The pros and cons on both sides of this debate are compelling. Blizzard's time, money, and "quality of product (the forums)" versus people's privacy.
Not sure why it had to be "either/or". I think they should have rolled out Real-ID-only forums in parallel and let people choose for themselves.
In the end I think Blizzard waited too long. "Serious" WoW-related discourse doesn't happen on Blizzard's forums anymore. Most serious players know to start at elitistjerks.com. Not that their forums are perfect, but if I want good info on class mechanics, gear, talents, rotations... that's where I go.
IT is often perceived as a "support activity" akin to other services such as HR, Payroll, etc... A lot of that ends up bunched under the CFO for somewhat obvious reasons, though most CFO's wouldn't count themselves as IT managers.
Regardless of where you are on the org-chart, small-shop IT people - especially one-man shows - need to be engaging stakeholders and understanding the needs of the business and then provisioning solutions to meet those needs. All while keeping the systems up to date, answering questions about excel or whatever, managing hardware/software purchases/deployments, etc... If you're doing a good job, no one will care where you are in the org-chart - you're the IT guy/department, and you'll be perceived and engaged appropriately.
When the Gizmodo punks outed the name of the Apple Engineer who lost the phone for, as near as I could tell, no good reason other than to pile on, I lost all sympathy for them. This wasn't a whistle-blower story exposing corporate crime or government misdeeds. It was just a punk profiting off of another person's misfortune.
Enjoy your interactions with the Criminal Justice System, Mr. Chen.
The iPhone is a walled garden. Specifically, Apple's walled garden. Want to enjoy Apple's garden and grow things in it? Want to pick fruit from the trees (make money off the user base) - again - agree to Apple's terms.
There may be gardens out there that look wall-free, but on closer inspection you'll find the walls are simply lower. Usually the walls are lower to entice people to enter the garden. Given enough consumers, the walls get higher and trap people inside. All of the vendors are playing the same game - trap the consumer, and take their money.
Quite a year for Bioware. Dragon Age and now this. Interestingly, playing Dragon Age caused my wife re-purchased Baldur's Gate to play through it again.
My 14-year old cousin transferred to my realm and sometimes is on vent with us. The conversation drifted off into the sophomoric-put-down gutter and some of the digs had me raising an eyebrow about my cousin being in channel until I saw he was commenting in raid chat "haha - that was awesome. LOL! Oooooh - snap - I'm going to use that on my brother!"
In any case, unless all forms of communication are removed except strict emotes... the problem's not solvable.
Actually, the opposite is true for me. Before the patch, I was faced with the following choice:
1) Go do dailies, quests, lore, explore, and as a result most likely do not run an instance because:
* I'm no longer in a capital city so I won't see many of the group advertisements
* The LFG tool rarely puts me in a group to the place I want to go
* Even if I see a group for an instance I want to run, now that I spent time getting to where I am (and when doing loremaster, some places take 15 minutes to get to or more) I have to decide if it's worth the time penalty.
or
2) Stay in the capital city because that's the best way to find a group, because for some reason/2 is the default LFG channel, and while I sit here waiting... do nothing.
Now I can leave the capital cities and work on goals/quests out in "the world" while waiting for a group and when the group pops, I don't have to eat a 15-20 minute time penalty getting back to Silithus so I can keep grinding Cenarion Circle rep.
I expect to see MORE people out and about now. And if not - fine - less competition.
If you like leveling characters, then they sped up the treadmill. But the truth is, WoW is two games.
1) Life before 80 (leveling the character) 2) Life after 80 (leveling gear).
They are really two completely different games, and most people want to play the 2nd one and try different classes. Blizzard is figuring out that World of Warcraft is also the World of Alting.
These are not the tech specs you're looking for...
on
The Myths of Security
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· Score: 1
Chapter 18 is on the topic of security snake oil, ironically a topic Schneier has long been at the forefront of. The chapter gives the reader sage advice that it is important to do their homework on security products you buy and to make sure you have at least a high-level understanding of the technical merits and drawbacks of the security product at hand. The problem though is that the vast majority of end-users clearly don't have the technical wherewithal to do that. It is precisely that scenario that gives rise to far too many security snake-oil vendors.
Sometimes I think my technical ability is an obstacle to choosing products. A lot of security products are wrapped in marketing cheese-whiz that make them sound better than they are. From my point of view, I just want to know how security product Y is doing what it's doing, but to tell me that is to reveal details about the implementation, so they re-cast using something like a firewall as "anti-packet technology". WTF is anti-packet technology?
I'm curious to know if Viega touches on the fact that most modern anti-virus products in-essence do to your OS what the bad guys are trying to do (mini root-kits with haxored network drivers). I think the proposition of modern anti-virus tools these days is "let us own your box before a bad guy does."
I jumped into Warhammer Online (WAR) to check it out. There were many things I liked about the game. The greenskin starting zone was a riot - very comedic quest descriptions and characterizations. The Public Quests were brilliant ideas to me until I realized that I'd falling behind the leveling zerg rush and suddenly the zones were empty and I couldn't do them.
But what turned me off the most in the game were two polish issues.
1) When mobs "aggrod" on a player, they would engage their run animation and close on the player, but the run speed and the run animations didn't match up, so they looked like they were running in place while sliding along the ground. Unforgivable.
2) Swimming animation. I know it has nothing to do with playing the game, but when my super-sexy-witch-elf-assassin-from-hell jumped into the water for the first time and looked like that lovable loser from the 2004 Olympics who almost didn't finish his race, my jaw hit the ground. I mean seriously, did the person who animated that model even LOOK at what a correct swimming stroke looked like? WoW's animators did, and each race has it's own stroke and they are animated beautifully. I started running around water just to avoid that awful swim animation.
I would need half the computer I have now to play games on Linux. I built this uber-rig to play games on Windows damn it! If all game developers magically supported Linux tomorrow, PC sales would drop for 18mos as it would take that long for game developers to use the performance-budget Linux would give back to them. That means I couldn't buy new toys for about three years.
I'm not sure when programmers were placed on such high pedestals around here. While the programming and project management that has happened with the rise to prominence of Linux/Open Source software is glamorous, the vast majority of programming jobs are not glamorous. A lot of them suck hard - especially if caught up in a project that is 100% in-house software development. Long hours, crunches, endless bug fixing, unrealistic schedules, changing requirements...
Yeah, I like programming.... for my own purposes/projects. Most of the programming jobs I see out there though are jobs I don't want any more than I want front-line/help-desk position. Now... design positions or architect positions, where you actually get to play with putting technologies together in new ways or designing new solutions - very cool - and something I get to do a fair bit of within my industry IT job. But just slinging code at the behest of a schedule and requirements document - I'll pass.
I think this is part of the reason that Nethack remains so much fun for so many people. The math and systems behind the game are phenomenally complex and, while obfuscated, there is little else in the game to distract from them.
Nethack is not challenging because of phenomenally complex mathematical systems. For me it's challenging because it's 2000 fucking in-jokes and puns cobbled together on top of rogue.
a) That's a really depressing thought. If the dice throws are predetermined, then so is your entire life. b) Many people want that to be true, yet somehow your personal take on it scores a 5 for interesting.
I wonder, how could you know that their numbers are truly random, as they claim?
You can never know that. You can test "properties of randomness" and conclude "it looks random." But you have no way of knowing if that hopefully random sequence cross-correlates to a non-random sequence you haven't found, but that passes all of the tests.
On the other hand, there is no randomness like quantum randomness. So if you believe their bit-stream faithfully represents the source, then in this case you can feel pretty good about it.
Slashdot Mirror
We're rapidly advancing in a different direction.
The pros and cons on both sides of this debate are compelling. Blizzard's time, money, and "quality of product (the forums)" versus people's privacy.
Not sure why it had to be "either/or". I think they should have rolled out Real-ID-only forums in parallel and let people choose for themselves.
In the end I think Blizzard waited too long. "Serious" WoW-related discourse doesn't happen on Blizzard's forums anymore. Most serious players know to start at elitistjerks.com. Not that their forums are perfect, but if I want good info on class mechanics, gear, talents, rotations... that's where I go.
Nope. I've already been silenced by the stupidity and spam. I wrote off the forums years ago.
IT is often perceived as a "support activity" akin to other services such as HR, Payroll, etc... A lot of that ends up bunched under the CFO for somewhat obvious reasons, though most CFO's wouldn't count themselves as IT managers.
Regardless of where you are on the org-chart, small-shop IT people - especially one-man shows - need to be engaging stakeholders and understanding the needs of the business and then provisioning solutions to meet those needs. All while keeping the systems up to date, answering questions about excel or whatever, managing hardware/software purchases/deployments, etc... If you're doing a good job, no one will care where you are in the org-chart - you're the IT guy/department, and you'll be perceived and engaged appropriately.
I wouldn't say "you failed". I would say you missed an opportunity.
Do I have people skills? :-)
When the Gizmodo punks outed the name of the Apple Engineer who lost the phone for, as near as I could tell, no good reason other than to pile on, I lost all sympathy for them. This wasn't a whistle-blower story exposing corporate crime or government misdeeds. It was just a punk profiting off of another person's misfortune.
Enjoy your interactions with the Criminal Justice System, Mr. Chen.
The iPhone is a walled garden. Specifically, Apple's walled garden. Want to enjoy Apple's garden and grow things in it? Want to pick fruit from the trees (make money off the user base) - again - agree to Apple's terms.
There may be gardens out there that look wall-free, but on closer inspection you'll find the walls are simply lower. Usually the walls are lower to entice people to enter the garden. Given enough consumers, the walls get higher and trap people inside. All of the vendors are playing the same game - trap the consumer, and take their money.
90% of the traffic by a relatively small subset of the consumers. They hates it.
Quite a year for Bioware. Dragon Age and now this. Interestingly, playing Dragon Age caused my wife re-purchased Baldur's Gate to play through it again.
My 14-year old cousin transferred to my realm and sometimes is on vent with us. The conversation drifted off into the sophomoric-put-down gutter and some of the digs had me raising an eyebrow about my cousin being in channel until I saw he was commenting in raid chat "haha - that was awesome. LOL! Oooooh - snap - I'm going to use that on my brother!"
In any case, unless all forms of communication are removed except strict emotes... the problem's not solvable.
Actually, the opposite is true for me. Before the patch, I was faced with the following choice:
1) Go do dailies, quests, lore, explore, and as a result most likely do not run an instance because:
* I'm no longer in a capital city so I won't see many of the group advertisements
* The LFG tool rarely puts me in a group to the place I want to go
* Even if I see a group for an instance I want to run, now that I spent time getting to where I am (and when doing loremaster, some places take 15 minutes to get to or more) I have to decide if it's worth the time penalty.
or
2) Stay in the capital city because that's the best way to find a group, because for some reason /2 is the default LFG channel, and while I sit here waiting... do nothing.
Now I can leave the capital cities and work on goals/quests out in "the world" while waiting for a group and when the group pops, I don't have to eat a 15-20 minute time penalty getting back to Silithus so I can keep grinding Cenarion Circle rep.
I expect to see MORE people out and about now. And if not - fine - less competition.
If you like leveling characters, then they sped up the treadmill. But the truth is, WoW is two games.
1) Life before 80 (leveling the character)
2) Life after 80 (leveling gear).
They are really two completely different games, and most people want to play the 2nd one and try different classes. Blizzard is figuring out that World of Warcraft is also the World of Alting.
Chapter 18 is on the topic of security snake oil, ironically a topic Schneier has long been at the forefront of. The chapter gives the reader sage advice that it is important to do their homework on security products you buy and to make sure you have at least a high-level understanding of the technical merits and drawbacks of the security product at hand. The problem though is that the vast majority of end-users clearly don't have the technical wherewithal to do that. It is precisely that scenario that gives rise to far too many security snake-oil vendors.
Sometimes I think my technical ability is an obstacle to choosing products. A lot of security products are wrapped in marketing cheese-whiz that make them sound better than they are. From my point of view, I just want to know how security product Y is doing what it's doing, but to tell me that is to reveal details about the implementation, so they re-cast using something like a firewall as "anti-packet technology". WTF is anti-packet technology?
I'm curious to know if Viega touches on the fact that most modern anti-virus products in-essence do to your OS what the bad guys are trying to do (mini root-kits with haxored network drivers). I think the proposition of modern anti-virus tools these days is "let us own your box before a bad guy does."
... the government farms the MMO.
I jumped into Warhammer Online (WAR) to check it out. There were many things I liked about the game. The greenskin starting zone was a riot - very comedic quest descriptions and characterizations. The Public Quests were brilliant ideas to me until I realized that I'd falling behind the leveling zerg rush and suddenly the zones were empty and I couldn't do them.
But what turned me off the most in the game were two polish issues.
1) When mobs "aggrod" on a player, they would engage their run animation and close on the player, but the run speed and the run animations didn't match up, so they looked like they were running in place while sliding along the ground. Unforgivable.
2) Swimming animation. I know it has nothing to do with playing the game, but when my super-sexy-witch-elf-assassin-from-hell jumped into the water for the first time and looked like that lovable loser from the 2004 Olympics who almost didn't finish his race, my jaw hit the ground. I mean seriously, did the person who animated that model even LOOK at what a correct swimming stroke looked like? WoW's animators did, and each race has it's own stroke and they are animated beautifully. I started running around water just to avoid that awful swim animation.
Call me shallow. (pun not intended). ;)
No way that's the "biggest disaster". Visible goof? Yeah. Disaster? No. Corrupted Blood came and went. Barrens chat lives on.
"I can't AE! I can't AE Oh god... it's a wipe."
I would need half the computer I have now to play games on Linux. I built this uber-rig to play games on Windows damn it! If all game developers magically supported Linux tomorrow, PC sales would drop for 18mos as it would take that long for game developers to use the performance-budget Linux would give back to them. That means I couldn't buy new toys for about three years.
Shhhhhhhhhhhh.
I'm not sure when programmers were placed on such high pedestals around here. While the programming and project management that has happened with the rise to prominence of Linux/Open Source software is glamorous, the vast majority of programming jobs are not glamorous. A lot of them suck hard - especially if caught up in a project that is 100% in-house software development. Long hours, crunches, endless bug fixing, unrealistic schedules, changing requirements...
Yeah, I like programming.... for my own purposes/projects. Most of the programming jobs I see out there though are jobs I don't want any more than I want front-line/help-desk position. Now... design positions or architect positions, where you actually get to play with putting technologies together in new ways or designing new solutions - very cool - and something I get to do a fair bit of within my industry IT job. But just slinging code at the behest of a schedule and requirements document - I'll pass.
Maybe I'm cynical, but I don't see mysql improving as a result of this.
I think this is part of the reason that Nethack remains so much fun for so many people. The math and systems behind the game are phenomenally complex and, while obfuscated, there is little else in the game to distract from them.
Nethack is not challenging because of phenomenally complex mathematical systems. For me it's challenging because it's 2000 fucking in-jokes and puns cobbled together on top of rogue.
Pretty much a non-issue now. The Notices have been added back. This looks like a classic "oops", not a conspiracy.
Interesting assertion given that the true insights into reality come from mathematical models that exactly describe natural process. :)
In that light, it does seem like what Cramer is trying to do is "Cross the streams." ;)
a) That's a really depressing thought. If the dice throws are predetermined, then so is your entire life.
b) Many people want that to be true, yet somehow your personal take on it scores a 5 for interesting.
I wonder, how could you know that their numbers are truly random, as they claim?
You can never know that. You can test "properties of randomness" and conclude "it looks random." But you have no way of knowing if that hopefully random sequence cross-correlates to a non-random sequence you haven't found, but that passes all of the tests.
On the other hand, there is no randomness like quantum randomness. So if you believe their bit-stream faithfully represents the source, then in this case you can feel pretty good about it.