By that logic, was OpenOffice included in the numbers for Redhat? I would be willing to bet that OpenOffice was counted against Redhat, while MS Office was not counted against Winders. Was Firefox or Evolution counted against Redhat? If so, was Internet Exploder or Outlook(Express) counted against MS?
When comparing my apple (pardon the pun) to your orange, it is clear mine makes better apple pie...
Except these devs are the keepers of The Vision(tm). These are the developers who basically blew this whole genre wide open. When Brad and Co. left SOE, EQ1 went downhill. Some may say it was their millitance about The Vision(tm) that made all the other games learn what not to do, but I really think most of them miss the point. It is not that corpse runs and death penalties and basically needing a group to do anything were bad design ideas; it was the soft effects of those things that made EQ pre-SoL so great. When they started whittling away The Vision(tm), the game lost something. The world was smaller despite being much bigger in actual area. The challenge became less meaningful.
I left EQ soon after and have tried nearly every MMO to come out since, and none of them had what EQ had. Death meant something, and that made your victories all that much more sweet. When my guild first beat Trakanon, or Yelinak, there was entire guild of people who felt as good as humanly possible. The accomplishment meant something because you really had to come together as a single unit and defeat a very tough challenge. No other game since gets it. For the accomplishments to mean something, it has to be a real challenge, overcoming real obstacles. End-game WoW just isnt the same. Nothing they have released will ever compare to The Vision's(tm) end-game unless defeating it actually means something. No death penalty? Death means nothing, and doesnt get the appropriate fear response required to make over-coming it meaningful. Dying in WoW = yawn. Dying in EQ was "FUCK! GDI! SHIT SHIT SHIT FUCK!!1!one!" but, the first time you beat that dragon or god, you felt like you just accomplished that for real. It meant something.
Death penalties while a pita, make the game more fun in the long run. No, I think Aradune and Sigil get it better than any other MMO devs out there. They should, they basically created what we know as the MMORPG today. If they can bring back what EQ was like at release, RoK, and SoV, then end-game WoW will die quickly. All the guilds who would be dedicated enough to tackle the tougher challenges will be gone... playing Vanguard. Casual gamers may keep the numbers high, but if half the content is unbeatable because all your hardcore gamers are gone... lets just say their longetivity will be impacted for sure.
It is a commonly used straw man, designed to obfuscate the discussion. It is a non sequitir to say that if a man can marry a man, then next we will have to let a man marry a sheep. It doesn't follow...
I agree. My team manages the servers for a business unit of a very large corp. Thousands of servers under our control, and we still manage to maintain 98% success on our 5 day SLA for requests. We have about 70% contractor and 30% FTE and most of the team is local.
New server requests are fulfilled in 2 weeks, from design to production, and if you purchase a virtual server, we can have you up and running next day. Big iron will take longer to turn around, but hey, that goes with the territory. Our contract with Sun helps with that though, so its not too much longer.
I guess we just have that good of a team... Maybe we should charge more.
A lot of missed points here by the "what monopoly" crowd. That Micro$oft has 95% of the desktop market isnt the issue (that is a monopoly, but that in itself is not the problem), it is what they did with that monopoly to force things like Internet Exploder and Windows Media Player onto the market and on everyones desktops and burying Netscape, Real, etc... in the process. It is how they used their monopoly that got them in trouble... not that they had it in the first place.
The band that continually used to appear on the top of the money making charts also had a history of allowing anyone to come to their shows and freely record and redistribute their shows.
The Grateful Dead (love em or hate em, not important for this discussion) proved that an artist doesnt need album sales to be successful. Hell, they encouraged people to swap their music. Yet, every year they would tour and tour and sell out show after show and were the richest band during their time. Piracy is a non-factor with empowered artists able to manage their own music and catalog.
The RIAA is setting the stage to make themselves obsolete. They could have gotten ahead of all of this, but that would have required investment and creativity. The former they refuse to do and the latter they completely lack. I look forward to the day when the music industry is making money for only the artists and their distributors (iTunes et.al.) and the scumbags in the RIAA are standing on highway on-ramps holding signs saying "Will make you a star... for food."
I would say most people dont view the RIAA as the "creator" of the music, but the musicians themselves. The RIAA is trying to cling to a dying business model. iTunes is showing the people are more than willing to pay for their music, but they refuse to be gouged by the RIAA's monopolistic tactics. I get all of my music from Emusic.com or iTunes and dont see myself every buying another physical cd. This knee-caps the RIAA because they have historically been able to inflate the overhead required for cd distribution to pad their profits. They dont want to end just p2p, they want to end all digital media because they cant manipulate those markets as well.
The RIAA is the old boys club, who had a good thing going, and rather than adept to the changing market, they attacked their customers. Any good will they may have held as they transitioned to a digital economy is gone. Consumers would much rather give their money to Apple or to the artists directly. These middle men have outlived their purpose.
I run enlightenment on my Mac. It works great and is light enough that it doesnt cause issues. I like variety though, so on my Linux boxes I use KDE, Gnome, XFCE, Elightenment in XFCE, and Fluxbox among others. Thats the great thing about X is that I am not restricted to what someone else says I have to use, I can play around with several different looks and configurations and ways of doing things. Variety is the spice of life and all that crap...
I work on the server team in a very large environment. Several thousand Solaris, Linux, HP-UX and Windows servers supporting business apps for the core business functions, an engineering environment, one of the largest oracle isntances in the world etc... Just setting the stage that I am not just talking out of my ass here. Our jobs are kept interesting due to the companies history of gobbling up other companies to grow into other areas. The *NIX world has been quite lax about security and with the rapid pace of acquisition, we are constantly inheriting other businesses crap.
In the past we have had a running joke that whenever something went wrong, and they requested we check the logs to find out what happened, it was someone named root who did it...
We recently joined the 90s and implemented LDAP and Sudo and have denied remote root logins. Sure everyone can still su to root, but at least there is a trail now. I totally concur that the people who should know better (DBAs, developers, and app admins mostly) cause the most damage. In a perfect world, no one would have root but a few from the server team to maintain. But it is a long road to get there since we have a few generations of apps that have been implemented and developed with root level permissions and the reach of these apps can be massive.
So I am in favor of restricting access as much as possible within the parameters of the business. At the end of the day, good or bad, the business has to meet its objectives, and all of us in infrastructure exist so that the business can do its job, not vice versa.
How do we survive with so many having the keys to the kingdom? We have strict change control, pristine production environments (as much as possible anyway) and we use data center automation software (cmdb whatever you want to call it) to track changes to all production systems and validate those changes against the approved change controls. We use snapshots and audits to verify what has changed on systems when problems do arise. It gives a really good trail to not only address the issues but also gives us a lot of push back when some dba borks the system and tries to blame the server team or the system itself. We get to say "well user so and so su'ed to root and edited this file and thats when we received the first alert from monitoring that services crashed and these other 2 files changed within 2 minutes of that file edit, etc..." It works wonders. Accountability on the systems is necessary when you have a pretty open environment within the different groups in infrastructure. Now Joe Schmoe user doesnt get anything but user level access, but there are thousands of people in infrastructure who do have root or root equivalent access.
The reality is, all of these folks who do have access are very sharp people and we couldnt possibly manage the servers if the dbas or app admins didnt administer their own servers to a large degree. We just dont have the manpower for the size of our environment. So we rely on them not doing anything dumb, but humans make errors, and such is life in the global enterprise IT world.
I clicked on the link and was prompted by firefox if I wanted to open the file in xine or save it to disk. What should I do? If I open it in xine, will crossover office install the malicious code and then I will be infected by M$ sploits? I'm at a loss. Should I open it in xine or save it to my home directory and view it later?
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By that logic, was OpenOffice included in the numbers for Redhat? I would be willing to bet that OpenOffice was counted against Redhat, while MS Office was not counted against Winders. Was Firefox or Evolution counted against Redhat? If so, was Internet Exploder or Outlook(Express) counted against MS?
When comparing my apple (pardon the pun) to your orange, it is clear mine makes better apple pie...
I see the humorectomy operation was a complete success...
As opposed to a two bit wonder...
The windows version of the download manager runs fine in wine.
Except these devs are the keepers of The Vision(tm). These are the developers who basically blew this whole genre wide open. When Brad and Co. left SOE, EQ1 went downhill. Some may say it was their millitance about The Vision(tm) that made all the other games learn what not to do, but I really think most of them miss the point. It is not that corpse runs and death penalties and basically needing a group to do anything were bad design ideas; it was the soft effects of those things that made EQ pre-SoL so great. When they started whittling away The Vision(tm), the game lost something. The world was smaller despite being much bigger in actual area. The challenge became less meaningful.
I left EQ soon after and have tried nearly every MMO to come out since, and none of them had what EQ had. Death meant something, and that made your victories all that much more sweet. When my guild first beat Trakanon, or Yelinak, there was entire guild of people who felt as good as humanly possible. The accomplishment meant something because you really had to come together as a single unit and defeat a very tough challenge. No other game since gets it. For the accomplishments to mean something, it has to be a real challenge, overcoming real obstacles. End-game WoW just isnt the same. Nothing they have released will ever compare to The Vision's(tm) end-game unless defeating it actually means something. No death penalty? Death means nothing, and doesnt get the appropriate fear response required to make over-coming it meaningful. Dying in WoW = yawn. Dying in EQ was "FUCK! GDI! SHIT SHIT SHIT FUCK!!1!one!" but, the first time you beat that dragon or god, you felt like you just accomplished that for real. It meant something.
Death penalties while a pita, make the game more fun in the long run. No, I think Aradune and Sigil get it better than any other MMO devs out there. They should, they basically created what we know as the MMORPG today. If they can bring back what EQ was like at release, RoK, and SoV, then end-game WoW will die quickly. All the guilds who would be dedicated enough to tackle the tougher challenges will be gone... playing Vanguard. Casual gamers may keep the numbers high, but if half the content is unbeatable because all your hardcore gamers are gone... lets just say their longetivity will be impacted for sure.
It is a commonly used straw man, designed to obfuscate the discussion. It is a non sequitir to say that if a man can marry a man, then next we will have to let a man marry a sheep. It doesn't follow...
I agree. My team manages the servers for a business unit of a very large corp. Thousands of servers under our control, and we still manage to maintain 98% success on our 5 day SLA for requests. We have about 70% contractor and 30% FTE and most of the team is local.
New server requests are fulfilled in 2 weeks, from design to production, and if you purchase a virtual server, we can have you up and running next day. Big iron will take longer to turn around, but hey, that goes with the territory. Our contract with Sun helps with that though, so its not too much longer.
I guess we just have that good of a team... Maybe we should charge more.
A lot of missed points here by the "what monopoly" crowd. That Micro$oft has 95% of the desktop market isnt the issue (that is a monopoly, but that in itself is not the problem), it is what they did with that monopoly to force things like Internet Exploder and Windows Media Player onto the market and on everyones desktops and burying Netscape, Real, etc... in the process. It is how they used their monopoly that got them in trouble... not that they had it in the first place.
The band that continually used to appear on the top of the money making charts also had a history of allowing anyone to come to their shows and freely record and redistribute their shows.
The Grateful Dead (love em or hate em, not important for this discussion) proved that an artist doesnt need album sales to be successful. Hell, they encouraged people to swap their music. Yet, every year they would tour and tour and sell out show after show and were the richest band during their time. Piracy is a non-factor with empowered artists able to manage their own music and catalog.
The RIAA is setting the stage to make themselves obsolete. They could have gotten ahead of all of this, but that would have required investment and creativity. The former they refuse to do and the latter they completely lack. I look forward to the day when the music industry is making money for only the artists and their distributors (iTunes et.al.) and the scumbags in the RIAA are standing on highway on-ramps holding signs saying "Will make you a star... for food."
I would say most people dont view the RIAA as the "creator" of the music, but the musicians themselves. The RIAA is trying to cling to a dying business model. iTunes is showing the people are more than willing to pay for their music, but they refuse to be gouged by the RIAA's monopolistic tactics. I get all of my music from Emusic.com or iTunes and dont see myself every buying another physical cd. This knee-caps the RIAA because they have historically been able to inflate the overhead required for cd distribution to pad their profits. They dont want to end just p2p, they want to end all digital media because they cant manipulate those markets as well.
The RIAA is the old boys club, who had a good thing going, and rather than adept to the changing market, they attacked their customers. Any good will they may have held as they transitioned to a digital economy is gone. Consumers would much rather give their money to Apple or to the artists directly. These middle men have outlived their purpose.
I run enlightenment on my Mac. It works great and is light enough that it doesnt cause issues. I like variety though, so on my Linux boxes I use KDE, Gnome, XFCE, Elightenment in XFCE, and Fluxbox among others. Thats the great thing about X is that I am not restricted to what someone else says I have to use, I can play around with several different looks and configurations and ways of doing things. Variety is the spice of life and all that crap...
I work on the server team in a very large environment. Several thousand Solaris, Linux, HP-UX and Windows servers supporting business apps for the core business functions, an engineering environment, one of the largest oracle isntances in the world etc... Just setting the stage that I am not just talking out of my ass here. Our jobs are kept interesting due to the companies history of gobbling up other companies to grow into other areas. The *NIX world has been quite lax about security and with the rapid pace of acquisition, we are constantly inheriting other businesses crap.
In the past we have had a running joke that whenever something went wrong, and they requested we check the logs to find out what happened, it was someone named root who did it...
We recently joined the 90s and implemented LDAP and Sudo and have denied remote root logins. Sure everyone can still su to root, but at least there is a trail now. I totally concur that the people who should know better (DBAs, developers, and app admins mostly) cause the most damage. In a perfect world, no one would have root but a few from the server team to maintain. But it is a long road to get there since we have a few generations of apps that have been implemented and developed with root level permissions and the reach of these apps can be massive.
So I am in favor of restricting access as much as possible within the parameters of the business. At the end of the day, good or bad, the business has to meet its objectives, and all of us in infrastructure exist so that the business can do its job, not vice versa.
How do we survive with so many having the keys to the kingdom? We have strict change control, pristine production environments (as much as possible anyway) and we use data center automation software (cmdb whatever you want to call it) to track changes to all production systems and validate those changes against the approved change controls. We use snapshots and audits to verify what has changed on systems when problems do arise. It gives a really good trail to not only address the issues but also gives us a lot of push back when some dba borks the system and tries to blame the server team or the system itself. We get to say "well user so and so su'ed to root and edited this file and thats when we received the first alert from monitoring that services crashed and these other 2 files changed within 2 minutes of that file edit, etc..." It works wonders. Accountability on the systems is necessary when you have a pretty open environment within the different groups in infrastructure. Now Joe Schmoe user doesnt get anything but user level access, but there are thousands of people in infrastructure who do have root or root equivalent access.
The reality is, all of these folks who do have access are very sharp people and we couldnt possibly manage the servers if the dbas or app admins didnt administer their own servers to a large degree. We just dont have the manpower for the size of our environment. So we rely on them not doing anything dumb, but humans make errors, and such is life in the global enterprise IT world.
I clicked on the link and was prompted by firefox if I wanted to open the file in xine or save it to disk. What should I do? If I open it in xine, will crossover office install the malicious code and then I will be infected by M$ sploits? I'm at a loss. Should I open it in xine or save it to my home directory and view it later?