EVE General Discussion

Computers that interface with the user's brain directly in the year 5,000 or whatever work like our computers today. C/D

C.

What the skill does is teach you which device drivers to disable, what bloatware to uninstall, and how to kill -9 the correct pieces of integrated malware — all of which lets you squeeze more CPU cycles out of your space canoe.

Real life situation:

I visit a customer's site. They've installed PostgreSQL and are running a Django based web site. Their system is getting really slow and they want help speeding it up.

So I do the simple things:

• see how much data is used, tune PostgreSQL's buffers and the system's shared memory size to boost responsiveness, I get about 5% better performance
• look at the queries and find that some queries are performing linear searches over many hundreds of thousands of records, so add an index on the relevant columns, achieve another 10% better performance
• see far too many "select * from x" queries, examine the Python/Django code and find that someone has decided to retrieve Class.objects.all(), then loop through the list in Python to extract all the records with creation dates between X and Y. So update that code to use Class.objects.filter( date_created__gte = X, date_created__lte = Y). Achieve order of magnitude improvement in response times.

So my expertise has enhanced the performance of that product to bring what used to be a two minute response time (on a web app) down to a couple of seconds. There are other improvements I could make, such as using memcache to hold query results.

How long does that performance improvement last, considering that once I leave the people that built it are the ones that will be "improving" it?

Skills are not transferrable. It makes no sense that I would be able to boost the CPU of a ship, then give it to someone else and have them achieve the same performance with no training. I could train that person to get the same results as me, but then they'd be trained.

Then consider that for privacy and security reasons, I'd want to reformat the storage and erase the memory of that spaceship before it was given to anyone else. Why should the random stranger buying my second hand Caracal have access to my list of bookmarks?

They should turn off their bots and go jump off a bridge. Giving them more SP for being cheaters is out of the question.

How about not, since the lack of a skill grinding mechanism is one of the parts that makes EVE great and which lets you play the actual game rather than engage in some bone-headed SP chase. They had something akin to what you're asking for in the early days, but it was removed due to the awful gameplay and behaviour it created.

You are already given ample rewards for playing a lot — you don't really need more.

And no, EVE should not be “like WoW and the other mmorpg[s] out there” — the largest point in EVE's favour is that it's completely different from that garbage.