True. Pretty much all investments are 'market linked' but have the redeeming feature that the market is essentially zero-sum. Your theoretical value will return, given time and no effort whatsoever. Even if stuff has gone bust, the 'market space' that the company existed in is still there, and will recover. The only people who get hurt are the ones that need to cash out short term, which would include those with pension funds.
Thin clients, much like virtualisation are valuable tools in the IT portfolio. Not something to be called 'the true way' because nothing ever is. But certainly something that can serve a technical requirement.
I mean, we've got a whole bunch of 'utility' apps, deployed off a thin client. Little things like document formatters, and password change utilities, and that kind of thing.
This saves us a lot of maintenance in terms of having the software in question installed, updated, backed up.
But mostly we're finding that for 'daily' usage apps, we're better off with a local install, with a network replicated datastore. Because... well, no matter how 'thin' you make something, you're still pushing bytes down a wire, and that has latency built in.
*shrug*. Having a Citrix server or 5 is a valuable utility. It's not a replacement, it's just part of an IT strategy. I suspect however, what will happen is the big sales plug of why it's great. Lots of manglers signing on the dotted line, and a whole bunch of people ending up with something that isn't the right tool for the job, but that gets railroaded through anyway because someone will look stupid if it fails.
Most backups work on a schedule basis. E.g. overnight or whatever. We have a product for our mobile users that essentially creates 'local' backup databases on a separate drive, and then uploads that whenever a netlink is available. They don't need 'full time' networks access, and we get an acceptable level of recovery capability.
The problem is that those sheets of paper are extremely important nowadays. If you have a mortgage, the ownership of your house is regulated by those sheets of paper. If something goes wrong, you suddenly find yourself without a home.
This is really critical, and something that's overlooked. The share market - yeah, whatever. When share prices fall, people who've already started gambling lose some money. That's not the end of the world, by any means.
The problem is, that anyone who has a mortgage, doesn't own their house - the bank does.
When the bank folds, it has to liquidate it's assets, in order to pay creditors. It's assets include your house. That's when the bad starts to happen, as a financial collapse forces lots of banks to do this, and a massive reshuffle of property as bankrupty firesales take place. Further crashing the property market, whilst it's at it, and making more people enter the realm where their property is worth less than the amount of money they have borrowed, secured upon it.
It's a bit harder to say 'I know how to code' than it is to provide evidence that 'I know how to do something specific, in a specific language'. And a bit harder to measure, too.
You're quite correct thought - my degree taught me 'programming techniques' rather than 'how to write in a particular language'. It's served me quite well, as I can basically port to... whatever, provided it's approximately similar in paradigm. But I'd have a hard time proving to a potential employer that given 4 hours I can write whatever language they happen to like with moderate utility.
You're quite correct - idling your engine/putting it in neutral or even just coasting on the clutch, is actually reducing your control over your vehicle.
I don't do it, for much the same reason I don't drive whilst drunk - not being in full control over my killing machine I consider unacceptable.
Actually the average is heavily skewed by a massive infant mortality in that sort of population.
Actually with an average if 15, you ended up with the age range of up to about 40-50, but most of the kids not making it to puberty.
The 'alpha' male would actually live quite a long, and mate quite a lot, and have a lot of sperm variance over that timeframe. And lots of offspring, and the majority would be dead early.
Both as I understand it - we're starting having children later, but stopping earlier too.
The earlier models started putting their thing in things from when it first started getting stiff, and continued until it stopped getting stiff. And without using contraception either. Lots of sprogs dropped, lots died early on.
Compare to now, where... well _most_ of the populace have a vague idea that contraception means more shagging. There's also a 'hold the family, I have a career' mindset, which does actually cause a generation cycle gap - the white collar crowd running on 25-35 year generations, and the 'working straight out of school' crowd working on 16-25 year generations.
Actually you're pretty close with VMware at the moment - VM instances can be 'hot' migrated, so you can clump them up on one server, power the rest down, and fire them up/migrate when demand shows. Your response won't be great, but at least you will be able to respond to dynamic load fluctuation.
Actually VM tech goes a long way to doing that anyway, provided you've a vaguely good concept of workload fluctuations.
There are degrees of distraction - I don't know about you, but I tune out what's on the radio when I'm needing to pay attention to an emergent road condition. But I have a harder time doing so, if i'm looking down at my passenger's seat, checking a map.
Distractions are things that take your eyes off the road, or that you cannot trivially interrupt when you have something that needs your full attention - phones count, because having a sensible conversation takes processing time. Passengers do, but less so, because they'll typically STFU when you're maneuvering. (Or at least, realise exactly why you started ignoring them)
Personally though, I think cars should be running heads up displays for most things - looking down at a dashboard is IMO just plain bad design, as it takes your eyes away from where you should be looking.
Grab something cool and internetty that they'll have heard of. YouTube or Facebook springs to mind.
Chances are you'll have some who 'know about it'.
Then take them through what's involved in getting that to happen. From the datacentre (ask them about computers crashing, power cuts, and ask them for what they'd do about it) and work along the chain, across the internet, and then down through your wireless router to your laptop.
Include representations of what's involved in a video - a stack of photographs might do the trick, to represent each 'frame', how you'd encode that, and move it fast enough to watch in real time.
I think that'd give you a good starting point actually, and take the opportunity to expand when there's interest/questions.
You're applying to the wrong corps. The 'best' corps, are the ones that set high expectations of their membership, and tell them in advance. The 'good' corps, are the ones that are simply clear about what they are. If you won't fit in with a low play time, then it's a bad idea on both your part and theirs, to bring you into one of the hardcore corps.
But most corps out there aren't like that. Look around a bit further, and there's TONNES that are geared up towards casual play. Ok, so they're not the most famous 'everyone knows who I am' corps, but they're fun. e-fame takes effort, and you don't get to freeload off a reputation for long. So don't try - just find something that suits what you're looking for in terms of play time and activity level - be honest about what you're looking for, and realistic in your expectations, and you'll find something.
For me, the real time nature of the skill progression is one of the best things about EVE.
It means there's no implicit advantage to being able to 'grind' all day, vs. being able to play a few hours a night.
Well, there is - you can make more isks, which is useful, but... I find isks needed, vs isks made is actually proportionate to online time anyway. More I'm online, more ships and stuff I'll buy:p
But it means I can feel free to enjoy the game, without feeling like I'm getting left behind - I'm being as efficient trading in a freighter, as going out and trying to single handedly kill Goonswarm. At least, in terms of SP progression.
I love that aspect - it's the freedom to choose what you want to do, without having had some developer decide what's 'good' and gets xp, and what's not. Seeing new professions emerge is truly beautiful - I've seen anti-sucide escorts, I've seen people selling mining director skills. I've seen one person who was doing 'narration' of a player's actions. He'd quite literally follow them around, and describe what they were doing in local, and in 'heroic' prose.
You get ore theives, you get people able to rig ships. You get people who do 'POS/reaction chain' design. You get people who will gather intel, and sell the reports.
They were discussing this at last fanfest - they do have a design team working on segmenting the 'solar system' in a rational fashion. It's quite a challenge, and probably still not something that they can do with linear scalability - you just can't break down the problem that far.
But Infiniband isn't so much disk I/O, as an enabled for NUMA architecture in the cluster - it makes multiprocessing much easier, if you can use distributed shared memory.
They will most likely start breaking down the various 'non space' stuff, into processes that can be distributed. They can 'cheat' and do a node handover whenever someone warps to another grid too, but the place where the 'problem' hits, is when you have lots of ships interacting with each other - 500 people all maneuvering and shooting is much much harder to distribute effectively, because you do need to communicate a lot between the different clients. It stops being an implicitly parallel problem, and starts requiring interprocess and possibly inter-node communication, and it needs it to be done 'real time', which is the killer.
But... well, it's something they're working on, and it's one of those 'big challenges' that I'm watching with interest as to how they'll solve it.
Jita's way better. Between Stackless IO, EVE64, and the fact that autopilots don't force you to go there any more - you get less people in a system that can support more people.
Bit early to tell on the large battles - they don't actually happen all that often, but there's rumours of one that's happened recently with some 300 vs 300, where it was 'pretty good'.
From a recent dev blog:
"This Monday, 29 September, we saw a fleet battle with over 1100 pilots reported in local. Field reports indicate that the fight was quite responsive for the first 10 minutes but then the node "missed its heart beat" as we call it and was removed from the cluster by our cluster integrity watchdog routines. This again is another exciting problem as we can address that as well under our StacklessIO world and that will be the subject of the next blog."
Actually the group of long term players you're referring to (assuming we are thinking of the same ones) are doing well for an entirely different reason. Have you seen how they operate? Take a look sometime - they're _very_ forceful in their organisation. They expect a lot of their pilots. They've picked up the hardcore players of EVE, for whom... almost militaristic discipline is what they find fun. They share phone numbers, and have a 'phone chain', and they have regular RL meets. They have a rule regarding turnout on ops, and you're _required_ to be there without approval from a director. They do have pilots who will turn out on 'alarm clock' ops, and log in at 4am local to kill a POS.
A bit too hardcore for my tastes, but it's quite obvious to me quite why they're the top of the pile _still_. It's because they take the business of Internet Spaceships much more seriously than almost everyone else. The 'insider benefits' scandal - well, it caused a furore, but the actual benefits provided are pretty insignificant - yes, it was some vaguely rare and valuable items, but... well, have you seen what the revenue of a promethium or dysprosium moon is? Have you seen how fast they're building 60bn each Titans?
Ship death is part of what makes EVE good. Losing a ship hurts. And the more 'veteran' you are, the more expensive ships you can fly, and the more it hurts when you do lose. And you will. There is always a bigger fish, no matter how many skills you have:).
But the fact that a ship dies, means strategic warfare is possible. I love that part. I love the fact that EVE is a strategy game, with resources to manage, unit skill points, 'hard' skill, and morale. Leaders, commanders, and intel warfare.
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True. Pretty much all investments are 'market linked' but have the redeeming feature that the market is essentially zero-sum. Your theoretical value will return, given time and no effort whatsoever. Even if stuff has gone bust, the 'market space' that the company existed in is still there, and will recover. The only people who get hurt are the ones that need to cash out short term, which would include those with pension funds.
I mean, we've got a whole bunch of 'utility' apps, deployed off a thin client. Little things like document formatters, and password change utilities, and that kind of thing.
This saves us a lot of maintenance in terms of having the software in question installed, updated, backed up.
But mostly we're finding that for 'daily' usage apps, we're better off with a local install, with a network replicated datastore. Because... well, no matter how 'thin' you make something, you're still pushing bytes down a wire, and that has latency built in.
*shrug*. Having a Citrix server or 5 is a valuable utility. It's not a replacement, it's just part of an IT strategy. I suspect however, what will happen is the big sales plug of why it's great. Lots of manglers signing on the dotted line, and a whole bunch of people ending up with something that isn't the right tool for the job, but that gets railroaded through anyway because someone will look stupid if it fails.
So no change there then.
Most backups work on a schedule basis. E.g. overnight or whatever. We have a product for our mobile users that essentially creates 'local' backup databases on a separate drive, and then uploads that whenever a netlink is available. They don't need 'full time' networks access, and we get an acceptable level of recovery capability.
This is really critical, and something that's overlooked. The share market - yeah, whatever. When share prices fall, people who've already started gambling lose some money. That's not the end of the world, by any means.
The problem is, that anyone who has a mortgage, doesn't own their house - the bank does.
When the bank folds, it has to liquidate it's assets, in order to pay creditors. It's assets include your house. That's when the bad starts to happen, as a financial collapse forces lots of banks to do this, and a massive reshuffle of property as bankrupty firesales take place. Further crashing the property market, whilst it's at it, and making more people enter the realm where their property is worth less than the amount of money they have borrowed, secured upon it.
You're quite correct thought - my degree taught me 'programming techniques' rather than 'how to write in a particular language'. It's served me quite well, as I can basically port to ... whatever, provided it's approximately similar in paradigm. But I'd have a hard time proving to a potential employer that given 4 hours I can write whatever language they happen to like with moderate utility.
I don't do it, for much the same reason I don't drive whilst drunk - not being in full control over my killing machine I consider unacceptable.
Lifestyle is one thing. Public sexual gratification is another.
Actually with an average if 15, you ended up with the age range of up to about 40-50, but most of the kids not making it to puberty.
The 'alpha' male would actually live quite a long, and mate quite a lot, and have a lot of sperm variance over that timeframe. And lots of offspring, and the majority would be dead early.
The earlier models started putting their thing in things from when it first started getting stiff, and continued until it stopped getting stiff. And without using contraception either. Lots of sprogs dropped, lots died early on.
Compare to now, where ... well _most_ of the populace have a vague idea that contraception means more shagging. There's also a 'hold the family, I have a career' mindset, which does actually cause a generation cycle gap - the white collar crowd running on 25-35 year generations, and the 'working straight out of school' crowd working on 16-25 year generations.
Shame 'none of the above' isn't an option on the ballot paper really, isn't it?
Actually VM tech goes a long way to doing that anyway, provided you've a vaguely good concept of workload fluctuations.
As a wise man once said: "Tax evasion is a crime. Tax avoidance? That's just common sense"
Which given Warhammer is a massively more expensive pursuit, is hardly all that suprising :)
There are degrees of distraction - I don't know about you, but I tune out what's on the radio when I'm needing to pay attention to an emergent road condition. But I have a harder time doing so, if i'm looking down at my passenger's seat, checking a map.
Distractions are things that take your eyes off the road, or that you cannot trivially interrupt when you have something that needs your full attention - phones count, because having a sensible conversation takes processing time. Passengers do, but less so, because they'll typically STFU when you're maneuvering. (Or at least, realise exactly why you started ignoring them)
Personally though, I think cars should be running heads up displays for most things - looking down at a dashboard is IMO just plain bad design, as it takes your eyes away from where you should be looking.
I understand there's a few established religions that have this problem.
I liked it, right up until the ... really horrific plot resolution, which made me very sad.
That's an option. But you'd probably not see _that_ many applicants - because ... well, there's no shortage of that type of corp.
Chances are you'll have some who 'know about it'.
Then take them through what's involved in getting that to happen. From the datacentre (ask them about computers crashing, power cuts, and ask them for what they'd do about it) and work along the chain, across the internet, and then down through your wireless router to your laptop.
Include representations of what's involved in a video - a stack of photographs might do the trick, to represent each 'frame', how you'd encode that, and move it fast enough to watch in real time.
I think that'd give you a good starting point actually, and take the opportunity to expand when there's interest/questions.
But most corps out there aren't like that. Look around a bit further, and there's TONNES that are geared up towards casual play. Ok, so they're not the most famous 'everyone knows who I am' corps, but they're fun. e-fame takes effort, and you don't get to freeload off a reputation for long. So don't try - just find something that suits what you're looking for in terms of play time and activity level - be honest about what you're looking for, and realistic in your expectations, and you'll find something.
How about: Requiring someone to do something stupid, doesn't change the fact that it's stupid :).
It means there's no implicit advantage to being able to 'grind' all day, vs. being able to play a few hours a night.
Well, there is - you can make more isks, which is useful, but ... I find isks needed, vs isks made is actually proportionate to online time anyway. More I'm online, more ships and stuff I'll buy :p
But it means I can feel free to enjoy the game, without feeling like I'm getting left behind - I'm being as efficient trading in a freighter, as going out and trying to single handedly kill Goonswarm. At least, in terms of SP progression.
I love that aspect - it's the freedom to choose what you want to do, without having had some developer decide what's 'good' and gets xp, and what's not. Seeing new professions emerge is truly beautiful - I've seen anti-sucide escorts, I've seen people selling mining director skills. I've seen one person who was doing 'narration' of a player's actions. He'd quite literally follow them around, and describe what they were doing in local, and in 'heroic' prose.
You get ore theives, you get people able to rig ships. You get people who do 'POS/reaction chain' design. You get people who will gather intel, and sell the reports.
Emergent professions are what makes EVE awesome.
But Infiniband isn't so much disk I/O, as an enabled for NUMA architecture in the cluster - it makes multiprocessing much easier, if you can use distributed shared memory.
They will most likely start breaking down the various 'non space' stuff, into processes that can be distributed. They can 'cheat' and do a node handover whenever someone warps to another grid too, but the place where the 'problem' hits, is when you have lots of ships interacting with each other - 500 people all maneuvering and shooting is much much harder to distribute effectively, because you do need to communicate a lot between the different clients. It stops being an implicitly parallel problem, and starts requiring interprocess and possibly inter-node communication, and it needs it to be done 'real time', which is the killer.
But ... well, it's something they're working on, and it's one of those 'big challenges' that I'm watching with interest as to how they'll solve it.
Bit early to tell on the large battles - they don't actually happen all that often, but there's rumours of one that's happened recently with some 300 vs 300, where it was 'pretty good'.
From a recent dev blog:
"This Monday, 29 September, we saw a fleet battle with over 1100 pilots reported in local. Field reports indicate that the fight was quite responsive for the first 10 minutes but then the node "missed its heart beat" as we call it and was removed from the cluster by our cluster integrity watchdog routines. This again is another exciting problem as we can address that as well under our StacklessIO world and that will be the subject of the next blog."
Take that how you will :).
A bit too hardcore for my tastes, but it's quite obvious to me quite why they're the top of the pile _still_. It's because they take the business of Internet Spaceships much more seriously than almost everyone else. The 'insider benefits' scandal - well, it caused a furore, but the actual benefits provided are pretty insignificant - yes, it was some vaguely rare and valuable items, but ... well, have you seen what the revenue of a promethium or dysprosium moon is? Have you seen how fast they're building 60bn each Titans?
But the fact that a ship dies, means strategic warfare is possible. I love that part. I love the fact that EVE is a strategy game, with resources to manage, unit skill points, 'hard' skill, and morale. Leaders, commanders, and intel warfare.