In my extensive experience with multiple IPs Port 25 is almost invariably blocked for OUTGOING connections only, except to the ISPs smtp servers.
Setting up a mail server is as simple as:
a) setup your mail server, it receives mail on port 25 just fine (this allows your mail server to receive mail from the rest of the word.) b) configure your mail server to relay out going mail through your ISPs outgoing server (this allows your mail server to deliver mail to the rest of the world.) c) configure your mail server to accept authenticated connections on the submission port (e.g. port 587) (this allows you to send out bound mail to your own mailserver from anywhere in the world, your mail server will in turn relay out it out to your ISP for delivery, unless its addressed to one of your own domains...)
d) finally - if you use SPF, be sure to include your ISPs smtp servers as authorized for your domain(s)
You can run a small business/soho setup on that configuration.
And really, who the hell uses the ISP's email service? If you change providers *poof* no more email your you. Talk about Vendor Lock In, this is ridiculous.
How is using gmail or anything else any better? Unless you have your own domain you are locked in to a provider. And if you have your own domain, than its pretty easy to do whatever and go where ever you want.
Also, not all the HFTs make money. I did ask someone here how it could be that easy to make money, ofc with no answer.
Here's one example: Suppose you place an order for 10,000 shares with a limit price of 10.50 into a market with the following characteristics:
last trade completed at 10.34...
a) buy 1000 @ 10.20 good until end of day b) buy 1000 @ 10.32 good until 2pm c) buy 1000 @ 10.34 good until end of day 1) sell 1000 @ 10.35 good until end of day 2) sell 1000 @ 10.40 good until 4pm 3) sell 5000 @ 10.42 good until end of day 4) sell 4000 @ 10.50 good until end of day 5) sell 8000 @ 10.51 good until 2pm...
When your order hits the market it should work through the first 3 sell orders, and pull shares in from the 4th, filling all 10k of the 10k order, and the market will look like this:
last trade completed at 10.50...
a) buy 1000 @ 10.20 good until end of day b) buy 1000 @ 10.32 good until 2pm c) buy 1000 @ 10.34 good until end of day 4) sell 1000 @ 10.50 good until end of day 5) sell 8000 @ 10.51 good until 2pm...
What HFT does is inundate the market with short term buy and sell orders with extremely short lives to essentially detect and analyze your 10,000 share order, probe its limit price, buy up all all orders up to your limit, and then sell you thousands of shares right at your limit price.
You don't get the 1000 shares at 10.35, you don't get the 1000 shares at 10.40, you don't get the 4000 shares at 10.42... you get all your shares at 10.49/10.50. The HFT successfully analyzed your order, bought those 1000 shares at 10.35 and then sold them to you at 10.49. They bought those 1000 shares at 10.40 and sold them to you at 10.49. They bought those 4000 shares at 10.42 and, yup, sold you those at 10.49 too.
Its essentially risk free. It ought to be illegal.
Its the financial equivalent of a man-in-the-middle attack.
The HFTs are making more money, because there's more other guys trading, because the other guys want to trade more when the spreads are tight. Ie it's not a zero-sum game.
Pointless trades draw value out of the market, not the other way around. The fees alone that accrue are parasitic but necessary. Any profits that HFT extracts are purely parasitic.
So, yes, the middle man makes money. Money that one imagines could have gone straight from A to Z. But A and Z are not present at the same time.
Aren't they? If the HFT holds the position for micro-seconds, A and Z are present at the same time for all intents and purposes.
If I place an order that would clear in 1/2 second, I don't benefit from paying a premium to clear it in 1/3 of a second. Paying a premium for that liquidity is parasitic to the transaction.
By "actual investors" presumeably you mean people who buy and hold?
I mean longs, shorts, and even speculators with time horizons in the hours and days.
HFT stuff is in the realm of seconds on down.
They benefit from tighter prices. Also, they are not as sensitive to short term price fluctuation. So how are they worse off?
Look, if HFT trader A skims X$ profit by inserting themselves amongst transactions between actual invenstors B-thru-Z, then B-thru-Z are collectively worse off by the X$ that A is up.
Some people try to handwave around it but at the end of the day either you believe:
(1) the HFT trader actually generated his X$ profit completely out of thin air or (2) or you believe that HFT traders X$ profit was extracted from the other market participants (i.e. actual investors)
Which do you think it is?
Its really that simple.
At the end of the day if you are taking money out then its coming from somewhere. Elementary financial accounting principles aren't violated by the stock market.
It becomes quite impossible to level crafting sensibly if neither exists.
Agreed. Thanks for the clarification.
Personally I really think "crafting without fighting" and craffting being the sole way of gaining equipment is sort of a flawed game premise in that there is no connection between your equipment and your accomplishments.
High frequency trading actually facilitates more accurate pricing of securities because of the liquidity it introduces to the market.
Liquidity has value. But HFT algorithms front running trades that would already complete without them aren't providing liquidity.
The benefit of accurate pricing is hard to explain fully without getting deeper into the economics of markets,
If market pricing were to consistently deviate from actual pricing by measurable amounts this would be relevant. But HFT algorithms front running trades to arbitrage fractional cents aren't providing any benefit whosoever.
The animosity you raised is probably due to a perceived lack of contribution (no tangible products produced).
We perceive a lack of contribution because there is a lack of contribution.
But actually, facilitating better pricing will route investment into areas that deserve it (e.g. to the guy who produces 2 potatoes per unit resource instead of 1.5 potatoes).
Sure. If pricing was that far out of whack. But we don't really need to "facilitate routing investment" to the guy that produces 1.50042 potatoes instead of the resource that produces 1.50041. The only person who cares about that difference is trying to profit on that 0.00001 delta.
The sum effect of these actions is a raised social utility.
The sum effect of these actions is parasitic to actual investors leading to a diminished "social utility". (whatever that is supposed to mean.)
And WoW is ostensibly a game where to advance you form groups kill monsters gain xp, and loot items. It isn't primarily a shopping simulator. Its fine that it has a shopping component. But as soon as it becomes more efficient to "go shopping" than "form groups kill monsters and loot items" something is broken.
For the low/middle/mid-high game in WoW, it is more efficient to "go shopping" than to "get gear from encounters".
Given this scenario most people will do exactly what I did in XIV. We simply won't use the system. If we can find something with a shout or 2 we will do it, else, que sera, sera!
Exactly right. The bazaar model serves a niche - its the best way to find the rare and unique items, but it isn't your one stop shop for all your gear. And people who 'enjoy shopping' can browse to their hearts content for deals and treasures. Meanwhile the rest of us pass through, and if we see something great... but our time is more productively and enjoyably spent playing the actual game.
Oh btw, your last point about the ah in pretty much every mmo is kind of funny... lets try a word substitution shall we:
I'm not sure I see your point. Amazon / Ebay are great for the purpose of shopping efficiently. In the real world shopping is how I obtain most of my gear. But I'm not playing MMORPGs because I'm looking for an efficient shopping simulator. I was sold on the "form groups with other people/kill monsters together/take their stuff" mechanic... so its counter productive if the game rewards "efficient shopping" with better gear with less effort.
Creating inefficient tools isn't a good way to promote socialization.
Thinking of it as "creating inefficient tools" is the wrong way to frame the question. The core mechanic of the game is an inefficient character builder tool from that perspective.
Carrot > Stick.
EXACTLY. The trouble with WoW's AH is that they've put the carrot and stick in the wrong place.
In everquest you skipped the marketplace and got your items through interacting with guild mates, picking them up off monsters in groups, completing quests, etc. That was the most efficient way to play. Players were motivated to group and go get things.
With WoW, you farm junk, and then buy gear in the market (for the low - mid game particularly). That's the most efficient way to play. Its demented. There is no reason to group because you can farm low level crap faster than level appropriate crap and make more money doing it.
The auction house shifts the maximum economic benefit to playing the game in a tedious and antisocial way (farming low level crap), and then the AH itself is tedious and antisocial.
The problem isn't that the "AH is efficient". The problem is that the relative efficiency of the AH is greater than anything else. For example, getting level appropriate drops from group encounters pays MUCH WORSE. If you want players to be motivated to get level appropriate drops from group encounters which is ostensibly the primary point of the game THAT is where the carrot needs to be.
Its a -game- and it needs to be designed around being a game. Rating it in terms of tool efficiency is absurd. Would wow be a better game if you could just go into the character creation screen, select your level, attributes, gear, and hair colour? Of course not.
But that would certainly be a much more "efficient" way to get high level uber geared characters.
Now compared to that the whole "kill monsters with groups of friends and acquaintances for xp and hope for random drops mechanic" by comparison is creating an extremely inefficient alternative. But that's the entire point of the game! That inefficient mechanic is what makes the game fun. Players WANT high level uber equipped characters, and they want to get them by playing through these encounters to get them.
Providing them shortcuts like getting all their gear through the auction house. Or simply selecting what they want at character creation... these may be far more efficient but they rob players of the very reason they want to play. As I said, its demented.
You can design an efficient auction house, but its horribly flawed if it results in players bypassing the core mechanic of the game and avoiding social interaction. It accomplishes precisely both of these in WoW.
3. No AH, no sensible group finding tools, nothing to facilitate your interaction with other players. Sorry, but this is just not acceptable in 2010 anymore. Even in 2005 MMOs noticed the need to give their players an easier way to gain access to other players and cooperate, find groups, find sellers and buyers and so on. It needn't be the proverbial ebay AH system, but at least SOME way to facilitate interaction. Right now, if you wanted to buy something, you'd spend hours trying to find someone selling it. Or you keep watching the spam in the trade channel for a few hours. Either is just not what MMO players would accept anymore this time and age.
I disagree. I think the WoW AH does more to harm player interaction than enhance it. And I'd prefer a game that de-emphasizes the importance and relative ease of player trade. I my opinion too many players end up motivated to gear up by farming / trading rather than adventuring because its more efficient.
In my opinion the path to gear upgrades and advancement in general should *never* be "farm spider silk", or "collect ore", then sell it at the market, and buy nice gear."
Its perverse because very few players actually enjoy this activity, but it is by far the most efficient use of time in terms of generating wealth / gear.
Consider everquest in its early days, before automated market places. It was exactly the situation you describe... there were a couple meeting grounds that worked as de facto open air markets with people hawking their stuff. If you wanted to buy or sell something it was a "hassle", it was time consuming, and to do it well you had to develop relationships (gasp) with other people. You had to physically meet up with the person you wanted to buy from. Because people weren't on 24x7 you had to come and go and keep checking the market.
It was primitive and inefficient.
It was also one of the fondest memories a lot of players had. It really felt like a bazaar. It was alive and it had its own pulse... you knew if you came in at such and such a time who would be be around would probably have some perfect pelts, you knew who specialized in spell research.
Their was haggling, arguments, and games. You'd ooc you wanted something unique and leave word with a few of the marketplace fixtures, and move on... perhaps getting a tell half an hour later, and then coordinating with a guildmate to pick it up for you since you were deep in a dungeon.
If was a "hassle" but hassles are what build friendships.
That's not to say EQ was perfect. There were many flaws with its marketplace that needed to be fixed. But a searchable spreadsheet and instant delivery to your mailbox a la WoW was not the right solution, or even a good one.
Cool tech that was ahead of its time. I don't think it was really surpassed in modern laptops until apple's multi-touch pad on the macbook pro. I didn't know cirque was absorbed by ALPS until you mentioned it either; thanks for triggering this trip down memory lane.:)
But I did, once upon a time, complete Doom on a PC. Time has lost whether it was using a fast 386 or a slow 486, but the deed was done. Furthermore, at the time, I was using an Cirque (now Alps) Glidepoint touchpad exclusively instead of a mouse...which isn't all that dissimilar from the interface on the iPod.
I actually played the original without a mouse. It wasn't until Duke Nukem 3D / Quake I that I started using a mouse.
Doom didn't support looking up/down; the mouse wasn't necessary, and none of my friends used it for doom. We played with our right hands on WASD and our left on the number keypad. (Although we had one nut that used a joystick+keyboard)
Coincidentally I did have a Cirque touch pad; although somewhat later. (Pentium 1 era)
I did so without strafing. I remember learning the merits of the strafe the hard way, by playing Quake deathmatches online and puzzling over the fact that people kept killing me with such ease until I realized "Oh! That's what the strafe function is for!". It logically follows that in the days of Doom, I had no concept of the technique.
I don't doubt you could have completed the game without strafe. But I'm EXTREMELY skeptical you did it on "Ultra Violent" or "Nightmare" and/or that you could do it without dying/respawning.
So. I still think you should try harder.
Is that what your strafing quake combatants told you until you had your strafe epiphany?;)
At what point did you decide having 5 kids on your minimum wage income was a good idea?
Whose to say they "decided" to have 5 kids? And once they've got them, you can't just un-have them. Telling them "Hey, you shouldn't have done that." doesn't fix things.
Is it possible to work really hard, make smart decisions, and still end up poor?
Yes. Next question.
I earned minimum wage most of my life, up until I got sick of it and used the money I squirreled away (and a few loans) to pay for college, get a CompSci degree, and start earning some real money doing work I actually like.
How was your health insurance situation "you earned minimum wage most of your life"? Minimum wage and adequate health care coverage rarely go hand in hand. A single unlucky medical event and you might be saddled with enough debt to ensure you'll be poor even with your CompSci degree income.
Without a doubt there are those who genuinely can't catch a break. But I fail to see why we should effectively reward the bad decisions of the other 99% for that.
1)"99%" - is a number pulled out of your ass. We both know it. What is the actual percent? I don't know, lets not pretend its just about everyone.
2) "bad decisions" - Your right, a lot of them do make bad decisions. Why is that? Why do they make bad decisions?
How many don't understand credit card interest? How many don't understand how "Do not pay for 1 year" works. How many don't understand how leasing costs work? You can't fix the problem by saying "hey, poor people, stop making bad decisions that ensure you remain poor."
Great advice, but completely worthless... kind of like yelling at someone who is drowning that they need to "swim better". Its not going solve anything. Financial planning, fiscal discipline, etc... these aren't innate, most people need to be taught.
get a CompSci degree, and start earning some real money doing work I actually like.
I'm glad it working for you, but its impossible that it is a solution for society. Society is a pyramid with the good high paying jobs at the top, and the shitty jobs at the base. Its absolutely possible for someone such as yourself to move up from the base to somewhere in the middle or even higher. But its categorically impossible for EVERYONE or even "most people" to do that. Those mc-walmart jobs are the majority... even if everyone in the country EARNED an advanced degree, the mc-walmart jobs still need to be filled, and the ratio of mc-walmart jobs to comp-sci class jobs is still going to be mc-walmart heavy.
Its like the "Too many chiefs and not enough Indians" management paradox. If you work hard you get recognized and you advance... but that only works as long as ONLY you do it. If EVERYONE works hard, you can't all get recognized and promoted.
In fact, the opposite is true... if everyone works hard most of them WON'T advance.
So individually, work hard and better yourself is excellent advice. But its not a large scale solution to large scale problems like "the working-poor".
We need solutions that ensure the base of the pyramid is reasonably comfortable because no matter what we do its not going away. Or we say fuck it, and let the base tend to itself... and that's libertarian nirvana but it leads to additional crime, disease, civil unrest... and a host of other problems.
I couldn't find a preference for "quick edit", but I did futz around with the preferences for a while, and hurrah, I did change something or other to "classic" and its working like it used to! It wasn't in the posting preferences where I had looked previously for an option on multiple occasions... it was somewhere in the layout prefs or something.
You can't do nearly the volume of inane posts on a slow connection with the full edit as you can with the quick edit.
I have a fast connection, and previewing slows me down more than opening a new page does.
I don't think that adequately addresses the shortcomings of the control scheme options. The lack of tactile feedback isn't addressed. Your fingers on the screen isn't resolved. Tilting to strafe or aim is downright clumsy.
I've played many games with terrible controls in my life. And "try harder" can overcome them, but they are still terrible controls.
It may be the best they could do, and I'm impressed with what they accomplished, but its still not anywhere near as good as having proper controls.
I'm now going to hit submit without doing a preview because I could really care less about the quality of this post.
It lets you do that? I -have- no submit button, just a preview... I WANT my submit button back.... what's the option I need to use to get this to work...
It is similar to my electric bill, but I do monitor standby power losses, and unplug or get rid of appliances that are too piggy. Acceptable standby power losses generally add to the functionality and convenience of using the product. Internet advertisements 99% of the time do neither.
I'm aware of power consumption, but it has to be pretty egregious to be worth changing things. If I forget the light on in my closet for an afternoon that's 100x the loss of leaving an unused microwave plugged in. So anally chasing down things like the microwave is just noise.
I agree with the usefulness of internet ads, but again appeal to the fact that the time wasted in blocking them exceeds any real financial gain you'll get by doing so. I'd block them because they are annoying, not because OMG they are costing me money. After all, there ARE ways for them to serve ads in ways that will be harder to block... simply serving them through the hosts server will bypass nearly all current blocking methods (granted at some expense to the host, but they'll eat that cost if that's what it takes to make the ad revenue.)
Whether the difference of blocking ads or not is noticeable to your bill will depend on if you do a lot of streaming and downloads that eats bandwidth, or a lot of static webpage viewing where the fancy animated ads use more bandwidth than the content.
In theory yes. In practice no.
In practice, if you aren't streaming or torrenting and mostly just surf the static web where the ads make up a big chunk of the bandwidth... then yes... at that point the ratio of ads to content is substantial.
But you'll never rack up enough total bandwidth just surfing the web for it to make a difference.
I doubt you'd be able to crack even a mere 5 or 6 GB just surfing the "static web with fancy ads".
That's sort of situation is going to comfortably fall into the lowest tier of usage.
You HAVE to get into video, torrenting, large file downloads, etc to rack up enough usage to break out of the lowest tiers that will be available.
In the end it is more about principle, for me to pay for delivery of a product, your product better be valuable to me.
Fair enough. And I respect that. But you have to realize you are in the minority. Most people aren't going to implement complex filters to save 50 cents a month.
And if it becomes an issue for many consumers, I am sure the already automated processes for creating, maintaining, and distributing hosts files will require little time to set up and virtually no time to use, so the transaction is frictionless.
Also true. But adblock is pretty painless, and yet most people don't know / both. Its already pretty frictionless...
And like I said, if it becomes an arms race, the content providers aren't even trying right now for the most part. If it becomes an arms race, then the friction level will go up.
I don't believe usually bin price by time, and the fact the internet is now relatively heavily loaded on the evenings from ~6pm to midnight, I'm not so sure you'll get evenings free, possibly just midnight to 6am and weekend days. That's not terribly helpful.
Good point. Peak time for voice is 9 to 5. Peak time for internet might be evenings. On the flip side, very few "large downloads" need to happen at peak time.
I can schedule an iso to download at 2am. I can throttle the torrents at peak time. Windows update scheduled for 3am. Maybe this would be a good thing.
The really big downloads are mostly not time-sensitive / interactive.
If I want to watch a netflix movie, I can pick the one I want to watch, have it cache overnight, and watch it the next day. Or I can stream it live, and have it use up my peak-time allotment.
'Julian wants to go to a crayfish party, anyone have a couple of available seats tonight or tomorrow? #fb'
'Sitting outdoors at 02:00 and hardly freezing with the world's coolest smartest people, it's amazing! #fb'
These were made the days immediately after she was "raped". Is that how you act after a rape? Call it hanging out with the coolest people in the world?
To make matters even worse, she tried to remove them after the fact...
It's amazing what people take for proof and sources to base their snap judge and jury judgement on in this case.
How much money do you really think downloading the ads is going to cost. I'm expecting pricing in the $0.50 to $1.50 per GB range. Even as a family that is constantly using the internet, I don't see the savings from ad blocking cracking more than a couple bucks.
I'm also, per my other post, expecting pricing to be primarily sold in pre-sold tiers, much like cell phone minutes. People will prepay for a tier that covers their need. When choosing between the 50GB/$100 with 1.25GB overage vs the 75GB/$120 with $1.10GB... pissing around over even 3000MB worth of ads or whatever is just noise in the discussion.
But if I have to start paying for every bit delivered to me, my hosts file is gonna get big fast, adblock and javascript blocking will become required addons for all my web browsers.
Perhaps you should find out how much those bits cost you first. Right now I pay $99/mo for 175GB, with an overage rate of $1.25/GB.
That works out to:
0.56$ / GB for the first 175 1.25$ / GB beyond that
A couple observations: 1) This is starting to look a bit like my electric bill. (And I've never had any complaints about that business model.) I don't unplug my microwave between uses to save all that juice its using to power the clock.
2) Lets say I used up the first tier with big downloads, and was into the cap. And suppose I implemented adblock/javascript blocking, and fucked around with my hosts files incessently, how much money would I save? I *honestly* can't see it being more than a few bucks. I'm skeptical it would even register.
Every business that advertises on the web should be screaming bloody murder at internet providers to not implement this. It will decimate the internet revenue model for many companies.
It will impact on those that offer very high bandwidth downloads, as the distribution cost borne by their customers will put off some percentage of their customers. So what?
In reality land, P-A-Y-G internet will look a lot like cellular phone service... where you buy a plan that includes X GB, and costs Y/GB to go over it, and for W/month you can pick 5 favorite sites that don't count to the allotment, for Z/month evenings and weekends are free... and if you sign up a family member you get a bonus Q GB.
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In my extensive experience with multiple IPs Port 25 is almost invariably blocked for OUTGOING connections only, except to the ISPs smtp servers.
Setting up a mail server is as simple as:
a) setup your mail server, it receives mail on port 25 just fine
(this allows your mail server to receive mail from the rest of the word.)
b) configure your mail server to relay out going mail through your ISPs outgoing server
(this allows your mail server to deliver mail to the rest of the world.)
c) configure your mail server to accept authenticated connections on the submission port (e.g. port 587)
(this allows you to send out bound mail to your own mailserver from anywhere in the world, your mail server will in turn relay out it out to your ISP for delivery, unless its addressed to one of your own domains...)
d) finally - if you use SPF, be sure to include your ISPs smtp servers as authorized for your domain(s)
You can run a small business/soho setup on that configuration.
And really, who the hell uses the ISP's email service? If you change providers *poof* no more email your you. Talk about Vendor Lock In, this is ridiculous.
How is using gmail or anything else any better? Unless you have your own domain you are locked in to a provider. And if you have your own domain, than its pretty easy to do whatever and go where ever you want.
Also, not all the HFTs make money. I did ask someone here how it could be that easy to make money, ofc with no answer.
Here's one example:
Suppose you place an order for 10,000 shares with a limit price of 10.50 into a market with the following characteristics:
last trade completed at 10.34 ...
a) buy 1000 @ 10.20 good until end of day ...
b) buy 1000 @ 10.32 good until 2pm
c) buy 1000 @ 10.34 good until end of day
1) sell 1000 @ 10.35 good until end of day
2) sell 1000 @ 10.40 good until 4pm
3) sell 5000 @ 10.42 good until end of day
4) sell 4000 @ 10.50 good until end of day
5) sell 8000 @ 10.51 good until 2pm
When your order hits the market it should work through the first 3 sell orders, and pull shares in from the 4th, filling all 10k of the 10k order, and the market will look like this:
last trade completed at 10.50 ...
a) buy 1000 @ 10.20 good until end of day ...
b) buy 1000 @ 10.32 good until 2pm
c) buy 1000 @ 10.34 good until end of day
4) sell 1000 @ 10.50 good until end of day
5) sell 8000 @ 10.51 good until 2pm
What HFT does is inundate the market with short term buy and sell orders with extremely short lives to essentially detect and analyze your 10,000 share order, probe its limit price, buy up all all orders up to your limit, and then sell you thousands of shares right at your limit price.
You don't get the 1000 shares at 10.35, you don't get the 1000 shares at 10.40, you don't get the 4000 shares at 10.42... you get all your shares at 10.49/10.50. The HFT successfully analyzed your order, bought those 1000 shares at 10.35 and then sold them to you at 10.49. They bought those 1000 shares at 10.40 and sold them to you at 10.49. They bought those 4000 shares at 10.42 and, yup, sold you those at 10.49 too.
Its essentially risk free. It ought to be illegal.
Its the financial equivalent of a man-in-the-middle attack.
The HFTs are making more money, because there's more other guys trading, because the other guys want to trade more when the spreads are tight. Ie it's not a zero-sum game.
Pointless trades draw value out of the market, not the other way around. The fees alone that accrue are parasitic but necessary. Any profits that HFT extracts are purely parasitic.
So, yes, the middle man makes money. Money that one imagines could have gone straight from A to Z. But A and Z are not present at the same time.
Aren't they? If the HFT holds the position for micro-seconds, A and Z are present at the same time for all intents and purposes.
If I place an order that would clear in 1/2 second, I don't benefit from paying a premium to clear it in 1/3 of a second. Paying a premium for that liquidity is parasitic to the transaction.
By "actual investors" presumeably you mean people who buy and hold?
I mean longs, shorts, and even speculators with time horizons in the hours and days.
HFT stuff is in the realm of seconds on down.
They benefit from tighter prices. Also, they are not as sensitive to short term price fluctuation. So how are they worse off?
Look, if HFT trader A skims X$ profit by inserting themselves amongst transactions between actual invenstors B-thru-Z, then B-thru-Z are collectively worse off by the X$ that A is up.
Some people try to handwave around it but at the end of the day either you believe:
(1) the HFT trader actually generated his X$ profit completely out of thin air
or
(2) or you believe that HFT traders X$ profit was extracted from the other market participants (i.e. actual investors)
Which do you think it is?
Its really that simple.
At the end of the day if you are taking money out then its coming from somewhere. Elementary financial accounting principles aren't violated by the stock market.
It becomes quite impossible to level crafting sensibly if neither exists.
Agreed. Thanks for the clarification.
Personally I really think "crafting without fighting" and craffting being the sole way of gaining equipment is sort of a flawed game premise in that there is no connection between your equipment and your accomplishments.
But I concede that may be a personal bias.
High frequency trading actually facilitates more accurate pricing of securities because of the liquidity it introduces to the market.
Liquidity has value. But HFT algorithms front running trades that would already complete without them aren't providing liquidity.
The benefit of accurate pricing is hard to explain fully without getting deeper into the economics of markets,
If market pricing were to consistently deviate from actual pricing by measurable amounts this would be relevant. But HFT algorithms front running trades to arbitrage fractional cents aren't providing any benefit whosoever.
The animosity you raised is probably due to a perceived lack of contribution (no tangible products produced).
We perceive a lack of contribution because there is a lack of contribution.
But actually, facilitating better pricing will route investment into areas that deserve it (e.g. to the guy who produces 2 potatoes per unit resource instead of 1.5 potatoes).
Sure. If pricing was that far out of whack. But we don't really need to "facilitate routing investment" to the guy that produces 1.50042 potatoes instead of the resource that produces 1.50041. The only person who cares about that difference is trying to profit on that 0.00001 delta.
The sum effect of these actions is a raised social utility.
The sum effect of these actions is parasitic to actual investors leading to a diminished "social utility". (whatever that is supposed to mean.)
Simply put, some people enjoy shopping.
And WoW is ostensibly a game where to advance you form groups kill monsters gain xp, and loot items. It isn't primarily a shopping simulator. Its fine that it has a shopping component. But as soon as it becomes more efficient to "go shopping" than "form groups kill monsters and loot items" something is broken.
For the low/middle/mid-high game in WoW, it is more efficient to "go shopping" than to "get gear from encounters".
Given this scenario most people will do exactly what I did in XIV. We simply won't use the system. If we can find something with a shout or 2 we will do it, else, que sera, sera!
Exactly right. The bazaar model serves a niche - its the best way to find the rare and unique items, but it isn't your one stop shop for all your gear. And people who 'enjoy shopping' can browse to their hearts content for deals and treasures. Meanwhile the rest of us pass through, and if we see something great... but our time is more productively and enjoyably spent playing the actual game.
Oh btw, your last point about the ah in pretty much every mmo is kind of funny... lets try a word substitution shall we:
I'm not sure I see your point. Amazon / Ebay are great for the purpose of shopping efficiently. In the real world shopping is how I obtain most of my gear. But I'm not playing MMORPGs because I'm looking for an efficient shopping simulator. I was sold on the "form groups with other people/kill monsters together/take their stuff" mechanic... so its counter productive if the game rewards "efficient shopping" with better gear with less effort.
Creating inefficient tools isn't a good way to promote socialization.
Thinking of it as "creating inefficient tools" is the wrong way to frame the question. The core mechanic of the game is an inefficient character builder tool from that perspective.
Carrot > Stick.
EXACTLY. The trouble with WoW's AH is that they've put the carrot and stick in the wrong place.
In everquest you skipped the marketplace and got your items through interacting with guild mates, picking them up off monsters in groups, completing quests, etc. That was the most efficient way to play. Players were motivated to group and go get things.
With WoW, you farm junk, and then buy gear in the market (for the low - mid game particularly). That's the most efficient way to play. Its demented. There is no reason to group because you can farm low level crap faster than level appropriate crap and make more money doing it.
The auction house shifts the maximum economic benefit to playing the game in a tedious and antisocial way (farming low level crap), and then the AH itself is tedious and antisocial.
The problem isn't that the "AH is efficient". The problem is that the relative efficiency of the AH is greater than anything else. For example, getting level appropriate drops from group encounters pays MUCH WORSE. If you want players to be motivated to get level appropriate drops from group encounters which is ostensibly the primary point of the game THAT is where the carrot needs to be.
Its a -game- and it needs to be designed around being a game. Rating it in terms of tool efficiency is absurd. Would wow be a better game if you could just go into the character creation screen, select your level, attributes, gear, and hair colour? Of course not.
But that would certainly be a much more "efficient" way to get high level uber geared characters.
Now compared to that the whole "kill monsters with groups of friends and acquaintances for xp and hope for random drops mechanic" by comparison is creating an extremely inefficient alternative. But that's the entire point of the game! That inefficient mechanic is what makes the game fun. Players WANT high level uber equipped characters, and they want to get them by playing through these encounters to get them.
Providing them shortcuts like getting all their gear through the auction house. Or simply selecting what they want at character creation... these may be far more efficient but they rob players of the very reason they want to play. As I said, its demented.
You can design an efficient auction house, but its horribly flawed if it results in players bypassing the core mechanic of the game and avoiding social interaction. It accomplishes precisely both of these in WoW.
3. No AH, no sensible group finding tools, nothing to facilitate your interaction with other players. Sorry, but this is just not acceptable in 2010 anymore. Even in 2005 MMOs noticed the need to give their players an easier way to gain access to other players and cooperate, find groups, find sellers and buyers and so on. It needn't be the proverbial ebay AH system, but at least SOME way to facilitate interaction. Right now, if you wanted to buy something, you'd spend hours trying to find someone selling it. Or you keep watching the spam in the trade channel for a few hours. Either is just not what MMO players would accept anymore this time and age.
I disagree. I think the WoW AH does more to harm player interaction than enhance it. And I'd prefer a game that de-emphasizes the importance and relative ease of player trade. I my opinion too many players end up motivated to gear up by farming / trading rather than adventuring because its more efficient.
In my opinion the path to gear upgrades and advancement in general should *never* be "farm spider silk", or "collect ore", then sell it at the market, and buy nice gear."
Its perverse because very few players actually enjoy this activity, but it is by far the most efficient use of time in terms of generating wealth / gear.
Consider everquest in its early days, before automated market places. It was exactly the situation you describe... there were a couple meeting grounds that worked as de facto open air markets with people hawking their stuff. If you wanted to buy or sell something it was a "hassle", it was time consuming, and to do it well you had to develop relationships (gasp) with other people. You had to physically meet up with the person you wanted to buy from. Because people weren't on 24x7 you had to come and go and keep checking the market.
It was primitive and inefficient.
It was also one of the fondest memories a lot of players had. It really felt like a bazaar. It was alive and it had its own pulse... you knew if you came in at such and such a time who would be be around would probably have some perfect pelts, you knew who specialized in spell research.
Their was haggling, arguments, and games. You'd ooc you wanted something unique and leave word with a few of the marketplace fixtures, and move on... perhaps getting a tell half an hour later, and then coordinating with a guildmate to pick it up for you since you were deep in a dungeon.
If was a "hassle" but hassles are what build friendships.
That's not to say EQ was perfect. There were many flaws with its marketplace that needed to be fixed. But a searchable spreadsheet and instant delivery to your mailbox a la WoW was not the right solution, or even a good one.
Gratz. :)
Yet my victory is hollow and empty. By your self deprecation you have robbed it of all its delectable succulence. Bravo! :p
Meanwhile, I'm amazed that someone might actually remember Cirque.
Your mention got me to go looking for it on the web... it was a cirque power cat:
http://www.ergocanada.com/products/other/cirque_power_cat.html
Cool tech that was ahead of its time. I don't think it was really surpassed in modern laptops until apple's multi-touch pad on the macbook pro. I didn't know cirque was absorbed by ALPS until you mentioned it either; thanks for triggering this trip down memory lane. :)
But I did, once upon a time, complete Doom on a PC. Time has lost whether it was using a fast 386 or a slow 486, but the deed was done. Furthermore, at the time, I was using an Cirque (now Alps) Glidepoint touchpad exclusively instead of a mouse...which isn't all that dissimilar from the interface on the iPod.
I actually played the original without a mouse. It wasn't until Duke Nukem 3D / Quake I that I started using a mouse.
Doom didn't support looking up/down; the mouse wasn't necessary, and none of my friends used it for doom. We played with our right hands on WASD and our left on the number keypad. (Although we had one nut that used a joystick+keyboard)
Coincidentally I did have a Cirque touch pad; although somewhat later. (Pentium 1 era)
I did so without strafing. I remember learning the merits of the strafe the hard way, by playing Quake deathmatches online and puzzling over the fact that people kept killing me with such ease until I realized "Oh! That's what the strafe function is for!". It logically follows that in the days of Doom, I had no concept of the technique.
I don't doubt you could have completed the game without strafe. But I'm EXTREMELY skeptical you did it on "Ultra Violent" or "Nightmare" and/or that you could do it without dying/respawning.
So. I still think you should try harder.
Is that what your strafing quake combatants told you until you had your strafe epiphany? ;)
At what point did you decide having 5 kids on your minimum wage income was a good idea?
Whose to say they "decided" to have 5 kids? And once they've got them, you can't just un-have them. Telling them "Hey, you shouldn't have done that." doesn't fix things.
Is it possible to work really hard, make smart decisions, and still end up poor?
Yes. Next question.
I earned minimum wage most of my life, up until I got sick of it and used the money I squirreled away (and a few loans) to pay for college, get a CompSci degree, and start earning some real money doing work I actually like.
How was your health insurance situation "you earned minimum wage most of your life"? Minimum wage and adequate health care coverage rarely go hand in hand. A single unlucky medical event and you might be saddled with enough debt to ensure you'll be poor even with your CompSci degree income.
Without a doubt there are those who genuinely can't catch a break. But I fail to see why we should effectively reward the bad decisions of the other 99% for that.
1)"99%" - is a number pulled out of your ass. We both know it. What is the actual percent? I don't know, lets not pretend its just about everyone.
2) "bad decisions" - Your right, a lot of them do make bad decisions. Why is that? Why do they make bad decisions?
How many don't understand credit card interest? How many don't understand how "Do not pay for 1 year" works. How many don't understand how leasing costs work? You can't fix the problem by saying "hey, poor people, stop making bad decisions that ensure you remain poor."
Great advice, but completely worthless... kind of like yelling at someone who is drowning that they need to "swim better". Its not going solve anything. Financial planning, fiscal discipline, etc... these aren't innate, most people need to be taught.
get a CompSci degree, and start earning some real money doing work I actually like.
I'm glad it working for you, but its impossible that it is a solution for society. Society is a pyramid with the good high paying jobs at the top, and the shitty jobs at the base. Its absolutely possible for someone such as yourself to move up from the base to somewhere in the middle or even higher. But its categorically impossible for EVERYONE or even "most people" to do that. Those mc-walmart jobs are the majority... even if everyone in the country EARNED an advanced degree, the mc-walmart jobs still need to be filled, and the ratio of mc-walmart jobs to comp-sci class jobs is still going to be mc-walmart heavy.
Its like the "Too many chiefs and not enough Indians" management paradox. If you work hard you get recognized and you advance... but that only works as long as ONLY you do it. If EVERYONE works hard, you can't all get recognized and promoted.
In fact, the opposite is true... if everyone works hard most of them WON'T advance.
So individually, work hard and better yourself is excellent advice. But its not a large scale solution to large scale problems like "the working-poor".
We need solutions that ensure the base of the pyramid is reasonably comfortable because no matter what we do its not going away. Or we say fuck it, and let the base tend to itself... and that's libertarian nirvana but it leads to additional crime, disease, civil unrest... and a host of other problems.
Thanks for the assist.
I couldn't find a preference for "quick edit", but I did futz around with the preferences for a while, and hurrah, I did change something or other to "classic" and its working like it used to! It wasn't in the posting preferences where I had looked previously for an option on multiple occasions... it was somewhere in the layout prefs or something.
You can't do nearly the volume of inane posts on a slow connection with the full edit as you can with the quick edit.
I have a fast connection, and previewing slows me down more than opening a new page does.
I think you just need to try harder.
I don't think that adequately addresses the shortcomings of the control scheme options. The lack of tactile feedback isn't addressed. Your fingers on the screen isn't resolved. Tilting to strafe or aim is downright clumsy.
I've played many games with terrible controls in my life. And "try harder" can overcome them, but they are still terrible controls.
It may be the best they could do, and I'm impressed with what they accomplished, but its still not anywhere near as good as having proper controls.
Agreed.
But at the same time I don't see buying a hard drive and fedexing it around the country is quite a fair comparison either. :)
I'm now going to hit submit without doing a preview because I could really care less about the quality of this post.
It lets you do that? I -have- no submit button, just a preview... I WANT my submit button back.... what's the option I need to use to get this to work...
1$/GB is crazy expensive.
The average person pays more than that; in the sense that they pay between $30-50 for high speed internet and they download less than 10GB/mo.
Futzing around the web, browsing, twittering, checking email and facebook, simply doesn't use a lot of bandwidth.
Fair point. But for a TV show (and most movies for that matter), the odds I care to watch it twice are pretty low. And I can always stream it again.
It is similar to my electric bill, but I do monitor standby power losses, and unplug or get rid of appliances that are too piggy. Acceptable standby power losses generally add to the functionality and convenience of using the product. Internet advertisements 99% of the time do neither.
I'm aware of power consumption, but it has to be pretty egregious to be worth changing things. If I forget the light on in my closet for an afternoon that's 100x the loss of leaving an unused microwave plugged in. So anally chasing down things like the microwave is just noise.
I agree with the usefulness of internet ads, but again appeal to the fact that the time wasted in blocking them exceeds any real financial gain you'll get by doing so. I'd block them because they are annoying, not because OMG they are costing me money. After all, there ARE ways for them to serve ads in ways that will be harder to block... simply serving them through the hosts server will bypass nearly all current blocking methods (granted at some expense to the host, but they'll eat that cost if that's what it takes to make the ad revenue.)
Whether the difference of blocking ads or not is noticeable to your bill will depend on if you do a lot of streaming and downloads that eats bandwidth, or a lot of static webpage viewing where the fancy animated ads use more bandwidth than the content.
In theory yes. In practice no.
In practice, if you aren't streaming or torrenting and mostly just surf the static web where the ads make up a big chunk of the bandwidth... then yes... at that point the ratio of ads to content is substantial.
But you'll never rack up enough total bandwidth just surfing the web for it to make a difference.
I doubt you'd be able to crack even a mere 5 or 6 GB just surfing the "static web with fancy ads".
That's sort of situation is going to comfortably fall into the lowest tier of usage.
You HAVE to get into video, torrenting, large file downloads, etc to rack up enough usage to break out of the lowest tiers that will be available.
In the end it is more about principle, for me to pay for delivery of a product, your product better be valuable to me.
Fair enough. And I respect that. But you have to realize you are in the minority. Most people aren't going to implement complex filters to save 50 cents a month.
And if it becomes an issue for many consumers, I am sure the already automated processes for creating, maintaining, and distributing hosts files will require little time to set up and virtually no time to use, so the transaction is frictionless.
Also true. But adblock is pretty painless, and yet most people don't know / both. Its already pretty frictionless...
And like I said, if it becomes an arms race, the content providers aren't even trying right now for the most part. If it becomes an arms race, then the friction level will go up.
I don't believe usually bin price by time, and the fact the internet is now relatively heavily loaded on the evenings from ~6pm to midnight, I'm not so sure you'll get evenings free, possibly just midnight to 6am and weekend days. That's not terribly helpful.
Good point. Peak time for voice is 9 to 5. Peak time for internet might be evenings. On the flip side, very few "large downloads" need to happen at peak time.
I can schedule an iso to download at 2am. I can throttle the torrents at peak time. Windows update scheduled for 3am. Maybe this would be a good thing.
The really big downloads are mostly not time-sensitive / interactive.
If I want to watch a netflix movie, I can pick the one I want to watch, have it cache overnight, and watch it the next day. Or I can stream it live, and have it use up my peak-time allotment.
I'm not sure its really all that terrifying.
Why exactly do I care to get a scene download when I can get a legit download a couple weeks later?
What tweets?
These tweets for example:
http://radsoft.net/news/20101001,01.shtml
'Julian wants to go to a crayfish party, anyone have a couple of available seats tonight or tomorrow? #fb'
'Sitting outdoors at 02:00 and hardly freezing with the world's coolest smartest people, it's amazing! #fb'
These were made the days immediately after she was "raped".
Is that how you act after a rape? Call it hanging out with the coolest people in the world?
To make matters even worse, she tried to remove them after the fact...
It's amazing what people take for proof and sources to base their snap judge and jury judgement on in this case.
Yes, that is scary. I agree with you there.
I beleive it is there primarily so England royalty couldn't send their kids over to run in an election.
That is a very accurate assessment.
How much money do you really think downloading the ads is going to cost. I'm expecting pricing in the $0.50 to $1.50 per GB range. Even as a family that is constantly using the internet, I don't see the savings from ad blocking cracking more than a couple bucks.
I'm also, per my other post, expecting pricing to be primarily sold in pre-sold tiers, much like cell phone minutes. People will prepay for a tier that covers their need. When choosing between the 50GB/$100 with 1.25GB overage vs the 75GB/$120 with $1.10GB ... pissing around over even 3000MB worth of ads or whatever is just noise in the discussion.
But if I have to start paying for every bit delivered to me, my hosts file is gonna get big fast, adblock and javascript blocking will become required addons for all my web browsers.
Perhaps you should find out how much those bits cost you first. Right now I pay $99/mo for 175GB, with an overage rate of $1.25/GB.
That works out to:
0.56$ / GB for the first 175
1.25$ / GB beyond that
A couple observations:
1) This is starting to look a bit like my electric bill. (And I've never had any complaints about that business model.) I don't unplug my microwave between uses to save all that juice its using to power the clock.
2) Lets say I used up the first tier with big downloads, and was into the cap. And suppose I implemented adblock/javascript blocking, and fucked around with my hosts files incessently, how much money would I save? I *honestly* can't see it being more than a few bucks. I'm skeptical it would even register.
Every business that advertises on the web should be screaming bloody murder at internet providers to not implement this. It will decimate the internet revenue model for many companies.
It will impact on those that offer very high bandwidth downloads, as the distribution cost borne by their customers will put off some percentage of their customers. So what?
In reality land, P-A-Y-G internet will look a lot like cellular phone service... where you buy a plan that includes X GB, and costs Y/GB to go over it, and for W/month you can pick 5 favorite sites that don't count to the allotment, for Z/month evenings and weekends are free... and if you sign up a family member you get a bonus Q GB.
50$CAD (39.60 USD, before you make any joke)
Who are you letting do your currency conversion?
$50CAD is $49.45USD right now.