"Backward Compatibility" - it's a bitch. Once the user interface becomes an established standard, changing it might never happen . . . even after mankind uses up the Earth and settles new ones.
Storage limits ("our database can't handle the load, we'll fix it later" - Thanks Raph/SoE. Oh, wait, you never did fix that, did you?)
tell-hell ("Joe RandomPlayer: Make me your best gun, use the good stuff. Oh, and can I have it for free? I don't have any money.")
loot components better than anything you could make, dropped maybe never, but that's all the high-end customers want ("What, no Acklay Power Hammers? Ur a useless ws."
automated vendors that can only sell a limited number of items before they were full
tell-hell ("Mstr Obnxs: Hey! Ur vndrz got no Comp Armor!" "Me: I don't make armor, try so-and-so")
factories that randomly stop for no reason
Having no combat skills ("You have been slain by a rogue gnort")
Being soooooo sick of seeing that crafting station on your screen (I will never have an orange room in real life, thanks to the months I spent stuck in the basement of a Naboo Medium house... what awful colors).
tell hell: ("MrBeggar: credz plz. Ur a crafter ur rich, Im poor")
And I had it good - I had most of the best resources that ever spawned on my server, and acquired the right crafting bonus equipment. I even managed to get a small number of legendary (!) krayt tissues and made what I suspect was the nastiest republic blaster on my server. But it took 4 accounts to hold everything I had accumulated.
I'm not sure that you can say that it does not happen in real life, though. I started out with a pretty long list of bad reasons why people's personalities can change radically, such as disease, injuries and life experiences, like: Stroke. Major Car Accident. Natural Catastrophe. Depression. Addiction. War. Divorce. Brainwashing. Multiple Personality Disorder. Blackmail. Alzheimer's. Side-effects of prescription drugs. Bankruptcy.
But after thinking about it, I also came up with some good reasons: Growing up. Job Requirement (e.g. undercover police). Finding a purpose in life (e.g. "born again"). Starting a family.
In some of those cases, the history carries over, but in others, it doesn't. Some of the things that I did as a 3-year old may be fondly remembered, but only some of those things still apply now:).
Not that we deal with it any better IRL than we do in the virtual world...
I decided that the Author's Guild was an enemy of the freedoms I enjoy as a Citizen of the United States of America after in 2002, after they tried to get Amazon to stop selling used books (reference article).
Basically, they seem to think that they can take away my rights (First Sale Doctrine) if they apply enough pressure . . . so they can earn more money.
I understand that authors get paid way too little, but if they sign the publishing contracts, it is their own dumb fault.
It irritates me to see yet another group (MPAA and RIAA) decide that it is better to fight the new technology rather than embracing it and making it work for them. Sad, really. I'm sure that some people in the Natural ice industry hated that new-fangled refrigeration device, too.
so election results can be monitored in real time.
Bad Idea. Strike this part, please.
Real time results mean that one voter is casting his or her vote while in possession of different information than other voters - that being the results of the votes cast so far.
The worst-case scenario is when there is a candidate who is strongly favored by "morning voters" in a race against a candidate favored by "evening voters". If the morning/evening split would be 200/300, the evening candidate would win. Except that, at noon, the real time vote is 200/0, so none of the evening voters even bother going to vote, since "their guy" is so far behind.
You cannot control every "later has more information than earlier" factor, but since this one can be controlled, it should be to prevent skewing the vote by accident.
The tuning advice given by the O'Reilly books is quite useful if and only if you are going to have a single user accessing the data.
However, if you intend to allow multiple people to access the data at one time (i.e. a web site), then burn those books and start reading about performance tuning on Tom Kyte's website.
The main problem in the O'Reilly books is that they completely ignore the effect of the queries on resources that are shared globally by all users on the database. In a perfect world, there wouldn't be any shared resources, but we aren't in a perfect world.
The idea here is that one person's tasks are processed sequentially simple because of the nature of what they are doing. However, when you have 15 people on the database, you really want their tasks to be running in parallel with each other. You end up sacrificing some of the "best possible" performance that a single user could gat in order to give everyone reasonably good performance.
A good analogy is automotive traffic. It would be really nice for you if every traffic light you hit was always green in your direction... but everyone else on the road would hate you for it.
WHAS Radio (and Clear Channel Entertainment) fired John Ziegler a few years ago because of similar personal attacks against a fellow "personality".
Up until that point, his talk-show was the highest rated program in the market, and he was getting a pass on a lot of his attitute because he did bring in the advertising money.
But he also went too far, and ultimately got punished for it.
So, here's how we help get rid of Ms. O'Gara:
Check the local bookstores and supermarket magazine racks. For any company that carries this magazine - write them a letter of COMPLAIN about Ms. O'Gara.
Incremental upgrats is a great idea for stand-alone software, but it is not so great for client-server (like MMORPGs).
As a simple example, let's say they upgrade Alleria (I am Alliance on that machine) but do not upgrade Dalaran (I am horde, there).
Now, if Blizzard did not change the protocol that their servers use in this patch . . . great. But if they did have to change something, then when I log on to Alleria, I get cut off from Dalaran until they get around to upgrading it. Can you imagine the whining in the forums if that took place?
Then lets say that they have some problem occur on Server "X". First, the tech has to check which software version is on "X", then get the way to fix the problem on "X" . . . which is very different than how they fix it on "Y". Oops! someone recorded the version number incorrectly, and now the tech has the wrong procedure . . . and uses it, screwing things up worse.
Then a hard drive fails on Z, and they go swipe a piece of hardware from X to replace it . . . Oops! X had a different software version, so now the entire database for Z is corrupt.
That, and if they are closing an exploit, they really want to close the exploit everywhere, instead of just some places.
So, to follow H. D. Thoreau's advice to "Simplify, Simplify" - upgrade them all at once, and take the lumps that this will result in.
The simplest program ever was a 0-byte file in IBM's MVS operating system. (That O/S had some utilities that could only be accessed by running a "program" - and to get the utility to run without actually doing anything... well, the solution was a program that literally did nothing).
The funny thing was, someone wrote a Problem Tracking Report (i.e. "Bug") about this, and had the MVS team change the program - the flaw was that the return code register was being set in the utility, but the 0=byte program was not copying this result code into it's own return register, so the program was returning a "success" evem when a failure had occurred.
We co-ops got a chuckle out of it because of the "bugs per line of code" calculation would have had a div-by-zero problem:).
I love base-30 systems - we have one that is about to expire, and has already caused all sorts or predictions of doom and gloom here on slashdot: The Serial Number for the Vehicle Identification Numbering system (VIN).
Of course that was created to make it harder for your local sherrif and local auto dealer from writing down the VIN as "I2FO0000" instead of "12E00000" . . . despite the reality that rolling over the VINs at the end of this decade should only be an inconvenience for the corporate executives that have the "I must start numbering everything at 1" mind-set. But getting back on topic . ..
Let's break this down:
They have a pair of floating point numbers: latitude, longitude - no immediate patent claim here, as the lat/lon numbers have been in use for a very long time.
They convert that number to a digital format, with a minor loss of precision. Prior Art: Every Analog to Digital Converter that has ever been made, from joysticks to MP3.
Storing a number in a specific base-30 format. Prior art: IEEE 754-1985, Standard for Binary Floating Point Arithmetic. Prior Art: RGB Monitors - the colors specified in HTML "*color=" tags actually represent a floating-point value in a base-16 numbering system.
Sigh. Nevermind. Our entire society is built upon a foundation of information sharing - the public school system. We spend 12 years forcing our children to accept and regurgitate information from a small number of sources (teachers), and to share information freely amongst themselves (recitation in class), and then to prove that they know it (tests) . . . only to turn around and slap the label "Intellectual Property" and to forbid them from doing precisely what we just spent 12 years training them to do.
Self-defeating.
Information is the INFRASTRUCTURE of technological advance. Just like roads and the electrical grid is the infrastructure of modern society. Any nation that figures this out, and acts to build its infrastructure will do precisely what the United States did between 1865 (backwater nation fighting a civil war) and 1945 (superpower) . . .
There was no immediate reply to an e-mail sent to Cash Link Systems on Saturday.
Congratulations! Your e-mail adderss has just been harvested, Mr. Associated Press reporter. I am sure that the "replies" will start pouring in, presently . . .
For an gaming cafe (Korea, et cetera), an owner can buy one of these, and use it as an ongoing advertisement to get people into the cafe.
For G4/TechTV, they can show the "game" to the viewing public without having to rig a system, anymore...... making it easy for them to focus *only* on the games that XBox puts out. (Advertising the X-Box without costing Microsoft a cent.)... making the viewing audience want to buy those great games that they see on TV.
There is a small cost associated with the hardware, but sell 2 more game licenses per X-Box, it's a worthwhile investment.
The major problem with using lower case letters is a physical one - the VIN plate on your vehicle is a piece of stamped metal of a a specified-by-law size and shape, with a specified-by-law font that ensures that Mr. County Sherriff can clearly read what that thing says without making mistakes.
The mechanics of stamping a piece of metal precludes fancy fonts - and lower case letters will tend to end up smears, rather than clear text.
Besides, a lot of the software will helpfully uppercase the letters for you (since it cannot be lower case, yet most keyboards these days are multicase), so you're still right back to the "expensive to update all the software" problem.
There is a A *MUCH* simpler solution.
Those 17 positions include a lot of detail about the type of vehicle/engine, et cetera. Even *one* difference is enough to change that position and the checksum characters, which will make the VINs unique. So, any auto manufacturer at risk of overlapping VINs,
Gets the list of VINs that were used on the last cycle
Compares their current vehicle line to see if they would have any "oops, they match" situations
If they find any, they shuffle the vehicles around, until there are no more matches.
Everything hinges on the 5 characters in positions 4 through 8 (body style, Engine type, model, series) along with the checksum in position 9. The manufacturer has positions 12 through 17 to play with, and 31 possible values to put into each position, or 31^7 possible serial numbers that they can use in a year.
In other words, for a guaranteed overlap, that manufacturer would have to build 27 billion identical cars in a single year to exhaust the entire serial number space.
That's what, 4 cars for every human on the planet?
They will scream because the vehicle that they want to be serial number "A00001" has to be shunted to serial number "A00003", but in the grand scheme of things, it can be dealt with by creative assignment of the serial number range.
One bit of advice that I heard before I started taking classes in college boiled down to this:
"You will use maybe 20% of what we teach you in college. Unfortuantely, we have no way of knowing which 20% is important for you - so we take into account that your 20% is different that his 20% and her 20%, and we end up teaching you more than you need. to compensate."
Take advantage of this, and explore anything that sounds interesting while you still can. You have enough control to read the entire set of course listings, and your cirriculum is specified by you, instead of some state education board. I did that, and found that,
I loathed accounting
I loathed programming in COBOL
I had no talent for Thermodynamics
Programming was easy, and fun
I was a math major, until the day they sat me down in front of a keyboard and insisted that I write a program. Then I was hooked.
Take drama 101. Take the programming classes that interest you. Take art appreciation. Take Business Economics. Take Philosophy 101. Any of those that drive you crazy for a mere three months (until the class is over) are not a total loss - you have learned something very important about yourself and what kind of things you do not want to do.
And that is my key point. College is about learning about YOURSELF as much as it is about learning the curriculum that they offer.
And yes, you sound like an INTP. If you have not read up on Myers-Briggs personality classification, do so, now.
For example, start with the U. S. Patent and Trademark website, where you may find your way to this page. Use their search feature, and read up on what, precisely, is trademarked:
G & S: production of audio programming and distribution to listeners via cable, satellite or global computer network
G & S: computerized on-line ordering services in the field of music
and
G & S: Computer services, namely broadcasting music and music information via an electronic computer network
You get into trouble with the last bullet item. Your website also broadcasts music information via an electronic computer network. Someone else mentioned "Aspirin", and the fact that companies have to aggressively defend themselves against dilution of their trademark, so they pretty much had to go after your goofed metatags.
You might be able to defend "Hard Radio", but that is where a real Trademark Attorney would come into play.
You never really know how far things like this can go. For example, this recent Supreme Court case was decided in favor of the little guy, but three courts ruled against the little guy before the Supreme Court overturned them all. And the Supreme Court even said that they had to prove that there was confusion and dilution - if they really do have customers who complained to them that they found your site while searching for theirs...
Duh. If *you* don't complain to the company, and the next person doesn't complain... then there is no groundswell. Heck, tell them precisely what you told us, "I would not have bought the product if I knew it wanted a service running all the time," and "I feel like I've unknowlingly funded the digital mafia."
And find their forums and Usenet news group, and post the same thing in those places. That might set off the groundswell that you want.
One person can make a difference - even you. Just ask Rosa Parks.
I wish programmers got more worked up about that metaphor. It ought to offend them. Your work, creating new and useful technology, is like an outbreak of cholera or botulism?
Diseases? Nah. I prefer my analogy:
The software that I have written makes decisions and performs actions using my thought-processes, like some ghostly echo of my own mind, now embedded in a machine.
Except when is acts up - then I call it a "poltergeist" instead of "ghost".
Well, in a previous place of employment, I had a lot of opportunity to send business to Belkin . . . manufacturing plants use hundreds of thousands of miles of wire.
Looks like I will have to suggest alternative sources for the wiring . . . until Belkin public disowns this genius's (*cough*) idea.
Many SWG players have two or more accounts in the game, now - I, for, example have a combat character and a crafting character. Of course, I paid for the game twice, but that is my perogative.
That, and many many people have left the game for other things - they still have the year's worth of dues paid, but their accounts are inactive.
So, I would estimate that the actual subscriber count is closer to 250,000, and the Active subscriber count is more like 100,000.
About 90 days ago, Blizzard released a beta test copy of the 1.10 patch - and anyone who uses it cannot play on battle.net. I wonder how many of these 400,000 accounts were automatically purged due to lack of use?
Mine should have been automatically purged in the previous few days, for example.
Maybe their math accounts for it, but I wonder, was it really
On a whim, I took a COBOL class in college (1989). I learned one critical fact during that class - that I *never* wanted to do COBOL programming again.
It never showed up on my resume, and very few people know about it.
However, I passed up on some $20k/year salary increases by *not* listing it on my resume during the late 1990s. It was a conscious choice - and one that I was glad to be able to make.
By adding networking to your skill set, you could become the IT person at a small company. Imagine being the fifteenth guy to work for Microsoft, for example. Big bucks.
More opportunities (if you like doing that work still, once the class is over), or knowledge that you want to avoid the field like it was the plague. Hmmm. . .
Slashdot Mirror
"Backward Compatibility" - it's a bitch. Once the user interface becomes an established standard, changing it might never happen . . . even after mankind uses up the Earth and settles new ones.
Isn't that just ASKING for paper cuts???
And you only scratched the surface ...
And I had it good - I had most of the best resources that ever spawned on my server, and acquired the right crafting bonus equipment. I even managed to get a small number of legendary (!) krayt tissues and made what I suspect was the nastiest republic blaster on my server. But it took 4 accounts to hold everything I had accumulated.
I'm not sure that you can say that it does not happen in real life, though. I started out with a pretty long list of bad reasons why people's personalities can change radically, such as disease, injuries and life experiences, like: Stroke. Major Car Accident. Natural Catastrophe. Depression. Addiction. War. Divorce. Brainwashing. Multiple Personality Disorder. Blackmail. Alzheimer's. Side-effects of prescription drugs. Bankruptcy.
But after thinking about it, I also came up with some good reasons: Growing up. Job Requirement (e.g. undercover police). Finding a purpose in life (e.g. "born again"). Starting a family.
In some of those cases, the history carries over, but in others, it doesn't. Some of the things that I did as a 3-year old may be fondly remembered, but only some of those things still apply now :).
Not that we deal with it any better IRL than we do in the virtual world ...
I decided that the Author's Guild was an enemy of the freedoms I enjoy as a Citizen of the United States of America after in 2002, after they tried to get Amazon to stop selling used books (reference article).
Basically, they seem to think that they can take away my rights (First Sale Doctrine) if they apply enough pressure . . . so they can earn more money.
I understand that authors get paid way too little, but if they sign the publishing contracts, it is their own dumb fault.
It irritates me to see yet another group (MPAA and RIAA) decide that it is better to fight the new technology rather than embracing it and making it work for them. Sad, really. I'm sure that some people in the Natural ice industry hated that new-fangled refrigeration device, too.
Sigh.
Bad Idea. Strike this part, please.
Real time results mean that one voter is casting his or her vote while in possession of different information than other voters - that being the results of the votes cast so far.
The worst-case scenario is when there is a candidate who is strongly favored by "morning voters" in a race against a candidate favored by "evening voters". If the morning/evening split would be 200/300, the evening candidate would win. Except that, at noon, the real time vote is 200/0, so none of the evening voters even bother going to vote, since "their guy" is so far behind.
You cannot control every "later has more information than earlier" factor, but since this one can be controlled, it should be to prevent skewing the vote by accident.
The tuning advice given by the O'Reilly books is quite useful if and only if you are going to have a single user accessing the data.
However, if you intend to allow multiple people to access the data at one time (i.e. a web site), then burn those books and start reading about performance tuning on Tom Kyte's website.
The main problem in the O'Reilly books is that they completely ignore the effect of the queries on resources that are shared globally by all users on the database. In a perfect world, there wouldn't be any shared resources, but we aren't in a perfect world.
The idea here is that one person's tasks are processed sequentially simple because of the nature of what they are doing. However, when you have 15 people on the database, you really want their tasks to be running in parallel with each other. You end up sacrificing some of the "best possible" performance that a single user could gat in order to give everyone reasonably good performance.
A good analogy is automotive traffic. It would be really nice for you if every traffic light you hit was always green in your direction ... but everyone else on the road would hate you for it.
WHAS Radio (and Clear Channel Entertainment) fired John Ziegler a few years ago because of similar personal attacks against a fellow "personality".
Up until that point, his talk-show was the highest rated program in the market, and he was getting a pass on a lot of his attitute because he did bring in the advertising money.
But he also went too far, and ultimately got punished for it.
So, here's how we help get rid of Ms. O'Gara:
Check the local bookstores and supermarket magazine racks. For any company that carries this magazine - write them a letter of COMPLAIN about Ms. O'Gara.
Incremental upgrats is a great idea for stand-alone software, but it is not so great for client-server (like MMORPGs).
As a simple example, let's say they upgrade Alleria (I am Alliance on that machine) but do not upgrade Dalaran (I am horde, there).
Now, if Blizzard did not change the protocol that their servers use in this patch . . . great. But if they did have to change something, then when I log on to Alleria, I get cut off from Dalaran until they get around to upgrading it. Can you imagine the whining in the forums if that took place?
Then lets say that they have some problem occur on Server "X". First, the tech has to check which software version is on "X", then get the way to fix the problem on "X" . . . which is very different than how they fix it on "Y". Oops! someone recorded the version number incorrectly, and now the tech has the wrong procedure . . . and uses it, screwing things up worse.
Then a hard drive fails on Z, and they go swipe a piece of hardware from X to replace it . . . Oops! X had a different software version, so now the entire database for Z is corrupt.
That, and if they are closing an exploit, they really want to close the exploit everywhere, instead of just some places.
So, to follow H. D. Thoreau's advice to "Simplify, Simplify" - upgrade them all at once, and take the lumps that this will result in.
I am not the only person who remembers this program - and it looks like there were two more patches on that 0-byte program after I left IBM.
Heh.
The simplest program ever was a 0-byte file in IBM's MVS operating system. (That O/S had some utilities that could only be accessed by running a "program" - and to get the utility to run without actually doing anything ... well, the solution was a program that literally did nothing).
:).
The funny thing was, someone wrote a Problem Tracking Report (i.e. "Bug") about this, and had the MVS team change the program - the flaw was that the return code register was being set in the utility, but the 0=byte program was not copying this result code into it's own return register, so the program was returning a "success" evem when a failure had occurred.
We co-ops got a chuckle out of it because of the "bugs per line of code" calculation would have had a div-by-zero problem
I love base-30 systems - we have one that is about to expire, and has already caused all sorts or predictions of doom and gloom here on slashdot: The Serial Number for the Vehicle Identification Numbering system (VIN).
Of course that was created to make it harder for your local sherrif and local auto dealer from writing down the VIN as "I2FO0000" instead of "12E00000" . . . despite the reality that rolling over the VINs at the end of this decade should only be an inconvenience for the corporate executives that have the "I must start numbering everything at 1" mind-set. But getting back on topic . . .
Let's break this down:
Sigh. Nevermind. Our entire society is built upon a foundation of information sharing - the public school system. We spend 12 years forcing our children to accept and regurgitate information from a small number of sources (teachers), and to share information freely amongst themselves (recitation in class), and then to prove that they know it (tests) . . . only to turn around and slap the label "Intellectual Property" and to forbid them from doing precisely what we just spent 12 years training them to do.
Self-defeating.
Information is the INFRASTRUCTURE of technological advance. Just like roads and the electrical grid is the infrastructure of modern society. Any nation that figures this out, and acts to build its infrastructure will do precisely what the United States did between 1865 (backwater nation fighting a civil war) and 1945 (superpower) . . .
Pssst, ZeeExSixAre, c'mere.
If Duhbya over there falls in love with a virtual woman, then maybe he WONT BREED. It's in the best interest of the gene pool, Zee!
There was no immediate reply to an e-mail sent to Cash Link Systems on Saturday.
Congratulations! Your e-mail adderss has just been harvested, Mr. Associated Press reporter. I am sure that the "replies" will start pouring in, presently . . .
Simple,
... ... making it easy for them to focus *only* on the games that XBox puts out. (Advertising the X-Box without costing Microsoft a cent.) ... making the viewing audience want to buy those great games that they see on TV.
It is a great marketing ploy.
For an gaming cafe (Korea, et cetera), an owner can buy one of these, and use it as an ongoing advertisement to get people into the cafe.
For G4/TechTV, they can show the "game" to the viewing public without having to rig a system, anymore
There is a small cost associated with the hardware, but sell 2 more game licenses per X-Box, it's a worthwhile investment.
The major problem with using lower case letters is a physical one - the VIN plate on your vehicle is a piece of stamped metal of a a specified-by-law size and shape, with a specified-by-law font that ensures that Mr. County Sherriff can clearly read what that thing says without making mistakes.
The mechanics of stamping a piece of metal precludes fancy fonts - and lower case letters will tend to end up smears, rather than clear text.
Besides, a lot of the software will helpfully uppercase the letters for you (since it cannot be lower case, yet most keyboards these days are multicase), so you're still right back to the "expensive to update all the software" problem.
There is a A *MUCH* simpler solution.
Those 17 positions include a lot of detail about the type of vehicle/engine, et cetera. Even *one* difference is enough to change that position and the checksum characters, which will make the VINs unique. So, any auto manufacturer at risk of overlapping VINs,
Everything hinges on the 5 characters in positions 4 through 8 (body style, Engine type, model, series) along with the checksum in position 9. The manufacturer has positions 12 through 17 to play with, and 31 possible values to put into each position, or 31^7 possible serial numbers that they can use in a year.
In other words, for a guaranteed overlap, that manufacturer would have to build 27 billion identical cars in a single year to exhaust the entire serial number space.
That's what, 4 cars for every human on the planet?
They will scream because the vehicle that they want to be serial number "A00001" has to be shunted to serial number "A00003", but in the grand scheme of things, it can be dealt with by creative assignment of the serial number range.
One bit of advice that I heard before I started taking classes in college boiled down to this:
Take advantage of this, and explore anything that sounds interesting while you still can. You have enough control to read the entire set of course listings, and your cirriculum is specified by you, instead of some state education board. I did that, and found that,
- I loathed accounting
- I loathed programming in COBOL
- I had no talent for Thermodynamics
- Programming was easy, and fun
I was a math major, until the day they sat me down in front of a keyboard and insisted that I write a program. Then I was hooked.Take drama 101. Take the programming classes that interest you. Take art appreciation. Take Business Economics. Take Philosophy 101. Any of those that drive you crazy for a mere three months (until the class is over) are not a total loss - you have learned something very important about yourself and what kind of things you do not want to do.
And that is my key point. College is about learning about YOURSELF as much as it is about learning the curriculum that they offer.
And yes, you sound like an INTP. If you have not read up on Myers-Briggs personality classification, do so, now.
and
You get into trouble with the last bullet item. Your website also broadcasts music information via an electronic computer network. Someone else mentioned "Aspirin", and the fact that companies have to aggressively defend themselves against dilution of their trademark, so they pretty much had to go after your goofed metatags.
You might be able to defend "Hard Radio", but that is where a real Trademark Attorney would come into play.
You never really know how far things like this can go. For example, this recent Supreme Court case was decided in favor of the little guy, but three courts ruled against the little guy before the Supreme Court overturned them all. And the Supreme Court even said that they had to prove that there was confusion and dilution - if they really do have customers who complained to them that they found your site while searching for theirs ...
Either change it, or see an attorney.
Quote: Do I call the company and complain?
Duh. If *you* don't complain to the company, and the next person doesn't complain ... then there is no groundswell. Heck, tell them precisely what you told us, "I would not have bought the product if I knew it wanted a service running all the time," and "I feel like I've unknowlingly funded the digital mafia."
And find their forums and Usenet news group, and post the same thing in those places. That might set off the groundswell that you want.
One person can make a difference - even you. Just ask Rosa Parks.
From the article:
Diseases? Nah. I prefer my analogy:
The software that I have written makes decisions and performs actions using my thought-processes, like some ghostly echo of my own mind, now embedded in a machine.
Except when is acts up - then I call it a "poltergeist" instead of "ghost".
Well, in a previous place of employment, I had a lot of opportunity to send business to Belkin . . . manufacturing plants use hundreds of thousands of miles of wire.
Looks like I will have to suggest alternative sources for the wiring . . . until Belkin public disowns this genius's (*cough*) idea.
Many SWG players have two or more accounts in the game, now - I, for, example have a combat character and a crafting character. Of course, I paid for the game twice, but that is my perogative.
That, and many many people have left the game for other things - they still have the year's worth of dues paid, but their accounts are inactive.
So, I would estimate that the actual subscriber count is closer to 250,000, and the Active subscriber count is more like 100,000.
Number of accounts before the banning: X
Number of accounts after the banning: X-400,000
Simple, right?
However ...
About 90 days ago, Blizzard released a beta test copy of the 1.10 patch - and anyone who uses it cannot play on battle.net. I wonder how many of these 400,000 accounts were automatically purged due to lack of use?
Mine should have been automatically purged in the previous few days, for example.
Maybe their math accounts for it, but I wonder, was it really
Number of accounts before the banning: X
Number of accounts after the banning: X-5000
Number of accouts after the purge: X-400000
West Virginia might be inland, but the projected storm track puts the eye of the storm as far west as Charleston, WV.
Category 3 over the ocean, Category 2 over North Carolina, Category 1 over Virginia, Tropical Depression (and tornados) over West Virginia.
On a whim, I took a COBOL class in college (1989). I learned one critical fact during that class - that I *never* wanted to do COBOL programming again.
It never showed up on my resume, and very few people know about it.
However, I passed up on some $20k/year salary increases by *not* listing it on my resume during the late 1990s. It was a conscious choice - and one that I was glad to be able to make.
By adding networking to your skill set, you could become the IT person at a small company. Imagine being the fifteenth guy to work for Microsoft, for example. Big bucks.
More opportunities (if you like doing that work still, once the class is over), or knowledge that you want to avoid the field like it was the plague. Hmmm. . .