Quoting: Eike

Quoting: KimyrielleIt doesn't change my opinion, or the rest of my posting you chose not to react to. If your company would NOT be dinosaurs, "tens of thousands" of intranet users would mean exactly nothing. It's just a matter of putting up the needed infrastructure.

I'm not a network guy, and I cannot judge how hard it actually is. My wild guess is you can't, either. But what I know for sure that things change with size. A matter of quantity does become a matter of quality sooner or later. And I know that there's a lack of supplies at the moment, not only in life support but also in computing and network power. Azure is scaling down non-vital businesses, YouTube, Netflix, you name it. So even if it would be easy under normal circumstances - we don't have those.

Your guess is correct. Like you, I am a software person. I don't set up networks. Yet, I still comfortably stand by my statement that this load should not be an issue. Because there are networks around that handle loads like that and MUCH larger ones quite easily, so yours should be able too. Logically, your intranet has to handle the load no matter from where it originates, so it's really a function of being able to handle the bandwidth.

Quoting: Eike

Quoting: KimyrielleTens of thousands of concurrent users are actually laughable in 2020. If your company (big German tech company with tens of thousands of employees - let me take a wild guess? SAP?) isn't a collection of dinosaurs, you have to admit you were at least woefully unprepared to work in a modern fashion. You know, without wasting everybody's valuable lifetime and needlessly poisoning the environment by making everyone commute for two hours each way to an office to do the exact same things they can do at home.

If I don't remember completely wrong on your politcal posts here, one thing you should easily agree with is that modern isn't always better or even good. Being in an office has it's pros and cons, I'm usually meeting both on a daily basis. Calling home office "modern" sure isn't an argument. I gave some pro office in an other post. I absolutely agree an your valuable lifetime (*sigh *) and environemnt arguments, though.

I nowhere claimed that remote work is a flat improvement over office work. I know that office work has its upsides and that easier communication is one of them. I also understand that people in Europe tend to have super-tiny homes that aren't really designed for setting up work spaces for several family members. I get that.
But the bottom line is that after weighing pros and cons, remote work is STILL laughably superior. It saves both the employer and the employee -massive- costs. For most people, remote work has shown to be overall more productive than working in an office, because it eliminates many of these unproductive meetings that are good for nothing but drinking coffee, and because people generally can concentrate better on their work at home than in a noisy cubicle farm and are happier for being in a familiar environment. The ONE thing that takes a bit more thought is communication. But it's 2020, and we have the tools for that. It's no biggie.
You correctly pointed out that not every change is progress. Our so-called modern work culture is built around people founding a family, then making dad commute two hours in one direction, mom commute two hours in the other direction, and the kids get raised by total strangers doing it for money and not because they love them. The total amount of work including the silly commute takes so much of our available time that all we then tend to do as family is eating mass-produced frozen food for dinner and watch TV, because we lack the energy to do anything else. If that's modern society, then I really want to have no part of it.

My daughter is about to grow out of the age I have to taxi her to school every day or check that she's doing her homework. I could go back to work. Given that everybody seems to look for software engineers, I suppose there is even demand for me. But honestly, if somebody would tell me that I have to commute to an office five days a week to do the same work I can do at home, I'd just laugh at them and walk away. I don't want to work for dinosaurs.

Quoting: Eike

Quoting: KimyriellePS: I am not sure if I like being associated with people who generally don't like to communicate. If I would be anti-social, why oh why would I even post here?

Well, there's communication and communication. I'm introvert myself and online communication is easier for me.

I like both parts of communication. The personal and online sort of. I just don't want to drive for a total of three to four hours a day just to talk to 2 or 3 people in person for 20 minutes each, when I could do this ALMOST as effectively from home, save $100 a week in gas in the process, and spend said 3-4 hours a day with my family instead.

Honestly, office work-culture cannot die fast enough for me.

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Quoting: Eike

Quoting: KimyrielleThat's the stuff you usually hear from dinosaur managers who are mentally unable...

Sorry, but honestly: If that's your custom way of communicating I understand if you tend to avoid to.

I am sorry if what I said offended you. Particularly since I nowhere implied that you're a dinosaur manager. Just that these words are what I am used to hear from dinosaur managers. I kinda have experience with that. When I was still employed, my line of work included migrating analog processes to digital ones. Go figure! As another poster said, it's just being honest and blunt.

It doesn't change my opinion, or the rest of my posting you chose not to react to. If your company would NOT be dinosaurs, "tens of thousands" of intranet users would mean exactly nothing. It's just a matter of putting up the needed infrastructure. Tens of thousands of concurrent users are actually laughable in 2020. If your company (big German tech company with tens of thousands of employees - let me take a wild guess? SAP?) isn't a collection of dinosaurs, you have to admit you were at least woefully unprepared to work in a modern fashion. You know, without wasting everybody's valuable lifetime and needlessly poisoning the environment by making everyone commute for two hours each way to an office to do the exact same things they can do at home.

Humans hate change. Right now it's being forced on them. If there is ANYTHING I find amusing about all of this, it's this.

Welcome to the 21st century!

PS: I am not sure if I like being associated with people who generally don't like to communicate. If I would be anti-social, why oh why would I even post here?

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Quoting: Eike

Quoting: KimyrielleThat's the first time I hear a company claiming that remote-work would somehow be less efficient than working in an office. lol!

You must be joking. I'm working in a big software development department and it is just... hard. The infrastructure is fine for 5% working from home. It is overwhelmed with 90% working from home. I took two weeks off because I couldn't bare it.

Also, it is helpful to look people in the eyes.

That's the stuff you usually hear from dinosaur managers who are mentally unable to trust their staff to get any work done unless being watched. If a tech company is set up in a way that only 5% of the staff can work remotely, I am wondering if you're working for Fred Flintstone, really. Or any other company still working like they did in the middle ages. Any tech company can do close to 100% of their work online. By definition. Digital work is the very nature of what they do, and everything digital can be done online. Some processes interacting with outside organizations might be exempt when THEY can't handle digital processes, but that's about it.
Otherwise, there is zero reason for a tech worker to ever go to an office, unless it's for socialization reasons. And in that case I would still argue that this can be done just as well in a pub, after work, so people don't have to pretend to be working while they're chatting. If a tech company tells me that they can't digitalize ALL their processes, they should consider hiring somebody that tells them how, really.

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That's the first time I hear a company claiming that remote-work would somehow be less efficient than working in an office. lol!

I call bs on it, really. It's just the usual bad project management and unrealistic deadlines common to the games industry, except that now they go a convenient excuse for it.

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This game might be the first good thing to happen in this trainwreck of a year...

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Good to see them working on getting Wolcen to run. That was one of the last games I backed on Kickstarter, under the promise that it will have a Linux version.

/sarcasm

I wonder why I even care if WINE can run it, since it got promised a Linux version!

/endsarcasm

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I guess my daughter would love that game! Thanks for reporting about it, I have never heard of it before! :)

And yes, I don't even want to know how much work it was to replace the engine of a -finished- game. I have never heard of this being done before. oO

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Quoting: gregfI want AMD not intel, and I want a good keyboard like on a think pad. Till then it's a no go for me.

If I am not totally mistaken, that's because AMD doesn't have a competitive on-board GPU solution. It also is not considered a force for dedicated mobile GPUs. Intel still kinda has a monopoly on that. Which is why nobody considers AMD for building a laptop, still.

I otherwise agree with the sentiment. I'd love to see a good AMD laptop platform one day.

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Quoting: 14Usually when people speak in ultimatums, they're exaggerating due to a lazy mind or anger-fueled irrationality.

Needless to say, I disagree with you. But that's fine.

For the most part I would agree with you that absolutes rarely exist, and there's usually an exception or two to every statement one can make. I felt fairly comfortable generalizing in this particular instance though, and still do. The reason for this lies in the very effect the "Free"-to-Play model causes on game design, which makes these games bad by definition.

I will try to explain:

For a Buy-to-Play game, the game design focuses on delivering the best possible experience for the player. There are no secondary concerns for game design - the monetization has already happened.
For a "Free"-to-Play game, monetization has to happen DURING play, and AFTER giving the player access to it. The design no longer focuses on the best possible experience for the player, it focuses on motivating the player to pay up. Which for the F2P side of the industry is habitually done by intentionally making the game boring or tedious after a few hours of playing it, while giving players the opportunity to buy away these nag-mechanics with micro-transactions ("Don't want to wait 100 hours for this cooldown to expire? Just pay $10!").
In short, you can safely say that F2P games are universally designed to suck unless you pay up. It's how these games make you pay when you otherwise would have no reason to.

Now, you might say "But what about vanity and cosmetic items that have no effect on gameplay? Selling these don't make a game suck!"

Unfortunately, it does.

In a B2P game, cosmetic items are earned in-game, by PLAYING it. For many games, getting better-looking gear is the very essence of our motivation to play them in this first place. But with F2P games, you just BUY them. You can't earn the good-looking stuff in game, because it's moved to the cash-store. All you do is swipe your credit card and done! Your character looks great now. The only problem is that moving in-game rewards to a cash-store is that it kills in-game content, because your already great-looking character doesn't have to do any dungeon crawling to become great-looking. Cash-stores, even if cosmetic only, leave game designers with a lot less options to design rewarding and engaging content.

Maybe this helps you to understand why I made my absolute statement the way I did. There is simply no way to make a F2P game NOT suck, because the problem is in the business model itself.

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Quoting: 14

Quoting: Kimyrielle

Quoting: rkfgMake it F2P,

100% of all so-called "free"-to-play games suck. As in all of them, no exceptions. Because all of them are designed to suck unless you dump more money into it than you ever would in an actual for-purchase game.

Oh, like Dota 2?

I'm fine with buying a digital card game if I can play a trial mode first. I was too hesitant to put money down on Artifact and so never experienced it. I wish they had a free weekend or a trial mode of some sort. I also think it's OK to charge money for card packs just like Magic (etc) does in the physical world... as long as the game includes a Draft mode!

Not sure which part of "100% no exceptions" wasn't so clear. If a game was -designed- to be "free" (haha!) to play, it sucks. FTP is probably the most successful fraud ever conceived. Except that it's (yet) legal.

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