Company of Heroes isn't. Granted there are times in my games where I push the 150 CPM mark for a minute or two, that's during the most intense fighting when I'm trying to micromanage a half-dozen tanks while keeping my infantry in the fight and in good cover. My average CPM for CoH is something like 30-40, and that's counting one command for each unit in a group...so a group of 3 units hits 30 cpm with one command every 6 seconds.

My God. It's so beautiful. An excellent argument for a small amount of chance to be inserted in to StarCraft.

The Koreans would riot.

I despise StarCraft. I really, honestly do. This isn't some trolling to piss people off, this is me venting.

StarCraft is all about speed and memorization. In that way it's more like a side-scrolling fighting game, where the person who can execute the right combos at the right time wins. Wrong build order? You lose. Didn't mass enough units by the five minute mark? You lose. I play StarCraft 2 with some friends from time to time and I do reasonably well at it, but it's nowhere near as fun as other games. It feels more like a job. I have no desire to play it solo.

What really disappointed me from the start is how the game utterly lacks any sort of reward for solid tactical decisions. High ground? That's negated by simple line-of-sight. Every shot is a hit, and every hit scores exactly the same damage. Compare that to Total Annihilation which at least attempted to give some realism in how units move and fire and the effects of terrain. TA's engine was FAR superior to StarCraft.

StarCraft is a clickfest, the closest thing RTS has to an arcade game. And it's tainted the whole genre.

So StarCraft was a dominant game when the World Cyber Games started. That doesn't mean it originated the idea of "esports" (a term I LOATHE by the way). I was playing in for-money Quake tournaments two years before StarCraft came out.

You see overcomplicated. I see multipurpose. Sure you could build a high-speed color sorter that is much smaller and more efficient, but this guy built something that could be used for a lot more than sorting colored blocks. As a proof of concept and early prototype, it's quite good.

Parker Brothers' "Aggravation" is a family tradition. Simple mechanics + a small degree of strategy, so it is accessible to young players and fun for adults as well.

The even horizontal distribution greatly increases your search times. It would be far more optimal if you were to divide your documents into separate stacks. This way if you know which stack a document is in, your search is limited to a fraction of the total. Knowing approximately when you last used it narrows the search even more, allowing you to bypass more recently-used documents. Given enough use, your most-used documents will filter to the top, optimizing your searches by grouping your most-needed papers at the beginning of your search.

"If you were in Joe User's department, which solution would you prefer?"

Oh I'd love Joe's solution. And then when Joe was out sick for a week and the server went down, I'd hate it. And my boss would pull a fit about it. He'd gripe to his higher-ups and a big to-do would be made over "the server being down" with the crucial information that it's Joe's Server being lost along the way. By Friday VPs are dragging IT personnel into meetings to discuss why my department's mission-critical server has been down for a week. IT the has to explain why Joe has a server that's not managed by IT and answer hours of stupid, repetitive questions that prevent them from actually getting any work done.

I kid you not, I've seen almost this very scenario play out, more than once. Information is lost as it moves through the chain and the complaint takes on a life of its own, so that when it does finally come down on the heads of IT, we waste valuable time trying to convince the overeducated buffoons hired to run the place that 1) we know what the hell we're doing, and 2) this is someone else's fault because we weren't allowed to set and/or enforce good network policies.

These policies aren't dreamed up by IT crews with nothing else to do. We are tight-fisted with our networks because if we aren't, WE are the ones who pay the price. Not the suits, not the workers, and not Joe "This is MY server" User.

As has been said: if you don't want to operate under the umbrella of IT, use online services or host your own outside of work.

Here's the thing: he doesn't describe any sort of action by the IT department that would indicate they were unwilling to provide the service. They simple "don't." Not "won't" or "can't" or "will in two years", just it "doesn't offer" the service he wants.

Networks serve people, that is true enough. But without careful planning, proper execution, and rigorous monitoring and maintenance, they serve us very poorly and can even inflict harm by allowing breaches of security. Allowing users a free pass with a "sequestered unsecure network" where they can do whatever they want almost always results in more and more users jumping on that network, as they see it as being unrestricted and "just easier". A few dozen mismanaged servers, scores of personal laptops, and every smartphone owned by a user who knows how to set up wifi ends up on that beast. IT ends up with a hundred unhappy users because your "user-friendly" unsecure network is crippled by idiocy. And who gets blamed? IT, of course!

The answer doesn't lie in a draconian set of IT policies either. Somewhere in the middle is the idea that when a department head sees a need for a service, they can approach IT through the proper channels, tell them what they're looking for, and work together to implement a solution in a timely manner. In this particular case, he should have taken his test product to IT and asked for help putting it into service. They could look for potential problems, more practical solutions, and deploy it in such a way that everyone is happy.

And if the IT crew just immediately shot him down, he'd at least have some clout when he put up a fight, whereas now IT could simply say "he plugged in a rogue server and asked us to make the network less secure so he could use it" and put an end to the debate.

My employment (aka my source of money) is put at risk when someone else plugs a server into my network that might open up the entire network to intrusion. Your reckless behavior can impact my ability to make money. This has nothing to do with God complexes and everything to do with making sure IT doesn't take the fall for incompetency elsewhere.

Wow. I couldn't write that last sentence with a straight face. We take the fall for other people's incompetencies all the time.

Some questions not answered:

Did the OP ask the IT department what sort of services they are capable of providing? Hospital IT departments are usually in the habit of trying to provide departments with what they need, as department heads and doctors generally win the battle for "I want ________" when it goes up the chain.

Did he inform IT of his plans prior to executing it, or just bring in a server and set it up, then start asking for access? If he did the former, they might have worked with him, providing him with rackspace, security, and expert administration so that his workload was limited to application administration. if he did the latter, he's lucky they haven't made an issue out of it and gotten him written up.

Did he make sure he's not violating any federal regulations regarding patient data security? A rogue server on the network is a MAJOR security threat, no matter how competent the administrator is (or believes himself to be).

Did he think about the precedent this sets? If every department decides to go running their own servers on their own terms, IT can't support them and the whole hospital steps back about 20 years in how their network functions.

Did he consider the idea that maybe the service he's setting up for his own department might be useful to scale to the entire hospital at a later date? it sounds like he's found a service he considers worth putting a lot of effort into providing...for just his department. If it's good for radiology, it's likely good for lots of others. But HIS server probably can't accommodate that scale. HIS server isn't centralized. HIS server...well, is his.

By "better" I mean to say "more plausible"

They probably could. I have another idea though that might be better.

If GooTube would use their awesome powers of awesomeness to publicly put pressure on the big media companies to lighten up about people using their content in freely-distributed videos. I'm not saying they should be okay with you posting the last five minutes of their latest blockbuster movie. I'm saying that they shouldn't pitch a fit when you choose to use their music in a video you make.

Here's a thought: wouldn't it be cool if you could use any song you wanted, so long as you linked to a place a viewer could buy that song online if they liked it? Look at how many videos have people asking "what song is that?" They want to know because they like it.

Copyright holders are missing so many opportunities to make money.

"By the parent's logic..."

I should clarify: One's rights don't include the infringement of the rights of others. I made the mistake of assuming that was implied. If I have the right to life, you don't have the right to infringe on that by murdering me.

It has nothing to do with divinely-granted rights. It comes down to two ideas:
- It is not acceptable for one individual to compel another to do something, or to stop doing something, unless there is a danger to others.
- It is not acceptable for one individual to take from another that which is not offered.

If these two things aren't followed, I would argue that a society cannot function.