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Okay, firstly, the weather appears to be on the turn, but in London we've just had one of the brightest, hottest weekends of the summer. Now, it may not matter to a lot of people – especially in our increasingly windowless, social-netfraping, Warcraft-'I-can-live-in-another-reality-as-a-Dwarf-lord'-world – but the environment in which we listen to different types of music seems to me to be pretty crucial. There's music that'll sit right during a sunny day, or late at night in a packed club. Strolling to the park this weekend to lay in the grass and watch the world go by, but also compelled by the enigmatic rulers of DiS to listen to How To Dress Well's new record, I desperately want to tell the album's seemingly inconsolable creator, Tom Krell, to share a warm can of Tyskie with me and lighten the fuck up.
What possessed Weird World to release the avant-garde songwriter/producer's second LP, Total Loss, at the end of summer? First track 'When I Was In Trouble' opens with what sounds like a downpour in the background, interspersed with rumbling thunder, while a look at some of the other track names lets you know what else you're in for: 'Cold Nites'; 'Struggle'; 'Running Back'. This music – haunting minimalist electro-r&b – should be experienced in the dead of night, lights off, alone in the darkness. Its pale skin must never be touched by the warming, cheering fingers of sunshine. It must never see the light of day. I've learnt that the hard way.
Fortunately, it's 3am right now on a Monday morning and I have to be up in four hours and I'm wondering if several of the things I did this weekend were good ideas. Krell's fragile falsetto wavering over muffled percussion, spare melodies, and eerie samples, is oddly comforting in exactly the way that some of the most depressing music will comfort you when you're wallowing.
I should concede that I might need more time with Total Loss (though iTunes tells me I'm on my twelfth listen), because thus far it seems incapable of competing with 2010's Love Remains. That collection of heartbroken suicide letters was overwhelming in its tender bleakness, its devastating candour. Although austere r&b is the 'in' thing nowadays (see The Weeknd, Frank Ocean), Love Remains was unlike anything else around, a mystical distillation of broad influences and samples, a self-contained world – disturbing at times in its darkness, but astounding in its realness. I came back to it again and again, submitting each time before its wretched wasteland because whenever I stooped down to pick at the charred soil I found beneath it a fertility of emotion, endless fragments of ideas.
Total Loss isn't weaker in any single sense, but I'm not sure it if it builds on its predecessor either. There're the monstrous bass drums – one of the album's bedrocks – and shattered snares, along with greater clarity to the keyboards, and the occasional use of real strings, notably on 'World I Need You, Won't Be Without You', recalling the 2011 EP, Just Once. But it'd maybe be nice to see such an experimental artist deviate more from his admittedly unique sound.
Vacillating comparisons aside, there's a delicacy, a deftness of touch throughout Total Loss that's wondrous. Every syllable, every echo seems designed to convey a particular shade of feeling. Struggle is a highlight, opening with a distant, muttered vocal, before dramatic keys arrive along with tribal drums, all gathering towards a dub-stepping rave-y finale, as more and more layers of percussion rise. Then there's the intensely pleasurable '& It Was U', Krell duetting with himself like a slightly psychotic diva plied with helium over nothing but drums; the playfulness of this song is a glimpse of redemption, and the album is peppered with them, if not overtaken by them. When we get to closer 'Ocean Floor For Everything', it sounds like the minutes just before sunrise; all is quiet and tremulous, but there's expectation in the air, promise in the hints of first light. Perhaps Total Loss is as much about learning to let go as it is about giving way to absolute despair. Both are arguably prerequisites for moving on. They say the night is darkest just before dawn, right?
Knowing this (or, erm, suspecting it), doesn't mean I'll be listening to How To Dress Well in the park any time soon – I've learnt my lesson – but I never really understood the big draw with sunshine anyway. Besides, there'll be thunderstorms this week, after which it's a steady nosedive into a desolate winter that'll freeze all hope until well into 2013 (especially if that fucker Romney wins). Total Loss gets my vote for soundtracking it.
8Darren Loucaides's Score


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Mariah Carey Hopes Kim Kardashian Dumps Kanye West So She Can Date Him?
December 16th, 2019
Kanye West was born in Atlanta on June 8, 1977. Following his parents' divorce when he was three, he moved with his mother to Chicago, where she worked as an academic before eventually becoming his manager.
West's lifelong interest in the arts led him to the hip-hop community and, after dropping out of college, he began working behind-the-scenes as a producer for a number of stars, including Jay Z, who would go on to become his biggest collaborator and one of his closest friends. West had his own musical breakout with his 2004 album, "The College Dropout," which received 10 Grammy nominations. He released his second album, "Late Registration," the very next year, featuring the monster hit "Gold Digger." In 2007 and 2008 came two more records, "Graduation" and "808s & Heartbreak." In 2010 there was "My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, and 2011 brought a joint album with Jay Z called "Watch The Throne." "The Life of Pablo," West's seventh album, was released in 2016, featuring the massive hit "Famous."
As his music career took off, West also explored his interest in design, and started his own fashion label. He also made a name for himself as one of the industry's most outspoken stars, with infamous moments including his "George Bush doesn't care about black people" comment during the 2005 Hurricane Katrina relief telethon, and crashing Taylor Swift's VMAs acceptance in 2009. On-stage rants have almost become a staple of West's concert tours, and his aggressive personality has led to conflicts with the paparazzi, as well as some legal trouble. He has also experienced tragedy, with the 2007 death of his mom following surgery complications.
After relationships with Alexis Phifer, to whom he was engaged, and Amber Rose, he began dating longtime friend Kim Kardashian in 2012. They welcomed a daughter, North, in 2013, a few months before he proposed, and a son, Saint, in 2015. The couple, known in the media as "Kimye," tied the knot in Florence, Italy in 2014.
In November 2016, West abruptly cancelled the remainder of his "Saint Pablo" tour and was later hospitalized in Los Angeles for psychiatric evaluation. According to medical professionals, the rapper had gone into a state of "temporary psychosis," and had been suffering from sleep deprivation and exhaustion. He was released from hospital a week later, and continued to recover at home. A number of celebrities voiced their support for the rapper.
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subset: commoncrawl


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Super Cobalt Straight Shank Long Drills with heavy duty construction. Used for drilling very high tensile material. Made to AISI M42 / 8% Cobalt. Made in 2mm to 13mm sizes. British made excellent 1st quality to DIN340RN
Click on Cobalt Long Drills Metric to buy all sizes from 2mm to 13mm
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Being absolutely fastidious about where things go, labeling everything clearly, and getting upset when they are missing from their allotted space will quickly get you an obsessive-compulsive disorder diagnosis. But in a warehouse, all this is good, in fact, very good.
Warehouses thrive on order. They must have defined locations for the items they stock and it makes their operations productive. Such locations are picked after careful consideration and depend on various factors such as:
- Item's physical attributes (length, width, weight, volume, orientation, and co-location constraints). Physical dimensions determine feasibility of the location for stocking the item and co-location constraints determine if the item's neighbors will play well with it.
- Item's handling attributes determine how this item will be moved to this location and later picked for shipping. Does it need a forklift, a hand-truck, or simply a cart? Can a person handle it without physical strain or does it require some kind of lifting assistance? These attributes also limit the number of locations that are suitable for the item under consideration and help determine where it will stay in the warehouse.
- Item's demand attributes, like the volume and velocity of demand also affect the best storage locations for the item. High velocity items are desirable to be kept in most accessible locations and so on.
But having a location defined for all items in the warehouse is simply a start. Change in item demand from season to season, discontinuation of old items and introduction of new items, changes in item packaging, changes in their handling attributes or their co-location constraints, inclusion in promotions or store clearance, and other similar changes affect the optimal item locations. These changes require can result in less-than-optimized item locations over time. As the item locations become suboptimal, they start affecting warehouse operations and efficiency.
Slotting applications ensure that item-locations in a warehouse are always optimized for their operations. Slotting is the science of placing the products inside the warehouse. In all warehouses, there are bound to be locations that are closer to the receiving or shipping docks, convenient to access or easier to reach. As the number of such locations is relatively fixed, it would make sense to utilize them for products with the highest velocities or manual touch points. Slotting applications determine the best placement of products in the warehouse based on different product attributes mentioned earlier.
Slotting applications can continuously slot the warehouse so that the routine warehouse activities of receiving, putting-away, picking, and shipping continuously result into an optimally slotted warehouse as the demand patterns change. Alternately, slotting can be run at pre-determined intervals or when seasons or demand patterns change. These slotting runs will then produce a new set of optimized item locations and a set of warehouse move tasks to execute. Some of the applications are capable of doing a cost-analysis to suggest if the cost of moves is more or less than the expected efficiency gains.
Slotting not only helps maintain operational efficiency in the warehouse, it also helps in maximizing the warehouse cube for storage. With emphasis on online retail channels that must cater to individual order fulfillment, slotting provides a substantial opportunity to retailers of all sizes to enhance their warehousing efficiency. For a more complete discussion on warehouse efficiencies, you can read this article.
© Vivek Sehgal, 2010, All Rights Reserved.
Want to know more about supply chain processes? How they work and what they afford? Check out my book on Enterprise Supply Chain Management at Amazon. You will find every supply chain function described in simple language that makes sense, as well as see its relationship to other functions.


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Books, DVDs and CDs
Featured Publications
Maezumi Roshi Archive
ZCLA Legacy
Dairyuzan Busshinji, Great Dragon Mountain Buddha Essence Temple
The book ZCLA Legacy is a tribute to the Venerable Koun Taizan Maezumi, Roshi, and his legacy as the founding abbot of Zen Center of Los Angeles. Photographs from the ZCLA archives, many of which have not been seen by a new generation of practitioners, capture his life and work in establishing Zen Buddhism in the West. The photos, together with a brief text, provide an intimate portrait of Maezumi Roshi's teachers, family, and life's work, and the temple and teaching lineage of ZCLA. The book was produced on the occasion of the founding of ZCLA's Legacy Circle in 2009.
To preview and order click here.
By the end of March the book will be available in the ZCLA bookstore, so you can save the shipping costs.
Your Life: The Essence of Zen Practice
Experience his "brilliant, simple, infinitely subtle appreciation of this precious life" and the unique teaching style that drew thousands of Dharma students to him.
We have more items for sale at our Online Store!


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CRESTVIEW � Led by Roman Donofro's two-hit shutout the Crestview High School baseball team rolled to a 10-0 win over Harrison County Kent., on Monday. The game was called in the sixth inning on the 10-run rule as the Bulldogs rolled to their sixth-consecutive win.
CRESTVIEW � Led by Roman Donofro's two-hit shutout the Crestview High School baseball team rolled to a 10-0 win over Harrison County Kent., on Monday.
The game was called in the sixth inning on the 10-run rule as the Bulldogs rolled to their sixth-consecutive win.
Donofro had the batters from the Blue Grass State singing the Blues as he struck out 10 in picking up the complete game win. The Thoroughbreds managed just five base runners on two hits, a walk a hit batter and a Bulldog error.
Crestview (14-4) provided Donofro with all the run support he would need with a three-run first inning.
Seth Thomason, who went 2-for-3 with a double, triple, two runs scored and three runs batted in, had the big blow of the inning. Thomason delivered a two-run double to score Tyler Henderson and Corey Armstrong.
Thomason scored on an Austin Armstrong base hit.
"Would put together some good at bats," Bulldog coach Tim Gillis said. "We had some RBI opportunities and took advantage of them and that's really the name of the game. We've been swinging the bats well the last week or so and I thought we continued that tonight.
"Roman was very good tonight. He was sharp and he's been good all year."
Crestview might have done more damage if Dakota Dean had not been thrown out at home plate for the first out of the inning as Corey Armstrong reached on a fielder's choice.
When the Bulldogs added a run in the seconds inning as Tate Sweatt reached on an error and scored on a Hunter Sullivan single, Harrison County starting pitcher Jordan Martin was done for the night, but not before picking up the loss.
The Bulldogs made it 6-0 with two runs in the third inning. Hunter Willis had a two-run single scoring Justin Rebholz and courtesy runner P.J. Grainger.
Corey Armstrong was hit by a pitch to lead off the Bulldog fourth and scored on Thomason's triple. Thomason scored as Austin Armstrong grounded out to short stop for the inning.
Gillis went to his bench in the fifth and sixth innings bringing in pinch-hitters for every batter.
Corbin Carroll led of the sixth with a single up the middle and moved to third on a Preston Bass double. Carroll scored on a Drew Graham groundout and Bass scored on a wild pitch to end the game.
Gillis hopes the Bulldogs will be able to keep the momentum as they prepare for the district tournament that starts April 22.
"We have to keep pressing and get focused in on what is going to happen in three weeks," he said. "Every day is a process to get to that point. It's going to be a war in the district tournament and we want to play every game like it's a playoff atmosphere for us.
"We wanted to get on a good roll. We didn't play too well at Fort Walton Beach a few weeks ago and I challenged them the next day at practice and they really answered the bell and rallied together as a group and that's what it takes. We've got a long way to go, and we want to keep staying positive and keep getting better and that's the name of the game."
Randy Dickson is the Crestview News Bulletin�s sports editor. Email him at email@example.com, tweet him @BigRandle, or call 682-6524.


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One of the conditions which must be satisfied for a will to be valid is that the person making it must be of sound mind. With an ageing population, cases involving disputes over a testator's mental capacity are becoming more common – it is estimated that up to two million people in the UK suffer from some form of dementia or brain injury.
Case law developments in this area and legislation in the form of the Mental Capacity Act 2005 have led the Law Society and the British Medical Association to develop new guidelines to assist doctors and lawyers to assess mental capacity. It is a useful guide for anyone who has to care for or is responsible for someone whose mental capacity is in doubt.
The guide can be purchased from the Law Society or from a number of online booksellers although, at £39.95, you might prefer to wait until a copy finds its way to your local reference library. For free information see the Department of Health website.
The bar for a successful challenge to a will on the gorund of a lack of mental capacity is set high. Cases in 2013 and 2014 made it clear that recurrent mental illness (schizophrenia) and being 'grief stricken' do not necessarily mean that a testator lacks the mental capacity to make a valid will.


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Elements Of Style
A Designer Disappointment
My dad sent me this article from the New York Times yesterday and to say it disappointed me is an understatement. Take a read and then lets discuss….
You see Thompson, CT is a very near and dear town to me. It abuts the town my parents' home is in and is the town in which I married my husband (at the Lord Thompson Manor , which was so amazing that two of our friends married there after us!). There is a gorgeous, albeit small, main street where some truly stunning historic homes stand and this, my friends, is where we pick up on our story.
As a designer- interior, architectural or the like-we are taught to not only love homes but live, sleep, eat and breathe them. They are the medium in which we express our artistic talents and the canvas upon which we make our mark. To find out that a designer, never mind an incredibly FAMOUS designer, would treat a historic home with such disdain, such negligence, disgusts me. He is incredibly successful and has the means to restore this property to it's historic glory, but if that doesn't interest him he should simply sell it to someone who does want to. To hang onto it and let it rot just because "he can" and thinks "no one should be able to tell him otherwise" is repulsive and against everything a designer should stand for. To allow it to fall into ruin, have it affect an entire town and specifically his neighbor's property values all while becoming an eyesore in a totally charming town is quite possibly the most unflattering display of ego I've ever heard of in this business. To allow it to be demolished is thumbing his nose at history AND his own industry. And finally, to threaten to "sell it to a funeral parlor" just to piss off the neighbors proves this man is frankly, a total asshole. Who would trust their home to a designer so cavalier, rude and self-centered with no appreciation for architecture or other people?
I for one have signed the petition to save this gorgeous piece of history from demolition and send Mr. Buatta a message- GET OVER YOURSELF. I hope you will too and share this story with others. It's yet another example of the fact that money can't buy you everything, least of all CLASS.


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Planning for Healthy Travel: CDC Travelers' Health Website and Mobile Applications
Travelers' Health Website
The CDC Travelers' Health website (www.cdc.gov/travel) offers destination-specific vaccine and travel health recommendations, travel notices, help with finding a travel medicine provider, and other resources for travelers and clinicians. The home page (Figure 1-1) includes separate portals for travelers and clinicians. Users can also select special populations (such as "traveling with children" or "immune-compromised travelers") to receive customized health recommendations.
Destination Pages
The most popular feature of the Travelers' Health website are the "destination pages," each with a clinician and traveler view. Destination pages provide health recommendations for a particular destination and include the following information:
- Vaccine and medicine recommendations
- Patient counseling information (called "Stay Healthy and Safe" on the destination pages and includes information on preventing foodborne and vectorborne disease and avoiding injuries)
- Healthy travel packing list
- Travel health notices
- Post-travel health information
Information Centers
Resources for clinicians (wwwnc.cdc.gov/travel/page/clinician-information-center) includes clinical updates on travel medicine–related topics and continuing education courses on travel medicine.
Resources for travelers (http://wwwnc.cdc.gov/travel/page/resources-for-travelers) provides printable fact sheets that cover over 40 travel health topics written in plain language for the international traveler. Topics include travel health insurance, jet lag, motion sickness, cruise ship travel, and travel to high altitudes.
Resources for the travel industry (wwwnc.cdc.gov/travel/page/travel-industry-information-center) contains guidelines for the air travel and cruise ship industries. It includes information on reporting illnesses and deaths among travelers, managing ill crew members, and other guidance.
Disease Directory
The disease directory (wwwnc.cdc.gov/travel/diseases) is a list of diseases that may be related to travel. It provides a resource on rare as well as common infections, the risk to travelers, and what travelers can do to prevent them.
Travel Notices
CDC posts travel health notices about disease outbreaks and international events (such as natural disasters or mass gatherings) that may affect the health of travelers. The notices include information about what the situation or health risk is, who is affected, how travelers can protect their health, and links for more information. Travel health notices and information about travel notice categories can be found at wwwnc.cdc.gov/travel/notices.
Mobile Applications
CDC has developed 2 mobile applications for travelers, Can I Eat This? and TravWell , in addition to the mobile version of the Yellow Book. All are available for iOS and Android devices and can be accessed from wwwnc.cdc.gov/travel/page/apps-about.
Can I Eat This?
CDC's Can I Eat This? application helps international travelers avoid travelers' diarrhea by guiding their food and drink choices. Travelers select the country they are in and answer a few simple questions about what they are eating or drinking, and the application will tell them whether it is likely to be safe. In addition to helping guide their on-the-spot decisions, Can I Eat This? also teaches travelers general principles regarding safe food and water. All recommendations are stored locally on the user's device, so no international data connection is needed to use the application when traveling.
CDC's TravWell is a companion application to the Travelers' Health destination pages. It allows users to build an itinerary and receive destination-specific vaccine and medicine recommendations. For each itinerary, it also generates a customizable, destination-specific to-do list and packing list. TravWell also prompts users to set reminders for healthy behaviors, such as taking malaria prophylaxis or getting booster doses of vaccines. It also provides users with a place to store electronic copies of health-related travel documents, such as prescriptions or vaccination records.
Ronnie Henry


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Understanding your users' physical footprints — where they shop, live or search for competing products — is difficult, but it's imperative to creating great experiences. Adobe Experience Platform Location Service gives you that insight, so you can create richer user profiles that fuse the digital and physical worlds.
Micro and macro location insights.
Get deep insight into customer location information, whether they're at a local shop or in a given region.
Get consistent real-time updates.
Keep a constant eye on customer locations with geo-tracking working even when your app is in the background.
Keep track of movement.
Stay in the loop at all times and set triggers for whenever a customer enters or exits a given geo-fence.
Make life easier with automation.
Leave the manual work behind and use a central location database to add locations — including competing locations — automatically.
Knowing both the digital and physical behaviour of your customers has never been easier. Experience Platform Location Service makes location data ubiquitous across Adobe Experience Cloud. It harnesses location signals and sensor data points, which lets you design and deliver relevant experiences. Because when you know where your customers are and how they're interacting with you, you know exactly what experience to deliver.
Manage geo-fences in the new API-driven places library database.
Provide out-of-the-box monitoring of users' location even when the app is in the background. You can also monitor your own code.
Map a user's location with the places database.
Use the SDK's rules engine to make location data available for real-time mobile experiences — available on the client. Also, send data where it's needed.
Deliver the right message or experience to users in real time at the instant it's relevant to them and where they are.
Target messages and experiences to their users based on their historical interactions with places.
Gain deeper insights into users by analysing their physical behaviour.
Attribute successful conversions of campaigns with a call to action to visit a physical location.


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Details About the Potomac Valley AAU District
The Potomac Valley District of the
Amateur Athletics Union
("AAU") was first organized on October 15, 1929. It includes all territories within the:
District of Columbia
Counties of Montgomery and Prince George's in the State of Maryland; and
Counties of Arlington and Fairfax along with the cities of Alexandria and Falls Church in the Commonwealth of Virginia.
The Potomac Valley District of the A.A.U. was first organized on October 15, 1929. The Potomac Valley District was re-aligned December 1968. It was formerly the District of Columbia District; it was renamed December 1972.
Potomac Valley District Managed by Board of Managers
The Potomac Valley District has a "Board of Managers" that is responsible for overseeing and managing all aspects of all the different sports in the Potomac Valley District, including all aspects of individual sports organizations and individuals that are members of the Potomac Valley District.
Girls' Basketball Committee Manages Potomac Valley AAU Girls' Basketball
In accordance wtih AAU rules, the Potomac Valley District has created a Girls' Basketball Committee to directly manage the affairs of girls' basketball in the District.
Jim Butler, Executive Director of the
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text:
This module implements a "flattened" data structure for Blast hits, as opposed to the hierarchical structure in Bio.Alignment.BlastData.
The flat data type is useful in many cases where it is more natural to see the result as a set of rows (e.g. for insertaion in a database).
It would probably be more (memory-) efficient to go the other way (i.e. from flat to hierarchical), as passing the current, partially built BlastFlat object down the stream of results and stamping out a stream of completed ones. (See Bio.Alignment.BlastXML.breaks for this week's most cumbersome use of parallelism to avoid the memory issue.)
|The BlastFlat data type
|Read XML format
|Convert from hierarchical to flat structure
|Convert BlastRecords into BlastFlats (representing a depth-first traversal of the BlastRecord structure.)
|Re-exports from the hierarchical module (Bio.Alignment.BlastData)
|Produced by Haddock version 2.4.2


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text:
Investigation of the pharyngeal aerodynamics characteristics in OSA patients
Search Medline for
|April 4, 2012
The purposes of this research were to compare the differences of pharyngeal aerodynamics characteristics between normal people and OSA patients and to explore the contributing effect of total nasal airway resistance to the pathophysiology of OSA patients.
A prospective research was designed to investigate the alteration of pharyngeal aerodynamics characteristics in 60 OSA patients by comparing with 60 normal people with the method of CFD. The indices of total nasal airway resistance, average pressure and average velocity in cross sectional plane in pharyngeal cavity would be extracted from numerical analysis and compared between normal people and OSA patients.The indices of average pressure and average velocity in three transverse cross-sectional planes were extracted for analysis with the method of CFD, and the correlation analysis between nasal resistance and average pressure in pharyngeal cavity was implemented too. The results showed that the negative pressure in pharyngeal cavity was significantly higher in OSA patients and the total nasal airway resistance correlated well with average pressure in three consecutive transverse cross-sectional planes in pharyngeal cavity. The increased negative pressure in pharyngeal cavity contributed to the increased collapsibility in OSA patients to some level. The good correlation implicated that the nose acted as a predisposing factor for the pathogenesis of OSA.


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Grae's Rating:
Can't say "expendable" without "duh"
In 2010, The Expendables left more unanswered questions than The Tree of Life, causing the entire world to beg, plead, and bargain with Sylvester Stallone to give us a second one. Oh, wait. That's not true at all. It was a full-scale action epic that did next to no work outside pyrotechnics to make you love the characters, because you already love them. And it turns out that "Sly" is a more appropriate nickname than we ever thought, because his plan worked so well he's back again, this time with even more action stars you didn't even know you missed. But you did.
There's so much muscle in this movie that it leaves room for barely anything else, which is fine, as long as you don't think too hard about it. We didn't go to see Bruce Willis, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Terry Crews, Randy Couture, Jet Li and Jason Statham stir our intellects, did we? Nah. The new additions to the movie include Liam Hemsworth as Billy the Kid, Chuck Norris as the Lone Wolf, and Jean Claude Van Damme as Jean Vilain (who makes this movie finally feel like a real assembly of badasses). There are tons of gross kills, tanks rolling over people, walls getting knocked down, gunfire and knifework. But past the post-modern chuckles of conservative ex-governor Arnold ripping the door off a Smart Car, they really skimped on anything resembling even the simplest kind of story that made these guys stars in the first place.
Mr. Church (Willis) forces Barney (Stallone) and his rag-tag band of misfits to do an easy job that turns out to be more than they bargained for. When Jean Vilain and his baddies intercept the important thing Church was really after, he slashes some throats and takes off. The Expendables have to follow him, because it's literally in their contracts. Along the way, they're getting chased while trying to find Vilain. There's a complete lack of double-crossing and complications--they pretty much just seek the bad guys and find them. You never worry about them not achieving the goal.
There are a couple of things that yanked me out of the movie faster than you could say "I'll be back." One of the reasons we even got this sequel is that the first film did well money-wise, and 40% of its audience was female. So why would they make choices in the sequel that seem really misogynistic? I'm never one to cry "sexist," but having an all-female town of vigilantes who can't shoot to save their lives is a little puzzling. Yes, haters, I get why it's funny and I chuckled. But combined with the fact that Maggie (Nan Yu) does very little except ask Sylvester Stallone about his feelings a lot (to contribute to the paper-thin character development we already discussed that we don't need), my head cocked quizzically to one side.
And speaking of quizzical looks, my eyebrow now has a permanent arch having now listened to almost every character quoting their famous films, or someone else doing it for them. It's like when your grandmother says "Those are totes dope" when she's talking about your new Nikes in front of your first boyfriend. We could have used exactly five less of those references…all except the Chuck Norris one. Because we all know we can't get enough of those. Like how Chuck Norris isn't going to wait for the box office reports, he's just going to go stare at a movie theater and the worldwide revenues will grow out of sheer fright.
Movies.com Critic
Pass the death, hold the jokes.
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51 out of 100 Metascore®
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Nothing mediocre about this medium.
Valley of the Dolls with Firepower?
Just shy of a landslide.
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The future of sports car racing in North America became apparent earlier this year when its two premiere series – the American Le Mans Series and the Grand-Am Series – announced their merger for the 2014 season.
What isn't as clear is whether Long Beach will be part of that future. The new partnership between once-rival series, to be called United SportsCar cqRacing, hasn't released its schedule for the 2014 campaign. While the endurance races at Daytona, Sebring and Atlanta will certainly be part of next year's schedule, the rest of the events are still being negotiated.
"We certainly hope so," ALMS CEO Scott Atherton said when asked if United SportsCar Racing would return for the 2014 Toyota Grand Prix of Long Beach.
ALMS has run as part of the Grand Prix weekend since 2007, and it's become very popular with fans who enjoy the tight, competitive racing and daring passes. "When you look at the manufacturers and sponsors involved in ALMS – Corvette, Ferrari, Porsche, Audi, BMW – the Southern California market for all of them is either No. 1 or No. 2 in the United States. – Sports car culture and Southern California go hand-in-glove.
"It's a very important market for us," Atherton continued. "We've had many years of success there."
Atherton said the 2014 schedule – as well as television details and title sponsorship – should be finalized by June or July, and will include between 10 and 12 events. That's fewer than either ALMS or Grand-Am are running this season, but the unified series will mean the endurance races at Daytona (previously a Grand-Am event), Sebring and Atlanta (both ALMS) will be available to all teams and drivers.
"For far too long, sports car racing at the professional level has been too fragmented," Atherton said. "For 14 years, (ALMS and Grand-Am) survived but neither was truly thriving. We were splitting the tracks, forcing (teams and drivers) to make a choice. By bringing it all together, we've eliminated that forced choice."
Grand Prix Association president Jim Michaelian said many fans like the fact that cars racing in most ALMS classes aren't that far removed from showroom models available to them.
"They're aspirational cars," Michaelian said. "That's what people enjoy watching on the track. Obviously, sports cars are an important part of the nature of the Southern California fan."
When the series come together next season, the International Motor Sports Association (IMSA) will be the sanctioning body. In previous years, IMSA sanctioned ALMS while NASCAR owned and sanctioned Grand-Am. Atherton said NASCAR's role in the new series would be that of "the enabler," helping with administration, marketing, technology and broadcasting, among others.
"NASCAR provides an infrastructure of immense and unprecedented value," Atherton said.
The class structure of USR will include P (Prototype), PC (Prototype Challenge), GTLM (GT Le Mans), GT Daytona and GX. The Prototype class will include current LMP2 and Delta Wing cars from ALMS, and the Daytona Prototype from Grand-Am. Atherton acknowledged that adjustments would have to be made to make the cars competitive – either slowing down the current ALMS cars or speeding up the Grand-Ams – but not much tweaking would be needed. As they run now, P2 cars have more downforce while the Daytona Prototypes have more horsepower.
The new series will not include the LMP1 class, however. While being ALMS' fastest and most technically advanced class, LMP1 is also its most expensive and has the smallest roster. Typically, between four and six cars line up at each venue.
Bob Faieta is an ALMS GT Challenge driver and team owner who seems positive about the new partnership, especially if it will help streamline schedules and travel.
"You won't have two separate series running all over the place, competing with each other," the Competition Motorsports owner said.


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Patch 5.4 brought us the Timeless Isle, which is a new approach to providing content. Rather than a bunch of daily quests to lead you around the island by the nose, it went for a very open-world, sandbox-y approach. While there are a few quests to get you started, and a handful of daily or weekly quests you can do, the majority of the achievements and other things to do on the island are uncharted. You wander around and explore until you stumble across something cool. It's a really interesting way to approach new content, and quite the reversal from the daily-heavy introduction we had to the Mists expansion. And frankly, on paper it looks like a lot of fun, and I was looking forward to it.
But, as it turns out, stuff that looks good on paper doesn't always work.
Because in reality, I've had a miserable time on the Timeless Isle so far. There have been spotty moments of fun and the occasional neat experience. But the vast majority has been a frustrating experience that encourages me to avoid the new content rather than experience it.
And I'm not even talking about the ludicrous reputation grind that Emperor Shaohao represents. While I feel that reputation grind was a bit silly and poorly planned, it's a minor footnote, not a major irritation. Sure, it's annoying, but it's also completely optional and not designed to be a 3- or 4-week grind; it's an "insane"-style long-term goal, which is fine since it's only awarding vanity stuff.
Nor am I complaining about the inconsistency of gear acquisition for alts. It is annoying that Burdens of Eternity, which are scarce enough as-is, aren't account-bound. The four I've found on Theck are rotting in the bank because I have nothing to use them on, which is a shame. But I see the intent, even if I disagree with the execution: they want you to play your alt in order to gear it. Unfortunately, the reputation grind and achievements on the Isle encourage you to focus on your main if you're working with limited play time, so the achievements and reputation work at cross purposes to the alt-gearing mechanisms. And all of that misses the larger issue that's preventing many people from raiding on alts, which is the legendary cloak quest line. But while all of that is annoying, it's not my major gripe about the Isle.
Because this post isn't actually complaining about the Isle's content. As I said earlier, I think the content itself is pretty solid. The problem is that the Timeless Isle exposes one of the core weaknesses of World of Warcraft: World PvP.
Rotten Core
Now, before we go too far down this rabbit hole, let's be completely clear about that pronouncement. First, I'm a total carebear in WoW. And despite that, I've been on PvP servers during my entire WoW career. I would probably choose to play on a PvE server if it were up to me, but it's always turned out that the people I want to play with wanted to be on a PvP server, so I've quietly shrugged and accepted the consequences of those decisions. Living on a PvP server does means getting ganked once in a while, but the upside is that once in a while you get to do the ganking.
And to be fair, it's not like I'm a pacifist. I played a fair amount of more competitive games in college (CounterStrike, Enemy Territory, Starctaft, WC2: BNE, and Diablo II PvP, just to name a few). I "get" the mindset of wanting to have spontaneous conflict. And I have fond memories of PvP in the early days of Vanilla WoW. But as I've gotten older, I've found that I value my time more and more because I always seem to have less and less of it. If I log on and want to make some PvE progress, and get held up for 30 minutes because "PvP happened," it just starts to feel frustrating and no longer fun.
But even given all of that, world PvP can be interesting, and traditionally WoW has been one of the better games about keeping it interesting. I still remember the epic battles between Southshore and Tarren Mill back before Battlegrounds existed. Those could be incredibly fun, as could chance one-on-one encounters while leveling or questing. So this isn't me complaining that open-world PvP can't co-exist with PvE in the same game, because it demonstrably can, and first few expansions of WoW are one of the best examples of that.
No, the core weakness I speak of isn't that World PvP exists. It's that WoW's PvP servers have a critical and fundamental failure mode that manifests itself over a sufficiently long period of time. To illustrate that failure mode, let's take a walk down memory lane.
Story Time
In the beginning, there was Vanilla WoW. And a rag-tag group of veteran Diablo II players decided to create a WoW guild. I was one of those players, and my group of friends decided to choose a PvP server under the assumption that there wouldn't be a lot to do at max level other than world PvP (boy were we wrong!). We landed on Blackrock Alliance (chosen somewhat randomly from amongst the PvP server list) and started our WoW careers.
Blackrock was fairly well balanced during the first few years of WoW. It was a high-population server (often with nightly queues that made raiding difficult), but the population was fairly well distributed amongst Alliance and Horde. Keep in mind that at this point in time, there were no server transfers. If you wanted to move to another server, you had to roll a brand new character there. You also weren't allowed to have a character on both factions of a PvP server at that time. Both of those made the concept of "Character Mobility" essentially moot, because there literally was none.
The faction balance persisted pretty well throughout the Burning Crusade and the majority of the Wrath of the Lich King. Or at least, I don't remember a time when Alliance felt massively outnumbered in world PvP or PvE content. If there was some slight balance drift, it was small enough to not be noticeable, likely in large part due to the lack of character mobility. Character server transfers became a "thing" in 2006, but for some reason it didn't cause any sort of severe imbalance. It could be that the 6-month lockout period and $25 fee had a chilling effect that kept things stable, or it could just be pure luck given that other servers had already succumbed to severe faction imbalance.
Either way, near the end of Wrath of the Lich King, things changed. A guild named Adept, who was ranked world #2 at the time according to WoWprogress, transferred to horde side on Blackrock. This was the metaphorical straw that broke the camel's back, tipping the first domino as it were. Horde already had several strong, competitive raiding guilds at that point, and the addition of Adept just made that faction even more appealing. Ambitious raiders (or would-be raiders) flocked from Alliance to Horde, figuring that their chance of getting into a strong raid team (even if it wasn't Adept) was much higher just due to the higher concentration of serious players.
By the end of Wrath, Blackrock was already starting the downward spiral into a single-faction server. Leveling in Cataclysm was frustrating because for every Alliance at a quest-giver, there were 3-5 Horde. It was very difficult to level outside of dungeons unless you got ahead of the pack by starting at midnight or stayed behind the pack by starting significantly later. It was a really good thing (for me) that Cataclysm didn't encourage open-world play very much, because Stormwind was one of the few places in which you wouldn't get ganked every 10-15 minutes (in this case, I use "ganking" to mean "overwhelmed by horde").
Leveling in MoP was similarly frustrating, because by this point the ratio had tipped to 10:1 or higher in favor of Horde. My guild was literally one of the only raiding guilds left on Alliance. Between recruitment issues, the difficulty of leveling from 85-90, and the increased focus on open-world content in Mists, we agreed that we'd quit in frustration if we had to continue to play on Blackrock.
So after the first week of Mists, we transferred. A large portion of the guild still wanted the flavor and atmosphere of a PvP server. So we chose Tichondrius based on a few criteria, the foremost of which was that it had a roughly equal (though slightly Alliance-leaning) faction balance. And for the first month or two, things were pretty good. I can't imagine doing those Golden Lotus dailies on Blackrock, but on Tichondrius it was pretty painless. There were enough of both Horde and Alliance in the zone that it felt like a proper PvP server – that feeling of uneasy truce that spontaneously erupts into world PvP once in a while.
Sadly, it wasn't to last. Unbeknownst to us, a large chunk of the active PvP players on Alliance had decided to switch to Horde in early Mists. And that tipped the scales just enough to start the same sort of population shift that occurred on Blackrock. Throughout patches 5.1 and 5.2, the Alliance population steadily dwindled while the Horde population grew. Doing dailies on the Isle of Thunder became more and more difficult as we became more and more outnumbered. The focus shifted from worrying about stomping 75 roaches to worrying about dodging the roving bands of 5-10 Horde indiscriminately killing any Alliance players.
By the time 5.3 rolled around, we were thoroughly outnumbered once again, just as we had been on Blackrock. Even though it's not as numerically imbalanced as Blackrock was (if WoWprogress is to be believed – more on that in a second), it's arguably worse because there's also a distinct play-style difference involved. The remaining Alliance are biased towards PvE content, while Horde is biased towards PvP content. So we're not just outnumbered, but those Horde also tend to be wearing PvP gear.
Population Dynamics
As entertaining as that story was (or wasn't), the point was that there's a distinct failure mode for a PvP server. When the factions are fairly balanced, a PvP server can be very enjoyable, and both factions can thrive, often to the benefit of both. In vanilla WoW or Burning Crusade, it wasn't hard to round up four or five Alliance players to help clear a group of Horde out of the entrance to Serpentshrine Cavern. As Blizzard would put it, there was a "PvP solution" to that situation, and by taking advantage of it we'd often meet new people or build up relationships with people from guilds we already interacted with. These "team up to survive" type experiences built up a sense of respect and pride in your faction and the people on it. And I think that the solidarity it built up was unquestionably a good thing.
However, there's a limited range of faction imbalance where this condition holds. If you exceed that range – if the balance tips so far that you can't feasibly grab a few people that happen to be in the zone and build a respectable counter-attack – bad things happen. The players on the numerically inferior side tend to get frustrated when trying to take part in open-world content, because it's hard to feel like you're making any progress when you're getting ganked every 20-30 minutes (or less). And that feeling of solidarity, of being able to team up and overcome adversity, just breaks down into trolling.
That gives players a strong incentive to avoid content (both PvE and world PvP) rather than experience it. Many players will just give up on that content and sit in town, only doing content they can queue for. And that's bad, because it means they feel like that open world they were promised by MoP has been taken away from them. One method I abused heavily for Isle of Thunder was to use cross-realm groups to "borrow" someone else's server while I did dailies. That gives you the best of both worlds, but it's a hassle, and I hate feeling like I'm inconveniencing a friend by shackling them to a party.
Eventually, all of this leads to an exodus of players from the weaker faction that can rarely be recovered from. After all, nobody will want to transfer to that faction without a good reason, like a strong raiding or PvP guild. But as those guilds and teams get frustrated and leave, that happens less and less.
As a physicist, this phenomenon isn't unfamiliar to me, because there's a perfect physical analogy to what's happening on a WoW PvP server. What we're seeing is a case of unstable equilibrium in action. To illustrate, this is what we mean by an "unstable equilibrium" in physics:
Here, we have a ball sitting on a hill, perfectly balanced such that it doesn't move. We say that the ball is "in equilibrium." Which means that the ball will stay in that position – it's at rest. But it's an unstable situation – the slightest breeze could push the ball enough that it starts rolling down the hill, and is therefore no longer in equilibrium.
And this is exactly what happens on a WoW PvP server. Even if the server starts out balanced, all it takes is a small event that breaks that balance to start a cascade in one direction or the other. And once you head down that slope, it's nearly impossible to recover – it's far more likely that the server just bottoms out until it essentially becomes a one-faction server. To put it in physics terms, there's no "restoring force" here that encourages the ball (population) to come back into a balanced state.
The ideal case would be the opposite situation: a stable equilibrium:
In this case, the ball starts at the bottom of the valley, in perfect balance. If you push the ball slightly in one direction, it will climb up a little, but eventually roll back down and settle in the middle. There's always a restoring force that encourages the system to return to a stable (balanced) state.
And this is the fundamental problem with WoW and world PvP – there's just no incentive to keep the factions balanced. Once one faction gains an upper hand, it just gets easier for them to do everything, while becoming harder for the underdog faction. There's nothing to make being the underdog attractive, so there's no restoring force. Instead, PvP servers simply degenerate into being essentially single-faction PvE servers rather than being "true" PvP servers with constant (but balanced) inter-faction conflict.
For proof of that, let's take a look at some data. This is what we get if we look to WoWprogress for realm balance information for US servers:
It's not hard to see the problem here. Out of the first 6 servers, all of which are PvP servers, none have less than a 2:1 faction imbalance. Some of them are very extreme (Mal'Ganis, Illidan, Sargeras, Stormreaver) while others aren't as bad (Frostmourne, Kil'Jaeden). But I doubt the Horde on Frostmourne or Alliance on Kil'Jaeden feel like the server is close to a balance point, either.
Extending this to the top 10 or 20 servers shows that this isn't just a problem affecting PvP realms. In fact, out of the 30 realms shown, only a handful (Kilrogg, Caelestrasz, Turalyon, Ner'zhul maybe? all PvE realms I should add….) come close to having true faction balance. Prominent PvE realms, like Stormrage and Area 52, also suffer from a very lopsided faction balance. I suspect it's less apparent in day-to-day play on those servers because you don't end up eating dirt every 5 minutes thanks to the other faction. And the imbalance is less likely to be caused by frustration than simply due to concentration of player talent. But it's still not an ideal situation, even on a PvE server.
I should note, however, that I'm not completely trusting of this data. For example, WoWprogress suggests that while Blackrock really is in the 30:1 ballpark (it's only gotten worse since we left), Tichondrius is only about 2.4:1. But I don't think that's an entirely accurate reflection of world PvE content. A large chunk of the remaining Alliance players never leave town, simply queuing for battlegrounds or arenas. Whereas I think a lot of that Horde population goes out to see new content. In any event, this sure as hell doesn't look like being outnumbered by only a factor of two to one:
I can't go for more than about 5 minutes without getting attacked at peak hours, and easily see 4 or 5 horde (or more) for every one alliance on the Timeless Isle, suggesting WoWprogress' data isn't the entire story. Even if that data is accurate for raw player numbers, it says nothing about how many of those Alliance take part in world PvE content, or for that matter how many are simply alts of Horde players that are never taken out of town.
And the Timeless Isle is really the worst-case scenario for a server like mine. At least during the majority of Mists of Pandaria, the factions were spread out over a fairly large continent. The Isle of Thunder concentrated those players in a smaller area, exacerbating the problem, but the Isle of Thunder was still pretty huge, so there was room to spread out. The Timeless Isle is nowhere near as large from a functional standpoint, because it funnels all of those players into a few more densely-populated areas (especially the Celestial Court) and has a number of choke points (the bridges on the path to Ordos). And the Shaohao reputation grind, which further concentrates players into two or three small areas to farm Yaungol, makes things even worse. Add the Emissary of Ordos mechanic, and you've got a giant mess on an unbalanced PvP server.
Restoring Balance
At this point, it may be tricky to reverse the process and force faction balance. Blizzard certainly has the tools to do it with connected realms, but that's also of limited effectiveness. It won't help high-population realms, for example, where it's just not feasible to cram together two full servers worth of Horde and Alliance for the sake of faction balance.
But I'm optimistic that it can be done, and not just by a large, arbitrary, and game-breaking shake-up. Just as in physics, sometimes all it takes is a little nudge in the right direction. In this case, there just has to be some incentive or combination of incentives to play the underdog. There has to be some sort of restoring force at play.
You could imagine all sorts of mechanisms that may work. A reliable method, if harsh, would be to disable transfers to the higher-population faction on heavily imbalanced servers. For example, if the imbalance was larger than 2:1 in favor of Horde, then players would simply not be allowed to transfer to Horde on that server. And maybe even unable to start new characters there, unless they already have an existing character (thus, alts of existing players aren't inhibited).
That gets into some sticky territory, though – if a new player wants to play with a real-life friend who happens to be on that server, they're out of luck. Cross-realm groups may alleviate most of that problem, but it still introduces an artificial barrier to entry for new players, which isn't necessarily in the game's best interests. The whole point of this exercise is to construct an artificial barrier to prevent attrition, but if we lose more new players than we gain in keeping existing subscribers, that's not an effective way to do it.
As an alternative, they could just make server/faction-specific transfers much less costly. Blizzard is frequently offering free transfers from high-population realms to low-population realms (ironically enough, there was a free Tichondrius->Blackrock transfer available a little while ago…which was amusing given Blackrock's traditional motto: "Blackrock's full, GTFO"). For example, since Tichondrius Alliance is heavily outnumbered, transfers from Horde to Alliance would be automatically free, as would transfers from other servers (either faction) to Tichondrius Alliance. Transferring to Tichondrius Horde would still cost the full $25. That puts an artificial monetary barrier in place, but doesn't inhibit new players from rolling a character and leveling it.
I think this sort of system would probably work. Consider, if you're a guild and you're thinking of transferring to another server. You think Tichondrius might be a good fit, but are hesitant to ask your entire guild to pay for a transfer given the size of the imbalance. But if the transfer is free for everyone, what do you have to lose? The whole guild could transfer there, set up shop,and try it for a few months. If it's not a good fit, maybe you pay the $25 to transfer elsewhere, but you're no worse-off than if you had done that in the first place. It introduces a natural bleed valve in the population flow, such that it's easier (and cheaper) for population to flow in the direction of balance than in the direction of imbalance. It may not be enough to fix the realms that are really far gone, but it might stem and reverse the tide on realms that still have a chance of recovering.
For the really bad servers, something more drastic would be required in addition to the monetary solution. For example, incentives for prominent guilds on one faction to move to the other. Maybe by doing that, they get some nice free perks for a year (or until balance is restored, whichever is longer); free or cheap consumables for raiding, increased experience and reputation gain (XP bonus disabled during the first week of a new expansion, naturally), discounts on heirlooms, or special bind-to-account items that provide significant perks for alts. Ideally nothing that gives a strong advantage during the progression race, but something like nearly-free flasks and potions would be great for a guild that's not fighting for top-100 status and is willing to help balance a server.
You could also imagine a Wintergrasp-like system that makes each player stronger when their faction is outnumbered in a zone. While I don't think Tenacity itself is the right call here, it would certainly make open-world content more accessible to the underdog faction. If I did +200% damage, took 200% less damage, had +200% health, and perhaps most importantly had 50% reduction on crowd-control duration, I wouldn't worry much about taking on 3 or 4 horde at a time. Ten might still be a tall order, but at the very least I'd stand a fighting chance if I played my class well. But we've sen in the past that this sort of buff is hard to balance properly even within the confines of one zone, so I'm skeptical that the devs would want to try and employ it server-wide. It would also make PvE content sort of strange; the bonus damage and damage reduction could easily only apply to players, but the health increase would be weird. Perhaps without the health increase, it would work though.
And that's just a few of the ideas that one could suggest. There are many others, but those three are enough to show that there are viable solutions to the faction imbalance issue. It's just a matter of choosing which ones to deploy and in what magnitude.
Parting Thoughts
It's really a shame that this failure mode exists, because it's the sort of thing that must have come up in other games before. And if not, any scientist who's studied population dynamics (animal or physical) could have predicted this behavior. In fact, I suspect Ghostcrawler is probably familiar with predation and population dynamics if the results of a quick Google Scholar search are any indication. That's not to say this is his fault, or his decision, just that there are smart people on the team who are definitely capable of identifying this problem, as well as its potential solutions.
But it's sad because it's very clear from all of this that I'd love the Timeless Isle content, if I was only able to play it. But instead, every time I go to the Isle I get frustrated by my inability to make much progress. Nowadays, when I log on WoW I want to get things done efficiently, because there's a pile of work, blogging, coding, theorycrafting, and so on that's lying around vying for my attention. And I simply can't do anything efficiently on the Timeless Isle, not because I'm on a PvP server, but because I can't fend for myself against the sheer number of Horde I have to contend with. WoW is pretty questionably-balanced even for 1v1 play; it's definitely not balanced around one hero defeating ten (or even two) players from the other faction.
Which means that almost every time I go to the Timeless Isle, I end up thinking to myself, "Why am I wasting my time on this?" I don't need Shaohao rep or any of the gear or achievements to raid. I was only doing them because I generally find those things fun. But they just aren't here, because I spend more time watching my back than enjoying the content.
Maybe I'm just old now, or something. Or maybe I'm just the wrong type of person for a PvP server. I don't (and really never have) gotten any satisfaction from making other people feel bad or ruining their experience. I almost never pro-actively attack another player anymore, because in the back of my mind I can always see myself on the receiving end and think about how irritated I would be at the inconvenience. And I don't want to inflict that on someone, so I don't. I'm not the sort of kid who enjoys ganking and then /spitting and tea-bagging the corpse. That's just not me, and never has been.
But my guild, my friends, are on a PvP server. And while I play this game for a lot of reasons, one of them is to play with that group of people. Switching to a PvE server and leaving them behind is likely to just lead to disillusionment with the game, and eventually to me quitting and finding something else to do with my time.
But it's a bit of a catch-22, because heading to the Timeless Isle is having the same effect. After the first few times I have to make a graveyard run, I start thinking about all of the other things I could be doing. I'd rather be finishing up one of the many games I have for the PS3 (and even a few ancient PS2 titles) that I haven't gotten around to yet, or spending some more time playing X-COM, or finally getting around to playing BioShock (any of them – I haven't played a single one in that series, even though I own them all).
So the Timeless Isle is, more than anything else in this game, actually driving me away from the game. Turning me into one of those players that logs on only for raid nights, and does the bare minimum to keep their character up-to-date the rest of the week. And that's sad, because to me that feels like I'm entering the twilight (not the movie) of my WoW experience. Rather than looking forward to logging on as soon as I get home so I can raid, explore a new continent, or try out a new feature, that enthusiasm is turning to apathy.
And I wonder how many other players feel the same way for the same reason. WoW is an old game, it's bound to have a slow decline in subscriber numbers. But I wonder if that decline is being hastened, at least for players that enjoy PvP servers, by the fact that almost none of them can have a properly-functioning world PvP experience anymore.
Just to be clear: I don't think this problem is killing WoW. The long-term eventuality is just that every PvP server will end up being a one-faction PvE server, and world PvP will die out. Guilds like mine will eat the player attrition, and probably eventually transfer to the dominant side of another server if there are no balanced PvP servers left to choose from. That's a far different thing than WoW collapsing. But I do think it will hurt WoW's numbers, and it definitely hurts the world PvP experience that WoW has traditionally offered.


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For those of you that are relatively new to EMR and HIPAA, you might not appreciate this post as much as long time readers of EMR and HIPAA. A few years back, I admit that I was pretty harsh on CCHIT and their EHR certification. I remember one guy stopping me at a conference and after realizing who I was asked, "so what's your issue with CCHIT?" I was happy to answer that I thought they misled the industry (doctors in particular) by saying that the CCHIT certification provided an assurance that the EHR was a good EHR. They never came outright and said this, but that's what EMR sales people would communicate during the sales process.
In fact, EHR certification was incorrectly seen by many doctors and practice managers as the stamp of approval on an EHR being of higher quality, more effective, easier to use, and was more likely to lead to a successful EHR implementation. EHR certification today still has some of these issues. However, the fact is that the EHR certification doesn't certify any of the great list above. If EHR certification of any kind (CCHIT or otherwise) could somehow assure: a higher implementation success rate, a better level of patient care, a higher quality user experience, a financial benefit, or any other number of quality benefits, then I'd support it wholeheartedly. The problem is that it doesn't, and so they can't make that assurance.
So, yes, I do take issue with an EHR certification which misleads doctors. Even if it's the EHR salespeople that do the misleading.
I still remember the kickback I got on this post I did where I said CCHIT Was Marginalized and the post a bit later where I said that the CCHIT process was irrelevant. Today, I came across an article on CMIO with some interesting quotes from CCHIT Chair, Karen Bell. Here's a quote from that article.
In addition, the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT's (ONC) new program has provided two new reasons for certification: proof that an EHR can do the things that the government wants it to do, and to enable eligible providers and hospitals to get EHR incentive money.
"The idea is not to assure the product will do all things that are desired for patient care, instead, the idea is to stimulate innovation," said Bell. As a result, the program is considered a major success because more than 700 certified health IT products are now on the ONC website. "The idea was to get a lot of new products started. This is a very different reason for certification than what we began doing several years ago," she said.
However, just because CCHIT or another ONC-Authorized Testing and Certification Body (ONC-ATCB) doesn't test and certify for a particular ability, that doesn't mean the EHRs don't have it. "It's just up to [the provider] to make sure the vendors have it," said Bell.
I first want to applaud Karen Bell and CCHIT for finally describing the true description of what EHR provides a clinic assurance that:
1. The EHR does what the government wants
2. You are eligible for the EHR incentive money
Then, she even goes on to say that it's up to the providers to make sure the vendors have the right capabilities for their clinic.
I imagine Karen and CCHIT would still probably say that the CCHIT "complete" EHR certification provides assurance that…< fill in the blank >, which the ONC-ATCB EHR certification doesn't provide. The happy part for me is that even if CCHIT says this, no one is really listening to that message anymore.
Yes, CCHIT has essentially become irrelevant.
I can't remember anyone in the past year asking me about CCHIT certification. From my experience, many people care about ONC-ATCB EHR certification, but they really couldn't care less if it comes from CCHIT, Drummond Group, ICSA Labs, SLI Global, or InfoGuard (That's all of them right?). Have any of you had other experiences?
I also do enjoy the irony of this post coming right after my post about differentiation of EMR companies (Jabba vs Han Solo). CCHIT is the reason that I know so much about the challenge of EHR differentiation. CCHIT's efforts provided some very valuable (and lengthy) discussions over the past 5 years about ways to help doctors differentiate between the 300+ EHR vendors. As you can see from my comments above, I was just never satisfied with CCHIT being the differentiating factor. As you can see from my post yesterday, I'm still searching for a satisfactory alternative for differentiating EHRs. Until then, we'll keep providing an independent voice a midst all the noise.


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As 2013 rolls in and the economy stabilises, many IT organisations are looking to upgrade their computational and storage systems. Like any IT purchasing decision, there are tradeoffs to consider and choices to make regarding hardware features and the technology available. When it comes to storage servers, the first step is understanding your CPU options.
Intel vs. AMD
For at least this year, the two server CPU choices remain Intel and AMD. ARM might solve some of the computational parts of some of the problems, but in 2013, ARM won't have enough I/O bandwidth with 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports and storage to make it a viable alternative. This might change for 2014, but it's too soon to predict as development of PCIe buses with enough performance capability is complex.
The latest AMD CPUs have 16 cores, but only if you are running integer operations. When it comes to floating-point operations, you have only eight cores. This combined with the fact that the latest Intel server processors can read and write data from memory significantly faster than AMD processors mean that AMD processors should be relegated to operations with low computational intensity that do not require high-memory bandwidth - you might think of things like VMs, but more on why this is not a good idea later.
Communications between CPU sockets
Another place that Intel has a major advantage is communications between CPU sockets. The current crop of Intel server CPUs support 25.6 gigabits per second (Gbps) of I/O bandwidth between CPU sockets over the Quick Path Interconnect (QPI).
This performance combined with the per-socket memory bandwidth performance exceeds the current performance of AMD CPUs. On multi-socket machines, this has a dramatic impact on the performance for all of the sockets because a process might be making a request for which memory has been allocated on another socket.
PCIe bus drives Intel ahead
PCIe is where the rubber meets the road on why the latest Intel processors are far ahead of their AMD competitors. The Intel technology on the latest server CPUs runs PCIe 3 with 40 lanes on each CPU.
That means that the PCIe bus and the CPU are capable of 40Gbps of I/O bandwidth. This is far greater than the bandwidth of available on AMD processors. So if you need to do a lot of network I/O or disk I/O, PCIe 3 is the better choice because it has far higher bandwidth than PCI 2.0 and the performance of the bus will double, but also the Intel CPU supports more PCIe lanes.
It's Intel's year but there are still issues
There is one problem with the new Intel CPUs that becomes more noticeable with quad-socket configurations. As mentioned earlier, the PCIe bus is on the CPU socket so with four sockets you have four PCIe buses with 40 lanes each for a total of 160 lanes of 1Gbps PCIe bandwidth. That is a lot of I/O bandwidth, but looking a bit deeper there is a problem:
- The QPI connections between sockets is a dual-channel 12.8Gbps channel for a total performance of 25.6Gbps.
- The PCIe express bandwidth of a socket is 40x 1Gbps per lane or 40 Gbps of PCIe bandwidth to the socket.
Problems quickly arise when PCIe bandwidth exceeds 25.6Gbps and the process requesting access to the PCIe bus is not on the socket with the bus where the access is being requested. Some of the workarounds attempted would lock processes on sockets with the PCIe bus that needs to be read or written. But it did not work for all applications. For example, those with data coming in and going out of multiple locations such as a striped file system are affected because you cannot break the request and move each request to each PCIe bus.
The real-world performance for general purpose applications running on a four-socket system is likely an estimated 90 percent of the QPI bandwidth between sockets (or 23Gbps) unless the data goes out on the socket with the PCIe bus. Every fourth I/O, if they are equality distributed, will run at 40Gbps, so the average performance would be (3x23Gbps +40Gbps)/4 or an average performance of about 27.25Gbps per socket for a quad-socket system.
This is, of course, the average based on equal distribution of the processes and I/O to the PCIe bus. A process that has PCIe processor affinity will significantly improve that average, but it is often difficult to architect and meet the requirements of putting every task on a PCIe bus and ensuring that the process runs on the CPU with that bus. The probability of this limitation is higher with a quad-socket system than with a dual-socket system.
The diagram below shows an example of a dual-socket system that, though having the same issues, reduces the potential of hitting that architectural limitation.
My estimate for performance for a dual-socket system is (23Gbps +40Gbps) or average socket performance of 31.5Gbps. On a dual-socket system it is much easier to architect the system so that you can put the right I/O on the right CPU and achieve near-peak performance.
CPU conclusions are counter-intuitive
New Intel systems have far more I/O bandwidth than previous systems and they have more than anything available from AMD. ARM is not currently competitive if you need to move lots of data in and out of the system.
The current Intel line quad-socket systems will average about 27.25Gbps unless significant work is done to architect the system to connect with processors and PCIe buses. The IOPS performance of the system will, of course, be higher as IOPS is not impacted by QPI bandwidth limitation.
The dual-socket systems are easier to get higher performance, and the average system performance is over 4.25Gbps. So my conclusion is you are better off using dual-socket systems for high I/O bandwidth requirements versus a quad socket. This, of course, is clearly counterintuitive, but is the best strategy given the current Intel architecture.
You will mostly likely see Ivy Bridge server processors in 2013 and the QPI bandwidth will go way up so with Ivy Bridge quad socket systems likely make sense. More on this after the Ivy Bridge serve processor are released.


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Endpoint security systems protect computers and other devices on a network or in the cloud from cybersecurity threats. Endpoint security has evolved from traditional antivirus software to providing comprehensive protection from sophisticated malware and evolving zero-day threats.
Organizations of all sizes are at risk from nation-states, hacktivists, organized crime, and malicious and accidental insider threats. Endpoint security is often seen as cybersecurity's frontline, and represents one of the first places organizations look to secure their networks.
As the volume and sophistication of cybersecurity threats have steadily grown, so has the need for more advanced endpoint security solutions. Today's endpoint protection systems are designed to quickly detect, analyze, block, and contain attacks in progress. To do this, they need to collaborate with each other and with other security technologies to give administrators visibility into advanced threats to speed detection and remediation response times.
Endpoint security components
Typically, an endpoint security solution will include these key components:
- Machine-learning classification to detect zero-day threats in near real time
- Advanced antimalware and antivirus protection to protect, detect, and correct malware across multiple devices and operating systems
- Proactive web security to ensure safe browsing on the web
- Integrated firewall to block hostile network attacks
- Actionable threat forensics to allow administrators to quickly isolate infections
- Centralized endpoint management platform to improve visibility and simplify operations
Endpoint security needs multiplied due to the "internet of everything"
Endpoints can range from the more commonly thought of devices like laptops, tablets, and mobile devices, to printers, servers, and even ATM machines and medical devices. If a device is connected to a network, it is considered an endpoint. With the growing popularity of BYOD (bring your own device) and IoT (internet of things), the number of devices connected to an organization's network can quickly reach into the tens (and hundreds) of thousands.
Because they are entry points for threats and malware, endpoints (especially mobile and remote devices) are a favorite target of adversaries. Mobile devices have become much more than just Android devices and iPhones—think of the latest wearable watches, smart devices, voice-controlled digital assistants, and other IoT-enabled smart devices. We now have network-connected sensors in our cars, airplanes, hospitals, and even on the drills of oil rigs. As the different types of endpoints have evolved and expanded, the security solutions that protect them have also had to adapt.
The latest SANS endpoint security survey highlights the importance of implementing a comprehensive endpoint protection solution. Some of the key findings from this survey include:
- 42% of respondents reported that their endpoints had been breached.
- A variety of threat vectors were used, including web drive-by (63%), social engineering/phishing (53%), and/or ransomware (50%).
- Only 47% of attacks were detected by antivirus.
- 32% of compromises were detected by SIEM alerts.
The evolution of virus protection—from signatures to machines
The endpoint security business began in the late 1980s with antivirus software that could recognize malicious software (malware) by their signatures. The first endpoint antivirus tools searched for changes in file systems or applications that matched known patterns, and flagged or blocked those programs from running. As the internet and e-commerce gained popularity, malware became more frequent, more complex, and more difficult to detect. It also no longer relies on signatures, and the industry is seeing a rise in fileless malware. Today, fighting malware is much more of a team sport, and antivirus software is just one of many weapons.
This increase in weapons brings more complexity. The rapid growth of security products with overlapping functionality and separate management consoles can make it difficult for many organizations to get a clear picture of potential attacks. Security teams, after years of bolting endpoint security point products together, often end up managing multiple agents and consoles—with little to no integration or automation.
Recent research shows that isolated endpoint solutions can't keep up with sophisticated, emerging threats. Tactical security firefighting can be replaced with integrated, multistage defenses that adapt to outsmart attackers. The latest endpoint protection requires finding and correcting hidden attacks in seconds, not months. This requires a closed-loop system that automatically shares threat intelligence between connected components to detect, resolve, and adapt to new attack strategies. Integrated multistage protection lets organizations collaborate, share threat insights, and act efficiently to combat future threats.
We're now at a stage where humans can't do it alone—and are teaming up with machines. Machine learning and artificial intelligence are enabling endpoint defenses to evolve at nearly the same speed as the attacks. Traditional capabilities such as firewall, reputation, and heuristics are combined with machine learning and containment to stop the most advanced attacks.
Advanced endpoint security solutions
McAfee offers a full range of solutions that combine powerful endpoint protection with efficient endpoint management. McAfee Endpoint Security combines established capabilities such as firewall, reputation, and heuristics with cutting-edge machine learning and containment, along with endpoint detection and response (EDR) into a single platform agent, with a single management console. The resulting integrated endpoint protection platform keeps users productive and connected while stopping zero-day malware, like ransomware, before it can infect the first endpoint.