This really isn't specific to the gaming industry.
My first job (printer company) I lost because we were acquired and they wanted to cull the herd. My second job (storage company) I lost because we outsourced everything. My third job (HPC company) I lost because our CEO was an idiot and ran the company into the ground. My fourth job (storage company) I lost because we bought our biggest competitor, put them in charge of my division, and then strangely we took the brunt of the cuts.
experienced programmers at the richest studios can make six figures Experienced programmers pretty much anywhere should be making six figures. If they're not, they're probably being taken advantage of.
When I was having issues with my Alienware and their support stopped being helpful, I contacted the Better Business Bureau and the Florida Attorney General's Office (where Alienware was based at the time, not sure if they'd been fully acquired by Dell at the time). Soon thereafter I received a call to arrange for a 'please don't sue us' replacement laptop that worked fine for years after.
I always put the set together the way the instructions say once. It's a good way to see what techniques they use for certain things (building trees with some of the recent sets, for example). After a while it gets recycled back into the bins of Lego to be reused. I'll often buy a set specifically because it has new pieces or minifigs I want. When I was a kid, I'd often start with one of the spaceship or boat sets and just keep adding pieces. Ended up turning a tugboat into a 4' long freighter once.:)
If you're on Windows, Microsoft OneNote is fantastic. You can drag in other files as printouts, then write on them. The text of the printouts is searchable. The individual note pages can be organized in numerous ways (I have tab groups for semester, tabs for classes, then subtabs for each lecture). It can record and transcribe notes, does handwriting conversion, allows writing using a mouse or tablet pen (I use it on a ThinkPad Tablet PC, which makes it even handier).
With a tablet PC, I've used it to write mathematical and chemical formulas directly in my notes, or highlight parts of diagrams from lecture notes or even just dragged from websites (or cut with the snipping tool; with OneNote installed, you can use windows-S as a shortcut key to the snipping tool and past things into your document). You can also export your notes as PDFs.
OneNote has been remarkably useful in undergrad and now in grad school. I highly recommend it. I'm always kind of boggled that MS doesn't market it better; it just sort of 'comes with' Office and they don't really advertise that well.
I have an X220. It's great. I use it to take notes in my classes and in my tabletop RPGs with MS OneNote. I love being able to cut-and-paste arbitrary segments from the screen (windows-S if you have OneNote installed), paste them into my notes, then type notes and markup the graphics with the pen. It was especially handy for my Molecular Cell Biology class (being able to mark what's relevant on a gel or slide is nice).
The current Lenovo tablet PC (X220) senses the proximity of the pen to the screen and disables the touchpad automatically, so resting your wrist on the screen will no longer mess things up (my previous tablet had that problem and I just disabled the touchscreen altogether). With an i7 in it, mine has no appreciable input lag when I'm writing. The screen's a nice size, so you can get a lot onto it. I use MS OneNote, which can also convert your handwriting to text (and does a pretty good job of it that I've found). I mostly type my notes into OneNote, then past in graphics or use the pen to draw on the screen when I need to put in a formula or chemical structure (I'm working on a Master's in Biomedical Informatics and Computational Biology, so math and biology need a bit of freeform input).
I'm in graduate school and I picked up a Lenovo X220 Tablet PC (to replace my previous Gateway tablet PC, which performed admirably for many years). It gets about 6 hours of battery time with the larger battery, the pen input is great and includes pressure sensitivity, and I love Microsoft OneNote for taking notes. The professor gives us PDFs with the slides, and I can either drag the PDF into the app and insert it as a printout so I can take notes directly on it, or I can use the snipping tool that comes with Windows 7 to cut out sections of the slide and paste into the notepad (which makes for better flow than inserting as a printout, but can be time-consuming in class when I'm quickly cutting something out and pasting it in while the instructor is talking).
Dunno if they're still doing it, but CoH had real ads for a while (which could be disabled in the options if you wanted) mixed in amongst their usual assortment of fake billboards. Not sure if all of them were themed this way, but seeing billboards for a T-Mobile Sidekick in a superhero world was actually pretty amusing.:) As long as the ads actually 'fit in' with the world, I really don't mind.
I've had good luck reporting companies to the Better Business Bureau if their customer service is highly uncooperative. I was receiving unsolicited credit card offers from Citi, even though I'd signed up for the permanent do-not-sell list. Their customer service couldn't tell me who sold them my information, but after talking to the BBB, I got a call from someone higher up who let me know Equifax had sold it to them.
I had much worse issues with Alienware, whose customer service was atrocious. I eventually had to go to both the BBB and the Florida Attorney General's office, but they finally swapped out my lemon of a laptop for a new one.
I went to FurryMUCK specifically because I didn't know how to code there. I was staff on every MUSH I set foot on, and that was where I went to not be staff. My blood pressure dropped to almost normal levels after that.:)
I think it boils down to what you do other than playing games. If the only answer is 'eat and sleep', then there could be a problem. I definitely had a problem. I just managed to turn it to my advantage after it had completely ruined all of my plans. I ended up doing something I'm good at, and pays well, but about which I'm not particularly passionate.
Still figuring out the 'what to do with my degree' part.;) There are so many different subdisciplines in Biology that picking one to pursue a graduate degree in is proving complicated. I've also picked up a mortgage in the meantime, and paying that on a grad student stipend (~22k a year, about a quarter my last salary) is just not possible. I finished the degree while still working my programming job, so I just stayed at that job until the office closed September of last year.
I had wiz-access on about a dozen MUSHes at one point. Drove me nuts. But it gave me enough experience that I was able to call it 'customer service' and 'administration' and get a tech support job. After a year or so of that, I applied for an opening in our R&D department as a buildmaster and got it. Worked on my C and Perl skills there. After some consolidation, I ended up in QA, then lost my job there when they sold the company.
Got a QA job at my next company, where I ended up writing and maintaining our test tools. That office got closed, moved on to my next QA gig at another company. A year there and I requested a transfer into development and got it, and was there for ~4 years before the office closed (there's a trend there:).
Oddly, kinda worked the opposite for me. I spent all my time on MUSHes when I was in college, was academically dismissed, then turned the programming and computer skills I'd taught myself while MUSHing into a career. Not that I'd expect that to work for modern MMOs, since you don't program anything in them really unless you're into modding. I did eventually go back and finish my biology degree, however, and being kicked out was definitely the reality check I needed on getting my priorities straight (though it took a while to figure that out).
I never did get a CS degree. I started off in technical support at a printer company (had to be able to rip a laser printer apart and reassemble it and have it work before I could touch a phone, so I find most tech support these days insulting), then got into QA at the same company.
Once that company laid me off, I got into QA at StorageTek, where I wrote test tools in C, Perl, and various Shell scripting languages. I was doing development there, too, before they closed our office.
From there I got another QA job where I wrote more test tools and automated a lot of tests (C, Perl, Java, various shells). They pulled me out of testing and into development, where I spent the last 4 years.
Test tools and automation worked for me as a gateway out of testing and into development. Talk to your manager. Let them know you're interested in a development role. On your resume, play up your skills, not your job title. If you're not doing much programming in this QA job, use it to get into another QA job that does call for it.
but defending my people from those who wish to use and exploit them certainly captures my mind and heart. Later on, you fight demons who are trying to destroy the entire world you know and love
What WoW lacks, compared to pen-and-paper role-playing, is state and consequences. If you devote your time to destroying the Defias, go through the Deadmines, kill the guy, nothing changes. 15 minutes later, all those Defias you killed are back. You've defended no one. Letting them run rampant in the countryside doesn't impact life in the town in any way. If nobody hung out in Outland fighting demons, the demons would never take advantage of it to destroy the world. The only thing making it more compelling than a regular computer RPG is the other players.
I like the lore and many of the storylines in WoW, and I do play it. It's hardly an 'either/or' proposition. But I'd never ditch my tabletop Supers game to play WoW; it will, after all, be there when I'm done. But if I skipped a run of a tabletop game, my team might fail to stop the villain and boom, no more city, and I'd have to deal with the consequences of that next time I play. And that's one of the biggest differences.
What's more likely is that Alienware's abysmal technical support department couldn't identify a CableCard if an irate customer stabbed them with it. You couldn't pay me to buy another Alienware system. After dropping $3500 on a gaming laptop that's had numerous problems, and having had to register complaints with the Better Business Bureau and the Florida Attorney General's Office just to get them to replace a battery, I'm pretty much at the point where I'm going to build another desktop system and shoot skeet with my m9700. Selling it on eBay would just make someone else think it worth buying.
A tiny Chicago with a handful of NPCs is not going to work.
They could probably pull off a City of Heroes model with multiple city zones (some of which are huge) forming a full-sized city. They have hordes of NPCs wandering the streets with basic AI (run from bad guys, but that superhero over there? Just push him the hell out of the way;), but only certain contacts actually have anything useful to say. They have some random encounters like muggings, where if you defeat the bad guys the citizens they're menacing will thank you. The city definitely feels populated that way.
My PowerBook was in for repairs 4 times in the first year I had it. Two logic boards, a display, and a broken latch. This being my first Mac, I'm not inclined to get another.
That said, I picked up a Toshiba M4 (tablet PC) to replace it, and the video card fried itself 2 weeks later. It was in for repairs for a week and a half, and the local service center was told the part was backordered and Toshiba wouldn't get back to them on when it might be in. I called Toshiba, and after 40 minutes on hold and being bounced around amongst various customer service departments, sometimes repeating my problem 3-4 times to a single representative who would then parrot my problem back to me, I had to browbeat someone until they agreed that this was unacceptable and gave me an RMA for the machine.
Every time my PowerBook died, I had it back within 3-4 days. There's definitely something to be said for having good customer service and a good supply chain for your parts. If Toshiba hadn't been backordered and had better service, I might still have that Tecra.
WAM (the thing the article talks about) is an add-on for our core product, Collage. Collage handles more of the administration/maintenance/support side.
As a basic overview, say you have an app (or apps) you need to run on a bunch of servers, but how many is variable (say, 2 under light load, 10 under heavy). You configure a server once, then use Collage to capture an image of that server. You can tell it which parts of the image are static, and which will be variable on each system. You then use Collage to create a tier of systems, using that image, and tell it you want a max of 10, with a target of 2. You can set some conditions under which more will come up, and hardware requirements (SAN, 2 NICs, etc.). If the systems use power management (RAC, iLO, couple others), then it will actually power the systems down when not in use, and power them up and load the image on them when they're needed.
When systems are detected by Collage, their hardware is inventoried and they're placed in an available pool for use. Say one of your systems goes down, and you need it to be replaced with something that has a fibrechannel card connected to your SAN. Collage checks the available systems for one that meets the requirements, assigns it to your tier, and brings it up as a replacement. The failed system is moved to a maintenance pool until it's manually moved back to the free pool (presumably after someone's examined it to find out why it failed).
It does quite a bit more than this, but hopefully it's a start on the questions you asked.
I first saw it here, in Brent Rasmussen's blog. It doesn't look like a quote, so I'm guessing this is the source.
The full quote:
You can call atheism anything you want, but you may just confuse people if you do so. Because if atheism is a religion, then not collecting stamps is a hobby and baldness is a hair color.
I've never received unsolicited mail (electronic or otherwise) from Barnes and Noble, and I've had their discount card and I've been using bn.com for close to 2 years. The only thing they mailed was was their 'Book Magazine' (or whatever it's called), and there was an option not to receive it.
In Mozilla, you can fine-tune it by telling it how many times to let the animation play. Go into Edit|Preferences|Privacy & Security|Images, and there's a 'Animated images should loop' with three options: As many times as the image specifies, Once, or Never.
I haven't used Opera for ages, though, so I'm not sure how you'd do it there. I've just heard that it's possible.
Slashdot Mirror
This really isn't specific to the gaming industry.
My first job (printer company) I lost because we were acquired and they wanted to cull the herd.
My second job (storage company) I lost because we outsourced everything.
My third job (HPC company) I lost because our CEO was an idiot and ran the company into the ground.
My fourth job (storage company) I lost because we bought our biggest competitor, put them in charge of my division, and then strangely we took the brunt of the cuts.
experienced programmers at the richest studios can make six figures
Experienced programmers pretty much anywhere should be making six figures. If they're not, they're probably being taken advantage of.
I got it switched back to Win+S using instructions from this page. I think the second answer on that page was sufficient.
Jiggery-pokery has its origins in the 19th century, so its use by Scalia isn't terribly out-of-character.
When I was having issues with my Alienware and their support stopped being helpful, I contacted the Better Business Bureau and the Florida Attorney General's Office (where Alienware was based at the time, not sure if they'd been fully acquired by Dell at the time). Soon thereafter I received a call to arrange for a 'please don't sue us' replacement laptop that worked fine for years after.
I always put the set together the way the instructions say once. It's a good way to see what techniques they use for certain things (building trees with some of the recent sets, for example). After a while it gets recycled back into the bins of Lego to be reused. I'll often buy a set specifically because it has new pieces or minifigs I want. When I was a kid, I'd often start with one of the spaceship or boat sets and just keep adding pieces. Ended up turning a tugboat into a 4' long freighter once. :)
If you're on Windows, Microsoft OneNote is fantastic. You can drag in other files as printouts, then write on them. The text of the printouts is searchable. The individual note pages can be organized in numerous ways (I have tab groups for semester, tabs for classes, then subtabs for each lecture). It can record and transcribe notes, does handwriting conversion, allows writing using a mouse or tablet pen (I use it on a ThinkPad Tablet PC, which makes it even handier).
With a tablet PC, I've used it to write mathematical and chemical formulas directly in my notes, or highlight parts of diagrams from lecture notes or even just dragged from websites (or cut with the snipping tool; with OneNote installed, you can use windows-S as a shortcut key to the snipping tool and past things into your document). You can also export your notes as PDFs.
OneNote has been remarkably useful in undergrad and now in grad school. I highly recommend it. I'm always kind of boggled that MS doesn't market it better; it just sort of 'comes with' Office and they don't really advertise that well.
I have an X220. It's great. I use it to take notes in my classes and in my tabletop RPGs with MS OneNote. I love being able to cut-and-paste arbitrary segments from the screen (windows-S if you have OneNote installed), paste them into my notes, then type notes and markup the graphics with the pen. It was especially handy for my Molecular Cell Biology class (being able to mark what's relevant on a gel or slide is nice).
The current Lenovo tablet PC (X220) senses the proximity of the pen to the screen and disables the touchpad automatically, so resting your wrist on the screen will no longer mess things up (my previous tablet had that problem and I just disabled the touchscreen altogether). With an i7 in it, mine has no appreciable input lag when I'm writing. The screen's a nice size, so you can get a lot onto it. I use MS OneNote, which can also convert your handwriting to text (and does a pretty good job of it that I've found). I mostly type my notes into OneNote, then past in graphics or use the pen to draw on the screen when I need to put in a formula or chemical structure (I'm working on a Master's in Biomedical Informatics and Computational Biology, so math and biology need a bit of freeform input).
I'm in graduate school and I picked up a Lenovo X220 Tablet PC (to replace my previous Gateway tablet PC, which performed admirably for many years). It gets about 6 hours of battery time with the larger battery, the pen input is great and includes pressure sensitivity, and I love Microsoft OneNote for taking notes. The professor gives us PDFs with the slides, and I can either drag the PDF into the app and insert it as a printout so I can take notes directly on it, or I can use the snipping tool that comes with Windows 7 to cut out sections of the slide and paste into the notepad (which makes for better flow than inserting as a printout, but can be time-consuming in class when I'm quickly cutting something out and pasting it in while the instructor is talking).
Dunno if they're still doing it, but CoH had real ads for a while (which could be disabled in the options if you wanted) mixed in amongst their usual assortment of fake billboards. Not sure if all of them were themed this way, but seeing billboards for a T-Mobile Sidekick in a superhero world was actually pretty amusing. :) As long as the ads actually 'fit in' with the world, I really don't mind.
I've had good luck reporting companies to the Better Business Bureau if their customer service is highly uncooperative. I was receiving unsolicited credit card offers from Citi, even though I'd signed up for the permanent do-not-sell list. Their customer service couldn't tell me who sold them my information, but after talking to the BBB, I got a call from someone higher up who let me know Equifax had sold it to them.
I had much worse issues with Alienware, whose customer service was atrocious. I eventually had to go to both the BBB and the Florida Attorney General's office, but they finally swapped out my lemon of a laptop for a new one.
I went to FurryMUCK specifically because I didn't know how to code there. I was staff on every MUSH I set foot on, and that was where I went to not be staff. My blood pressure dropped to almost normal levels after that. :)
I think it boils down to what you do other than playing games. If the only answer is 'eat and sleep', then there could be a problem. I definitely had a problem. I just managed to turn it to my advantage after it had completely ruined all of my plans. I ended up doing something I'm good at, and pays well, but about which I'm not particularly passionate.
Still figuring out the 'what to do with my degree' part. ;) There are so many different subdisciplines in Biology that picking one to pursue a graduate degree in is proving complicated. I've also picked up a mortgage in the meantime, and paying that on a grad student stipend (~22k a year, about a quarter my last salary) is just not possible. I finished the degree while still working my programming job, so I just stayed at that job until the office closed September of last year.
I had wiz-access on about a dozen MUSHes at one point. Drove me nuts. But it gave me enough experience that I was able to call it 'customer service' and 'administration' and get a tech support job. After a year or so of that, I applied for an opening in our R&D department as a buildmaster and got it. Worked on my C and Perl skills there. After some consolidation, I ended up in QA, then lost my job there when they sold the company.
Got a QA job at my next company, where I ended up writing and maintaining our test tools. That office got closed, moved on to my next QA gig at another company. A year there and I requested a transfer into development and got it, and was there for ~4 years before the office closed (there's a trend there :).
Oddly, kinda worked the opposite for me. I spent all my time on MUSHes when I was in college, was academically dismissed, then turned the programming and computer skills I'd taught myself while MUSHing into a career. Not that I'd expect that to work for modern MMOs, since you don't program anything in them really unless you're into modding. I did eventually go back and finish my biology degree, however, and being kicked out was definitely the reality check I needed on getting my priorities straight (though it took a while to figure that out).
I never did get a CS degree. I started off in technical support at a printer company (had to be able to rip a laser printer apart and reassemble it and have it work before I could touch a phone, so I find most tech support these days insulting), then got into QA at the same company.
Once that company laid me off, I got into QA at StorageTek, where I wrote test tools in C, Perl, and various Shell scripting languages. I was doing development there, too, before they closed our office.
From there I got another QA job where I wrote more test tools and automated a lot of tests (C, Perl, Java, various shells). They pulled me out of testing and into development, where I spent the last 4 years.
Test tools and automation worked for me as a gateway out of testing and into development. Talk to your manager. Let them know you're interested in a development role. On your resume, play up your skills, not your job title. If you're not doing much programming in this QA job, use it to get into another QA job that does call for it.
but defending my people from those who wish to use and exploit them certainly captures my mind and heart.
Later on, you fight demons who are trying to destroy the entire world you know and love
What WoW lacks, compared to pen-and-paper role-playing, is state and consequences. If you devote your time to destroying the Defias, go through the Deadmines, kill the guy, nothing changes. 15 minutes later, all those Defias you killed are back. You've defended no one. Letting them run rampant in the countryside doesn't impact life in the town in any way. If nobody hung out in Outland fighting demons, the demons would never take advantage of it to destroy the world. The only thing making it more compelling than a regular computer RPG is the other players.
I like the lore and many of the storylines in WoW, and I do play it. It's hardly an 'either/or' proposition. But I'd never ditch my tabletop Supers game to play WoW; it will, after all, be there when I'm done. But if I skipped a run of a tabletop game, my team might fail to stop the villain and boom, no more city, and I'd have to deal with the consequences of that next time I play. And that's one of the biggest differences.
What's more likely is that Alienware's abysmal technical support department couldn't identify a CableCard if an irate customer stabbed them with it. You couldn't pay me to buy another Alienware system. After dropping $3500 on a gaming laptop that's had numerous problems, and having had to register complaints with the Better Business Bureau and the Florida Attorney General's Office just to get them to replace a battery, I'm pretty much at the point where I'm going to build another desktop system and shoot skeet with my m9700. Selling it on eBay would just make someone else think it worth buying.
A tiny Chicago with a handful of NPCs is not going to work.
;), but only certain contacts actually have anything useful to say. They have some random encounters like muggings, where if you defeat the bad guys the citizens they're menacing will thank you. The city definitely feels populated that way.
They could probably pull off a City of Heroes model with multiple city zones (some of which are huge) forming a full-sized city. They have hordes of NPCs wandering the streets with basic AI (run from bad guys, but that superhero over there? Just push him the hell out of the way
My PowerBook was in for repairs 4 times in the first year I had it. Two logic boards, a display, and a broken latch. This being my first Mac, I'm not inclined to get another.
That said, I picked up a Toshiba M4 (tablet PC) to replace it, and the video card fried itself 2 weeks later. It was in for repairs for a week and a half, and the local service center was told the part was backordered and Toshiba wouldn't get back to them on when it might be in. I called Toshiba, and after 40 minutes on hold and being bounced around amongst various customer service departments, sometimes repeating my problem 3-4 times to a single representative who would then parrot my problem back to me, I had to browbeat someone until they agreed that this was unacceptable and gave me an RMA for the machine.
Every time my PowerBook died, I had it back within 3-4 days. There's definitely something to be said for having good customer service and a good supply chain for your parts. If Toshiba hadn't been backordered and had better service, I might still have that Tecra.
(disclaimer: I work for Cassatt, but not on WAM)
WAM (the thing the article talks about) is an add-on for our core product, Collage. Collage handles more of the administration/maintenance/support side.
As a basic overview, say you have an app (or apps) you need to run on a bunch of servers, but how many is variable (say, 2 under light load, 10 under heavy). You configure a server once, then use Collage to capture an image of that server. You can tell it which parts of the image are static, and which will be variable on each system. You then use Collage to create a tier of systems, using that image, and tell it you want a max of 10, with a target of 2. You can set some conditions under which more will come up, and hardware requirements (SAN, 2 NICs, etc.). If the systems use power management (RAC, iLO, couple others), then it will actually power the systems down when not in use, and power them up and load the image on them when they're needed.
When systems are detected by Collage, their hardware is inventoried and they're placed in an available pool for use. Say one of your systems goes down, and you need it to be replaced with something that has a fibrechannel card connected to your SAN. Collage checks the available systems for one that meets the requirements, assigns it to your tier, and brings it up as a replacement. The failed system is moved to a maintenance pool until it's manually moved back to the free pool (presumably after someone's examined it to find out why it failed).
It does quite a bit more than this, but hopefully it's a start on the questions you asked.
I first saw it here, in Brent Rasmussen's blog. It doesn't look like a quote, so I'm guessing this is the source.
The full quote:
You can call atheism anything you want, but you may just confuse people if you do so. Because if atheism is a religion, then not collecting stamps is a hobby and baldness is a hair color.
I've never received unsolicited mail (electronic or otherwise) from Barnes and Noble, and I've had their discount card and I've been using bn.com for close to 2 years. The only thing they mailed was was their 'Book Magazine' (or whatever it's called), and there was an option not to receive it.
Just figured I'd mention that.
Y'know, after spending a few minutes tinkering with it, it occurred to me, 'duh, communications ports'.
;)
Stupid device manager, making me forget about DOS device names.
You can't name it that because COM1-9 are reserved for serial ports in the shell.
I believe both Opera and Mozilla can.
In Mozilla, you can fine-tune it by telling it how many times to let the animation play. Go into Edit|Preferences|Privacy & Security|Images, and there's a 'Animated images should loop' with three options: As many times as the image specifies, Once, or Never.
I haven't used Opera for ages, though, so I'm not sure how you'd do it there. I've just heard that it's possible.