Elder Scrolls III Collection (Morrowing + Tribunal + Whatevertheotherexpansionnameis) : $20. Dawn of War + Winter Assault : $20 Sid Meier's Pirates : $25.
Etc. Now, factor in buying one game every 4-6 weeks, apply to above and... voila. ~$15-20/mo. I am not acting like a victim - I am just making a realistic breakdown of my gaming expenses. just because so many people out there -must- have a new game the moment it hits the shelves, at $50+ prices, doesn't mean I have to as well. Light knows I can't even hope to catch up with all the good games that came out in past 3 years.
I do have to say, WoW did have serious impact on my gaming habits, as well as budget. I have a life. I have a job. I have responsibilities. That means that my time and my money are a precious commodity when it comes to things such as computer games. In pre-WoW days, I'd usually buy a game every 4-6 weeks (usually a RPG), play it an hour or three two or three times a week, finish it, shelf it, buy a new one. In addition, every couple of months, I'd pick up a strategy such as Starcraft, Warcraft III etc and spend couple of hours couple of times a month playing it with friends in a LAN party.
Along came WoW
Suddenly, in addition to $50 USD - usually my bi-monthly game budget for games - I spent on the copy of the game, I found myself spending ~$15/month (roughly my monthly budget) on WoW subscription. In addition, since woW is quite a time-intensive game (don't get me started on log in - spend 45 min forming a raid - start a raid - disband a raid 45 min later routine) I found myself spending 95% of my gaming time slots playing WoW. And so it went for, well, over a year.
Now, I'm happily 'off the WoW' for over half a year. Since then, I picked up a reasonable number of games that seemed interesting (Dawn of War, Sid meier's Pirates, Morrowind etc - 8 in total) - and I would've gotten more, if I didn't waste some time on auto Assault and D&D Online Betas. Thus, I have to definitely agree with TFA - WoW does seem to be harming other game markets, although I'd dare to expand / elaborate : MMOs are hurting the game market for less 'massively-teamplay' games. It's not solely WoW's fault - merely its popular content and quality (let's not start a Blizzard flamewar here, please) compared to other MMOs that's causing proportionately more market disturbance.
Windows is / will be a commercial program. If Microsoft manages to develop a fool-proof system to identify pirated copies / installations, why would they allow those installations to run at all? Why not just set up the system so that Windows, upon identifying itself as pirated, simply uninstalls or refuses to run or whatever?
Conceptually, this is like setting up a car with anti-theft system that disables windshield wipers and bright headlights if car is stolen - but still allows the thief to drive it around.
In its basic form, 'Innocent until proven guilty' might apply only to criminal cases... but nowhere in legal world is it acceptable for prosecutor to accuse the (potential) defendant of crime without providing any evidence to support the accusation, and then expect defendant to be found guilty unless he provides evidence to his innocence.
My point is, to establish guilt, you need evidence to support the accusation. No evidence, no case. That's really an old one. Defendant isn't supposed to provide evidence to defend from unsupported accusations - if they were, that'd become ideal means of industrial espionage.
Software company A: "Company B's source code contains code we have patent on." Software company B: "No it doesn't!" Software company A: "Show us your source code to prove it! (And so that we can snoop around your proprietary, classified, patented data)."
Well, I really don't understand what's all the din and noise about.
Innocent until proven guilty is one of staples of US justice system. You can't walk into the court and say 'My neighbor stole something from me' and then leave it to the defendant to prove that everything in his appartment was actually purchased and owned by him, not you. You kinda need to say 'My neighbor stole my TV. Here's the warranty for the said TV I bought, with my name on it, and with serial of TV that's now on my neighbor's shelf.' Admittedly, the above example is vastly simplified, yet I think it would apply just fine to any copyright / patent infringement lawsuit. You can't just say you own patents to 'some of the code' in someone else's software, and then expect them to prove they own all the code - you have to specify which of the code in defendant's software is, allegedly, protected under the patents you hold.
Racist, totalitarian, militant... you can be all of those and not be fascist. The defining characteristic of fascism is the notion that government exists to serve corporations.
Actually...
"Although the broadest definitions of fascism may include every authoritarian state that has ever existed, most theorists see important distinctions to be made. Fascism in Italy arose in the 1920s as a mixture of syndicalist notions with an anti-materialist theory of the state; the latter had already been linked to an extreme nationalism. Fascism in many ways seems to have been clearly developed as a reaction against Communism and Marxism, both in a philosophic and political sense, although it opposed democratic capitalist economics along with socialism, Marxism, and liberal democracy. It viewed the state as an organic entity in a positive light rather than as an institution designed to protect collective and individual rights, or as one that should be held in check...
Fascism is also typified by totalitarian attempts to impose state control over all aspects of life: political, social, cultural, and economic. The fascist state regulates and controls (as opposed to nationalizing) the means of production.
Call me a luddite... but professor has a valid point. As I see it, laptops don't beling in a classroom unless the lecture requires use of software or is about use of software, or if student is handicapped or disabled and needs one to follow the class.
And yes, I think that using laptops to take notes is ridiculous and counter-productive. Those students are attending a law school, not a dactilography course. In all my years of 'higher education', including university, specialisation courses and even high school, actually paying attention to the lecture itself and taking shorthand notes resulted in 3 positive consequences: I learned how to listen and extract important fragments of information; I developed excellent short-term memory and good shorthand; and organisation of shorthand notes into useful studying materials after class made for exceptionally efficient study sessions in and by itself.
It's not your data anymore. This is like you selling me a book and then trying to dictate what tone of voice I use while reading it aloud because it's your poetry.
Well, technically... that example doesn't completely hold water. Just because you bought my book, CD, DVD or whatever doesn't explicitely allow you to use it for a public performance, unless otherwise noted. So while I cannot tell you what tone of voice you may use when reading it in privacy of youir own home, alone, if you, say, invite a dozen friends and read the same poetry to them out loud, or if you do it out in the street, that makes you subject to 'broadcasting or public performance' aspects of copyright laws.
In parallel, just because you give your census information to government doesn't directly imply you grant them the permission to share your information with public - no 'public performance rights' are included.
In the corporate world, Mr. Barrett once met a challenge to hack into a large multinational company's system in four days to win a security assignment. He stole the company's undisclosed new logo as a trophy, he wrote.
Does anyone else see this as a non-sequitur to the whole article? In general, original article is very interesting, and more than a little amusing - but the OP on/. is, to say the least, addlebrained and lacking any resemblance of article summary (which is what it really should be). The article, indeed, speaks of mr. Barret's role in Microsoft anti-trust lawsuit as a sort of a technical witness, and explains the background and circumstances of his involvement with Microsoft's 'rivals'. And then, out of nowhere, 'Yeah, he also once stole some company's logo from their network'. Talk about going out on a non-tangent.
May I point out that successful companies very often see such 'small' expenses, especially when those stack, as areas of great savings. Only 65 million dollars? Are you joking? You can't put only and 65 000 000 US$ in the same sentence and be successful in any form of business.
Look at Walmart. Look at the amount of money they rake in. And look at the, for example, frugal travel policies they have. Not only are their travelling employees expected to share one room if more than one is travelling; not only are their meal expense funds barely good enough for fast foods... no, they're also expected to take bus/train instead of plane if trip is below a certain (none too small) distance, and use cabs and public transportation over rent-a-cars whenever possible.
Company I work for dominates world market in its area of business - it holds over 75% of US market, and significant portions of world market. Our profit growth figures are terrifying... yet you won't see us shoveling money left and right - to the contrary. Savings are made wherever possible. Why? only a million dollars here, only five million there, only twenty million for something else... and suddenly your profit margins aren't that great anymore. And anyone who says that modern corporate business cares about anything except profits...
To be honest, I don't see a lot of reason for discontent over 'stagnant' pay comming from rank and file workers at Microsoft. I haven't noticed any major fluctuations within IT job market as a whole when it comes to pay rates in the last two years. And the whole situation becomes even less surprising if one takes into account these two factors:
Company size. Microsoft is not a small business, nor medium, nor even a large one. It's humongous. Thus, it is not really practical to talk about giving raises to i.e. top 5% or 10% performance employees like so many other companies do. In fact, even giving raises to just top 1% of employees still would bump the salary budget significantly every year.
Benefits. From what Net has been saying for years now, Microsoft's benefits and policies really don't suck. From stock options to silly things like 'nap time' during work hours, being a med-level employee for Microsoft doesn't seem to be really all that bad. Just as you check 401K and other benefits when considering work for Sun, IBM or any other IT (or non-IT) company, so too you should consider Microsoft's benefits before you complain about your stagnant pay.
Regarding elements of the article I find interesting: According to employees, who said they would be fired if they spoke on the record, the annual review amounts to little more than a closed-door popularity contest in which managers "fight" for higher scores for their team, or defer to higher-level decision makers who mandate how many workers drop to the bottom of the review scale. - this is definitely nothing unusual. In fact, if my manager didn't fight tooth and nail to prove that me and my team are better than other teams and get us raises or bonuses, seriously, I wouldn't have too high an opinion of him. Likewise, I have to notice that article focuses on salary itself - there is nothing in it about bonuses and incentives that I could find. Having a spouse who works for a major IT industry, I have to say I'm regularly stunned by the sums on her 'chrismas checks', 'yearly performance bonuses' and other 'small' things like that - they certainly make a significant portion of her yearly income (and regularly mess up our taxes, too).
I see sense and logic in your idea - but for it to work, the standards would have to be established across the board to guarantee that the 'lag reducing card' on client side employs same methods as the serverside equipment, regardless of game / application. Before such standard is implemented, claiming your product can do that single-sidedly, on user end, is sort of ridiculous. Not to mention the question that has been raised throughout this topic... why would you want to use a piece of dedicated hardware just to implement dynamic packet encryption/compression protocols when your PC already has plenty of computing and processing power of its own?
Adding another piece of hardware with dedicated software package for that, as I see it, only adds a Point of Failure to the chain. Instead of having PC talk to communication equipment (router or cable modem) which talks to Server, you have, in effect, PC talk to interface card which talks to communication equipment - so you need to guarantee that both user's PC and user's comm equipment are stably interfacing with this newfangled piece of hardware. And, as any Windows user will tell you, tat's not always easy....
Honestly, I don't see how user-side hardware (or software, for that matter) can reduce online activity lag. Sure, you might try to implement some sort of protocol that evens out the lag a bit by pulling excessive amount of data when 'lag is low' and use it to fill in the gaps when 'lag is high' - but that'd require a certain, no small, amount of heuristics and second-guessing. I'm certain many of early MMO veterans remember the ancient lag issues from the times of real-time simulations - fast ones in particular, such as flight simulators, suffered tremendously from lag-related issues such as phantom opponents (where your 'second guessing' lag-compensators assumed that opponent would continue in a straight line or at the same turn radius/speed, whereas he actually went into some wild maneuver).
In the current state of affairs, I'm honestly not sure how much, if any, of the lag in your average MMO is user/connection-side and thus corrigible; games such as World of Warcraft, City of Heroes and Battlefield 2 are actually playable over dial-up - the trickle of packages isn't a lot of challenge even for a stable 56k modem. The bottleneck of modern day MMOs seem to be game servers going slightly ballistic when a certain area gets swarmed by a large number of active player objects (think Ironforge in WoW or Atlas Park in CoH) and therein lies the catch... how do you expect client-side hardware to correct server-side problems?
I have to admit my company is a mixed one when it comes to overtime... I do get paid overtime (150%) for anything over 40h/week, but several of my colleagues were 'offered' salaried positions recently, meaning they really don't get paid any overtime - and if they refuse, well, adios. It's a bit of dirty play...
I cannot say if it's the norm for the industry... but I just saw the loose ends of my department's budget for last year wrapped up, (I'm Remote Site Admin in a sizeable corporation's IT) and I was shocked at how much money was in it for IT staff training, unused. After chatting with some other friends in the industry, I discovered that often companies don't refuse to pay for training... but do expect employees to go through training without dropping any of their tasks. And since so many of IT people work 60+ hour weeks, we can all see how frequently that kind of training is a feasible scenario.
Of course, that was supposed to be Dual core Pentium 4@3.2 Ghz frequency and 800 MHz FSB freq + 2 MB cache. I suspect most people figured that one out, but just in case...
I think the reason for naming conventions change is relatively simple (though cetrtainly, IMHO, not too solid): Marketing. Gone are the days when only people asking 'what processor is in that box' were tecchies, geeks, nerd and co - to them, something like P4-2/3.2-800/2 , meaning Dual core Pentium 4@3.2 Ghz frequency and 800 MHz freq + 2 MB cache made sense as an understandable, technical naming convention. To Joe Schmoe, it is confusing. He likes to hear "Yes, sirree, the finest gen-yu-wain Pentium 4 Smithfield in there!"
Now, as I said previously, I don't think it's a terribly good reason - but from a marketing standpoint, it is quite a solid one - using memorable, simple names appeals to a far broader public, and if a customer can remember a product name, that's score one for marketing. Me, falling in more of a technically proficient minority, I long for long past days of meaningful names - but think of it. In the past, processors worked on one, maybe two sockets, with a relatively small number of differing parameters - everything was Socket 7 or Super Socket 7, every processor had same clock ranges, etc. So "Pentium 233 MMX" was really all you needed to know. Now, what to put in the name? Frequency? Some people don't consider it the main factor. Slot/socket type? FSB? Level 1/2 cache? Manufacter sub-series? So many things, so little space...
Take off your troll mask and chill for a minute... I never said Blizzard should answer all of the player whining on the forums... my observation was in regard to nature and quality of the answers Blizzard CMs provide, NOT quantity. I am well aware of the size of WoW player base and pure logistic challenge answering every BLUE PLS ANSWER titled post on forums would present. But it's a fact that, even when dozens or scores of threads raise the same valid questions about gameplay-disrupting issues or about the future of the game, they get either ignored or given a phrase-ladden, content-deficient answer which borders on PR bullshit you can see in answers to/. questions.
I'd dare say/. did the right thing... this 'interview' paints a certain, not too impressive, image of Blizzard. Purpose of interviews is not always simply to get correct and informative answers to questions you ask - more often than not, interview is interviewer's tool to paint a portrait of interviewee. How will the target respond is more important than what he will say. will his responses be lethargic, enthusiastic, agressive or premeditated tells readers a lot about interviewee's personality, even if it leaves questions themselves unanswered. Thus, may I suggest that - while we'd love to actually see real answers to those questions -/. did owe us the posting of Blizzard's 'answers' to the questions...
What can I say? I'm massively dissapointed. I've been fan of Blizzard, and especially Warcraft franchise, since Warcraft 1... and it more than slightly annoys me to see the company which always seemed to care about its player base visibly more than most other companies suddenly finds it necessary to answer both the most basic and quite intriguiung questions related to their best-selling game with a load of cookie-cut, soulless and rather empty phrases instead of honest, insightful answers that'd show us Blizzard still consists of people who -enjoy- creating games.
Yes, I play on WoW. And while the game, in itself, is quite awesome (though not, by any stretch of imagination, flawless or perfect), I am increasingly annoyed and dissapointed by the kind of feedback players receive for Blizzard representatives on all levels of game - from in-game issues and assistance requests sent to GMs, through many querries directed to Bliz Forums CMs, all the way to requests for assistance regarding account and payment issues. I find it hard to believe that any company that reached its current cult status purely through great products it created by listening to its fans and customers can make such a sudden and radical turn for the worse in the ways it communicates with those same fans who helped it grow into what it is now.
{ Durmitor/Hermann, Alliance side of Terenas (US) Server}
I'm aware of that - but the fact is, capsule handles re-entry stresses and wear and tear in a way significantly different from that encountered by Space Shuttle; the fact that capsule design avoids asymetrical aerodyne design which has issues with variable stress on different parts of structure, in favor of a radially symetrical design which is better suited to withstand repeated hi-stress situations because structure tends to distribute loads more evenly... thus wear and tear are reduced and, as long as landing impact doesn't break the thing, re-entry by itself is almost a minor nuisance.
Eh, fudge. Post got mangled... anyway, end is supposed to read:
(as an example, my AdAware finds
Bottom line... it is not about -number- of vulnerabilities, in my book. It is about what -kind- of vulnerabilities. Being allergic to kryptonite is not same as being allergic to wool.
Well, perhaps Mozilla -does- have 'more' vulnerabilities than IE. Or it doesn't. But that kind of statement doesn't buy me. I've started using alternate browser (Phoenix) sometime in 2002, and I've switched to Firefox more or less fulltime well over a year ago. In all that time, I didn't have a single incident of spyware/adware infection, much less anything approaching disaster-scale events some of my friends and customers had, where ad/spyware infection rendered the computers completely useless, pending wipe & reinstall. Many of my colleagues and friends who, in most cases, started using Firefox share these same experiences. (as an example, my AdAware finds Bottom line... it is not about -number- of vulnerabilities, in my book. It is about what -kind- of vulnerabilities. Being allergic to kryptonite is not same as being allergic to wool.
Slashdot Mirror
Not.
Elder Scrolls III Collection (Morrowing + Tribunal + Whatevertheotherexpansionnameis) : $20.
Dawn of War + Winter Assault : $20
Sid Meier's Pirates : $25.
Etc. Now, factor in buying one game every 4-6 weeks, apply to above and... voila. ~$15-20/mo. I am not acting like a victim - I am just making a realistic breakdown of my gaming expenses. just because so many people out there -must- have a new game the moment it hits the shelves, at $50+ prices, doesn't mean I have to as well. Light knows I can't even hope to catch up with all the good games that came out in past 3 years.
Along came WoW
Suddenly, in addition to $50 USD - usually my bi-monthly game budget for games - I spent on the copy of the game, I found myself spending ~$15/month (roughly my monthly budget) on WoW subscription. In addition, since woW is quite a time-intensive game (don't get me started on log in - spend 45 min forming a raid - start a raid - disband a raid 45 min later routine) I found myself spending 95% of my gaming time slots playing WoW. And so it went for, well, over a year.
Now, I'm happily 'off the WoW' for over half a year. Since then, I picked up a reasonable number of games that seemed interesting (Dawn of War, Sid meier's Pirates, Morrowind etc - 8 in total) - and I would've gotten more, if I didn't waste some time on auto Assault and D&D Online Betas. Thus, I have to definitely agree with TFA - WoW does seem to be harming other game markets, although I'd dare to expand / elaborate : MMOs are hurting the game market for less 'massively-teamplay' games. It's not solely WoW's fault - merely its popular content and quality (let's not start a Blizzard flamewar here, please) compared to other MMOs that's causing proportionately more market disturbance.
Allright, I'm officially confuzed.
Windows is / will be a commercial program. If Microsoft manages to develop a fool-proof system to identify pirated copies / installations, why would they allow those installations to run at all? Why not just set up the system so that Windows, upon identifying itself as pirated, simply uninstalls or refuses to run or whatever?
Conceptually, this is like setting up a car with anti-theft system that disables windshield wipers and bright headlights if car is stolen - but still allows the thief to drive it around.
In its basic form, 'Innocent until proven guilty' might apply only to criminal cases... but nowhere in legal world is it acceptable for prosecutor to accuse the (potential) defendant of crime without providing any evidence to support the accusation, and then expect defendant to be found guilty unless he provides evidence to his innocence.
My point is, to establish guilt, you need evidence to support the accusation. No evidence, no case. That's really an old one. Defendant isn't supposed to provide evidence to defend from unsupported accusations - if they were, that'd become ideal means of industrial espionage.
Software company A: "Company B's source code contains code we have patent on."
Software company B: "No it doesn't!"
Software company A: "Show us your source code to prove it! (And so that we can snoop around your proprietary, classified, patented data)."
Two words: Nuh-nuh.
Well, I really don't understand what's all the din and noise about.
Innocent until proven guilty is one of staples of US justice system. You can't walk into the court and say 'My neighbor stole something from me' and then leave it to the defendant to prove that everything in his appartment was actually purchased and owned by him, not you. You kinda need to say 'My neighbor stole my TV. Here's the warranty for the said TV I bought, with my name on it, and with serial of TV that's now on my neighbor's shelf.' Admittedly, the above example is vastly simplified, yet I think it would apply just fine to any copyright / patent infringement lawsuit. You can't just say you own patents to 'some of the code' in someone else's software, and then expect them to prove they own all the code - you have to specify which of the code in defendant's software is, allegedly, protected under the patents you hold.
No proof, no case.
Racist, totalitarian, militant ... you can be all of those and not be fascist. The defining characteristic of fascism is the notion that government exists to serve corporations.
Actually...
"Although the broadest definitions of fascism may include every authoritarian state that has ever existed, most theorists see important distinctions to be made. Fascism in Italy arose in the 1920s as a mixture of syndicalist notions with an anti-materialist theory of the state; the latter had already been linked to an extreme nationalism. Fascism in many ways seems to have been clearly developed as a reaction against Communism and Marxism, both in a philosophic and political sense, although it opposed democratic capitalist economics along with socialism, Marxism, and liberal democracy. It viewed the state as an organic entity in a positive light rather than as an institution designed to protect collective and individual rights, or as one that should be held in check...
Fascism is also typified by totalitarian attempts to impose state control over all aspects of life: political, social, cultural, and economic. The fascist state regulates and controls (as opposed to nationalizing) the means of production.
(Quoted from Wiki.)
Fascism really has nothing to do with association of goverments with corporations...
And yes, I think that using laptops to take notes is ridiculous and counter-productive. Those students are attending a law school, not a dactilography course. In all my years of 'higher education', including university, specialisation courses and even high school, actually paying attention to the lecture itself and taking shorthand notes resulted in 3 positive consequences: I learned how to listen and extract important fragments of information; I developed excellent short-term memory and good shorthand; and organisation of shorthand notes into useful studying materials after class made for exceptionally efficient study sessions in and by itself.
Well, technically... that example doesn't completely hold water. Just because you bought my book, CD, DVD or whatever doesn't explicitely allow you to use it for a public performance, unless otherwise noted. So while I cannot tell you what tone of voice you may use when reading it in privacy of youir own home, alone, if you, say, invite a dozen friends and read the same poetry to them out loud, or if you do it out in the street, that makes you subject to 'broadcasting or public performance' aspects of copyright laws.
In parallel, just because you give your census information to government doesn't directly imply you grant them the permission to share your information with public - no 'public performance rights' are included.
Does anyone else see this as a non-sequitur to the whole article? In general, original article is very interesting, and more than a little amusing - but the OP on /. is, to say the least, addlebrained and lacking any resemblance of article summary (which is what it really should be). The article, indeed, speaks of mr. Barret's role in Microsoft anti-trust lawsuit as a sort of a technical witness, and explains the background and circumstances of his involvement with Microsoft's 'rivals'. And then, out of nowhere, 'Yeah, he also once stole some company's logo from their network'. Talk about going out on a non-tangent.
May I point out that successful companies very often see such 'small' expenses, especially when those stack, as areas of great savings. Only 65 million dollars? Are you joking? You can't put only and 65 000 000 US$ in the same sentence and be successful in any form of business.
Look at Walmart. Look at the amount of money they rake in. And look at the, for example, frugal travel policies they have. Not only are their travelling employees expected to share one room if more than one is travelling; not only are their meal expense funds barely good enough for fast foods... no, they're also expected to take bus/train instead of plane if trip is below a certain (none too small) distance, and use cabs and public transportation over rent-a-cars whenever possible.
Company I work for dominates world market in its area of business - it holds over 75% of US market, and significant portions of world market. Our profit growth figures are terrifying... yet you won't see us shoveling money left and right - to the contrary. Savings are made wherever possible. Why? only a million dollars here, only five million there, only twenty million for something else... and suddenly your profit margins aren't that great anymore. And anyone who says that modern corporate business cares about anything except profits...
To be honest, I don't see a lot of reason for discontent over 'stagnant' pay comming from rank and file workers at Microsoft. I haven't noticed any major fluctuations within IT job market as a whole when it comes to pay rates in the last two years. And the whole situation becomes even less surprising if one takes into account these two factors:
Company size. Microsoft is not a small business, nor medium, nor even a large one. It's humongous. Thus, it is not really practical to talk about giving raises to i.e. top 5% or 10% performance employees like so many other companies do. In fact, even giving raises to just top 1% of employees still would bump the salary budget significantly every year.
Benefits. From what Net has been saying for years now, Microsoft's benefits and policies really don't suck. From stock options to silly things like 'nap time' during work hours, being a med-level employee for Microsoft doesn't seem to be really all that bad. Just as you check 401K and other benefits when considering work for Sun, IBM or any other IT (or non-IT) company, so too you should consider Microsoft's benefits before you complain about your stagnant pay.
Regarding elements of the article I find interesting: According to employees, who said they would be fired if they spoke on the record, the annual review amounts to little more than a closed-door popularity contest in which managers "fight" for higher scores for their team, or defer to higher-level decision makers who mandate how many workers drop to the bottom of the review scale. - this is definitely nothing unusual. In fact, if my manager didn't fight tooth and nail to prove that me and my team are better than other teams and get us raises or bonuses, seriously, I wouldn't have too high an opinion of him. Likewise, I have to notice that article focuses on salary itself - there is nothing in it about bonuses and incentives that I could find. Having a spouse who works for a major IT industry, I have to say I'm regularly stunned by the sums on her 'chrismas checks', 'yearly performance bonuses' and other 'small' things like that - they certainly make a significant portion of her yearly income (and regularly mess up our taxes, too).
I see sense and logic in your idea - but for it to work, the standards would have to be established across the board to guarantee that the 'lag reducing card' on client side employs same methods as the serverside equipment, regardless of game / application. Before such standard is implemented, claiming your product can do that single-sidedly, on user end, is sort of ridiculous. Not to mention the question that has been raised throughout this topic... why would you want to use a piece of dedicated hardware just to implement dynamic packet encryption/compression protocols when your PC already has plenty of computing and processing power of its own? Adding another piece of hardware with dedicated software package for that, as I see it, only adds a Point of Failure to the chain. Instead of having PC talk to communication equipment (router or cable modem) which talks to Server, you have, in effect, PC talk to interface card which talks to communication equipment - so you need to guarantee that both user's PC and user's comm equipment are stably interfacing with this newfangled piece of hardware. And, as any Windows user will tell you, tat's not always easy....
Honestly, I don't see how user-side hardware (or software, for that matter) can reduce online activity lag. Sure, you might try to implement some sort of protocol that evens out the lag a bit by pulling excessive amount of data when 'lag is low' and use it to fill in the gaps when 'lag is high' - but that'd require a certain, no small, amount of heuristics and second-guessing. I'm certain many of early MMO veterans remember the ancient lag issues from the times of real-time simulations - fast ones in particular, such as flight simulators, suffered tremendously from lag-related issues such as phantom opponents (where your 'second guessing' lag-compensators assumed that opponent would continue in a straight line or at the same turn radius/speed, whereas he actually went into some wild maneuver). In the current state of affairs, I'm honestly not sure how much, if any, of the lag in your average MMO is user/connection-side and thus corrigible; games such as World of Warcraft, City of Heroes and Battlefield 2 are actually playable over dial-up - the trickle of packages isn't a lot of challenge even for a stable 56k modem. The bottleneck of modern day MMOs seem to be game servers going slightly ballistic when a certain area gets swarmed by a large number of active player objects (think Ironforge in WoW or Atlas Park in CoH) and therein lies the catch... how do you expect client-side hardware to correct server-side problems?
I have to admit my company is a mixed one when it comes to overtime... I do get paid overtime (150%) for anything over 40h/week, but several of my colleagues were 'offered' salaried positions recently, meaning they really don't get paid any overtime - and if they refuse, well, adios. It's a bit of dirty play...
I cannot say if it's the norm for the industry... but I just saw the loose ends of my department's budget for last year wrapped up, (I'm Remote Site Admin in a sizeable corporation's IT) and I was shocked at how much money was in it for IT staff training, unused. After chatting with some other friends in the industry, I discovered that often companies don't refuse to pay for training... but do expect employees to go through training without dropping any of their tasks. And since so many of IT people work 60+ hour weeks, we can all see how frequently that kind of training is a feasible scenario.
Of course, that was supposed to be Dual core Pentium 4@3.2 Ghz frequency and 800 MHz FSB freq + 2 MB cache. I suspect most people figured that one out, but just in case...
I think the reason for naming conventions change is relatively simple (though cetrtainly, IMHO, not too solid): Marketing. Gone are the days when only people asking 'what processor is in that box' were tecchies, geeks, nerd and co - to them, something like P4-2/3.2-800/2 , meaning Dual core Pentium 4@3.2 Ghz frequency and 800 MHz freq + 2 MB cache made sense as an understandable, technical naming convention. To Joe Schmoe, it is confusing. He likes to hear "Yes, sirree, the finest gen-yu-wain Pentium 4 Smithfield in there!"
Now, as I said previously, I don't think it's a terribly good reason - but from a marketing standpoint, it is quite a solid one - using memorable, simple names appeals to a far broader public, and if a customer can remember a product name, that's score one for marketing. Me, falling in more of a technically proficient minority, I long for long past days of meaningful names - but think of it. In the past, processors worked on one, maybe two sockets, with a relatively small number of differing parameters - everything was Socket 7 or Super Socket 7, every processor had same clock ranges, etc. So "Pentium 233 MMX" was really all you needed to know. Now, what to put in the name? Frequency? Some people don't consider it the main factor. Slot/socket type? FSB? Level 1/2 cache? Manufacter sub-series? So many things, so little space...
Take off your troll mask and chill for a minute... I never said Blizzard should answer all of the player whining on the forums... my observation was in regard to nature and quality of the answers Blizzard CMs provide, NOT quantity. I am well aware of the size of WoW player base and pure logistic challenge answering every BLUE PLS ANSWER titled post on forums would present. But it's a fact that, even when dozens or scores of threads raise the same valid questions about gameplay-disrupting issues or about the future of the game, they get either ignored or given a phrase-ladden, content-deficient answer which borders on PR bullshit you can see in answers to /. questions.
I'd dare say /. did the right thing... this 'interview' paints a certain, not too impressive, image of Blizzard. Purpose of interviews is not always simply to get correct and informative answers to questions you ask - more often than not, interview is interviewer's tool to paint a portrait of interviewee. How will the target respond is more important than what he will say. will his responses be lethargic, enthusiastic, agressive or premeditated tells readers a lot about interviewee's personality, even if it leaves questions themselves unanswered. Thus, may I suggest that - while we'd love to actually see real answers to those questions - /. did owe us the posting of Blizzard's 'answers' to the questions...
What can I say? I'm massively dissapointed. I've been fan of Blizzard, and especially Warcraft franchise, since Warcraft 1... and it more than slightly annoys me to see the company which always seemed to care about its player base visibly more than most other companies suddenly finds it necessary to answer both the most basic and quite intriguiung questions related to their best-selling game with a load of cookie-cut, soulless and rather empty phrases instead of honest, insightful answers that'd show us Blizzard still consists of people who -enjoy- creating games.
Yes, I play on WoW. And while the game, in itself, is quite awesome (though not, by any stretch of imagination, flawless or perfect), I am increasingly annoyed and dissapointed by the kind of feedback players receive for Blizzard representatives on all levels of game - from in-game issues and assistance requests sent to GMs, through many querries directed to Bliz Forums CMs, all the way to requests for assistance regarding account and payment issues. I find it hard to believe that any company that reached its current cult status purely through great products it created by listening to its fans and customers can make such a sudden and radical turn for the worse in the ways it communicates with those same fans who helped it grow into what it is now.
{ Durmitor/Hermann, Alliance side of Terenas (US) Server}
I'm aware of that - but the fact is, capsule handles re-entry stresses and wear and tear in a way significantly different from that encountered by Space Shuttle; the fact that capsule design avoids asymetrical aerodyne design which has issues with variable stress on different parts of structure, in favor of a radially symetrical design which is better suited to withstand repeated hi-stress situations because structure tends to distribute loads more evenly... thus wear and tear are reduced and, as long as landing impact doesn't break the thing, re-entry by itself is almost a minor nuisance.
I swear I will never again try to use "less than" and "greater than" math/logic symbols in a html-enabled posts. Me dork.
Eh, fudge. Post got mangled... anyway, end is supposed to read:
(as an example, my AdAware finds
Bottom line... it is not about -number- of vulnerabilities, in my book. It is about what -kind- of vulnerabilities. Being allergic to kryptonite is not same as being allergic to wool.
LOL... Zing? (No, me nyet rusky. I'm not a yank, either.)
Well, perhaps Mozilla -does- have 'more' vulnerabilities than IE. Or it doesn't. But that kind of statement doesn't buy me. I've started using alternate browser (Phoenix) sometime in 2002, and I've switched to Firefox more or less fulltime well over a year ago. In all that time, I didn't have a single incident of spyware/adware infection, much less anything approaching disaster-scale events some of my friends and customers had, where ad/spyware infection rendered the computers completely useless, pending wipe & reinstall. Many of my colleagues and friends who, in most cases, started using Firefox share these same experiences. (as an example, my AdAware finds
Bottom line... it is not about -number- of vulnerabilities, in my book. It is about what -kind- of vulnerabilities. Being allergic to kryptonite is not same as being allergic to wool.