes. As I said, it's inevitable that hardware fails on occasion.
In terms of pompousness, I've met a lot of great directors/CIOs/CTOs that have provided valuable opinions without attempting to be condescending. I learn from them, not from a random Slashdot poster.
Finally, as for C-level, buddy, way beyond that. Although my hope is to get past "levels" completely and guide people formerly in my position without appearing as an ass.
Well, first, I'd rather not be a sysadmin by trade. I'd rather be a director or move towards CTO/CIO, which is why I'm focusing my time on education/networking. By and large, a monkey could do my position (or a senior sysadmin -- or anyone who would write "peer-reviewed papers on the subject). It's the technological equivalent of being an automechanic, and anyone who writes about them would be better served writing about Joe at the local garage (might want to consider a career change, bud).
That said, I get alerts based on very specific events. The issue is that I'm motoring 10, 20-node clusters -- 200 machines with probably in the neighborhood of 2000 "important" pieces of hardware that can fail. Let me clarify what I mean by "monitoring" -- I'm the only one who does it. I'm the one who not only gets the alerts but has to head down to one of four sites to repair the nodes. I'm also in charge of optimizing and occasionally tightening the code that runs them. I'm also in charge of security (the IP on these boxes is worth about 1 billion). In any sanely run company, I would at least have 1 underling, so when a hard drive failed in node 18 of cluster 6, I could push a button and say "Johnny, go ship out a drive to the Canada site". Instead, I have to hop on a plane and remember my passport. Braindead way of doing things? Absolutely. I've argued that many times with management. But budgets are budgets and they'd rather pay one lackey a nice salary then 4 lackeys (one for each site).
As it stands right now, I have multiple scripts that weed out largely unnecessary alerts. Node 4 of cluster 2 is at 90% CPU? Don't care. However, there's only so much one can weed out if you're the only admin. I need to know when critical hardware on any of the 200 nodes fail. I need to know when a node or cluster is pinned at 100% for an extended period of time. I need to know when a competitor might be trying to break into one of the boxes. I need to know if it's safe to bring down half a cluster for a code change (which I usually have to write myself). What is your solution when you have 1 admin and about 300 recognized noteworthy events in this type of environment? "Ignore your Blackberry?"
In short, I need to act as a responsible employee, as I have no one else to fall back on to do the same. If that means checking my Blackberry on occasion, so be it. If your response is "Your job sucks," well, I agree. Most do. And I doubt I'll be here much longer.
Bottom line, though, if the alternative is losing cluster time, losing a site, or losing a couple hundred million worth of IP, I'll take a minor inconvenience of checking a blinking light.
P.s. Calling someone a "bad admin" when you know nothing about the environment, workload, etc. is bad form. My statement that you don't seem to be a sysadmin still stands -- you seem more to be a pompous prick.
You're obviously not a sysadmin.
I have all my systems email me if something goes wrong.
We're given these things under the assumption that we'll use them. While I agree that the situation has gone too far -- and I'd very much like to stick my Blackberry in a potato, and launch said potato out of some PVC pipes -- that's not how things work today. I don't have my servers call me when there's a problem (how irritating would that be, getting ringed every so often because some log was full?) The altnerative is to suffer the pain of the little blinking light.
Many people don't "help make the world better" -- ever. Think about it: what have you actually done to "make the world better" today? Name one thing. I'll wait.
What people consider "bettering the world" is largely subjective. I'm sure George Bush honestly thought he was bettering the world when he started the Iraq war. What's "good" for the world is individually defined.
Whether or not playing these games is a waste of one's time is another discussion altogether.
Fact of the matter is, if they weren't playing these games, most of these people would be watching TV. Or maybe sleeping. You can't naturally assume that the two choices for them are "play games" and "better the world". Doing so is overly simplistic and utterly moronic.
I disagree somewhat on some of your points and completely on some others.
* Art direction should have gone to Okami, no question. But Twilight Princess really isn't the shiznet Nintendo fans are making it out to be. I'm not talking on a technical level (which we all knew Zelda couldn't compete in), but in terms of pure art. A couple of green/purple on black textures? Bland grasses and forests? It honestly looked like they kept the exact same aesthetic as N64 (which was ok a decade ago, but fairly plain now). For a good example of great artwork with low polys, check out Burning Crusade.
* Bender, er... Marcus was a great character. He didn't need to have an over-elaborate back story -- texture was added in the delivery. John Di Maggio did a great job bringing him to life.
* "Outstanding achievement in visual engineering" means "pretty graphics on a technical level" (not hard to figure out, actually). Gears of War pretty much ran away with this. They set a bar that has yet to be topped on any console or the PC.
A couple points:
1.) You obviously know nothing about advertising. If you worked in the industry, you would realize that $2 million *IS* a substantial amount of money for a marketing program that probably cost Turner originally less than $50k.
Advertising is all about get your work in front of as many eyes of the target demographic as possible for the cheapest possible money. Considering most younger males don't watch Fox News for their terror alerts (and the whole situation still hasn't been covered on the Daily Show) this was wasted money. The only people "on the fringe" that really noticed were those that saw the ads physically in the cities before they were taken down. The majority in the demographic probably thought to themselves "AQTF. Cool." The rest looked at a pixelated video game character giving them the finger and shrugged it off.
No matter what way you slice it, it's wasted money.
2.) While I agree that our "Department of Homeland Security" has helped with anything but, the whole "asphyxiation" thing is a complete urban legend. Trust me, the US government doesn't need Slashdotters spreading lies about their incompetence -- they're more than enough incompetent alone.
"years-old databases"
Read the copyright at the bottom of the links, dude. The pictures were taken in 2007.
You're joking, right?
Joe Terrorist: "Well, let me just root around MA for a good pizza place... hello there! What's this?"
Terrorists know their targets way, WAY before they ever go to Google Maps (IF they go to Google Maps). The only time someone would search for aerial photos is if they knew what they were targetting and wanted a better view. They don't just spin the globe randomly.
Searching the entire world for pixelated pictures, obviously, would take forever. No one has that kind of time (not even Joe Terrorist). The smart ones would simply look up the nuclear plants in the phone book.
They only made the genre accessible to millions, polished it to a sheen and made it feasible for a player to spend hundreds of hours in game and still have new experiences (instead of killing the same spawn over and over again). No, that's not "redefining" by any stretch of the imagination -- no sir.