A bot is much less likely to get into an instance since there will generally be some level of chat to make sure they are even compatible. What would be interesting (purely from a concept viewpoint) is "botting" an instance party entirely so they can run the instance repeatedly to farm rare BoE drops and shards.
repeatedly banishing the mob the other guy was whacking on
Pure evil if it wasn't a bot but pure genius if it was.
I may have come off as being "all hunters are bad", but I certainly don't mean it to be that way. As you mentioned, hunters are often at or near the top of the DPS along with warlocks. Their CC may not be as reliable as a sheep (although some hunters spec'd for it, really are pretty close) but they can trap mobs that mages can't sheep, and that is valuable too. I've run with some very good hunters but I do see a larger number of bad hunters. In fact, the majority of the good hunters I see are often when I do arenas (or maybe I'm just a bad PvP mage...the more likely situation).
A bad 70th level player is a bad 70th level player, regardless of whether they used a bot or mindlessly wandered through the same tasks themselves. Going through the same motions as the bot will not necessarily make them a better player.
The general grinding task will to some extent make you better. If you think about it, why do students do repetitive math problems? Doing it once does not reinforce the skills. Now I won't argue that excessive grinding can also turn people from the game, but they do make people "work" to level. If you could get to level 70 quickly, you would still find bad players since it would be easy to find "guides" to help you. Maybe the grinding also discourages being "power leveled" since a level 70 would find it boring to easily kill the 30 murlocs for some quest when the player should be able to do it on their own.
Actually, bots usually play much much worse then real players.
While leveling my priest alt, I ran several instances with players (amazingly mostly hunters...guess the "huntard" term is more appropriate than I had expected) that I would argue are worse than bots.
I think the damage to the game is that by allowing the economies to be influenced by bots and players to gain a high level character without actually learning to play it, real players become disappointed with the game. While playing a character doesn't necessarily make you a good player when you hit level 70, it certainly helps. I could sell my mage (wearing a lot of T6 gear) to a new player to the game and I'm sure people could easily tell that they have no clue how to play. If the server were heavily populated by "bad" players, I'd either transfer to another realm or quit playing the game. This is one of the forms of damage that Blizzard can claim (not sure if they can back it up, but at least they can claim it).
As you said, the article doesn't really provide much detail. I am wondering though if this could be similar to what we are seeing with their recently acquired BEA WebLogic line. Have you read the BEA WebLogic 9.2 Virtual Edition offering? Most solutions will install products like Oracle and WebLogic on a dedicated server to maximize performance. What if they removed all but the necessary components of an operating system and optimized it? This has potential if it isn't, as you said, just a rebranded Proliant server with Oracle pre-installed.
I'm not opposed to war when it is necessary and other realistic options have been exhausted. The real concern is if we clean war up too much, that it could become a more readily used tool (i.e. the first choice, rather than the only choice left).
"I loved that episode but it wasn't realistic. If you think it was, all I can say is geez, trekkie, get a life.;)"
I am a casual fan of the Star Trek series but no more than many other series that I've watched. I guess you could call me a SciFi fan, but not really for a specific series. The show/episode was obviously not very realistic, but then many things about it require dropping understanding reality to enjoy the show. The point of bringing up the reference though was to show that if we clean up war enough, will it ever get to the point that it no longer raises a concern to why we choose to go to war.
While I support making weapons more humane, how long until we reach Taste of Armageddon (Star Trek)? We'll start having virtual wars to avoid the ugliness of war, protecting infrastructure but losing lives.
I know my sample set is small and has little chance of being accurate when looking at WoW at large. I was really just saying that I've seen many players that are older. I do have two kids that play as well so if I looked at my family, 50% would be between 35-40 and the other 50% would be 10-15. The guild I belong to probably does have some bias. They tend to boot players that do game actions that are typically associated with younger players. I'm sure the realm that I'm on also has a factor in the age makeup of my realm versus the typical realm (I'm on Shattered Halls, a long time low pop server).
I haven't seen demographics from any of the games you listed, but I play WoW and most of the guild members (approximately 35 on regularly) and friends (6 real life, approximately 15 unguilded or other guilds) I play with are at least 30 years old. I'd put a quarter of them over 40 and one is 60. Now I realize it is a small sample, but so far my experience is that WoW doesn't have a younger audience.
"When I posed the question of how to go about getting small pick up groups on the WOW message boards, I was basically told that unless you're in a guild, nobody will want to team with you, and that I should just grind my character up to level 25 so I could start doing some of the upper level raiding."
To some extent, this is true. You just need to realize that at the lower levels, you have two categories of players:
- Other new players
- Experienced players leveling an alternate character
At the lowest levels of the game, the "new player" folks won't necessarily understand the concept of grouping up to complete quest or run the low level instances. Those running an "alt" (especially if they have multiple "alts") will understand the advantage of running as a group and will often do so with other guild members. They will almost certainly only run with those guild members since they can do this only when online together so they can complete quest and quest chains without having to redo them for a person a stage behind on a quest.
Having reached a point where I am leveling multiple "alts", I do try to do a bit of both approaches. I have 3 alternate characters that I'm leveling (mainly to do most of it on "rested experience"). The first is one that the only guild help was a few run throughs of particular instances to get the good item drops for my class. Outside of that, all questing was done either solo or with groups of people that were random finds in the game. I've also mostly done "on level" dungeon raids to ensure I really do know how to play the class (a priest in this case). Now my second "alt" is a character that I'm leveling exclusively with my wife (and eventually my daughter when we catch up to her "alt" character level). We only work on these characters when we both have time online. We'll group with other random people, but when people ask if we can join up the next day to continue questing, we explain our plans for leveling together and most find it "sweet". My other "alt" is still very low and I'm just working them slowly. I may do the same thing with them and another of my wife or daughters characters.
So I guess the short answer is that yes, being in a guild will make teaming up easier, but no, it isn't entirely accurate. You can find low level guilds or leveling guilds if you look around. You may also find that if you play a certain time of day regularly or get lucky to find a lot of players that understand the "looking for group" system, you can get decent groups to accomplish the tasks (especially those annoying grind quest of "kill x ", since everyone in the group gets credit for the kill).
"it's all about leveling up to get to a high enough level to do raids to get the good loot"
This is mostly true, but you can also find people that "twink" their characters at a lower level to focus on PvP battlegrounds. Of course this does tend to be easier if you have "high level help", but it can be done even without it (just have to be careful about not gaining experience unless it leads to that "better item). Personally I'm not a big fan of this strategy since it creates a major imbalance in the battlegrounds but I don't know of a good strategy (other than causing each battleground to slowly provide experience to force a player up to the next bracket).
As for the rest of your post, while porting can be done efficiently, it often isn't, and things would be easier if nobody had to think about it in the first place. If Java became a viable language for high end games, perhaps things would be different
If you think about it, how far would the earliest computer system have come along if there hadn't been competitors to it? It almost sounds as though you want a single operating system or a VM that runs inside of multiple operating systems. Either of these situations doesn't sound very good for the industry to continue inovating. A bit of competition is good, even if it creates a bit more work.
As for the "10 times", I realize development teams have gotten larger but is it to utilize the CPU/GPU/disk space more fully or is it because they can add more content (i.e. be more creative).
why haven't more gamers rallied for Linux versions?
It comes down to limited resources and applying them to the platform where you'll see enough of a return for the investment. Linux for gaming is in a catch 22. You won't see major game development until the platform has enough users, and the platform won't have enough users without the games (not taking into account other uses of course).
First, most mainstream games were multi-platform, except for consoles where there was a lot of exclusives....Finally, as for your comment that "porting" is a waste of time, it really depends on your point of view. In a way, porting means you can reuse a lot of the same and make a full new product for another customer.
But if you don't have to port in the first place you have more time to spend on the game itself.
Developing for cross platform compatiblity is not terribly difficult. I'm not saying it isn't without cost (compilers, testing, support, marketing, etc...) but technically developers can write code independent of the underlying OS if they plan it from the start.
You forgot to mention that utilizing the full potential of multiple systems today is much more difficult than it was when everything was 10 times less complicated.
The example of useradd vs a GUI was just that, an example. I could have gone with ifconfig vs Network Properties on a Microsoft platform too. The point is that many of the basic functions for system administration have moved behind tools to simplify the work. Are you telneting into your routers to configure them or going through a nice web interface? You are right though about some portions becoming more complex, especially with locking down from outside access, VPN configurations, etc..., but once most of that is setup, you are back into a maintenance mode that you can turn over to a less skilled administrator.
Statistics may show that for some people, but I've actually been working 40 hours per week for the last couple of years, except for two major deployments that had me working 60-70 hours per week for a couple weeks. My brother is fairly similar in his IT situation and he only went beyond 40 hours when his company relocated to a new facility.
Finally, for all the misery your Dad puts up with in a Union, does he get paid more? Cheaper health/dental/optical insurance? Why did he agree to it?
First, he didn't stay long with the union (recall it being about 2 years). His base pay did go up, but his overall pay did not. His yearly pay essentially dropped by about $14K because he couldn't work any overtime (union philosophy was that any overtime was "stealing" a job from another person). As for his benefits, I recall my parents both complaining about how they were paying more for the coverage and getting less options. I don't know the details since they didn't really go into them with me.
As to his agreeing with becoming union, he didn't really have a choice. The company he worked for had fought going to a union shop for many years. The plumbing company had 50-70 employees for the few summers I worked there and had some good size commercial contracts. Eventually the owner of the company decided that he was closing up the company and retiring and moving out of the area. His thought was to screw over the union by joining, then closing up the shop so that the union would have to find a place for these new members. Unfortunately, at least according to my Dad, it didn't go as well for the plumbers themselves. When my Uncle (who also worked for the original company) decided to open his own business, my father went to work for him and left the union. Now my father has his own company and my Uncle works for him.
Re:Unions (or a professional association?)
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Should IT Unionize?
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· Score: 1
>Unions may have helped some industries
Unions are about helping the workers, not about helping industries.
Typo on my part. I meant that unions may have helped employees in some industries in the past.
The point isn't that I would bill myself as an expert in any of them, but if I focused on one of those tasks, wouldn't it be possible that I could be an expert in it? None of them are terribly difficult if you take the time to learn them. Even software development can be picked up by a young kid with enough interest in it. My brother and I used to enter code from the Commodore magazing into our C64 and make simple modifications as we began to understand the code. I have a wide range of skills I've picked up over my life, but I developed the one that was the most interesting to me, software development. If I were to open a business, I wouldn't in good faith be able to sell my self as most of the skills I mentioned without further perfecting them (essentially becoming a professional at it). The "one stop shop" approach only works when you are large enough and have enough specialized people to pull it off. This doesn't mean that people can't have multiple skills, but you are likely to have experts in each offering and others to work with them, even if they aren't experts in that same field. I know the buildings I helped hang drain pipes in are still standing and I haven't heard anything to indicate that my work was less sufficient compared to the journeyman plumbers I worked with.
"and I must acknowledge the mysterious devaluing of IT skills since ~2001 (Microsoft's marketing for Active Directory is partially to blame: "use AD, no need for FT IT!"). It sickens me to see jobs that in 2001 paid 65K that are now advertised as $12/hr part-time (and CS degree required, WTF!!)."
As technology advances, positions become easier. Look at the fact that in a big company you can centralize numerous servers to a single datacenter. Would you complain that this advancement caused a decrease in the number of system administrators or would you look at this as progression in the field? Should we look at the fact that system administrators no longer have to use "useradd" at a shell prompt but can use GUIs on UNIX systems and can now be administered with less skill as a reason to unionize to keep the administrators making the same pay? As a position becomes easier to fill, pay rates go down since the pool of available skilled candidates grows. Unless the position is so undesirable (septic tank cleaner probably isn't a "hot" position people are looking to work in), progression will cause it to be easier to fill.
"Why should skilled IT pull the same pay a non-skilled day laborer makes?"
Are non-skilled positions artificially kept to a level because of minimum wage laws? While I enjoy my salary, I certainly don't expect it to be artificially high. I'll continue to work hard and develop new skills to make sure I stand out compared to the majority of the field.
Oh, do you consider the work of a farm laborer to be any less work than that of an IT employee? Is physical labor any less than IT labor or does IT just pay better because it generally requires a skill that many people don't learn?
I am reminded of a comic that a co-worker had hanging in their office years ago..."Innovate or Die", with a dinosaur in the picture.
World of Warcraft has raid parties up to 40 characters (pre-Burning Crusades), but most are not run since the Burning Crusade expansion (which has 10 & 25 man raids). Managing 6 players in a list probably isn't bad to click through, but 25 or 40 is probably not easy to manage unless the list can sort itself based on priority for healing. Figure even if you set the tanks as the top slots in the list, a damage class can overtake the aggro of the tank and quickly become the focus of the monster you are trying to kill. At this point, they will either need a lot of healing or they need to quickly drop aggro on their own (usually accomplished through their death...lol).
I have rebuilt the engine (gasket, rings, bearing bushings) in my car, replaced the transmission, brakes, exhaust, CV joints, timing belts, and numerous other components. I have no formal training, but I am able to do most of the basics a mechanic can do. I wouldn't say that I'm a professional, but I do feel confident that I could work in a garage if my IT profession ever failed. I've also done concrete finishing, painting, plumbing (as my earlier post states), and I have experience in making bulk ice. I did not go to any schools for these skills. I was able to learn them on the job or by simply reading the right material (Haynes manuals FTW, Chiltons FTL). I've seen both professionals and non-professionals mess up (a plumber that worked with my father drilled through the ceiling to put a Hilti anchor bolt in and went all the way through and nearly hit the foot of a guy on the floor above him....I never did and he had plumbing school and I didn't). When you hire anyone, you expect a high degree of skill. In the case of a doctor, that skill comes from education and following other doctors while working med rotations. For many others, it comes from a desire to learn that field.
Thank you for your great response. As a son of a father who was a plumber in a company that decided to go into the union, I can say that the union seriously ruined productivity and made the work environment hostile. My father had been working commercial plumbing, non-union, for close to 20 years before the company joined the union. His work didn't magically become better when he joined the union. In fact, his productivity went down because of it. He would come home complaining that installing a commercial water heater took twice as long because he had to have a union electrician handle the wiring that he traditionally had done. The electrician of course came on their own schedule and had to bring an apprentice along. A simple task made inefficient and expensive. Prior to joining the union, when he worked on a site that had union employees, he had to be careful where he parked his car for fear it would be vandalized by the union employees. Oh, and lets talk about pay. My father has worked with some good and bad plumbers in his career (oh...and I worked as cheap labor during the summers when I was old enough so I've seen them). When the company went union, everyone went to the same pay scale, no matter how good/bad they were.
Unions may have helped some industries in the past, but I can't see where it helps now. The last thing I want to happen to my field (software engineering) is a union being created. I'll work and get paid on my merit. If I don't like the work environment, I'll find a new position. There are plenty of opportunities if you have the skills.
Can I play it with the video player of my choosing or do I have to install yet another video player? I don't really want to have 10 different video players on my system. I don't want to have to maintain/update every one of them. I don't want each of them thinking they need to change file associations.
I could see the shoulder buttons working for smaller parties (maybe up to 10 players), but if you start approaching the 25-40 man raids, the shoulder buttons seem like they'd be a bit slow. Maybe ordering the list for "likely" targets would help (i.e. put tanks as the first five entries and the rest of the raid sorted in a likely damage taken order). Seeing some fights though that damage the entire raid (High Warlord Naj'entus, for example, deals 8500 health damage to the entire raid at intervals so each member needs to be healed above that before a certain point in the fight). I'd see this as being a bit more difficult without a mouse/keyboard, but not impossible.
If the consoles and PCs were both playing on the same servers, I could also see bias toward/against the two for raid/party makeup depending on the efficiency of the interface. For end game content, if consoles end up being easier to use for a particular role, this could effectively exclude PC players for that role. I realize mods do this now, but at least everyone has the opportunity to install the mod.
I'm not much of a console player (my kids have the Wii and XBox360, but I don't touch them too often) so my concern would be for classes that need to monitor the other party/raid members. I have a alt priest character in WoW that I'm leveling and healing in battle ground raids is a real pain without some sort of mod to help with healing (in my case, Healbot Continued). Using a console controller, how easy is it to target and cast a desired spell on party/raid members? It seems that a controller wouldn't be too difficult if you spend most of your time on a single target (or AoE) but for switching rapidly between targets it seems like it would take a lot longer.
There are a lot of things you simply cannot do adequately in 10 hours a week, actually. Raiding. PvP. High-level instances. Crafting. All of these become exercises in futility when you're playing less than 20 hours a week in WoW
Just wanted to point out that this isn't entirely true. If you are lucky enough to find a guild with a lighter raiding schedule, you can actually do it with less hours. The problem is finding such a guild. I'm someone who just switched from a relaxed guild that didn't raid often to one that has 5 organized raids per week. In my initial guild, I could have played roughly 5-10 hours per week to keep up with the raid schedule. With my new guild, I'm in the 25+ hour range. My wife on the other hand plays more on the 10 hours per month schedule and she still gets into raids, but that's mainly because if we were short a person, I'd get her into the group (oddly enough, her warlock still was one of the top DPS in the group).
Game companies and tobacco companies are not inherently good organizations.
Companies are not good or bad. They may be seen as having those qualities by people, but they don't.
You don't really understand the addictive nature of these games.
Games, movies, books, TV series, etc... are all designed to make a person interested in handing over their money. Anything that is a "series" (including online games with growing content) have the advantage of providing additional content to get consumers to hand over more money. The addictive qualities of a game are merely trying to keep you as a paying customer but the goal is no different than any other item/service from a company.
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A bot is much less likely to get into an instance since there will generally be some level of chat to make sure they are even compatible. What would be interesting (purely from a concept viewpoint) is "botting" an instance party entirely so they can run the instance repeatedly to farm rare BoE drops and shards.
repeatedly banishing the mob the other guy was whacking on
Pure evil if it wasn't a bot but pure genius if it was.
I may have come off as being "all hunters are bad", but I certainly don't mean it to be that way. As you mentioned, hunters are often at or near the top of the DPS along with warlocks. Their CC may not be as reliable as a sheep (although some hunters spec'd for it, really are pretty close) but they can trap mobs that mages can't sheep, and that is valuable too. I've run with some very good hunters but I do see a larger number of bad hunters. In fact, the majority of the good hunters I see are often when I do arenas (or maybe I'm just a bad PvP mage...the more likely situation).
A bad 70th level player is a bad 70th level player, regardless of whether they used a bot or mindlessly wandered through the same tasks themselves. Going through the same motions as the bot will not necessarily make them a better player.
The general grinding task will to some extent make you better. If you think about it, why do students do repetitive math problems? Doing it once does not reinforce the skills. Now I won't argue that excessive grinding can also turn people from the game, but they do make people "work" to level. If you could get to level 70 quickly, you would still find bad players since it would be easy to find "guides" to help you. Maybe the grinding also discourages being "power leveled" since a level 70 would find it boring to easily kill the 30 murlocs for some quest when the player should be able to do it on their own.
Actually, bots usually play much much worse then real players.
While leveling my priest alt, I ran several instances with players (amazingly mostly hunters...guess the "huntard" term is more appropriate than I had expected) that I would argue are worse than bots.
I think the damage to the game is that by allowing the economies to be influenced by bots and players to gain a high level character without actually learning to play it, real players become disappointed with the game. While playing a character doesn't necessarily make you a good player when you hit level 70, it certainly helps. I could sell my mage (wearing a lot of T6 gear) to a new player to the game and I'm sure people could easily tell that they have no clue how to play. If the server were heavily populated by "bad" players, I'd either transfer to another realm or quit playing the game. This is one of the forms of damage that Blizzard can claim (not sure if they can back it up, but at least they can claim it).
As you said, the article doesn't really provide much detail. I am wondering though if this could be similar to what we are seeing with their recently acquired BEA WebLogic line. Have you read the BEA WebLogic 9.2 Virtual Edition offering? Most solutions will install products like Oracle and WebLogic on a dedicated server to maximize performance. What if they removed all but the necessary components of an operating system and optimized it? This has potential if it isn't, as you said, just a rebranded Proliant server with Oracle pre-installed.
I'm not opposed to war when it is necessary and other realistic options have been exhausted. The real concern is if we clean war up too much, that it could become a more readily used tool (i.e. the first choice, rather than the only choice left).
;)"
"I loved that episode but it wasn't realistic. If you think it was, all I can say is geez, trekkie, get a life.
I am a casual fan of the Star Trek series but no more than many other series that I've watched. I guess you could call me a SciFi fan, but not really for a specific series. The show/episode was obviously not very realistic, but then many things about it require dropping understanding reality to enjoy the show. The point of bringing up the reference though was to show that if we clean up war enough, will it ever get to the point that it no longer raises a concern to why we choose to go to war.
While I support making weapons more humane, how long until we reach Taste of Armageddon (Star Trek)? We'll start having virtual wars to avoid the ugliness of war, protecting infrastructure but losing lives.
I know my sample set is small and has little chance of being accurate when looking at WoW at large. I was really just saying that I've seen many players that are older. I do have two kids that play as well so if I looked at my family, 50% would be between 35-40 and the other 50% would be 10-15. The guild I belong to probably does have some bias. They tend to boot players that do game actions that are typically associated with younger players. I'm sure the realm that I'm on also has a factor in the age makeup of my realm versus the typical realm (I'm on Shattered Halls, a long time low pop server).
I haven't seen demographics from any of the games you listed, but I play WoW and most of the guild members (approximately 35 on regularly) and friends (6 real life, approximately 15 unguilded or other guilds) I play with are at least 30 years old. I'd put a quarter of them over 40 and one is 60. Now I realize it is a small sample, but so far my experience is that WoW doesn't have a younger audience.
"When I posed the question of how to go about getting small pick up groups on the WOW message boards, I was basically told that unless you're in a guild, nobody will want to team with you, and that I should just grind my character up to level 25 so I could start doing some of the upper level raiding."
To some extent, this is true. You just need to realize that at the lower levels, you have two categories of players:
- Other new players
- Experienced players leveling an alternate character
At the lowest levels of the game, the "new player" folks won't necessarily understand the concept of grouping up to complete quest or run the low level instances. Those running an "alt" (especially if they have multiple "alts") will understand the advantage of running as a group and will often do so with other guild members. They will almost certainly only run with those guild members since they can do this only when online together so they can complete quest and quest chains without having to redo them for a person a stage behind on a quest.
Having reached a point where I am leveling multiple "alts", I do try to do a bit of both approaches. I have 3 alternate characters that I'm leveling (mainly to do most of it on "rested experience"). The first is one that the only guild help was a few run throughs of particular instances to get the good item drops for my class. Outside of that, all questing was done either solo or with groups of people that were random finds in the game. I've also mostly done "on level" dungeon raids to ensure I really do know how to play the class (a priest in this case). Now my second "alt" is a character that I'm leveling exclusively with my wife (and eventually my daughter when we catch up to her "alt" character level). We only work on these characters when we both have time online. We'll group with other random people, but when people ask if we can join up the next day to continue questing, we explain our plans for leveling together and most find it "sweet". My other "alt" is still very low and I'm just working them slowly. I may do the same thing with them and another of my wife or daughters characters.
So I guess the short answer is that yes, being in a guild will make teaming up easier, but no, it isn't entirely accurate. You can find low level guilds or leveling guilds if you look around. You may also find that if you play a certain time of day regularly or get lucky to find a lot of players that understand the "looking for group" system, you can get decent groups to accomplish the tasks (especially those annoying grind quest of "kill x ", since everyone in the group gets credit for the kill).
"it's all about leveling up to get to a high enough level to do raids to get the good loot"
This is mostly true, but you can also find people that "twink" their characters at a lower level to focus on PvP battlegrounds. Of course this does tend to be easier if you have "high level help", but it can be done even without it (just have to be careful about not gaining experience unless it leads to that "better item). Personally I'm not a big fan of this strategy since it creates a major imbalance in the battlegrounds but I don't know of a good strategy (other than causing each battleground to slowly provide experience to force a player up to the next bracket).
As for the rest of your post, while porting can be done efficiently, it often isn't, and things would be easier if nobody had to think about it in the first place. If Java became a viable language for high end games, perhaps things would be different
If you think about it, how far would the earliest computer system have come along if there hadn't been competitors to it? It almost sounds as though you want a single operating system or a VM that runs inside of multiple operating systems. Either of these situations doesn't sound very good for the industry to continue inovating. A bit of competition is good, even if it creates a bit more work.
As for the "10 times", I realize development teams have gotten larger but is it to utilize the CPU/GPU/disk space more fully or is it because they can add more content (i.e. be more creative).
why haven't more gamers rallied for Linux versions?
It comes down to limited resources and applying them to the platform where you'll see enough of a return for the investment. Linux for gaming is in a catch 22. You won't see major game development until the platform has enough users, and the platform won't have enough users without the games (not taking into account other uses of course).
Developing for cross platform compatiblity is not terribly difficult. I'm not saying it isn't without cost (compilers, testing, support, marketing, etc...) but technically developers can write code independent of the underlying OS if they plan it from the start.
Anything to backup the claim of "10 times"?
The example of useradd vs a GUI was just that, an example. I could have gone with ifconfig vs Network Properties on a Microsoft platform too. The point is that many of the basic functions for system administration have moved behind tools to simplify the work. Are you telneting into your routers to configure them or going through a nice web interface? You are right though about some portions becoming more complex, especially with locking down from outside access, VPN configurations, etc..., but once most of that is setup, you are back into a maintenance mode that you can turn over to a less skilled administrator.
Statistics may show that for some people, but I've actually been working 40 hours per week for the last couple of years, except for two major deployments that had me working 60-70 hours per week for a couple weeks. My brother is fairly similar in his IT situation and he only went beyond 40 hours when his company relocated to a new facility.
Finally, for all the misery your Dad puts up with in a Union, does he get paid more? Cheaper health/dental/optical insurance? Why did he agree to it?
First, he didn't stay long with the union (recall it being about 2 years). His base pay did go up, but his overall pay did not. His yearly pay essentially dropped by about $14K because he couldn't work any overtime (union philosophy was that any overtime was "stealing" a job from another person). As for his benefits, I recall my parents both complaining about how they were paying more for the coverage and getting less options. I don't know the details since they didn't really go into them with me.
As to his agreeing with becoming union, he didn't really have a choice. The company he worked for had fought going to a union shop for many years. The plumbing company had 50-70 employees for the few summers I worked there and had some good size commercial contracts. Eventually the owner of the company decided that he was closing up the company and retiring and moving out of the area. His thought was to screw over the union by joining, then closing up the shop so that the union would have to find a place for these new members. Unfortunately, at least according to my Dad, it didn't go as well for the plumbers themselves. When my Uncle (who also worked for the original company) decided to open his own business, my father went to work for him and left the union. Now my father has his own company and my Uncle works for him.
>Unions may have helped some industries
Unions are about helping the workers, not about helping industries.
Typo on my part. I meant that unions may have helped employees in some industries in the past.
The point isn't that I would bill myself as an expert in any of them, but if I focused on one of those tasks, wouldn't it be possible that I could be an expert in it? None of them are terribly difficult if you take the time to learn them. Even software development can be picked up by a young kid with enough interest in it. My brother and I used to enter code from the Commodore magazing into our C64 and make simple modifications as we began to understand the code. I have a wide range of skills I've picked up over my life, but I developed the one that was the most interesting to me, software development. If I were to open a business, I wouldn't in good faith be able to sell my self as most of the skills I mentioned without further perfecting them (essentially becoming a professional at it). The "one stop shop" approach only works when you are large enough and have enough specialized people to pull it off. This doesn't mean that people can't have multiple skills, but you are likely to have experts in each offering and others to work with them, even if they aren't experts in that same field. I know the buildings I helped hang drain pipes in are still standing and I haven't heard anything to indicate that my work was less sufficient compared to the journeyman plumbers I worked with.
"and I must acknowledge the mysterious devaluing of IT skills since ~2001 (Microsoft's marketing for Active Directory is partially to blame: "use AD, no need for FT IT!"). It sickens me to see jobs that in 2001 paid 65K that are now advertised as $12/hr part-time (and CS degree required, WTF!!)."
As technology advances, positions become easier. Look at the fact that in a big company you can centralize numerous servers to a single datacenter. Would you complain that this advancement caused a decrease in the number of system administrators or would you look at this as progression in the field? Should we look at the fact that system administrators no longer have to use "useradd" at a shell prompt but can use GUIs on UNIX systems and can now be administered with less skill as a reason to unionize to keep the administrators making the same pay? As a position becomes easier to fill, pay rates go down since the pool of available skilled candidates grows. Unless the position is so undesirable (septic tank cleaner probably isn't a "hot" position people are looking to work in), progression will cause it to be easier to fill.
"Why should skilled IT pull the same pay a non-skilled day laborer makes?"
Are non-skilled positions artificially kept to a level because of minimum wage laws? While I enjoy my salary, I certainly don't expect it to be artificially high. I'll continue to work hard and develop new skills to make sure I stand out compared to the majority of the field.
Oh, do you consider the work of a farm laborer to be any less work than that of an IT employee? Is physical labor any less than IT labor or does IT just pay better because it generally requires a skill that many people don't learn?
I am reminded of a comic that a co-worker had hanging in their office years ago..."Innovate or Die", with a dinosaur in the picture.
World of Warcraft has raid parties up to 40 characters (pre-Burning Crusades), but most are not run since the Burning Crusade expansion (which has 10 & 25 man raids). Managing 6 players in a list probably isn't bad to click through, but 25 or 40 is probably not easy to manage unless the list can sort itself based on priority for healing. Figure even if you set the tanks as the top slots in the list, a damage class can overtake the aggro of the tank and quickly become the focus of the monster you are trying to kill. At this point, they will either need a lot of healing or they need to quickly drop aggro on their own (usually accomplished through their death...lol).
I have rebuilt the engine (gasket, rings, bearing bushings) in my car, replaced the transmission, brakes, exhaust, CV joints, timing belts, and numerous other components. I have no formal training, but I am able to do most of the basics a mechanic can do. I wouldn't say that I'm a professional, but I do feel confident that I could work in a garage if my IT profession ever failed. I've also done concrete finishing, painting, plumbing (as my earlier post states), and I have experience in making bulk ice. I did not go to any schools for these skills. I was able to learn them on the job or by simply reading the right material (Haynes manuals FTW, Chiltons FTL). I've seen both professionals and non-professionals mess up (a plumber that worked with my father drilled through the ceiling to put a Hilti anchor bolt in and went all the way through and nearly hit the foot of a guy on the floor above him....I never did and he had plumbing school and I didn't). When you hire anyone, you expect a high degree of skill. In the case of a doctor, that skill comes from education and following other doctors while working med rotations. For many others, it comes from a desire to learn that field.
Thank you for your great response. As a son of a father who was a plumber in a company that decided to go into the union, I can say that the union seriously ruined productivity and made the work environment hostile. My father had been working commercial plumbing, non-union, for close to 20 years before the company joined the union. His work didn't magically become better when he joined the union. In fact, his productivity went down because of it. He would come home complaining that installing a commercial water heater took twice as long because he had to have a union electrician handle the wiring that he traditionally had done. The electrician of course came on their own schedule and had to bring an apprentice along. A simple task made inefficient and expensive. Prior to joining the union, when he worked on a site that had union employees, he had to be careful where he parked his car for fear it would be vandalized by the union employees. Oh, and lets talk about pay. My father has worked with some good and bad plumbers in his career (oh...and I worked as cheap labor during the summers when I was old enough so I've seen them). When the company went union, everyone went to the same pay scale, no matter how good/bad they were.
Unions may have helped some industries in the past, but I can't see where it helps now. The last thing I want to happen to my field (software engineering) is a union being created. I'll work and get paid on my merit. If I don't like the work environment, I'll find a new position. There are plenty of opportunities if you have the skills.
Can I play it with the video player of my choosing or do I have to install yet another video player? I don't really want to have 10 different video players on my system. I don't want to have to maintain/update every one of them. I don't want each of them thinking they need to change file associations.
I could see the shoulder buttons working for smaller parties (maybe up to 10 players), but if you start approaching the 25-40 man raids, the shoulder buttons seem like they'd be a bit slow. Maybe ordering the list for "likely" targets would help (i.e. put tanks as the first five entries and the rest of the raid sorted in a likely damage taken order). Seeing some fights though that damage the entire raid (High Warlord Naj'entus, for example, deals 8500 health damage to the entire raid at intervals so each member needs to be healed above that before a certain point in the fight). I'd see this as being a bit more difficult without a mouse/keyboard, but not impossible.
If the consoles and PCs were both playing on the same servers, I could also see bias toward/against the two for raid/party makeup depending on the efficiency of the interface. For end game content, if consoles end up being easier to use for a particular role, this could effectively exclude PC players for that role. I realize mods do this now, but at least everyone has the opportunity to install the mod.
I'm not much of a console player (my kids have the Wii and XBox360, but I don't touch them too often) so my concern would be for classes that need to monitor the other party/raid members. I have a alt priest character in WoW that I'm leveling and healing in battle ground raids is a real pain without some sort of mod to help with healing (in my case, Healbot Continued). Using a console controller, how easy is it to target and cast a desired spell on party/raid members? It seems that a controller wouldn't be too difficult if you spend most of your time on a single target (or AoE) but for switching rapidly between targets it seems like it would take a lot longer.
There are a lot of things you simply cannot do adequately in 10 hours a week, actually. Raiding. PvP. High-level instances. Crafting. All of these become exercises in futility when you're playing less than 20 hours a week in WoW
Just wanted to point out that this isn't entirely true. If you are lucky enough to find a guild with a lighter raiding schedule, you can actually do it with less hours. The problem is finding such a guild. I'm someone who just switched from a relaxed guild that didn't raid often to one that has 5 organized raids per week. In my initial guild, I could have played roughly 5-10 hours per week to keep up with the raid schedule. With my new guild, I'm in the 25+ hour range. My wife on the other hand plays more on the 10 hours per month schedule and she still gets into raids, but that's mainly because if we were short a person, I'd get her into the group (oddly enough, her warlock still was one of the top DPS in the group).
Game companies and tobacco companies are not inherently good organizations.
Companies are not good or bad. They may be seen as having those qualities by people, but they don't.
You don't really understand the addictive nature of these games.
Games, movies, books, TV series, etc... are all designed to make a person interested in handing over their money. Anything that is a "series" (including online games with growing content) have the advantage of providing additional content to get consumers to hand over more money. The addictive qualities of a game are merely trying to keep you as a paying customer but the goal is no different than any other item/service from a company.