EVE General Discussion

I vote that the OP's station is the first to be destroyed along with all his stuff.

@RubyPorto

We shouldn't get into a detailed dicussion about GRBs on this forum, what is right now verified knowledge in Astrophysics and what not. There are several long GRBs were the Supernova (Type Ib/c, e.g. GRB 060218 (SN 2006aj), GRB 030329 (SN 2003dh) and GRB 980425 (SN 1998bw)) remnant was identified, there is no we think, we know.
We don't know yet what are other causes for long GRBs as not all long GRBs had a Supernova remnant.

About the ~7k ly as max range for being dangerous, i think it was in the Grant Hill et al. publication but don't nail me on it.

With the 450,000 subscriber base paying 17.50 a month (halfway between 15.00 cash directly or 20.00 PLEX), that's 7,875,000 per month.

Now subtract all their overhead for salaries, IP delivery, rent on all their headquarters, yadda yadda yadda.................

Thou doth exagerrate too much.

And don't forget Dust is F2P, so.........................................

And there are salaries for World of Darkness development....and now EVE: Valkyrie.

Technically, its less of an exaggeration than the exaggeration that says that code written in 2003 is jibberish.

However, I will gladly concede to math. $15 x 500,000 (CCP is currently claiming they have 500,000 active accounts) + a guess-imate of Plex Purchases (you can only buy 2 plex at a time, and plex cost $35) would probably bring CCP’s monthly income to around a number substantially higher than the one you gave.

Despite all that, the point is, that CCP makes more than enough money to hire a Consultant, an expert, or some college professor to work in his spare time, who could step through the infamous 2003 code and “decipher” it.

There is some video on YT of some guy claiming to be a Card-Punch enthusiast. If IBM ever had a Card-Punch programming emergency, this guy would be among the first people that they would call.

The idea that undocumented code written in 2003 has brought development of the game to a complete stop FOR YEARS is ludicrous!

Player A : "The 2003 code is jibberish!"

Player B: "That argument is rubbish! "

Player C: "Yes, but the 2003 code is a shambles."

Lulu: "Let's go around again!"

Indeed last I knew they were intentionally going through and rewriting the code. Programming has changed a lot over the last 10 years even if you're using the same language the entire time. CCP just needs to fix the mess and get it as close to modern programming dogma as possible.


I've heard quite a few horror stories over the years that were very much in a similar vein.

Sometimes coders intentionally write code to be difficult to understand in an effort to secure their job. Since they are the only one that knows how it works they suddenly become relatively safe from being fired..

When I see my team write code like that, it's sent back for failing to pass review.

That said, I do believe that Spenser is underestimating the difficulty examining the working of poorly written code (though that's not really in evidence, but we'll take it for the sake of argument) then devising a means to disentangle the code from a live system, without introducing side effects or rewriting massive amounts of code.

I work on systems that customers expect to be working with "4 nines" availability (99.99%) and no matter how reasonable the choice seems, there are times where management will just not allow the work to even start because it's too big a risk.

If the code is laced with poor cohesion and significant coupling (a tradeoff often made when performance is the primary concern), then it can be nearly impossible to make significant improvements without tearing the whole thing apart. This often takes longer than a single release cycle. I don't know about CCP, but there's been a trend for the last five years or so that if you can't get something done in a single release, you don't do it. Mostly this is a profound misunderstanding of so called "Agile" methods but happens to find a nice home in risk-averse managers' minds.

Again I can't tell you if that sort of thing is also occurring at CCP, but given some of the formalisms I've seen from CCP Seagull for example, it wouldn't surprise me.

Beyond all of that, however, what makes the job so much more difficult is bozos who think "just throw money at it... boom, done." We'll hire consultants that know nothing about our business and have no long term stake in the success of the effort. All you idiots saying it's difficult, see... the consultant says "no problem" so you guys suck. A month or three later, the consultant goes home, the job half-done, and the salaried developers are left holding the sack of crap.

Personally, I would really not like to see that done to Eve.

That WordPerfect Macro system was put in place by a dude around 1988....back in the days when companies just trusted all IT professionals as Gods and let them be.

That was one result.

the late 80's, good old times. :)

I could type a few xcopy commands in MS-DOS and everyone would think me the prime computer expert of our little town... I probably was, but still. Knowing how to use your computer without breaking it and being an expert, not the same.

I hate when Forum Warriors poast just to poast.

Meteor strike on ISS is reminder of cosmic hazard