Quantum olive

Pilots out in the darkest depths of lawless space know that not everything matches the cozy little categories that their colleagues back in CONCORD-policed space expect. This applies to conflicts as much as it does to the places and objects they find in their travels.

One such type of object occasionally shows up on their scanners. At its small size, ships generally need to engage their sensor boosters to lock onto it, even at relatively short ranges. Human eyes have difficulty keeping it in focus as it seems to slip in and out of reality. This object (occasionally called a “quantum olive”) has intrigued researchers since its initial discovery in the Curse region. Perhaps it represents some natural phenomenon, or perhaps the remnants of a Jovian experiment, or perhaps an even older culture. Perhaps some ancient non-human intelligence built it and let it float away once the artifact no longer held its interest, as a child with a suddenly-boring plaything. In truth, no one knows. Or anyone who does know hasn’t said publicly, at any rate…

Dominion has succeeded

I got a lot of really interesting feedback and conversation when I suggested on Twitter that Dominion has experienced wild success. We’ve seen major shake-ups, lots of fights, and an evolving sovereignty map. Okay, I’ll admit it hasn’t seen unalloyed success, but the problems we’ve seen are natural in system performance tuning.

Essentially, when you want to improve the performance of a system, you find the major bottleneck and remove it. This only means that the system performance improves up to the next bottleneck. (Note here that the actual method of bottlenecks will vary, so that a given problem could actually crash the system rather than slow it down.) You keep iterating through this process until the effort needed for the next iteration is larger than what you’ll gain from the performance increase. That is, when you reach the point of diminishing returns in cost and benefit, you stop.

Prior to Dominion, the bottlenecks largely came from design. POS spam, area-of-effect doomsday weapons, relative ease of maintaining Sov 4 (and thus cynojammers) everywhere, all that jazz. Once that went away, we started seeing even more massive fleet fights and all the shakeups. Plus, some alliances either couldn’t afford the sov bills or couldn’t manage their wallets appropriately. As far as I’m concerned, that amounts to the inability to properly direct your alliance.

After that, though, we found out that node capacity is the next bottleneck. While CCP does deserve some criticism for their initial handling of the problem (right after I commended them for riding the Cluetrain, sigh), they’ve finally made substantial improvements so that these fights can actually occur. They still need to do more, of course, but even once they’ve done that, we’ll just run into the next bottleneck. Unfortunately — actually, not — such is our voracious love for this world that fights and struggles will just expand to fill available capacity up to the next bottleneck.

But we’ll have lots of fun in the meantime.

Friday Flash Fiction 5: Sensor Boosters

Time for another week of Friday flash fiction! To recap:

That means I will post a small prompt every Friday. The following Tuesday, I’ll update the post with links to your own stories on your own blogs or even the EVE forum (preferably submitted through the comments here). This might consist of a phrase, or an object, or a location, or something else. Use it as the core theme, the starting sentence, or anything else; you just have to include it somewhere in the story. And the story should be really short. Definitely under one thousand words, but even greater brevity has great value. If you can tell a cohesive story (character, plot, theme) in a bare few sentences, go for it.

Combat ships depend on their sensor strength and signal resolution for targeting other ships, whether for friendly purposes or as a precursor to opening fire. Many pilots find themselves needing to improve their abilities in this regard. This week, let’s talk about sensor boosters. Maybe they play a key role in a fight, maybe a technician struggles to get them equipped, maybe a lone genius has found a way to increase their performance. Whether you take a technical turn or simply reference them in character drama, see what you can do!

Political leanings

My political leanings tend to have lots of nuance and complexity and evolve over time. Generally, however, I support the Minmatar people if not always the Minmatar Republic. This means that I have pro-Angel leanings and distrust Shakor, but would rather see almost anything than an upsurge in Amarr power (even under a ‘reformist’ administration like Jamyl’s). And I support New Eden: humanity as a whole in all our fractious, jabbering diversity.

In capsuleer politics, I generally support -A- and their coalition (including my brothers fighting under the Ushra’khan banner) against CVA and the Provibloc. The current fight in the North does not push me in one direction or the other, as long as whoever controls it uses the resources there wisely in a way that benefits us all. And as for the Goons, they will not stay down for long. I just intend to stay out of their way.

More than anything else, I work in the service of knowledge. I believe that scientific and technological progress can do far more to advance humanity and all of New Eden than mindless violence and destruction. (That said, those who do not bother to fly defensively and appropriately will get nothing but scorn from me.) To echo the ancient cyberbattle cry, Information wants to be free! Even more, Information deserves to be free! This freedom refers to the spread of ideas, not to a lack of price. Rewards of all sorts can provide powerful motivation, and so creating or discovering something new brings value. But that value comes about through use and transfer: if you lock information away, you destroy it.

We need a new creed, that of the knowledge nomad who cares much more about what you know and what you do than who you are. In coming days, I will have much more to say about this.

Kirith Kodachi on roleplay

Normally, I would throw this on my tumbleblog, but Kirith’s post on roleplay in modern MMORPGs has so much to chew on, and hits so close to an area that matters dearly to me, that I wanted to link it here.

Go read it and comment on it (preferably at his blog if you can). I will have more to say about this later.

Shattered planet

While traveling out to the Curse region on business, I passed through SL-YBS in the Great Wildlands region. My overview registered a planet with some odd readings, so I flew over in my Claw interceptor to check it out.

What I saw frightened and fascinated me at the same time. The first planet in the system had evidently run into a spontaneously-formed wormhole like the one that tore up Seyllin almost a year ago. Here’s some of the imagery.

A shattered planet, SL-YBS I in the Great Wildlands region. This happened during the original spontaneous formation of wormholes at the time of the Seyllin incident. I found this one while on a trip out to Curse.

Another view of the ugly wound on the planet surface.

Examining terms of service for hosting providers

You should always read your agreements before you sign up for them. Let’s talk about terms of service for hosting companies. Keep in mind that I write from the perspective of someone who’s a licensed private investigator and has years of hands-on “street experience” in network forensics, Internet investigations, acceptable use policy development and execution, and US federal, state, and local law enforcement liaison. I am not, however, a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. This is my thought process as I consider a ToS document. Factor that in however you like.

I wouldn’t ever sign a contract or any other document riddled with spelling, grammatical, and copyediting errors because that tells me they haven’t taken due care. That is, if they haven’t taken the time to make sure it’s readable, why should I take the time to read it? Attention to detail matters.

Further, if a contract specifies particular availability guarantees, then goes on to say that they make “no warranties of any kind” including for “any and all service interruptions,” then I have serious concerns about their business. Seriously, if you run a real business, get a lawyer to review this sort of thing.

And pardon me for sticking with my Fourth Amendment rights, but I don’t want to work with a provider that “may disclose any subscriber information to law enforcement agencies without further consent or notification to the subscriber upon lawful request from such agencies. We will cooperate fully with law enforcement agencies.” Given that this is my profession for many years, I can say with substantial authority that this sort of unswerving cooperation leads to bad things and abuses. “Lawful request” means many different things to many different people and it may not mean what you think it does.

Also, if somebody offers “unlimited” something, they should not go off and redefine “unlimited” to mean “limits we think are pretty high”. That’s dishonest at best and will almost certainly lead to problems later. (Ask those wireless companies and ISPs that have had lots of PR black eyes). If they offer tremendous amounts of resources above and beyond what their competitors offer, that’s great, but I don’t want to see anybody make the leap from puffery to outright deception. Because, yes, if you offer unlimited transfer amounts and I max out what you offer, that’s not a denial of service. That’s the logical extrapolation from what you said I could do.

Finally, ‘reserving the right to revise its policies at any time without notice’ sounds like what Darth Vader told Lando Calrissian: “I have altered the deal. Pray I do not alter it further.”

Now, all that said, what do I want in my hosting relationship?

I want a host that does not discriminate against my lawful content, including content related to my profession. I want a host that takes reasonable steps to secure and monitor their infrastructure but without treating me like I’m the enemy. I want a host that affirmatively stands up for me and doesn’t actually hold their customers directly responsible for their legal costs. I want a host that will treat me with respect when they want to make changes in our deal. I want a host that pays attention to what they’re doing and gives me every confidence that they will provide a well-designed, well-administered, professional service.

I’d like to see the hosts that specifically market to me and my fellow EVE players move in this direction. Because right now, a controversy has sprung up with Lonetrek Web Hosting (managed by an alliance mate of mine). I don’t want to bash anyone, particularly people whom I firmly believe want to do the right thing and just have some growing pains, as is the case here. I just want other players (and Anthony) to have the information available to make good, well-informed decisions, whatever those final decisions may be.

UPDATE: Anthony did a total re-write and, in my view, the new version of his terms represents a major improvement over the old ones. As I said, I knew he just wanted to do the right thing, and thus I didn’t want to present my opinion as an attack or bludgeoning. Props!

Tumbleblog launched

I set up a tumbleblog for stuff that doesn’t quite make it here. It’ll have quick links and other EVE bits, with plenty of updates but not a lot of drawn-out commentary. Please give me a follow there, and of course I’d love to reciprocate to other Tumblr blogs.

Referrer traffic distribution

Highlighting other folks

I looked over my referrer[1] stats this morning and noticed something interesting. As you might expect, the sources for my traffic don’t have a uniform distribution. Some sites send more traffic than others. But, even more interesting, they have a fairly classic power law distribution. For example, I threw together this chart of my January 2010 referrer stats[2]:

Or see the actual table:

So, lots of love to CrazyKinux, Mynxee, Kirith Kodachi (one of my ‘blog idols’), and Star Defender!

[1]: Yes, I know the official spelling is “referer”. But the official spelling is wrong, so let’s not go there, okay?
[2]: Stats for different referrer URLs from the same site have been combined. For example, if I got traffic from a blog’s home page and several separate posts, I combined them for this analysis.

Blog Banter Special Edition: New Eden is just awesome

CrazyKinux asks a very good question:

Whether you’ve logged into the game every day since its launch in 2003, or you’ve taken one or several sabbaticals from your capsuleer career, you’ve always come back to New Eden don’t you. Why is that?

We know the EVE Online Community is unique in so many ways, and that EVE Online is like no other MMORPG out there. But what makes the game special for you?

What is it that makes this particular virtual world so enticing, so mysterious and so alluring that we keep coming back for more. Why is EVE one of the very few MMOs to see a continuous growth in its subscriber.

To put it simply: Why do you love EVE Online so much?

I don’t have one single, simple answer. So I thought I’d try something new, because New Eden is just awesome.

New Eden is just awesome


I love the wormholes
I love our avatars
I love the scammers
I love the epic arcs

I love our spaceships
And all the ways we fly

Boom dee ah da
Boom dee ah da
Boom dee ah da
Boom dee ah da

I love Syndicate
I love cloaky ships
I love Metropolis
I love those sensor scripts

I love the forums
And all our flaming threads

Boom dee ah da
Boom dee ah da
Boom dee ah da
Boom dee ah da

I love space opera
I love post-cyberpunk
I love PVP
I love to salvage junk

I love New Eden
It’s such an awesome place

Boom dee ah da
Boom dee ah da
Boom dee ah da
Boom dee ah da