As anonymous coward guessed, there are 3 people. There are also two errors in my post but correcting them would make names blindingly obvious. (The errors are due to me retelling tales a couple years after hearing them of an agency of which I have no firsthand knowledge.)
Thank you for your diligence in fact checking. But I am reluctant to say more.
I was at a friends house playing Rayman recently and I have to say some of the mini-games require absurdly fast motion of the remote. I attempted to use subtlety and control. Then I tried speed with small motions. Finally when both those approaches failed to get top rankings, I used huge motions at top speed and took the top places in several minigames.
Now I have only played for a couple hours. And some games did require coordination or accuracy, but others definitely involved waving your limbs like a madman. I believe this is an issue with game design, not necessarily the Wii. And with the Wii having so many minigames it makes sense that some will have the mechanic wave the controller as fast as possible. A story based game wouldn't have this problem, nor sports, nor first person shooters. But how many collections of minigames are out for the Wii already? I know I have seen several. Also remember that minigames have different mechanics than most gamers are used to. (bop the mole, play the drums, shake the bottle, etc)
I haven't dropped a controller myself, but the design of some games makes it perfectly understandable that it happens. If worn the wrist strap should be sufficient, but when you are passing the controller at a party, someone is going to not tighten the strap all the way or have sweaty hands. And honestly most people aren't going to "buckle up" just for a short video-game session. Just having the wrist strap on isn't enough, it needs to be tightened and that is uncomfortable. So breakage will happen.
That may be true but it was taken to new (heights/depths) by the current administration.
When the current administration came into power and were looking for a executive to head the CDC they replaced the Nobel laureate whom was the current director. And the interview where he was removed consisted of two questions. (Second hand from a former director at Center for Disease Control)
1) Are you a republican
2) Did you vote for this president.
That explains just about everything you need to know about our current administration folks. That is the same treatment the military and other branches of government received. It helped push the administrations policies, but the person who was selected was completely incompetent. (Think FEMA) But the only criteria the administration cared about was loyalty. This absolutely destroyed the CDC. New policies included bureaucratic overview of what was considered publishable and bureaucrats deciding certain studies were flawed despite no experience in the field.
Essentially the scientists were told what results they were required to give and had to conduct studies to prove them. Pretty much all of the top scientists fled so they could actually continue doing science. The CDC parking lot is almost deserted these days. And this is one of the most important scientific establishments in the nation. (The rest of the National institute of health received similar "adjustments")
Look up "monk translation insertions" sometime. Even if the books were a thousand years old the script would have to be touched up by monks as the pages became worn from use. Also the oldest copy of the bible is partial and dates from 3rd century as far as I know. (http://www.allabouttruth.org/oldest-known-copy-of -the-bible-faq.htm)
Religious books were recopied every hundred years or so. The copies we have today have been copied dozens of times by monks who often "modernized" concepts to be in line with the politics of the current day. Also what they perceived as inconsistencies in the original work were "corrected".
Many Christian histories had this problem at least when compared to the record of Jewish scholars. Jewish scholars had an entire class of specialists that maintain documents and compare scrolls for discrepancies and drift. I remember from some research projects that Jewish histories were well respected for maintaining original accuracy while Christian monasteries had a reputation for "inserting" new materials into transcriptions.
The following is an except from http://www.leaderu.com/orgs/probe/docs/bib-docu.ht ml to back up my assertion on the reliability of Jewish histories. I don't have time to find reliable references for the "drift" in Christian lore, but Google seemed to have a lot of links.
The scribe was considered a professional person in antiquity. No printing presses existed, so people were trained to copy documents. The task was usually undertaken by a devout Jew. The Scribes believed they were dealing with the very Word of God and were therefore extremely careful in copying. They did not just hastily write things down. The earliest complete copy of the Hebrew Old Testament dates from c. 900 A.D.
Java is just a language. As with any tool it is only as good as the user.
Sometimes you need a specialized language for a specialized job. Sometime you need to write a language because your hardware is so far out there that nothing else can support it correctly. Maybe you think Ruby or C# is the new thing and Java is old news, but any language gets the job done. (Note - I use Java/SQL/XSLT/AJAX and used to work with ADA/Scheme/C/C++/VB and (once upon a time) dabbled in assembly.)
In every language 80% of programmers will be mediocre. These mediocre programmers and their less skilled cousins will be on the market more often then highly skilled programmers. I have headhunters calling and standing invitations at every company I have worked with. Highly skilled people will not be on the market for long. And most of them will be nabbed by friends to work at their companies.
Interviewing a few years ago we went through a few hundred applicants before we hired a Perl programmer with good references. He learned Java and SQL in the 3 weeks before he started. Everyone and their brother is claiming to be an expert in whatever language you are hiring. Many of these people have no real experience with the language they are claiming 5 years experience with. When someone admits they don't know a language but then spot errors and write functions in the interview you know you have someone who knows programming. Language is just a tool. Get them a reference book and they will be fine.
You need to cultivate talent. Letting someone stretch themselves and do something new is the only way to lure really promising individuals without paying them absurd amounts of money to get them to leave what they are currently doing.
Several people responded to you saying that it was not racism, etc.
I grew up in the south. I was taught in elementary school that the South should have won the civil war. My boyscout troop leaders discussed the "proud history" of the KKK. There were half a dozen private schools in my city that did not allow blacks. (They later changed this so that blacks athletes could attend.)
I agree that the south still has a LOT of racism. It varies though. The worse the education system and job market the more racism that is present.
One of your responders even said that democrats must feel "they will get the criminal vote". Well 1 in 10 black males are in jail. 30 percent of black men will spend part of their life in prison. (stats from http://www.ssc.wisc.edu/~oliver/RACIAL/Reports/MUM handoutsMarch19-2002.ppt) I would say it safe to say that current law means that blacks have only 70% of a vote. Also anyone who has studied the war on drugs will note that the higher minimum sentences are often conveyed for drug offenses of types most common among minorities. Back in college I ran a study and read many books (including http://www.amazon.com/Smoke-Mirrors-Drugs-Politics -Failure/dp/0316084468) on how the drug war was often directed to maximize political benefit for the party in power. The whole marijuana == illegal drug thing was started as a convenient way to criminal hippies protesting the war. Why yes democrats may get more of the vote, but part of why the criminals are not given the vote is their high inclination to vote against the lawmakers.
I think these facts are much more relevant to your post than the responses from your responders. My parents complained the other day of "literacy tests" at the polling place. They (white) were asked to read a simple passage from a book, the black guy behind them has to read a parable from the bible and explain it to the satisfaction of the poll worker. *sigh* Racism is in fact live and well despite what people would like to think.
But it is not just the US and not just the south. It is visible in the south because there are so many blacks and poor people that acts of racism are more common. Racism is probably as common anywhere, but in Norway there are no blacks for people to call names. (I recall no dark skin in my travels around Norway) Just something to think about. It may be just as present but not surface as much because there are less targets forcing the bigotry out into the open.
Except that the analysts specifically mentioned concerns about the "entertainments division".
We have adopted a cautious view of the impact of the [Sony] game business on the electronics business this term,'' Goldman Sachs analyst Yuji Fujimori told Bloomberg. Fujimori downgraded Sony's rating from "buy" to "neutral" citing "confusion over the release of PlayStation 3 and concerns [about] disappointing sales of [the] PlayStation Portable,
Being their pastor / guidance councilor might make the situation awkward. We often have unrealistic expectations that these people will remain pure in thought. Also going through several cases a week during sex-education seminars might give a bad impression.
(I am not a pastor/concilor but a close relative ran an STD clinic that went through a couple cases a week. A bit awkward at times, especially in the bible belt. As a female people assume that you are a prostitute if you buy in that kind of bulk.)
Well my mother had a long talk with a member of the whitehouse transition team back in 2000. And I remember the guy she spoke too complained about how they were obsessed with Iraq even back then. If you look at how they are a bunch of energy company old hands, and you look at how when Saddam rose to power he nationalized a bunch of oil holding you can start to see the big picture.
The transition team fellow also complained that the admisistration was the most paranoid group of people that he had ever had to work with. Everyone was in CYA (cover your ass) mode constantly.
Also on the backstabbing nature of the insiders I can attest that my mother and her boss were repeatedly called before congressional inquires on spurious matters mainly focused around the fact that the government agency they worked for advocated condom use. (She worked at the center for disease control) Her boss was a nobel prize winner for medacine who eventually stepped down due to the constant interuptions of his work and the hassling of his family and friends. (They were also called to these spurrious inquiry session)
It is not that Bush is corrupt, but that a single group has siezed power and allow no dissent nor debate. There is only an emperor and his minions all follow in lockstep.
CIA wrote the book on targeting civilan targets and using "martyrs". The manual recommended "selective use of violence for propagandistic effects" and to "neutralize" (i.e., kill) government officials. Nicaraguan Contras were taught to lead:
"demonstrators into clashes with the authorities, to provoke riots or shootings, which lead to the killing of one or more persons, who will be seen as the martyrs; this situation should be taken advantage of immediately against the Government to create even bigger conflicts."
The manual also recommended:
"Carefully selected, planned targets -- judges, police officials, tax collectors, etc. -- may be removed for PSYOP effect in a UWOA [unconventional warfare operations area]."
Wrote the book on torture (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torture_manuals)
And don't forget that we put Sadam in power. and trained that pesky Afganistan freedom fighter named bin Laden
Oh, Definately THINK OF THE CHILDREN! It is not like a 12 year old is capable of leading a band of armed rebels for several years. (http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2006-07-25-god s-army_x.htm) These are children, poor innocent harmless creatures that used to be considered "mature" at 12 or 14 when they were married off to have their own families. (http://library.thinkquest.org/26602/ceremonies.ht m) These are poor innocents uncapable of thinking for themselves! Think of the children!
Most children, in my experience, would rather be treated as adults. It is frustrating to be fully cognizant and yet sheltered by adults that still speak "baby talk" to you. You reach full mental maturity via experience, and theese days people are so sheltered they think it is normal that many college students still can not fend for themselves.
War reporting has always been censored (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_in_the_Un ited_States#War_reporting_and_national_security)
Also there is conformist censorship. For example from 2000-2003 you couldn't find negative information on the president in most American papers. News agencies were afraid to "rock the boat" and so ignored many negative articles. Meanwhile international newspapers were filled with blunders and gaffes. Of course that was not censorship, it was papers not wanting to seem partisan and lose advertising dollars, etc.
Such a strong opinion for someone with little experience in the music business.
As a former musician with professional musician friends I can say that contracts in the music industry are uniformly designed to screw the artist. Even if you get a "good contract" the business adds fees and "hides profits" and very often the artist is left bankrupt after a break-out album. When media companies own the distribution channels, manufacturing facilities, studios, radio stations, etc. You get gouged again and again. Your contract with the record company may be good, but how can you confirm their "profits", you usually get a fraction AFTER expenses and wow the most successful albums seem to rack up a lot more expenses.
Lets say your album sold a few million copies? The recording studio they had you go in for additional tracks runs 20k a day, and that mixing studio was 100k. And then they spent 500k on advertising to wholly owned subsidiaries. And it costs them 10 dollars to print each disk because we sent so many copies to radio stations. The list goes on and on. And since the company can show that they did spend that money, you have an almost impossible case showing that their profits should be higher.
Basically record corporation routinely funnel profits into subsidiaries. You can try to go after the corporation, but the case drags out for years, and without royalty checks how are you going to pay for your lawyers?
I personally agree with your assessment. I once saw a man whom I didn't recognize wandering around my office asking questions of employees. He was nicely dressed and acted like he belonged. Still I confronted him and it turns out he was my company's lead investor. To this day he respects me as the only person whom wasn't willing to disclose information until his identity was proven. And yes I did not let him out of my sight until his identity was proven.
It could have gone the other way too, but most investors want to see their investment is protected. Senior management, on the other hand, may be bullies with little to no respect of security. But even they are polite if they know you speak with their superior. *heh* Funny how they bully people who can't smack them down in return.
>Well, if the accounts are unused, Hotmail would delete them after 30 days
Hmm let me check the hotmail account I opened a couple years back. Last message sent - never. Last mail read was Feb 1. Yet after 90 days the mailbox got an new email message from "Hotmail Staff" which was apparently enough to keep it active.
I have gone without reading it for months at a time. I haven't checked AOL or Yahoo in years. yet the site claims I have unread mail when I log in. Grandparent poster does infact have a valid point, because Everyone I know who uses Gmail migrated from Yahoo, Excite, or MSN. And yet those accounts, at least in my case, are still open despite being unused.
Ummm it was successful wasn't it? Imagine what is would have been like if marketing or HR had organized it instead. All brochures and sit-down sessions. *shudder*
Developers are much smarter and should get to do fun things more often. Honestly, I am absolutely not biased what-so-ever.
People who object to me having so much gold despite the low level should think of it as me working a job instead of leveling. You log on and go into instances. I instead buy items during times of high supply and re-list them at times of high demand.
I am essentially a shop keeper who insures that other players can find the goods they are looking for whenever they log into the game. You man not find this role interesting, but I do. I have never hit the level cap in any MMO game I have played, but I do enjoy helping others to play. If you hit 60 you can then quest for money and probably even make more than me so don't say that my way of playing makes everyone into a auction-bot. It is perfectly possible not to train all the skills on a characters (due to money limitations) and yet play up to level 60 in a fraction of the time I have taken to play the game.
Not everyone plays to kill things. With my priest I spend almost as much time healing and buffing random people as I do killing, and I enjoy feeling that I am helping others. I have been in a frantic fight for my survival and still managed to buff a stranger running by me during the battle. It is just how I play. The game is about social interaction, not being uber-powerful.
Most people don't seem to get that, they are driven primarily by greed. It is a perfectly good motivation for getting tier 2 items, but greed is not a valid justification for buying gold. And yet it is the only defense people have. I work a job, a lot of my guild has children, and yet they still play and enjoy playing. I might occasionally help them by giving busy parents gold, but that is what guilds and communities are for. Anything that builds a sense of an online community improves the game. Farming actually reduces this by making it so that you never need anyone else. You just need 39 other losers to help you get that last head-piece to complete your set. If you join a large and vibrant guild then maybe money is not a problem, maybe getting that epic is also not a problem. Handle the problem within in the system.
Another way to stop farming that no one has mentioned is the punative approach.
Basically when you ban a farmer you also ban anyone on the consuming end as well. If you can get punished for buying gold and lose a character you spent monthes creating then you sure as hell do not buy gold. You have to state this as a penalty clearly to users and then only afterwards do you start punishing users.
Of course the sellers could randomly send gold to other people to try to cause false bans, but like the real world you can either return the stolen money, or you can be punished.
I am not sayign the punative approach is the best approach, but it sure would remove the market. A lot of people here seem to think gold farming and buying gold are not cheating. I strongly feel it is unethical. You play the game to enjoy the game. Making the game dependant on real world investments gives it the "Magic the Gathering" problem where no matter how good you are I can spend more money and become a better player.
MMORPGs are trying to say if you put more *time* into the game you are a better player. If someone has the best equipment in the game it is because they earned it, not because they cheated. Buying money is cheating and thus should also feel the ban.
I have been tempted by gold farmers. I have 500 gold and only one character at level 30. It has taken days to save the money up. I almost never hunt, I primarily work the auction house. A gold farmer could sends me twice what I have done in the game for $20 of real money. But that is not the game I am playing. I like my gold because I earned it. It means something to me just like that purple epic means something to the level 60 next to me. They show in-game accomplishments. Farmers and character sellers make that type of accomplishment meaningless.
Ummm... You shouldn't have picked New Orleans for your example.
From wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Orleans,_Louisia na) : "The per capita income for the city was $17,258. 27.9% of the population and 23.7% of families were below the poverty line. Out of the total population, 40.3% of those under the age of 18 and 19.3% of those 65 and older were living below the poverty line."
Below I set out a comparison of the US average versus New Orleans.
Comparison of US average:
Median household income 1999 $41,994
Per capita money income 1999 $21,587
Persons below poverty, 1999 12.4%
With New Orleans
Median household income, 1999 $27,133
Per capita money income, 1999 $17,258
Persons below poverty, 1999 27.9%
People are not joking when they said they could not afford a bus ticket out of town. Some places I know in Mississippi which was also hit by Katrina were even poorer than that.
Mississippi and Louisiana have had some of the worst education systems in the nation for over a decade. As a result there is a poorly educated workforce, which means there is no industry, which means there are no jobs, which mean there is no money for education, which means the next generation is also poor. This is a "vicious cycle" that contributes to the long term poverty of residents.
People don't work because there are no jobs in their community. When a community has 20% unemployment then service sector jobs an minimum wage opportunities also dry up. Also a LOT of people were unemployed after the storm making it even harder to find work.
Sorry, I just took umbrage at your choice of New Orleans residents as freeloaders.
But if they audit everything they could easily have caught the 9/11 hijackers. I mean look at this paper trail.
8 packaging knives (www.papermart.com $7.68)
8 plane tickets from Boston to NYC (delta $832)
These terrorists attacks could be financed by a single mugging. Yes I am ignoring the planning and training stages of this mission, but those steps could be done outside the US where we have no auditing capabilities.
I think it comes down to how far are we willing to go to protect ourselves from every attack. Scanning port cargo to catch nuclear materials being smuggled into this country is a good investment, patting down every citizen for possible nailclipper violations is asinine. You can never catch every individual with a chip on his shoulder, but you can try to make the big disasters harder. It really seems like they are concentrating effort on minimizing citizen rights rather than on real protection efforts.
Reclassification is also a weapon used to silence critics.
Well when Professor Theodore Postol (MIT) criticized the missile defense program for being ineffective using public sources, the materials he used were reclassified to make it hard to prove his case.
I also recall an interview with him where he stated he had been sent classified versions of documents via courier. The idea being that once he accepted them he could no longer PUBLICLY report on problems in the missile defense program since his research would be classified.
When that didn't work they classified his correspondence so he could no longer talk to the media about anything he had brought up with officials. (http://www.estarwars.net/tedpostal.htm)
Kinda nasty campaign to shut up a professor who is only pointing out the shortsightedness of designing a billion dollar missile defense system that only hit warheads painted silver. (Certain tests were rigged making it easy to distinguish warheads from decoys. Decoys were painted different colors and different shapes. If only we could get our enemies to be so kind.)
You are right I was grandstanding on my 5 million claim and I apologize for using a cheap shot. And you may be right that major web stores are more complex than "static content", but web servers are well understood and have relatively painless load balancing these days.
No Warcraft server serves 5 million clients, but I am guessing your server farm also uses a load balancer that distributes requests across dozens of servers which then persist to a set of back-end database servers. (or a single powerful blade server with high bandwidth storage subsystem behind it) So you could say that your severs only handle a few thousand request at a time.
Now if you consider that each user in Wow is making multiple transactions per second then you realize that online games are transaction monsters. There is no way that a single server can handle tens of thousands of clients. I remember when we first ran AC on a big honking UNIX box (This is way back before Turbine's Microsoft partnership) we were shocked how a few hundred clients could bring a serious server to its knees.
Also in the game I note a particular vendor wandering northward from one town to another. If a friends then runs along the road several minutes later he will find the vender has been moving the entire time. This suggests that the 10s of thousands of NPCs in each zone have much of the same state as a player. (not to mention having pathfinding, tactical AI, etc.)
To serve the "game" blizzard seems to have realm servers, authentication servers, billing servers, database servers, instance zone servers, chat servers, and maybe even a big-brother servers to watch for and aggregate bot/cheat behavior.
Each virtual world is coordinated by a realm server but clients are probably farmed out to pools of machines that each serve separate zones within the game world. Unfortunately these zones have so much state that makes it slow to dynamically load up additional machines to meet increased demand in a particular zone. Also the amount of data to be coordinated between servers means adding another server to a zone will only have a logarithmic improvement on performance If there are already five machines serving ironforge and their network traffic is maxed out you aren't going to improve performance by adding a sixth server.
This is one of the reasons why Wow has the weakness of zone overpopulation. Hot zones like Ironforge or Ogrimaar stress a set of zone servers unduly. Dynamic zone sizing might improve the population issue but then determining which server owns a particular zone area becomes difficult and finding other servers to negotiate client transfer becomes painful. I think there is a reason most of the larger MMOs have been moving to zone style server coverage. And zone coverage is most brittle when an even causes thousands of players to congregate to a single region of the game world (i.e. the current war efforts).
Hope this helps you understand some of performance issues and complexity of these MMO systems. I definitely am not belittling what you do. Running a major site is HARD work, but even several years ago MMO servers were mindblowingly complex and today they are probably more complicated by far. Also unlike web services which has become fairly well understood these games are the first to reach these points and as forerunners they have no "common solutions" to fall back on. These guys are paving the way for others (or would be if they would give some talks on their proprietary technologies. *heh*)
Slashdot Mirror
When the toilet server goes down the sh*t really hits the fan.
~Z
As anonymous coward guessed, there are 3 people. There are also two errors in my post but correcting them would make names blindingly obvious. (The errors are due to me retelling tales a couple years after hearing them of an agency of which I have no firsthand knowledge.)
Thank you for your diligence in fact checking. But I am reluctant to say more.
I was at a friends house playing Rayman recently and I have to say some of the mini-games require absurdly fast motion of the remote. I attempted to use subtlety and control. Then I tried speed with small motions. Finally when both those approaches failed to get top rankings, I used huge motions at top speed and took the top places in several minigames.
Now I have only played for a couple hours. And some games did require coordination or accuracy, but others definitely involved waving your limbs like a madman. I believe this is an issue with game design, not necessarily the Wii. And with the Wii having so many minigames it makes sense that some will have the mechanic wave the controller as fast as possible. A story based game wouldn't have this problem, nor sports, nor first person shooters. But how many collections of minigames are out for the Wii already? I know I have seen several. Also remember that minigames have different mechanics than most gamers are used to. (bop the mole, play the drums, shake the bottle, etc)
I haven't dropped a controller myself, but the design of some games makes it perfectly understandable that it happens. If worn the wrist strap should be sufficient, but when you are passing the controller at a party, someone is going to not tighten the strap all the way or have sweaty hands. And honestly most people aren't going to "buckle up" just for a short video-game session. Just having the wrist strap on isn't enough, it needs to be tightened and that is uncomfortable. So breakage will happen.
That may be true but it was taken to new (heights/depths) by the current administration.
When the current administration came into power and were looking for a executive to head the CDC they replaced the Nobel laureate whom was the current director. And the interview where he was removed consisted of two questions. (Second hand from a former director at Center for Disease Control)
1) Are you a republican
2) Did you vote for this president.
That explains just about everything you need to know about our current administration folks. That is the same treatment the military and other branches of government received. It helped push the administrations policies, but the person who was selected was completely incompetent. (Think FEMA) But the only criteria the administration cared about was loyalty. This absolutely destroyed the CDC. New policies included bureaucratic overview of what was considered publishable and bureaucrats deciding certain studies were flawed despite no experience in the field.
Essentially the scientists were told what results they were required to give and had to conduct studies to prove them. Pretty much all of the top scientists fled so they could actually continue doing science. The CDC parking lot is almost deserted these days. And this is one of the most important scientific establishments in the nation. (The rest of the National institute of health received similar "adjustments")
Look up "monk translation insertions" sometime. Even if the books were a thousand years old the script would have to be touched up by monks as the pages became worn from use. Also the oldest copy of the bible is partial and dates from 3rd century as far as I know. (http://www.allabouttruth.org/oldest-known-copy-of -the-bible-faq.htm)
Religious books were recopied every hundred years or so. The copies we have today have been copied dozens of times by monks who often "modernized" concepts to be in line with the politics of the current day. Also what they perceived as inconsistencies in the original work were "corrected".
Many Christian histories had this problem at least when compared to the record of Jewish scholars. Jewish scholars had an entire class of specialists that maintain documents and compare scrolls for discrepancies and drift. I remember from some research projects that Jewish histories were well respected for maintaining original accuracy while Christian monasteries had a reputation for "inserting" new materials into transcriptions.
The following is an except from http://www.leaderu.com/orgs/probe/docs/bib-docu.ht ml to back up my assertion on the reliability of Jewish histories. I don't have time to find reliable references for the "drift" in Christian lore, but Google seemed to have a lot of links.
The scribe was considered a professional person in antiquity. No printing presses existed, so people were trained to copy documents. The task was usually undertaken by a devout Jew. The Scribes believed they were dealing with the very Word of God and were therefore extremely careful in copying. They did not just hastily write things down. The earliest complete copy of the Hebrew Old Testament dates from c. 900 A.D.Java is just a language. As with any tool it is only as good as the user.
Sometimes you need a specialized language for a specialized job. Sometime you need to write a language because your hardware is so far out there that nothing else can support it correctly. Maybe you think Ruby or C# is the new thing and Java is old news, but any language gets the job done. (Note - I use Java/SQL/XSLT/AJAX and used to work with ADA/Scheme/C/C++/VB and (once upon a time) dabbled in assembly.)
In every language 80% of programmers will be mediocre. These mediocre programmers and their less skilled cousins will be on the market more often then highly skilled programmers. I have headhunters calling and standing invitations at every company I have worked with. Highly skilled people will not be on the market for long. And most of them will be nabbed by friends to work at their companies.
Interviewing a few years ago we went through a few hundred applicants before we hired a Perl programmer with good references. He learned Java and SQL in the 3 weeks before he started. Everyone and their brother is claiming to be an expert in whatever language you are hiring. Many of these people have no real experience with the language they are claiming 5 years experience with. When someone admits they don't know a language but then spot errors and write functions in the interview you know you have someone who knows programming. Language is just a tool. Get them a reference book and they will be fine.
You need to cultivate talent. Letting someone stretch themselves and do something new is the only way to lure really promising individuals without paying them absurd amounts of money to get them to leave what they are currently doing.
Several people responded to you saying that it was not racism, etc.
I grew up in the south. I was taught in elementary school that the South should have won the civil war. My boyscout troop leaders discussed the "proud history" of the KKK. There were half a dozen private schools in my city that did not allow blacks. (They later changed this so that blacks athletes could attend.)
I agree that the south still has a LOT of racism. It varies though. The worse the education system and job market the more racism that is present.
One of your responders even said that democrats must feel "they will get the criminal vote". Well 1 in 10 black males are in jail. 30 percent of black men will spend part of their life in prison. (stats from http://www.ssc.wisc.edu/~oliver/RACIAL/Reports/MUM handoutsMarch19-2002.ppt) I would say it safe to say that current law means that blacks have only 70% of a vote. Also anyone who has studied the war on drugs will note that the higher minimum sentences are often conveyed for drug offenses of types most common among minorities. Back in college I ran a study and read many books (including http://www.amazon.com/Smoke-Mirrors-Drugs-Politics -Failure/dp/0316084468) on how the drug war was often directed to maximize political benefit for the party in power. The whole marijuana == illegal drug thing was started as a convenient way to criminal hippies protesting the war. Why yes democrats may get more of the vote, but part of why the criminals are not given the vote is their high inclination to vote against the lawmakers.
I think these facts are much more relevant to your post than the responses from your responders. My parents complained the other day of "literacy tests" at the polling place. They (white) were asked to read a simple passage from a book, the black guy behind them has to read a parable from the bible and explain it to the satisfaction of the poll worker. *sigh* Racism is in fact live and well despite what people would like to think.
But it is not just the US and not just the south. It is visible in the south because there are so many blacks and poor people that acts of racism are more common. Racism is probably as common anywhere, but in Norway there are no blacks for people to call names. (I recall no dark skin in my travels around Norway) Just something to think about. It may be just as present but not surface as much because there are less targets forcing the bigotry out into the open.
Except that the analysts specifically mentioned concerns about the "entertainments division".
We have adopted a cautious view of the impact of the [Sony] game business on the electronics business this term,'' Goldman Sachs analyst Yuji Fujimori told Bloomberg. Fujimori downgraded Sony's rating from "buy" to "neutral" citing "confusion over the release of PlayStation 3 and concerns [about] disappointing sales of [the] PlayStation Portable,
Being their pastor / guidance councilor might make the situation awkward. We often have unrealistic expectations that these people will remain pure in thought. Also going through several cases a week during sex-education seminars might give a bad impression.
(I am not a pastor/concilor but a close relative ran an STD clinic that went through a couple cases a week. A bit awkward at times, especially in the bible belt. As a female people assume that you are a prostitute if you buy in that kind of bulk.)
Well my mother had a long talk with a member of the whitehouse transition team back in 2000. And I remember the guy she spoke too complained about how they were obsessed with Iraq even back then. If you look at how they are a bunch of energy company old hands, and you look at how when Saddam rose to power he nationalized a bunch of oil holding you can start to see the big picture.
The transition team fellow also complained that the admisistration was the most paranoid group of people that he had ever had to work with. Everyone was in CYA (cover your ass) mode constantly.
Also on the backstabbing nature of the insiders I can attest that my mother and her boss were repeatedly called before congressional inquires on spurious matters mainly focused around the fact that the government agency they worked for advocated condom use. (She worked at the center for disease control) Her boss was a nobel prize winner for medacine who eventually stepped down due to the constant interuptions of his work and the hassling of his family and friends. (They were also called to these spurrious inquiry session)
It is not that Bush is corrupt, but that a single group has siezed power and allow no dissent nor debate. There is only an emperor and his minions all follow in lockstep.
Your definition of terrorism is over simplistic.
Initiating conflicts, intentionally targeting civilians, intentionally putting civilians in harms way = terrorism.
Guatemalan assasinations
CIA wrote the book on targeting civilan targets and using "martyrs". The manual recommended "selective use of violence for propagandistic effects" and to "neutralize" (i.e., kill) government officials. Nicaraguan Contras were taught to lead:
"demonstrators into clashes with the authorities, to provoke riots or shootings, which lead to the killing of one or more persons, who will be seen as the martyrs; this situation should be taken advantage of immediately against the Government to create even bigger conflicts."
The manual also recommended:
"Carefully selected, planned targets -- judges, police officials, tax collectors, etc. -- may be removed for PSYOP effect in a UWOA [unconventional warfare operations area]."
Wrote the book on torture (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torture_manuals)
And don't forget that we put Sadam in power. and trained that pesky Afganistan freedom fighter named bin Laden
Oh, Definately THINK OF THE CHILDREN! It is not like a 12 year old is capable of leading a band of armed rebels for several years. (http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2006-07-25-god s-army_x.htm) These are children, poor innocent harmless creatures that used to be considered "mature" at 12 or 14 when they were married off to have their own families. (http://library.thinkquest.org/26602/ceremonies.ht m) These are poor innocents uncapable of thinking for themselves! Think of the children!
Most children, in my experience, would rather be treated as adults. It is frustrating to be fully cognizant and yet sheltered by adults that still speak "baby talk" to you. You reach full mental maturity via experience, and theese days people are so sheltered they think it is normal that many college students still can not fend for themselves.
War reporting has always been censored (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_in_the_Un ited_States#War_reporting_and_national_security)
Also there is conformist censorship. For example from 2000-2003 you couldn't find negative information on the president in most American papers. News agencies were afraid to "rock the boat" and so ignored many negative articles. Meanwhile international newspapers were filled with blunders and gaffes. Of course that was not censorship, it was papers not wanting to seem partisan and lose advertising dollars, etc.
tamatoe tomato
Such a strong opinion for someone with little experience in the music business.
As a former musician with professional musician friends I can say that contracts in the music industry are uniformly designed to screw the artist. Even if you get a "good contract" the business adds fees and "hides profits" and very often the artist is left bankrupt after a break-out album. When media companies own the distribution channels, manufacturing facilities, studios, radio stations, etc. You get gouged again and again. Your contract with the record company may be good, but how can you confirm their "profits", you usually get a fraction AFTER expenses and wow the most successful albums seem to rack up a lot more expenses.
Lets say your album sold a few million copies? The recording studio they had you go in for additional tracks runs 20k a day, and that mixing studio was 100k. And then they spent 500k on advertising to wholly owned subsidiaries. And it costs them 10 dollars to print each disk because we sent so many copies to radio stations. The list goes on and on. And since the company can show that they did spend that money, you have an almost impossible case showing that their profits should be higher.
Basically record corporation routinely funnel profits into subsidiaries. You can try to go after the corporation, but the case drags out for years, and without royalty checks how are you going to pay for your lawyers?
I personally agree with your assessment. I once saw a man whom I didn't recognize wandering around my office asking questions of employees. He was nicely dressed and acted like he belonged. Still I confronted him and it turns out he was my company's lead investor. To this day he respects me as the only person whom wasn't willing to disclose information until his identity was proven. And yes I did not let him out of my sight until his identity was proven.
It could have gone the other way too, but most investors want to see their investment is protected. Senior management, on the other hand, may be bullies with little to no respect of security. But even they are polite if they know you speak with their superior. *heh* Funny how they bully people who can't smack them down in return.
Hmm let me check the hotmail account I opened a couple years back. Last message sent - never. Last mail read was Feb 1. Yet after 90 days the mailbox got an new email message from "Hotmail Staff" which was apparently enough to keep it active.
I have gone without reading it for months at a time. I haven't checked AOL or Yahoo in years. yet the site claims I have unread mail when I log in. Grandparent poster does infact have a valid point, because Everyone I know who uses Gmail migrated from Yahoo, Excite, or MSN. And yet those accounts, at least in my case, are still open despite being unused.
Developers are much smarter and should get to do fun things more often. Honestly, I am absolutely not biased what-so-ever.
But... now you play strip poker over the net!
I would *SO* put a bet on a reduction between 20 tons and 400 million tons. Any bookmakers out there?
I am essentially a shop keeper who insures that other players can find the goods they are looking for whenever they log into the game. You man not find this role interesting, but I do. I have never hit the level cap in any MMO game I have played, but I do enjoy helping others to play. If you hit 60 you can then quest for money and probably even make more than me so don't say that my way of playing makes everyone into a auction-bot. It is perfectly possible not to train all the skills on a characters (due to money limitations) and yet play up to level 60 in a fraction of the time I have taken to play the game.
Not everyone plays to kill things. With my priest I spend almost as much time healing and buffing random people as I do killing, and I enjoy feeling that I am helping others. I have been in a frantic fight for my survival and still managed to buff a stranger running by me during the battle. It is just how I play. The game is about social interaction, not being uber-powerful.
Most people don't seem to get that, they are driven primarily by greed. It is a perfectly good motivation for getting tier 2 items, but greed is not a valid justification for buying gold. And yet it is the only defense people have. I work a job, a lot of my guild has children, and yet they still play and enjoy playing. I might occasionally help them by giving busy parents gold, but that is what guilds and communities are for. Anything that builds a sense of an online community improves the game. Farming actually reduces this by making it so that you never need anyone else. You just need 39 other losers to help you get that last head-piece to complete your set. If you join a large and vibrant guild then maybe money is not a problem, maybe getting that epic is also not a problem. Handle the problem within in the system.
Basically when you ban a farmer you also ban anyone on the consuming end as well. If you can get punished for buying gold and lose a character you spent monthes creating then you sure as hell do not buy gold. You have to state this as a penalty clearly to users and then only afterwards do you start punishing users.
Of course the sellers could randomly send gold to other people to try to cause false bans, but like the real world you can either return the stolen money, or you can be punished.
I am not sayign the punative approach is the best approach, but it sure would remove the market. A lot of people here seem to think gold farming and buying gold are not cheating. I strongly feel it is unethical. You play the game to enjoy the game. Making the game dependant on real world investments gives it the "Magic the Gathering" problem where no matter how good you are I can spend more money and become a better player.
MMORPGs are trying to say if you put more *time* into the game you are a better player. If someone has the best equipment in the game it is because they earned it, not because they cheated. Buying money is cheating and thus should also feel the ban.
I have been tempted by gold farmers. I have 500 gold and only one character at level 30. It has taken days to save the money up. I almost never hunt, I primarily work the auction house. A gold farmer could sends me twice what I have done in the game for $20 of real money. But that is not the game I am playing. I like my gold because I earned it. It means something to me just like that purple epic means something to the level 60 next to me. They show in-game accomplishments. Farmers and character sellers make that type of accomplishment meaningless.
From wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Orleans,_Louisia na) : "The per capita income for the city was $17,258. 27.9% of the population and 23.7% of families were below the poverty line. Out of the total population, 40.3% of those under the age of 18 and 19.3% of those 65 and older were living below the poverty line."
Below I set out a comparison of the US average versus New Orleans.
Comparison of US average:
Median household income 1999 $41,994
Per capita money income 1999 $21,587
Persons below poverty, 1999 12.4%
With New Orleans
Median household income, 1999 $27,133
Per capita money income, 1999 $17,258
Persons below poverty, 1999 27.9%
(statistics taken from http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/00000.html )
People are not joking when they said they could not afford a bus ticket out of town. Some places I know in Mississippi which was also hit by Katrina were even poorer than that.
Mississippi and Louisiana have had some of the worst education systems in the nation for over a decade. As a result there is a poorly educated workforce, which means there is no industry, which means there are no jobs, which mean there is no money for education, which means the next generation is also poor. This is a "vicious cycle" that contributes to the long term poverty of residents.
People don't work because there are no jobs in their community. When a community has 20% unemployment then service sector jobs an minimum wage opportunities also dry up. Also a LOT of people were unemployed after the storm making it even harder to find work.
Sorry, I just took umbrage at your choice of New Orleans residents as freeloaders.
But if they audit everything they could easily have caught the 9/11 hijackers. I mean look at this paper trail.
These terrorists attacks could be financed by a single mugging. Yes I am ignoring the planning and training stages of this mission, but those steps could be done outside the US where we have no auditing capabilities.
I think it comes down to how far are we willing to go to protect ourselves from every attack. Scanning port cargo to catch nuclear materials being smuggled into this country is a good investment, patting down every citizen for possible nailclipper violations is asinine. You can never catch every individual with a chip on his shoulder, but you can try to make the big disasters harder. It really seems like they are concentrating effort on minimizing citizen rights rather than on real protection efforts.
Color me cynical.
Well when Professor Theodore Postol (MIT) criticized the missile defense program for being ineffective using public sources, the materials he used were reclassified to make it hard to prove his case.
I also recall an interview with him where he stated he had been sent classified versions of documents via courier. The idea being that once he accepted them he could no longer PUBLICLY report on problems in the missile defense program since his research would be classified.
When that didn't work they classified his correspondence so he could no longer talk to the media about anything he had brought up with officials. (http://www.estarwars.net/tedpostal.htm)
Kinda nasty campaign to shut up a professor who is only pointing out the shortsightedness of designing a billion dollar missile defense system that only hit warheads painted silver. (Certain tests were rigged making it easy to distinguish warheads from decoys. Decoys were painted different colors and different shapes. If only we could get our enemies to be so kind.)
You are right I was grandstanding on my 5 million claim and I apologize for using a cheap shot. And you may be right that major web stores are more complex than "static content", but web servers are well understood and have relatively painless load balancing these days.
No Warcraft server serves 5 million clients, but I am guessing your server farm also uses a load balancer that distributes requests across dozens of servers which then persist to a set of back-end database servers. (or a single powerful blade server with high bandwidth storage subsystem behind it) So you could say that your severs only handle a few thousand request at a time.
Now if you consider that each user in Wow is making multiple transactions per second then you realize that online games are transaction monsters. There is no way that a single server can handle tens of thousands of clients. I remember when we first ran AC on a big honking UNIX box (This is way back before Turbine's Microsoft partnership) we were shocked how a few hundred clients could bring a serious server to its knees.
Also in the game I note a particular vendor wandering northward from one town to another. If a friends then runs along the road several minutes later he will find the vender has been moving the entire time. This suggests that the 10s of thousands of NPCs in each zone have much of the same state as a player. (not to mention having pathfinding, tactical AI, etc.)
To serve the "game" blizzard seems to have realm servers, authentication servers, billing servers, database servers, instance zone servers, chat servers, and maybe even a big-brother servers to watch for and aggregate bot/cheat behavior.
Each virtual world is coordinated by a realm server but clients are probably farmed out to pools of machines that each serve separate zones within the game world. Unfortunately these zones have so much state that makes it slow to dynamically load up additional machines to meet increased demand in a particular zone. Also the amount of data to be coordinated between servers means adding another server to a zone will only have a logarithmic improvement on performance If there are already five machines serving ironforge and their network traffic is maxed out you aren't going to improve performance by adding a sixth server.
This is one of the reasons why Wow has the weakness of zone overpopulation. Hot zones like Ironforge or Ogrimaar stress a set of zone servers unduly. Dynamic zone sizing might improve the population issue but then determining which server owns a particular zone area becomes difficult and finding other servers to negotiate client transfer becomes painful. I think there is a reason most of the larger MMOs have been moving to zone style server coverage. And zone coverage is most brittle when an even causes thousands of players to congregate to a single region of the game world (i.e. the current war efforts).
Hope this helps you understand some of performance issues and complexity of these MMO systems. I definitely am not belittling what you do. Running a major site is HARD work, but even several years ago MMO servers were mindblowingly complex and today they are probably more complicated by far. Also unlike web services which has become fairly well understood these games are the first to reach these points and as forerunners they have no "common solutions" to fall back on. These guys are paving the way for others (or would be if they would give some talks on their proprietary technologies. *heh*)
~Z