Any generation that can make a "Desparate Housewives" game and a sequel to "90210" deserves whatever nonsense MMO they birth!
I've also see a BRATZ video game, too many Barbie games to count, and about 200 old crappy FPS games based off the old Doom and Doom 2 engines. I've seen really bad attempts at serious Murder-Mystery games (Myst and Phantasmagoria being a few of the exceptions to the wave of shit they put out in that genre).
"Garbage in, Garbage Out. Counts for data, and counts for life"
Face it, there is the future of the gaming industry. I bet they'll blame the low subscription rate on the conviently leaked source code and demand the government subsidize them due to the evil pirates.
Down down down, right down the shitter only twice as fast as the movie industry's slide into irrelivance...
Books: they don't crash, do need hardware upgrades outside of the occasional new pair of glasses, and so far none of the books I have read have any class imbalances except "Last of the Renshai", the hobbled warrior class was WAY OP'ed!!
Most of IT has gone the way of the TV repair man. Technology becomes EASIER to use as the generations go by.
Programmers are now a dime a dozen with kids, KIDS, learning Java, C++, Pascal at a highschool level.
You could try to go the "professional" route, of course with 11 year old kids with MCSEs and CCNEs I doubt there is much in the way of credibility. A+ and Net+ are highschool coursework now. They are in fact, in a way, modern Highschool++.
Here is what you can unionize and I would recommend modeling it after the legal Bar Assoc.: Network Administration: (Potential access to confidential data, privacy issues, etc.) Network Security: (if you need an explanation on why they should be licensed, please go swim in lava) Enterprise Architects: (just like engineers that build highways, skyscrapers, most have licensing requirements, because you don't want to spend 3 million to get a network that is insecure and slower then pitch)
Here is what you can't unionize: Programmers: (dime a dozen, should count as a 2nd language in college if you ask me) Support Jockeys: (Incident and Problem Management, you have become Wal-Mart cashiers the moment they brought in drill down support databases and the ITIL escalation paths. Get over yourselves, you worth minimum wage at best. All you do is read crap out of a database that I could just as easily read myself.)
But let us look at the three "professional groups"
A: You need legislation to mandate that NA, NS, and EA staff must meet a rigeous standard and background check. Effectively the Bar Assoc. becomes the certifier of those qualifications and THE MUST BE LICENSED by the federal government. (As a net admin in Minnesota would more then likely admin servers in other states, so a state by state licensing becomes useless.)
B: The Bar Assoc. must maintain the highest of standards that are not vendor-centric with standardized best practices, continuing education requirements to meet licensing standards, etc.
Now let me ask you this: A generation of people that demanded to wear sandals and purple hair while setting up NT servers, are they really willing to wear a suit or, in my opinion, go back to the lab coats, and act like professionals? Because lets be honest, if you want to be treated like a professional, you, well have to act like it. An unlike a JOB, a career, a profession, you do not hang up when you leave work. That is something that generation-X and Y knows nothing about in my experience.
For an industry hell-bent in making open toed sandals, pony tails, goatees, and tee-shirt & jeans the norm, I doubt they have the intestinal fortitude to walk the professional line that doctors and lawyers have to maintain.
I don't see an IT union working in the fashion of say, Teamsters, but I can see a small sub-set heading the way of the legal professional. Perhaps a paralegal role would emerge so the dead beat, 3 nights a week, no-nothings answering the phones have something to shoot for so they can kick of Tivoli remote installs...
East side cop finds his ex-wife dead and he's the primary suspect.
Digging into the murder he finds his wife moonlighting with a weird cult operating out of the boiler room of a massive fast food corporation.
They open a gate to hell, the cop gets possessed and proceeds to murder the entire city as a demon.
Once the last soul is taken the gate seals up and the event becomes a cold case.
30 years later: An ex-army gone PI chases down a filandering wife and her boyfriend to the ruins of an abandon metropolis in the western part of Brazil where something bad happened 30 years ago...
I like the additions but if Palpatine is the centuries old Plagus apprentice then we need factor that in. I like the idea of role reversal though with Maul and Palpatine as you described, perhaps Maul is the Sith's "man in their pocket" only to end up become Palpatine's secret weapon to keep the Sith placated... I like where this is going. We should get a screen play ready!
Easy Fix: Animate it. While, to my knowledge, there has never been a long running animated drama, why not give it a shot with Star Wars? Can't be any worse then what Lucas has done lately.
New addition to add political pressure within an orgainzation, affords better story telling. It would take far more then just two to corrdinate all the activities. While two may call the shots there will still be people "on the payroll" so to speak.
The high availability stuff was switched to Microshaft's VM and dev boxes were switched to Xen as the VM provider. I know my two script boxes ended up as KVM driven but that was by my request for testing (my stuff is just perl scripts that execute as a reporting system and until I get my VMware scripts re-coded for Xen and KVM they won't be used much.)
Again I didn't do the switch over myself and I won't get an enterprise infrastructure map until month-end so I can be certain what got switched to what. I am currently on vacation and won't be in to that client till the 2nd weekend of Sept.
Yes they were just disk mounts so it wasn't too painful.
I checked with Travis (The admin) they mount the disks as raw devices so it was just a matter of creating a VM in the alternate VM host and pointing to the old disk, you still have to go in and add various tools and switch some NIC information (he said that all he had to do was let the system detect a new NIC, remove the old one, and set the new NIC to the same MAC then reboot.)
I can save it: I'll craft Star Wars into a 22 season television series about the slow decay of the Jedi and the friction between the Sith Council and the the current Sith Lord Sidious.
Sidious on the outs with the Council is in a despirate position and a critical timing to regain control of the galaxy.
Mean while the Jedi have descended into a religious in-fighting on differing theories of the nature of the Force.
Qui Gon is leading the "Living Force" theory basing it in the Midchlorians. Yoda is leading the Universal Force theory (mirroring the differing views of physics, partical, quantum, string, etc..)
The Galactic Sentate is steeping in corruption and dealing with technological stagnation and the political fall out of ivolving the Sith in ending the last of the Mandalorian strong holds. (The Sith this time function as more of a mafia-like organization.)
We then slowly start moving through the movies starting with episode 1 but spend considerably more time focusing on the the infighting of the Jedi and the drama that comes about with admitting Annakin. (Seasons 1-3)
Ok now we are at Movie #2's content where we really start breaking down Anakin psychologically. Obi Wan is the presumed to lead the Living Force movement but is more concerned with the Jedi's pure function, protecting the Republic. Sidious is playing a dangerous game violating several of the Sith's tenants and is running the risk of losing the Sith agent's loyalty. Amadala is dealing with a considerable age gap with Annakin and is dangerously close to plunging the Sentate into a political mess. (Seasons 4-5)
Ok Third Movie content where the Jedi implode politically just in time to get slaughtered. We focus this season specifically on Annakin\Vader and the trouble the Emperor has gotten himself into. At the last moment the Emperor has grabbed victory and appeased the Sith Council for now... The Jedi are hunted and exterminated as Vader begins his reign. (Season 6)
(Fast Forward 20 Years, yes we are aging the twins from original cannon)
Vader is a tormented soul but suprisingly the Emperor and Vader are in trouble contantly dealing with the reality of ruling the universe. Brokering deals with the Hutt, defending the Empire for invaders, and the rebellion. We paint an unapologetic yet sympathetic view of the Empire internals. Vader's confidant turns out to be Bobba Fett and the Emperor has to deal with growing threats of rebellion, knowing full well that failure will turn the Sith against him in full.
Mean while Luke and Leia's early life plays out in short clips while, once marginal characters (Ackabar, etc.) play out in how they become part of the rebellion.
(Season 7-10)
Ok Movie 4 content begins as a series of riots break out forcing the Emperor to implement the doctrine of fear as a despirate response to the growing rebellion. The clock has started and the only bargining chip he has is the Death Star.
Obi Wan gets word of the open rebellion and senses the time is right. Fate delivers Luke to him.
Mean while the Death Star plans are stolen and the story of their delivery to Leia unfolds.
(Season 11-13)
Ok Movie 5 Content remains straight forward from the movie but an additional focus of the Anti-Jedi propaganda starting to fall apart and the dangerous deals the Relbellion has to make to secure ships, supplies, etc.
Vader figures out whole Luke is and discretely tried to protect his son while playing a deadly game of cat and mouse with the Emperor, thinking Luke and himself can overthrow the Emperor and "Fix this, make things right" in his own twisted way.
Han begins to notice that Luke and Leia act a bit too much like one another, begins to see some similarities...
(Season 14 - 16)
Movie 6 now, with a slightly different take. We make the Ewoks just a tad more menacing and a little less cuddly and really focus now on Vader and the Emperor as advisaries. Luke and Leia playout but we add in the "cost of victory" for th
The Open Source Model gets a leg up again after this nonsense. A client of mine just ported all their VMs and said good bye to VMware. That's 280 VMs by the way. Thank God we had a contingency plan for switching VM providers for a DR exercise a year ago and here we go.
Management is pretty upset and I doubt we will be switching back any time soon to VMWare products after this.
On a side note this scenario did prove one thing:
Having a VM-agnostic storage makes migration easy. We changed a mount point, powered on the alternate VM host and we were off and running just that quick. We lost the ability to do live migrations for now but beyond that is was a good opporunity to see just how important an VM-agnostic disk storage array is. (I'm not the admin of those machines but I believe we are using iSCSI).
On my side though I had about 50 scripts tapping VMWare via PERL but I guess I can start building workarounds now... No more batch submission and dynamic routing for a week or two... The part I hate the most was I had a nice script to take a batch submission and if necessary migrate a utility node to bigger hardware to accomidate the batch... pisses me off but what can I do, thank you Vmware, that aquisition seems to be improving your product as much as when Symantec aquired Ghost Corp!
It is a telling sign of the time when a people elevate the useless trapping of sedentary life in an attempt at parity with the advancement and conditioning of the human body to a state of near perfection.
Have we lost the passion for self improvement somewhere in the fields of snack food and talk shows?
"To all things I see bent knees to man's greatness as man discards the human gifts and flaws for the cold comfort of a life spent as a machine..."
You faith in science may wane but my faith in man kind after reading all these threads save your and a few select has diminished to zero. We have truly degenerated into a bunch of thug morons. The movie Idiocracy is now a sad truth...
The main reason we are interested in life on Mars has nothing to do with life on Mars. We want to strip mine the fuck out of another planet and not have to worry about environmental shit.
The role-playing game Rifts found the solution to laser based warfare two decades ago:
The Glitterboy
It was a power armor that was coated in reflective\refractive material the resembled a metallic glitter. It simply scattered high intensity energy weapons forcing more convention munitions to be used.
Once the glitterboy armor technology spread they and the war dragged on, resources became scarce. To provide effective ammunition against other glitterboy based war suits they developed a high velocity cannon that shot, well, junked scrap metal called, affectionatly I assume, a BOOM cannon.
Politics is not a left\right arugment. As usual we are bound to 2D thinking.
There are 3 dimensions of politics, much like a gobbstopper.
The X axis is "Level of Social Control" The Y axis is "Level of Economic Control" The Z axis is "Acceptance of Change"
The rules is simple: Rule 1: "The rebellion becomes the establishment that we rebel against" Rule 2: There is a cycle of 4 generations:
Those that sow (WWII)
Those that harvest (BABY BOOMERS)
Those that expect (GEN-X)
Those that suffer (GEN-Y)
The first generation lays a foundation for success
The second enjoys what the 1st generation protected them from
The third generation, far removed from the 1st generation's hard work take what they have for granted not realizing that the harvest generation did not prepare a harvest for them.
The fouth generation suffers the ignorance of the 2nd and third but are the ones that raise the new geneartion of those who will sow the seed.
If you want to take democrats and republicans as examples of the 3D system you get (on a scale of 1 to 10 for ease with 0 in the center and 10 at the outer most point)
The individual stands at the center. When X,Y,Z are all at 0 you are on your own. Pure freedom. You also have no cushion... you live and die on your own.
The higher the score, the less important an individual is in an organization. The lower, the more involved.
Each person has their personal comfort zone. Most are in the center, a.k.a 15 (on a scale of 1-10 for each.)
Now this is a vast simplification of this idea, you would build a personal profile of what weight certain topics have and build out your scale from there but we need to move into a 3D thought process if we are to get away from the idea of a two party system.
... simply by using the product that you paid to use...
As far as MMO's go, it's more of a service then a product. If we want to handle online games properly in court we need to get off this "product" concept and move towards a service.
If you put a deposit down (buy) on a game and pay a monthly fee then you are renting or licensing that software. This is core to modern software, you never BUY the software, you license it, thus the EULA is a binding contract of sorts (IANALBIPOOT, "I am not a lawyer but I play one on TV"). If we get the courts to look at it as a service (remember the whole "Software as a service" arguments we had back when Bill Gates and that fruit cake wanna-be samurai from Oracle said it was the future) we would fair better in courts as if gives consumers better leverage treating MMO's as a service rather then a product. Ah! But alas in the US at least treating software as a service is a fools errand. Think about how you get treated with your CELL PHONE service! Just think of paying a $100 cancellation fee for getting rid of your MMO subscription. Thank god we don't have "carriers" for software that distribute your software as a service over secured channels... er wait... stardock, steam, xbox live, sonys... awww shit... here comes the cancellation fees!
WoW2! Free with 1 year agreement! --
Either way we are pooched. This is largely driven from the fact that most manufacturing in the US has gone away and our only large export is Intellectual Property. The courts and the politics are just trying to protect that last exportable resource that the top-tier developing nations have left.
As someone who has tested it, many of the melee classes were redundant. With spec lines there just wasn't a need for them. The difference wasn't large enough to justfy them.
The cities? I'll take fewer cities with better quality rather then more cities with less quality. Last thing we need is another Thunder Bluff\Darnassus city taking up space iwth 4 people sitting in each of em...
EA is proud to announce to our channel partners an excellent in-game advertising program we have integrated into our sports and MMO title. Now players of EA titles can experience rich in-game advertising. No when players die in Warhammer they must wait 10 seconds to respawn. Using our in-game advertising platform you can now send tailored context sensitive ads. Along with our billboard advertising options (you see those commonly in our sports titles as banners around the play field) we have extended that into the game for NPC battle standards.
Signed: Money @!#$ @!#$ Left Handed @!#$ @!#$ Mother @!#$ @!#$ Ben Affleck @!#$@!#$ @!#$ Rabies with a bad case of @!#$@!#$ @!#$ @!#$ Antelopes!
You are confusing Criminal versus Civil and ignoring public verus private.
She is not being prosecuted for using a false name; she is being prosecuted for accessing a private\protect system. Please re-read the mall scenario.
This is establishing the concept (long over due) of how "digital tresspassing" is handled. MMO players should be thrilled, if this works then logging into someone's account using false data, you as the customer now have a due course of action against the infiltrator.
They launched a liberal talk radio station. No one listened. They shut it down.
They launch conservative talk radio stations. They thrive.
This is not censorship, but simply free market.
The original fairness doctrine was used when outlets were limited and tightly controlled by a very few and select number of individuals.
Anti-trust laws and ownership regulation of media outlets drastically reduced the need for the Fairness Doctrine.
The basic choice though is whether the free market of ideas, the right of free associate, the right to reject that which you find is wrong is to be regulated by the market dynamics OR the government imposes and regulates that choice. When the government chooses what you can think, hear, say, and associate with you are neck deep in the communist ideaology, where you belong to the state and must comply with the state.
Imagine now that at an NAACP meeting that the KKK now gets it's fair share of time, the Nazi get their fair share of time, etc... You must question the right of the government to mandate the NAACP must give them equal time.
The choice is who decides, the free market or the government.
The same government most people complain about 7 days a week. If you don't trust them with your money why trust them with your mind.
If the free market doesn't decide are you really interested in the government, who's popularity right now is in the SINGLE DIGITS, deciding? Would you want a 70% democrat congress deciding what is fair? How about a 70% republican congress? 70% any party deciding... What happened to personal freedom and personal decision making? Mark my words, watch a Church broadcast on TV and your little tivo box won't let you watch again until you've watched an equal amount of time of some other religion to make sure we are being fair. Hmm 1 hour of Christian, better get in your 1 hour of non-christian broadcast before you can watch any more. 1 Hour of Pro-US broadcast? Better get you 1 hour of Pro-North Korea.
"Thank you for watching Mysteries of the Bible here on Christian TV. Please note that the next 78 hours of Christian TV broadcast, due to the Mysteries of the Bible must now broadcast 1 hour of: Hindu Muslim Confucian Satantics Buddist Hari Krishna Taoism Scientology Heaven's Gate Branch Dividians... the list goes on...
Thank you again for watching Christian TV. We understand that is is near idiotic to pay for Christian TV since we can only show Christian topics once every 78 hours but please remember without your support we couldn't broadcast high quality religious topics once every few days. See you in 78 hours once we have met the Fairness doctrine requirements because not all topics are two sided..."
The fact is that they couldn't cut it in the free market of ideas and now wants a government subsidy to force people like the NAACP to provide fairness in their publications. Imagine BET being told they don't have enough KKK broadcasts in order to be fair and balanced. I give people like David Duke 6 hours before trying that. Any bets on Larry Flint tossing out Hustler on a Nickelodian? CNN, NBC, CBS, ABC, guess what, some reps from those terrorist you keep showing want their side of the story told. Yeah the ones that cut the head off one of your reporters. They tallied up that 420 hours of anti-THEM broadcasts and are demanding 420 hours of rebuttle time... Yeah yeah most of them will just rant about their enemies while most people just turn the tv off, I am sure the advetisers won't mind... I'm sure the government will subsidize any lost revenue in order to comply with that doctrine.
Here comes the tax hike...
It is a slippery slope doomed to failure in a nation where most giant corporations are publically owned rather then age old trusts and CEOs must careful court the shareholds to keep them happy.
Be careful what you say/. and think hard before you type. This is a sword who's handle is covered in razors...
First stop thinking about EA\Activision\etc as game companies. They are at the core Interactive Entertainment companies.
Just as Marvel is no longer a comic book publisher, they deal in intellectual property. Their product is the world and characters they create and the various outlets are the tools (comics, movies, games, etc.)
With that in mind Activision and EA are looking at entertainment resources. The reason for the mergers is to pool capital for large projects that are internal and self directed.
Case in point, how many good video game movies are there?
Ok with that answer in mind: How many of them were produced by the game company?
Ahh we are starting to see the motivation here.
Blizzard alone, despite being a large high quality producer of games doesn't have all the tools they need to push things to the next level. The inverse is also true Activision doesn't have the tools that Blizzard has.
We all know there is a Warcraft movie in the works. The more money that Blizzard can front in the production, the more control. If they could fund the movie completely, they have complete control.
This is what motivated Marvel to start doing their own movies. Look at Marvel based movies before they spun their own studio (Hulk, Daredevil, Ghost Rider, Electra, etc.) and look at the post results in Iron Man.
By combining resources they are given themselves better leverage for a complete Entertainment company with better cross platform capitalization of their intellectual properties.
ActivisionBlizzard can do more with existing IPs then Blizzard alone can. Remeber, business is just as much about networking personally then just the logistics of business-as-usual. Activision brings a lot of "Who to call for XYZ" and "So-and-So over at Paramount owes me a favor".
The same goes the opposite way, Activision can now dip into the substantial talent pool that Blizzard has, their biggest asset is their art department. Think of all the artists who can now branch out and do work for other IPs not getting burned out drawing their 400th Orc or 200th Zerg. Retaining talent isn't jsut about good benefits, but giving them something to do that keeps them energized.
The key is ensuring good management, keeping the creative forces insulated against the business lines, and ensuring that creativity and profitability co-exist as peacefully as possible. That takes strong leadership to say yes and no when needed.
That being said I would love to see some new use of the WoW IP, how about a racing game in the theme of Rally car racing through Azeroth and Outland. How about some FPS in the land of Starcraft. How about a few anime series based on Starcraft, Diablo, and Warcraft?
Maintain quality, respect the IP, keep focused and keep costs in control.
Slashdot Mirror
DON'T YOU DARE ACT SUPRISED SLASHDOTTERS!
Any generation that can make a "Desparate Housewives" game and a sequel to "90210" deserves whatever nonsense MMO they birth!
I've also see a BRATZ video game, too many Barbie games to count, and about 200 old crappy FPS games based off the old Doom and Doom 2 engines. I've seen really bad attempts at serious Murder-Mystery games (Myst and Phantasmagoria being a few of the exceptions to the wave of shit they put out in that genre).
"Garbage in, Garbage Out. Counts for data, and counts for life"
Face it, there is the future of the gaming industry. I bet they'll blame the low subscription rate on the conviently leaked source code and demand the government subsidize them due to the evil pirates.
Down down down, right down the shitter only twice as fast as the movie industry's slide into irrelivance...
Books: they don't crash, do need hardware upgrades outside of the occasional new pair of glasses, and so far none of the books I have read have any class imbalances except "Last of the Renshai", the hobbled warrior class was WAY OP'ed!!
Most of IT has gone the way of the TV repair man. Technology becomes EASIER to use as the generations go by.
Programmers are now a dime a dozen with kids, KIDS, learning Java, C++, Pascal at a highschool level.
You could try to go the "professional" route, of course with 11 year old kids with MCSEs and CCNEs I doubt there is much in the way of credibility. A+ and Net+ are highschool coursework now. They are in fact, in a way, modern Highschool++.
Here is what you can unionize and I would recommend modeling it after the legal Bar Assoc.:
Network Administration: (Potential access to confidential data, privacy issues, etc.)
Network Security: (if you need an explanation on why they should be licensed, please go swim in lava)
Enterprise Architects: (just like engineers that build highways, skyscrapers, most have licensing requirements, because you don't want to spend 3 million to get a network that is insecure and slower then pitch)
Here is what you can't unionize:
Programmers: (dime a dozen, should count as a 2nd language in college if you ask me)
Support Jockeys: (Incident and Problem Management, you have become Wal-Mart cashiers the moment they brought in drill down support databases and the ITIL escalation paths. Get over yourselves, you worth minimum wage at best. All you do is read crap out of a database that I could just as easily read myself.)
But let us look at the three "professional groups"
A: You need legislation to mandate that NA, NS, and EA staff must meet a rigeous standard and background check. Effectively the Bar Assoc. becomes the certifier of those qualifications and THE MUST BE LICENSED by the federal government. (As a net admin in Minnesota would more then likely admin servers in other states, so a state by state licensing becomes useless.)
B: The Bar Assoc. must maintain the highest of standards that are not vendor-centric with standardized best practices, continuing education requirements to meet licensing standards, etc.
Now let me ask you this: A generation of people that demanded to wear sandals and purple hair while setting up NT servers, are they really willing to wear a suit or, in my opinion, go back to the lab coats, and act like professionals? Because lets be honest, if you want to be treated like a professional, you, well have to act like it. An unlike a JOB, a career, a profession, you do not hang up when you leave work. That is something that generation-X and Y knows nothing about in my experience.
For an industry hell-bent in making open toed sandals, pony tails, goatees, and tee-shirt & jeans the norm, I doubt they have the intestinal fortitude to walk the professional line that doctors and lawyers have to maintain.
I don't see an IT union working in the fashion of say, Teamsters, but I can see a small sub-set heading the way of the legal professional. Perhaps a paralegal role would emerge so the dead beat, 3 nights a week, no-nothings answering the phones have something to shoot for so they can kick of Tivoli remote installs...
My 2 cents...
Winos are often overlooked and ignored by society. The fact that they are considered DARK matter is nothing short of racism and social injustice.
QUIT STEPPING OVER THE WINOS AND LET THEM KNOW THAT THEY MATTER!
Addiction is a disease of the mind.
The MEDIUM of addiction really is irrelivant.
You can be addicted to booze, meth, smokes, cronic, video games, sex, sitcoms, eating, etc.
Video game addiction is as real as any other addiction indicated above.
Some people have addictive personalities, most don't.
The people likely to be addicted to gaming are just as likely, if they didn't have the games, to become addicted to any other substance or activity.
Plain and simple.
I can fix it:
East side cop finds his ex-wife dead and he's the primary suspect.
Digging into the murder he finds his wife moonlighting with a weird cult operating out of the boiler room of a massive fast food corporation.
They open a gate to hell, the cop gets possessed and proceeds to murder the entire city as a demon.
Once the last soul is taken the gate seals up and the event becomes a cold case.
30 years later: An ex-army gone PI chases down a filandering wife and her boyfriend to the ruins of an abandon metropolis in the western part of Brazil where something bad happened 30 years ago...
I like the additions but if Palpatine is the centuries old Plagus apprentice then we need factor that in. I like the idea of role reversal though with Maul and Palpatine as you described, perhaps Maul is the Sith's "man in their pocket" only to end up become Palpatine's secret weapon to keep the Sith placated... I like where this is going. We should get a screen play ready!
Easy Fix: Animate it. While, to my knowledge, there has never been a long running animated drama, why not give it a shot with Star Wars? Can't be any worse then what Lucas has done lately.
New addition to add political pressure within an orgainzation, affords better story telling. It would take far more then just two to corrdinate all the activities. While two may call the shots there will still be people "on the payroll" so to speak.
The high availability stuff was switched to Microshaft's VM and dev boxes were switched to Xen as the VM provider. I know my two script boxes ended up as KVM driven but that was by my request for testing (my stuff is just perl scripts that execute as a reporting system and until I get my VMware scripts re-coded for Xen and KVM they won't be used much.)
Again I didn't do the switch over myself and I won't get an enterprise infrastructure map until month-end so I can be certain what got switched to what. I am currently on vacation and won't be in to that client till the 2nd weekend of Sept.
Yes they were just disk mounts so it wasn't too painful.
I checked with Travis (The admin) they mount the disks as raw devices so it was just a matter of creating a VM in the alternate VM host and pointing to the old disk, you still have to go in and add various tools and switch some NIC information (he said that all he had to do was let the system detect a new NIC, remove the old one, and set the new NIC to the same MAC then reboot.)
I can save it:
I'll craft Star Wars into a 22 season television series about the slow decay of the Jedi and the friction between the Sith Council and the the current Sith Lord Sidious.
Sidious on the outs with the Council is in a despirate position and a critical timing to regain control of the galaxy.
Mean while the Jedi have descended into a religious in-fighting on differing theories of the nature of the Force.
Qui Gon is leading the "Living Force" theory basing it in the Midchlorians. Yoda is leading the Universal Force theory (mirroring the differing views of physics, partical, quantum, string, etc..)
The Galactic Sentate is steeping in corruption and dealing with technological stagnation and the political fall out of ivolving the Sith in ending the last of the Mandalorian strong holds. (The Sith this time function as more of a mafia-like organization.)
We then slowly start moving through the movies starting with episode 1 but spend considerably more time focusing on the the infighting of the Jedi and the drama that comes about with admitting Annakin. (Seasons 1-3)
Ok now we are at Movie #2's content where we really start breaking down Anakin psychologically. Obi Wan is the presumed to lead the Living Force movement but is more concerned with the Jedi's pure function, protecting the Republic. Sidious is playing a dangerous game violating several of the Sith's tenants and is running the risk of losing the Sith agent's loyalty. Amadala is dealing with a considerable age gap with Annakin and is dangerously close to plunging the Sentate into a political mess. (Seasons 4-5)
Ok Third Movie content where the Jedi implode politically just in time to get slaughtered. We focus this season specifically on Annakin\Vader and the trouble the Emperor has gotten himself into. At the last moment the Emperor has grabbed victory and appeased the Sith Council for now... The Jedi are hunted and exterminated as Vader begins his reign.
(Season 6)
(Fast Forward 20 Years, yes we are aging the twins from original cannon)
Vader is a tormented soul but suprisingly the Emperor and Vader are in trouble contantly dealing with the reality of ruling the universe. Brokering deals with the Hutt, defending the Empire for invaders, and the rebellion. We paint an unapologetic yet sympathetic view of the Empire internals. Vader's confidant turns out to be Bobba Fett and the Emperor has to deal with growing threats of rebellion, knowing full well that failure will turn the Sith against him in full.
Mean while Luke and Leia's early life plays out in short clips while, once marginal characters (Ackabar, etc.) play out in how they become part of the rebellion.
(Season 7-10)
Ok Movie 4 content begins as a series of riots break out forcing the Emperor to implement the doctrine of fear as a despirate response to the growing rebellion. The clock has started and the only bargining chip he has is the Death Star.
Obi Wan gets word of the open rebellion and senses the time is right. Fate delivers Luke to him.
Mean while the Death Star plans are stolen and the story of their delivery to Leia unfolds.
(Season 11-13)
Ok Movie 5 Content remains straight forward from the movie but an additional focus of the Anti-Jedi propaganda starting to fall apart and the dangerous deals the Relbellion has to make to secure ships, supplies, etc.
Vader figures out whole Luke is and discretely tried to protect his son while playing a deadly game of cat and mouse with the Emperor, thinking Luke and himself can overthrow the Emperor and "Fix this, make things right" in his own twisted way.
Han begins to notice that Luke and Leia act a bit too much like one another, begins to see some similarities...
(Season 14 - 16)
Movie 6 now, with a slightly different take. We make the Ewoks just a tad more menacing and a little less cuddly and really focus now on Vader and the Emperor as advisaries. Luke and Leia playout but we add in the "cost of victory" for th
The Open Source Model gets a leg up again after this nonsense. A client of mine just ported all their VMs and said good bye to VMware. That's 280 VMs by the way. Thank God we had a contingency plan for switching VM providers for a DR exercise a year ago and here we go.
Management is pretty upset and I doubt we will be switching back any time soon to VMWare products after this.
On a side note this scenario did prove one thing:
Having a VM-agnostic storage makes migration easy. We changed a mount point, powered on the alternate VM host and we were off and running just that quick. We lost the ability to do live migrations for now but beyond that is was a good opporunity to see just how important an VM-agnostic disk storage array is. (I'm not the admin of those machines but I believe we are using iSCSI).
On my side though I had about 50 scripts tapping VMWare via PERL but I guess I can start building workarounds now... No more batch submission and dynamic routing for a week or two... The part I hate the most was I had a nice script to take a batch submission and if necessary migrate a utility node to bigger hardware to accomidate the batch... pisses me off but what can I do, thank you Vmware, that aquisition seems to be improving your product as much as when Symantec aquired Ghost Corp!
It is a telling sign of the time when a people elevate the useless trapping of sedentary life in an attempt at parity with the advancement and conditioning of the human body to a state of near perfection.
Have we lost the passion for self improvement somewhere in the fields of snack food and talk shows?
"To all things I see bent knees to man's greatness as man discards the human gifts and flaws for the cold comfort of a life spent as a machine..."
You faith in science may wane but my faith in man kind after reading all these threads save your and a few select has diminished to zero. We have truly degenerated into a bunch of thug morons. The movie Idiocracy is now a sad truth...
I think you are looking for the word: Chiaroscuro
Artist term for Light and Dark, common for people that work with charcoals.
The main reason we are interested in life on Mars has nothing to do with life on Mars. We want to strip mine the fuck out of another planet and not have to worry about environmental shit.
No life? No problems.
The role-playing game Rifts found the solution to laser based warfare two decades ago:
The Glitterboy
It was a power armor that was coated in reflective\refractive material the resembled a metallic glitter. It simply scattered high intensity energy weapons forcing more convention munitions to be used.
Once the glitterboy armor technology spread they and the war dragged on, resources became scarce. To provide effective ammunition against other glitterboy based war suits they developed a high velocity cannon that shot, well, junked scrap metal called, affectionatly I assume, a BOOM cannon.
Once again Sci-Fi beats the brains to the punch.
Should it worry me that there is more interest in fake creatures then real ones these days? This is turning into Pokemon on Meth...
Politics is not a left\right arugment. As usual we are bound to 2D thinking.
There are 3 dimensions of politics, much like a gobbstopper.
The X axis is "Level of Social Control"
The Y axis is "Level of Economic Control"
The Z axis is "Acceptance of Change"
The rules is simple:
Rule 1: "The rebellion becomes the establishment that we rebel against"
Rule 2: There is a cycle of 4 generations:
Those that sow (WWII)
Those that harvest (BABY BOOMERS)
Those that expect (GEN-X)
Those that suffer (GEN-Y)
The first generation lays a foundation for success
The second enjoys what the 1st generation protected them from
The third generation, far removed from the 1st generation's hard work take what they have for granted not realizing that the harvest generation did not prepare a harvest for them.
The fouth generation suffers the ignorance of the 2nd and third but are the ones that raise the new geneartion of those who will sow the seed.
If you want to take democrats and republicans as examples of the 3D system you get (on a scale of 1 to 10 for ease with 0 in the center and 10 at the outer most point)
Democrats: :20 :10 :20 :30
X:5 Y:5 Z:10
Total
Republicans
X:5 Y:0 Z:5
Total
Communism
X:10 Y:10 Z:0
Total
Socialism
X:10 Y:10 Z:10
Total
Libertarian
X:0 Y:0 Z:10
Anarchist
X:0 Y:0 Z:0
The individual stands at the center. When X,Y,Z are all at 0 you are on your own. Pure freedom. You also have no cushion... you live and die on your own.
The higher the score, the less important an individual is in an organization. The lower, the more involved.
Each person has their personal comfort zone. Most are in the center, a.k.a 15 (on a scale of 1-10 for each.)
Now this is a vast simplification of this idea, you would build a personal profile of what weight certain topics have and build out your scale from there but we need to move into a 3D thought process if we are to get away from the idea of a two party system.
... simply by using the product that you paid to use...
As far as MMO's go, it's more of a service then a product. If we want to handle online games properly in court we need to get off this "product" concept and move towards a service.
If you put a deposit down (buy) on a game and pay a monthly fee then you are renting or licensing that software. This is core to modern software, you never BUY the software, you license it, thus the EULA is a binding contract of sorts (IANALBIPOOT, "I am not a lawyer but I play one on TV"). If we get the courts to look at it as a service (remember the whole "Software as a service" arguments we had back when Bill Gates and that fruit cake wanna-be samurai from Oracle said it was the future) we would fair better in courts as if gives consumers better leverage treating MMO's as a service rather then a product. Ah! But alas in the US at least treating software as a service is a fools errand. Think about how you get treated with your CELL PHONE service! Just think of paying a $100 cancellation fee for getting rid of your MMO subscription. Thank god we don't have "carriers" for software that distribute your software as a service over secured channels... er wait... stardock, steam, xbox live, sonys... awww shit... here comes the cancellation fees!
WoW2! Free with 1 year agreement! --
Either way we are pooched. This is largely driven from the fact that most manufacturing in the US has gone away and our only large export is Intellectual Property. The courts and the politics are just trying to protect that last exportable resource that the top-tier developing nations have left.
As someone who has tested it, many of the melee classes were redundant. With spec lines there just wasn't a need for them. The difference wasn't large enough to justfy them.
The cities? I'll take fewer cities with better quality rather then more cities with less quality. Last thing we need is another Thunder Bluff\Darnassus city taking up space iwth 4 people sitting in each of em...
EA is proud to announce to our channel partners an excellent in-game advertising program we have integrated into our sports and MMO title. Now players of EA titles can experience rich in-game advertising. No when players die in Warhammer they must wait 10 seconds to respawn. Using our in-game advertising platform you can now send tailored context sensitive ads. Along with our billboard advertising options (you see those commonly in our sports titles as banners around the play field) we have extended that into the game for NPC battle standards.
Signed: Money @!#$ @!#$ Left Handed @!#$ @!#$ Mother @!#$ @!#$ Ben Affleck @!#$@!#$ @!#$ Rabies with a bad case of @!#$@!#$ @!#$ @!#$ Antelopes!
You are confusing Criminal versus Civil and ignoring public verus private.
She is not being prosecuted for using a false name; she is being prosecuted for accessing a private\protect system. Please re-read the mall scenario.
This is establishing the concept (long over due) of how "digital tresspassing" is handled. MMO players should be thrilled, if this works then logging into someone's account using false data, you as the customer now have a due course of action against the infiltrator.
Simple:
They launched a liberal talk radio station.
No one listened.
They shut it down.
They launch conservative talk radio stations.
They thrive.
This is not censorship, but simply free market.
The original fairness doctrine was used when outlets were limited and tightly controlled by a very few and select number of individuals.
Anti-trust laws and ownership regulation of media outlets drastically reduced the need for the Fairness Doctrine.
The basic choice though is whether the free market of ideas, the right of free associate, the right to reject that which you find is wrong is to be regulated by the market dynamics OR the government imposes and regulates that choice. When the government chooses what you can think, hear, say, and associate with you are neck deep in the communist ideaology, where you belong to the state and must comply with the state.
Imagine now that at an NAACP meeting that the KKK now gets it's fair share of time, the Nazi get their fair share of time, etc... You must question the right of the government to mandate the NAACP must give them equal time.
The choice is who decides, the free market or the government.
The same government most people complain about 7 days a week. If you don't trust them with your money why trust them with your mind.
If the free market doesn't decide are you really interested in the government, who's popularity right now is in the SINGLE DIGITS, deciding? Would you want a 70% democrat congress deciding what is fair? How about a 70% republican congress? 70% any party deciding... What happened to personal freedom and personal decision making? Mark my words, watch a Church broadcast on TV and your little tivo box won't let you watch again until you've watched an equal amount of time of some other religion to make sure we are being fair. Hmm 1 hour of Christian, better get in your 1 hour of non-christian broadcast before you can watch any more. 1 Hour of Pro-US broadcast? Better get you 1 hour of Pro-North Korea.
"Thank you for watching Mysteries of the Bible here on Christian TV. Please note that the next 78 hours of Christian TV broadcast, due to the Mysteries of the Bible must now broadcast 1 hour of: ... the list goes on ...
Hindu
Muslim
Confucian
Satantics
Buddist
Hari Krishna
Taoism
Scientology
Heaven's Gate
Branch Dividians
Thank you again for watching Christian TV. We understand that is is near idiotic to pay for Christian TV since we can only show Christian topics once every 78 hours but please remember without your support we couldn't broadcast high quality religious topics once every few days. See you in 78 hours once we have met the Fairness doctrine requirements because not all topics are two sided..."
The fact is that they couldn't cut it in the free market of ideas and now wants a government subsidy to force people like the NAACP to provide fairness in their publications. Imagine BET being told they don't have enough KKK broadcasts in order to be fair and balanced. I give people like David Duke 6 hours before trying that. Any bets on Larry Flint tossing out Hustler on a Nickelodian? CNN, NBC, CBS, ABC, guess what, some reps from those terrorist you keep showing want their side of the story told. Yeah the ones that cut the head off one of your reporters. They tallied up that 420 hours of anti-THEM broadcasts and are demanding 420 hours of rebuttle time... Yeah yeah most of them will just rant about their enemies while most people just turn the tv off, I am sure the advetisers won't mind... I'm sure the government will subsidize any lost revenue in order to comply with that doctrine.
Here comes the tax hike...
It is a slippery slope doomed to failure in a nation where most giant corporations are publically owned rather then age old trusts and CEOs must careful court the shareholds to keep them happy.
Be careful what you say /. and think hard before you type. This is a sword who's handle is covered in razors...
First stop thinking about EA\Activision\etc as game companies. They are at the core Interactive Entertainment companies.
Just as Marvel is no longer a comic book publisher, they deal in intellectual property. Their product is the world and characters they create and the various outlets are the tools (comics, movies, games, etc.)
With that in mind Activision and EA are looking at entertainment resources. The reason for the mergers is to pool capital for large projects that are internal and self directed.
Case in point, how many good video game movies are there?
Ok with that answer in mind: How many of them were produced by the game company?
Ahh we are starting to see the motivation here.
Blizzard alone, despite being a large high quality producer of games doesn't have all the tools they need to push things to the next level. The inverse is also true Activision doesn't have the tools that Blizzard has.
We all know there is a Warcraft movie in the works. The more money that Blizzard can front in the production, the more control. If they could fund the movie completely, they have complete control.
This is what motivated Marvel to start doing their own movies. Look at Marvel based movies before they spun their own studio (Hulk, Daredevil, Ghost Rider, Electra, etc.) and look at the post results in Iron Man.
By combining resources they are given themselves better leverage for a complete Entertainment company with better cross platform capitalization of their intellectual properties.
ActivisionBlizzard can do more with existing IPs then Blizzard alone can. Remeber, business is just as much about networking personally then just the logistics of business-as-usual. Activision brings a lot of "Who to call for XYZ" and "So-and-So over at Paramount owes me a favor".
The same goes the opposite way, Activision can now dip into the substantial talent pool that Blizzard has, their biggest asset is their art department. Think of all the artists who can now branch out and do work for other IPs not getting burned out drawing their 400th Orc or 200th Zerg. Retaining talent isn't jsut about good benefits, but giving them something to do that keeps them energized.
The key is ensuring good management, keeping the creative forces insulated against the business lines, and ensuring that creativity and profitability co-exist as peacefully as possible. That takes strong leadership to say yes and no when needed.
That being said I would love to see some new use of the WoW IP, how about a racing game in the theme of Rally car racing through Azeroth and Outland. How about some FPS in the land of Starcraft. How about a few anime series based on Starcraft, Diablo, and Warcraft?
Maintain quality, respect the IP, keep focused and keep costs in control.