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Frogboy here! Lead designer of the game. Principle AI programmer.

We've started testing Mob Master. Mob Master is a new program we're working on that lets you control multiple computers at the same time with a single keyboard and mouse.

Many people use dual monitors, for instance. The problem with dual monitors is that they're connected to a single computer which has negative performance effects (try playing a game and surfing a support site at the same time with dual monitors).

With Mob Master, we hope to make it easier for people to do things like play multiple characters on-line at the same time. Some of us, myself included, have multiple accounts on some of the MMORPGs.

I have two World of Warcraft accounts. I normally "solo" in these games. But there are some quests that really require more than 1 person to do. Programs like Mob Master let you have a party without having to hunt around for other people. Or when you solo and pull more than one creature, rather than having to run away, you can deal with it.

Mob Master is also handy on Player vs. Player servers. Anyone who has solo'd knows the pain of being ambushed by players in "contested" areas. With Mob Master, they'll think twice before ambushing 2 guys walking down the road.

We're pretty excited about it. It's working pretty well on our machines and we hope to put it into wide beta before the end of the year. Stay tuned.

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Welcome to Mob Master Discussion.

Since 1992, the Democrats have seen a pretty steady decline in their status in the American political system.  They lost seats in the house of representatives, the senate, state governorships, and state assemblies.

In 2000 they narrowly lost the white house as well. And since 2000, things have become dramatically worse for the Democrats with them being a minority party in every sense? What the hell happened?

James Carville, a Democratic advisor to Kerry and Clinton put it succinctly on Meet the Press last week.  Simpy put, the Democrats need to stop being the party that manages problems and instead be a party that puts forth real world solutions. Identify a problem in society, a specific problem, and look for a way to fix it. Americans are a nation of fixers. We like problem solvers. We don't like whiners. And the Democrats have increasingly become identified as the party of whiners.

As Carville (and Bush ironically) put it, a littany of complaints isn't a plan.  Indeed, whether it be the private sector or the public sector, conservatives and thereby Republicans are associated with people who are looking to solve specific problems.  You may not agree with their goals but you have to agree that they are trying to solve problems. 

Entrepreneurs are over-OVERwhelmingly conservatives. Go to an Entrepreneur of the Year banquet and try to find a Democrat. Good luck. Some people, let's call them..dumb people.. think that Entrepreneurs are Republcans because they are greedy. No. You'll find that most Entrepreneurs were conservative long before they were rich.  Just as many Democrats are Democrats regardless of their wealth and status, most Republicans started out conservative as well.  The successful entrepreneurs I've met have almost universally been conservative Republican in nature since their youth.

Most successful people have one thing in common: They are DO-ers.  They don't just come up with an interesting idea. They take their ideas and try to make them into a reality.

Once upon a time, this was not the exclusive domain of conservative Republicans.  The New Deal, hardly a conservative Republican concept, was the fulfillment of a specific plan to solve specific problems.  The "Great Society", which has arguably failed, was at least a specific attempt to solve a specific set of problems.

Democrats at the problems of our country and put forth specific solutions. Specific, realistic, solutions.

Kerry put forth few.  Anyone with even a basic understanding of the health care industry knew that the "import drugs from Canada" plan was a joke. That's not a solution. That's just pandering. (Americans subsidize Canada's drugs, if we started buying all our drugs from Canada, a nation whose population total is less than that of California you can bet the prices would quickly go way up).

And after the failures of the Great Society, Americans are wary of gigantic, vaguely defined projects that have few metrics for success.

War on Terror. Whether you agree with Bush's strategy for the war on terror, at least it's a specific plan.  For the past quarter century militant Islam has been creating terrorists that kill people indiscriminately.  There is a corolation between terrorist creation and the oppressiveness of the regimes. The "Neo-Con" solution is straight forward - try to spread democracy and freedom in the middle east. First by getting rid of the Taliban. Next by getting rid of Saddam and then putting pressure on Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iran, Egypt, etc.  You may quibble with the execution of that plan (or if you're really arrogant you'll try to tell those of us who are pushing for this plan that we're really out for oil or some other asinine idiocy).  But it's a plan trying to solve specific things.

Education? Conservatives think the public schools in the US are pretty awful.  Solution? Put federally mandated testing on them to measure their effectiveness. Those that fail get some help but if they keep failing, the kids can go elsewhere. Conservatives also support school vouchers to help kids go to "better" schools.  Democrats respond by bitching that the programs aren't funded enough or that there are flaws in the program.  Fine, what's your idea? None. The Democrats had 40 years to fix education and they did nothing but throw more money at the flawed system instead of trying to fix it.

Social Security? Democrats demonize everyone who tries to do anything to fix it. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that when the baby boomers retire there will not be enough working people to pay for those who are receiving social security.  The Democratic solution? Nothing. Republicans have proposed lots of specific ideas - raise the retirement age dramatically, cut benefits, etc.  But they get nailed by Democrats on all those things.  The latest specific plan is to try to ween people off of the current social secuirty plan by letting people invest in private savings accounts.  Democrats complain that this will be too costly. Complaining isn't a plan. Where is the Democrat's plan?

Health Care.  We already talked about the Democrat's sad pandering of "Canadian drug imports". That's not a plan.  Moreover, Kerry's other health care plan wasn't a real plan either. It was just warm fuzzy talk. It was far too open ended (first, it assumed wrongly that companies wouldn't just drop coverage as soon as the government started providing health care for the uninsured).   Bush's plan is modest. But at least it's a workable plan.  Use the IRA system to create health savings accounts. Let people put money in those accounts to use later if they need it.

Fiscal Responsibility. This is the one that really bugs me. Bush's plan is to attempt to control spending and hope that the economy outpaces growth so that the deficit will be reduced/eliminated eventually.  I don't agree with this plan at all. On the other hand, I recognize the political expedience of this.  We already saw the Pell grant tirade in which a decrease in the rate of increase of spending is considered a "cut".  So you can't even slow down the rate of spending increases without liberals going into a frenzy.  But still, I would prefer that the government try to have a cross-the-board slow down in spending increases until the deficit is eliminated and start paying down the debt.

But even though I disagree with Bush, I recognize his plan.  Democrats, by contrast, don't seem to have a plan at all. It's all based on an ignorance of how our government is funded.  Raise taxes (roll-back) on the wealthy? That would barely make a dent in short-term tax revenues and could slow down economic growth.  And when you really get into trying to have fiscal sanity, the Democrats start screaming bloody murder if you start to talk about cutting anything at all.  If you want to have fiscal responsibility you have to cut spending more than raise taxes (taxes are already about as high as they're going to get before it creates economic disincentives for those who actually make the money). 

And Democrats don't want to give an inch anywhere. If merely slowing down the rate of increase that Pell grants get triggers hate-filled articles, you can imagine the response of Democrats if one were to suggest slowing the rate of spending increases for Medicare, the EPA, the Department of Education, and other "entitlement" programs.

Democrats need to come to the table with a specific, reasoned plan on how to achieve these goals.

Ultimately..the Democrats are losing because they are seen as the party of whiners. The party of children who sit back and cry about everything the adults are having to do. They don't like this, they don't like that, action X is unfair, action Y is cruel. And when Republicans get flabbergasted and say "Fine, what do you suggest?" We get "I would do everything different!" -- without specifics.

The Democrats need to quit worrying about managing problems so much and start trying to solve problems. They need to come to the table with a set of plans that are understandable by the majority of Americans. Focus on "little things" if necessary but at least come up with something. Show that you're ready to be serious players at governing and the people make let you back in.

I got my brand new Dell machine in.  It's the latest/greatest Dell XPS game box.  3.6Ghz Pentium IV processor built in with 2 gigs of RAM.  It's the "GEN 3" box.  Which means, naturally this week Dell has introduced the "GEN 4" box.  Little bit annoying but anyway..

It came with Windows XP Home edition. I haven't bothered to format it and throw on Windows XP Professional yet because the main difference between the two, from my vantage point, is Remote desktop which I don't really need on this machine.

However, ActiveX controls are problematic.  The home page of The Political Machine (for instance) never comes up. It just stops with "1 more item" downloading in Internet Explorer.  Same is true of the ActiveX based editor that high level access users on JoeUser.com get.  I've never seen such an issue before.

I have my other Dell machine (2.8 Ghz home machine) sitting next to it (that's what I'm typing this on) and the IE settings appear to be the same.  So I'm not sure what the deal is yet.

I'm wondering what other people's experiences have been with this. Has anyone heard of such an issue before?

 

I created my "Draginol" character on the Uther Pacific time-zone server.  The first day was a mess. Just total lag. Too frustrating.  Amazingly, other people apparently have a lot more patience or something because when I got on today, there were an amazing number of people who had zipped up to leve 18 or higher already.

I was in the alpha and beta of World of Warcraft.  It took me about a week of playing to get to level 15 and another 3 weeks to get to level 30.  Roughly speaking, in one day you can get up to around level 8 fairly easily if you know what you're doing. Assume a couple more days to get to level 15.  This is assuming around 4 to 6 hours of play in a given "day".

My 7 year old son is also playing. He's on as a Dwarft fighter called "Charly". He's having a blast with it. Been making use of a new internal beta of a program we're going to call Mob Master to let me control both accounts at the same time.  I have two PCs and two accounts and so when Alex isn't playing, I control both Charly and Draginol with my keyboard/mouse using Mob Master.

Some friends of mine told me that they object strongly (and note politely) to this kind of thing. Which, frankly annoys me quite a bit.  Those of us who don't have big gangs of buddies to help with quests can have (almost) the same benefit by using something like Mob Master.  Yea, some geek with bots or something could probably abuse it but that's not Mob Master's fault. I don't see how there's any problem with someone with two legitimate accounts with two legitimate characters being able to form a party that they control both characters. It's not quite as good as having an expert behind each one (since you obviously can only give commands to one player at a time) but it's definitely made some of the quests a lot easier.  It's a hellluva lot less cheesy than buying "gold" on eBay or something.

Anyway, so I got Draginol up to level 10 when I got tired of it.  I'm still not sure how I will feel about it long term. I played it so much during the beta/alpha that I'm not seeing a lot of new stuff.  If I can find more people I know on the Uther server that would make it more fun. Soloing gets old in a hurry even with two characters.

So if you're on Uther, look me up. If you're into these kinds of games, I think you'll like World of Warcraft. The lag issues seem to have subsided dramtaically and it's a very well put together game.

Any of you interested in World of Warcraft, some of us are gathering on the Uther server (Pacific Coast) to build our characters to form a guild eventually.  Check out the linked story if you're interested in joining us.

Okay, we have two people now on the Uther server (Pacific Coast time zone).  We chose pacific coast because it is 3 hours ahead of where we are (eastern) so more day-light playing in the game.

My character's name is Draginol. Tandis is another player on there.

So for starters, just look for me on there and add me to your friends list.

Once we have enough people, ew can form a guild.

See you there!

The month and a half WindowBlinds contest is nearly over. Only a little over 2 weeks left.  Hundreds of dollars in cash (5% of our subscription revenue during that time period) is going to be split amongst the top 10 skinners.

Right now, Tiggz has a narrow lead with his GT3 skin. Stay tuned!