FooHentai

For a restaurant chain this is something worth putting the development effort into because once you've figured it out and ran it for a few years to demonstrate it's reliability you can pitch the shift from a network-optional edge at each site to a network-dependent site with intelligent components hanging off it and depending on it. That's a pathway to having a major competitive advantage in the medium term that your competitors won't be able to put into place overnight once they realize you've left them behind.

You can't get there with the amount of effort often put into untrusted edge sites like this - aka a pc in a cupboard. You also can't get there with cloud when the weakest element in the chain is unrealiable site connectivity.

They could have done it in a lot of different ways, but going with cheap commodity hardware and avoiding expensive cluster license nonsense (vSphere etc) were smart choices. Spend that money on a compenent centralized tech team rather than vendor shinyness, and you can do a hell of a lot more (and often move faster, to boot).

I'm learning from you here now that I'm gonna lose all the paid content I have on my account?

“A house divided against itself cannot stand.” — Abraham Lincoln.

Man, that point resonates with me. I quit a while back due to severe burnout (actually, I think now, boreout) and have been struggling to get enthused about anything. I think what you said here is the core of why I might be done with tech as a profession entirely - I'm almost completely soured with the impact and direction of it as a whole.

So then the question becomes well, what do I agree with and want to do? That's a hard one. This is the only career path I've been on and even if I do find something else, starting off at 40 with no skill base is... oof.

Honestly, bravo. He's at the point in his career that he really doesn't need to prove anything, and as such is uniquely positioned to make this kind of statement with at least a vague chance that it will be heeded.

lvlworld.com - Curated, the polished and more playable end of the spectrum

en.ws.q3df.org (Worldspawn Archive) - Mostly focused on defrag (trick jumping) maps but has a lot for the standard game mixed in.

Excessive Plus's FTP server at ftp.excessiveplus.net

efservers.com/maps.php Elite Force Map Search. Has a lot of regular Q3 content buried amongst the Elite Force stuff.

When I was a kid we got our first PC just as Quake (1) released. We didn't have a modem to get online, but magazine cover disks sometimes included custom user maps and mods. I'd run around them offline, wondering in awe at these empty spaces and amazed at being able to explore a 3d space that someone somewhere else in the world had conjured from their own imagination and effort. In time I figured out the tools and techniques, and even released some of my own content to add to the mix. That sense of wonder has stuck with me for over twenty years, and while I very much enjoy playing the games, it's not just about that - Accessing and exploring the spaces themselves is fascinating and hold inherent value to me.

I recently came back to spending more time with the games, and see a great deal of that custom content dropping offline never to be seen again as the sites that used to host them wind down and dry up. A lot of it has likely already been lost. I'm digging through every available source I can to try and dig out as much content as possible, but of course it'll never be 'complete' in the same way that a ROM collection for a classic console might be.

Then, quite aside from finding and saving, there's the question of how to make it accessible (and interesting) to anyone else. I'd like to think it's of interest to more than just me, but maybe it isn't? Perhaps daves_awesome_map_v5.pk3 and the thousands of others I have stashed don't really have an audience beyond that one weirdo that saved them =)

On the offchance you're reading this and have any old Quake 3 custom content stashed away in your closet, please get in touch!

Perhaps the Gaelic word for barrel somehow came from the English measurement hogshead, but more likely that it was spoken Gaelic for barrel overheard and adopted by English speaking stevedores.

Likewise, it is a mistake to lump the Nazi dog case in with the other case. One occurred under Scottish legal jurisdiction, the other under English legal jurisdiction. The example is not relevant.

The actual point still stands. If you're going to take a dig at a legal system, country, or culture, don't try to back up your point with an example from a different one.

Scotland is not England legally or culturally, and the scots will be the first to make that point clear.

Edit: England, not Britain.

This same line of thought is what turned me away from pursuing a degree/career in climate science. It feels like an area where you can make significant contributions to the analysis of impacts and gain greater understanding of the future direction things will take (and the rate), it'll be akin to shuffling deckchairs on the titanic in terms of being able to actually effect any meaningful change; since I was frustrated in my current career with a sense of futility I realized the move into climate would not be satisfying, as much as the topic was of interest.

Similarly with working in industry 'tackling' climate change. Pinning hope on technological advancements are (IMO) fundamentally flawed. Plus much of 'green' industry where the majority of jobs are to be fund amount to a thin veneer of PR for organizations that are significantly exacerbating the issue.

As an aside, how much stock do you put in the notion that the first Blue-Ocean Event will significantly ramp up the rate of change being felt globally?

After bemoaning failure to consider second-order effects this seems like making the same mistake - It was a good news that kids were less susceptible to severe infection but protecting children was not the sole purpose of closing schools. Kids were still susceptible to infection and could still spread the disease to adults. Schools were a mixing pot for kids to get infected and then go home to infect adults who might then suffer more severe effects.

I think even in retrospect it holds up very well as an effective means (amongst many others) of slowing spread.

I don't think it's controversial to state that. Where it gets controversial is in what value judgements you place on it, because to a large extent it boils down to 'how much human life are you willing to risk for how much progress?'.

Less of an issue if it's an individual choosing freely to risk their own neck, but hard to distance even that from whatever safety culture and norms surround them. Perhaps less people take these risks today because it's no longer the norm in their field.