NO. I WAS FIRST. Actually I freaked cause I thought my account was compromised for a second. I just recently got identity thefted, so I'm a bit paranoid.Quote from Winged
Dolaiim no worries, good discussion is good discussion right?
Quote from Winged
An yes I'd agree earliest is July, though again.. Logic says Blizzard never reaches goals at the earliest possible date.. Again, when July 20th rolls around and the BETA isn't here yet I'll say I told ya so again
Definitely. That's why I made sure to say the earliest a beta could start is July 1. The latest a beta could start is Sept. 30th.
I'm not actually disappointed. I am, however, surprised and amazed that a 3-month margin of error was the best they could do for a BETA START DATE. I listened to the full conf call (I'm used to them since I work for a publicly traded company, and am a private investor), and it never ceases to amaze me that Blizzard can look Goldman and DB hedge fund managers in the face, who hold thousands of their shares, and basically admonish them for being curious about what YEAR this game will be released.
Once you go public, you have one boss: Your shareholders. There's a reason Act/Bliz stock has done nothing for a long time.
Calendar year 2011, not fiscal year.
Simple equation:
(July 1, 2011) <= (BETA START TIME) <= (Sept 30, 2011)
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I will say this.. the DHS is so amazingly behind the curve when it comes to "data tapping" it's mind-boggling. But yes, single-end-user targeted packet inspection can and has been viable for a loooong time..
But, I can also tell you that direct, indiscriminate packet sniffing has not been successfully deployed at the edge for two very simple reasons: One, a typical edge router is capable of 200Gbps to well beyond 1Tbps, and is generally at least 10:1 oversubscribed (meaning the routers run at least near capacity at all times).
Think about it.. it's hard enough just to forward all the packets coming into the router.. but in addition you want to duplicate each packet and store it on a server somewhere? It's not viable. Simply writing a script that can effectively filter that volume of data is just barely possible... and even if you could, there isn't a viable ways to store that volume of data.
Two, ISP's are very uptight and feature-poor when it comes to production-side innovation (i.e. doing something other than what the router can natively do). Very very few network engineers at <some ISP> have permissions to even log into their routers (for good reason). Even fewer would know what to do if they could. Of the ones that can, even fewer do anything other than the bare minimum to meet user performance requirements.
SP's typically use SNMP and/or Netflow for their accounting.. which is not nearly as granular as the features I showed here.
What this feature does is brilliantly and efficiently organize deep layer 7 packet inspection, providing hooks for not only monitoring and optimization in the asic (equals fast), but lean, efficient organization and storage of any/all accounting data using SNMP, FNF, etc.
The fact that this granularity is now being build into ROUTERS, is a very interesting topic to network geeks, and perhaps interesting to you. I mean, NBAR has been around for a while, but the list of applications supported is now pretty mind-blowing.
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I've been a software engineer for Cisco Systems for 6 years, so trust me when I say I'm informed. Among other things, I review customer deployment and solutions topologies...
To break things down:
At first I was like "Hey that's great! AT&T edge routers can optimize Quality of Service and Quality of Experience by classifying actual end-user application metrics!" Then I was like "Hey, this information, which is inextricably tied to IP and MAC address, can be requisitioned at ANY TIME by the department of homeland security! That's NOT-A-SO-GOOD!!"
Edit: Also removed some sass, cause I don't want a fight
Edit2: From this solution set, paired with other features, all your data usage, including how much bandwidth per APPLICATION (not per protocol) can be tied to your MAC/IP, and that data can (and will) be permanently stored on netflow/medianet/snmp servers.
I'm not trying to spread fear, I personally think this feature is great if used responsibly.. I just don't trust corporations to always act in the best interest of the general public.
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Make sense?
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XXXXX(config-cmap)#match protocol blizwow
XXXXX(config-cmap)#match protocol ?
applejuice ------------- Apple juice P2P file sharing
...
bb --------------------- Big Brother network monitoring tool
...
bittorrent ------------- bittorrent
...
blizwow ---------------- World of Warcraft Gaming Protocol
...
call-of-duty ----------- Call of duty online gaming
...
...
Basically what this means is, routers can match media traffic (there are hundreds of different sub-options under this command, I only listed 5). I'm not making any moral statements, this info is typically used to optimize network performance based on media-type, a very useful tool for service providers to improve your customer experience.. But of course there's a downside.. Just know the extent to which you're being watched, because each one of these match criteria can be configured to correlate to IP and MAC.
Edit: Modified original output to make it more readable since this forum doesn't accept multiple spaces.
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42
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As for the tooltip debate, it's a tooltip. It should be simple and basic. If the mathletes want to crunch numbers, they can do it on a notepad, their second monitor, or alt-tab. Totally agree with Bliz on this one.
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I can only hope
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hehehe. you almost got me
But you and I both know the reality of the matter.. Blizzard will be like "Hey we need another 2 months" ... But they need 2 "Blizzard months" which are represented by this simple formula:
1 unit Blizzard time == 1.82 units real human time
60 days * 1.82 == 111.6 days ~= 3 months and 22 days from an estimated Dec 15th 2011 release date == April 5th
Disclaimer: I neither endorse nor deny the release date estimate of April 5th, 2012. However, if the game is actually released on April 5th, get ready for the biggest shit-storm of I-told-you-so's in the history of human language.
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That's certainly a possibility, but I just can't see Blizzard saying "You know guys, if there were 17 additional days in 2011, we could release a D3 that meets our standards." 17 days doesn't make the kind of difference that warrants an external release-date delay. More likely, what they said was this:
"Well guys, we can either pull the trigger and release now, patch all the bugfixes in our backlog, and really hope the runestone deal works out.. or we can take another 2 months, really be sure, and confidently release a great product that will blow people away."
Here's what we have to remember: When Blizzard releases a title, they want to blow the entire gaming industry's mind all over their face. They want to build games that last for a decade, not a year. They look at Dice, Bethesda, Bioware, Infinity Ward, etc.. and say "That's not us."
Battlefield 3 knew that the timing of their release (i.e. beating MW3 to the punch) was just as important as the quality of their release. Blizzard just doesn't operate on the same planet.
When you're looking at product that will probably live for 10 years, adding fun to the lives of millions, what's another 2 months? I say do your thing Blizzard. I believe in you, and it's worth the wait. In their history they've never let me down. If I've been disappointed and frustrated throughout this process (believe me I have), it's the fault of my own expecations.
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Good point..
I will say, usually companies want to scale/stress test as far away from release as possible, to give them adequate reaction time to prepare for or fix scale issues that come out of the test.. but in reality that rarely happens.
As an aside, you'd be amazed how difficult it can be to get developers to even recognize the importance of scale testing. As a long-time QA lead, after more than one yelling match, the thing I learned was this: As a tester, you're breaking someone's brainchild. It's like telling a father that his son sucks at sports.. I've done both development and test.. as a developer, once my code was working at small scale, I was so stoked it was running, it's kind of like finishing a house of cards: you don't want anyone to blow on it for fear it'll collapse. But I always had this sinking feeling my code wouldn't hold up at scale, so subconsciously I just didn't want to see what the scale results even were. This kind of psychology is pretty common in the field.. I mean, most engineers tend to resemble angsty teenagers with something to prove
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First, how is the Beta going? I answer this a couple of ways:
1. There still seems to be a non-trivial number of severe/catastrophic bug reports coming in from beta players. This is based on my lurking the bug forums on bnet. These kinds of problems require a dev to:
a. reproduce
b. debug
c. troubleshoot
d. think up a fix
e. code the fix
f. code review the fix
g. unit test the fix
h. do a new build to smoke test the fix internally
i. release the fix in a new beta build
That process typically takes about 3 days minimum to a week or more (depending on severity and complexity).
I'd be surprised if all of those bugs have already been fixed internally, and simply haven't been patched into the beta yet. I can't be certain where they are in that process, but you can take rough guesses at bug backlog based on how many bugs are being filed. I'd say they're at least a month out on bugs, give or take. I'd be shocked if they could resolve all bugs in less than a month.
Now, as some of you have rightly pointed out, beta builds aren't necessarily representative of current dev build progress, but different companies handle this differently, and usually, the latest code is the most stable (assuming there is good sanity/smoke testing to handle bad code fixes). This may not be the case with Bliz, as it seems they have many parallel builds running simultaneously in order to test specific components individually.. but that means they still have to do integration test, which can shake out some serious issues.
2. They have been dealing with battle.net crashes, which might be minor, but are usually more serious infrastructure problems that can be difficult to root cause and troubleshoot.
3. They still haven't done very large scale/stress tests (from what I can tell) of their public game infrastructure (refer to the SW:TOR stress tests they did in their beta recently), which they stated as one of the primary reasons for the beta. So that tells me either they're having trouble getting the scale numbers they want, or they're dealing with lots of severe, system-test level bugs of high complexity, which take a while to fix, and may be blocking said boundary/stress tests.
Second, how much more time did they need when they pushed back the DEC 2011 date? This is different across companies. The company I work for has to push back internal dates all the time, but we very rarely push back external dates. (By the way, most software companies have internal deadlines that are weeks before the actual, committed external deadlines). When we push back internals, they are on the order of days or weeks, and on rare occasions, months. But when we have to push back external dates, it's usually because something major shifted (resources, change in business strategy, workforce reduction, etc) OR something fairly major is needed (i.e. re-writes, need to integrate more features for competitive reasons that aren't complete, etc).
In my view, Blizzard was going to have to make a lot of concessions on major features in order to meet a Dec 2011 deadline. When they finally said "No, let's get it right the first time and push the date back," that means they chose to really take the time to iterate, focus on quality, get the necessary re-writes done correctly, and get the product super-solid, so they wouldn't waste the first month of release patching an inferior product, all the while alienating a fan-base who's waited years for the game.
I think they made the right choice. I also think that making this choice bought them additional months, not additional days, from the original Dec 2011 push.
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You know what? you're right. No one can know anything, because all information might be untrue or misunderstood. Thanks for your contributions to this awesome thread. If you read that post carefully, you will see that a decision regarding runestones has not been made yet, which is evidence that supports my statement "They are not feature code complete." How can your code be finished if you haven't decided what features are going to be in your code yet? YOU CAN'T.
First off, there's no need to be rude.
Let me see if I understand your point correctly. When WoW was released, there was 19 days between release announcement and launch. Therefore, a January release is possible?
If that's your point, I absolutely agree. However, I'm not talking about what's possible, I'm talking about what's LIKELY. I personally believe it's HIGHLY unlikely that the game will launch in January, and I have both evidence and professional experience on which that opinion is based. Now, I don't know everything, and I will kindly (and happily) eat my words if my opinion is wrong.
There's plenty of information to back up my claims, just as there's plenty of info to back up yours. I just feel my bias should be represented alongside the others.
Frankly folks, take the hostility down a few notches, let's not bring our e-peens into this. I'm not pulling the "I'm a software engineer card" for for any other reason than the OP asked for the opinion of people who have worked in the industry.
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Common sense, mainly.
This quote was made by bash 6 days ago:
"We actually have moved on from the previously discussed unattuned system. We've been trying many different ideas out, but we're not quite comfortable enough with any of them yet to invite you in and see what you think.
Let me also say that the old system wasn't broken, per-se, it just had a few issues we thought we could resolve. Runestones are a huge part of Diablo III, and we think it's worth trying out some alternatives and see if we can't improve it. But if all of our experiments fail we can easily go back to the original system, and it will still be totally awesome."
The many bug reports regarding the RMAH is also a hint.
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You're funny.