So from "quite good" to "stunning" is a 0.3 rating on a 1 to 5 scale? That's quite a non-linear scale.

I think the problem is that people are always trying to reach the max level without actually having fun and when they get to max level people complain that there is nothing to do. 60-70 are very interesting levels if you spend time on the Outlands, there are like 10 zones with hundreds of quests that have a lot of story behind them. I did 6 levels in 2 zones by turning off the XP bar and actually reading the quest text and trying to have fun doing quests rather than just trying to get 70 so you can move to northrend and repeat.

The grind is your choice, try to stop and smell the flowers, there is a lot more to WoW than getting to max level in the shortest possibly time.

At the time of the Skype purchase, eBay was desperately trying to break into the China market against TaoBao (or something like that) that was beating them. Meg The CEO, in yet another display of ineptitude, after a long business trip (a.k.a vacation) in China got a hold of a rumor that Chinese auctioneers preferred to talk on the phone rather than email via anonymous email (which is how eBay was able to keep potential gray market auctions low) and that Skype was going to allow the buyer and seller a better route of communication and allow eBay to dominate China. How no major executive foresaw that once the buyer and seller could communicate by Skype then would just close the auction and negotiate offline and avoid seller fees; everyone but the powers that be saw this coming.

The asking price of 2.8 billion + 2 billion (or something ridiculous like that) if they met some internal goals (it was as insane as it sounds and at the time every blog, publication, news source was laughing outloud). Needless to say Skype missed their goal gloriously, did not get 2 billion and at that time it came out that in yet another stroke of brilliance by Meg the underlying technology was not part of the 2.8 billion. The only people who benefited were the founders of Skype who must still be laughing.

If I am buying a chat program for 2.8 billion I better be getting everything... anyhow, all this is public knowledge and a sad chronicle of how incompetent CEO can keep making mistake after mistake and be seen as successful because the company was hugely profitable despite their best efforts. For the record I sold my stock in eBay as soon as I read about this mess and it was at 44$usd at the time, it fell to almost 20$usd when Skype was reported as a write-down (a.k.a. complete loss) in the 10Q and never quite recovered.

I am a solo developer on several projects and run into this often. I find that switching to another project for a bit or exploring new technologies and how they can be used helps, then after a short time you will get the urge to go back. You can also see what new feature you can add that requires doing something completely new (embed a scripting engine, add an exotic data structure, write a new parser, whatever fits) and see if that re-ignites it.

I bet if they rewrote the CPU intensive parts in C/C++ (from PHP) they could reduce the overall machine count and stop worrying about which CPU manufacturer lied to them that week :)

You must be popular with the ladies.

I monitor http traffic and server logs and majority of the attacks coming from bot attacks have IE 7.0 as the user agent. They are also relentless in the volume of requests to random sites looking for some PHP proxy exploit. On a side note, why can't many of these PHP applications put their admin modules in a zip file and not into the public site by default (not an attack on PHP, rather on bad developers who use it without understanding what they are doing), I see 100s of attacks on some proxy.php every single day (and yes with IE7 user agent most of the time).

Because some mod with an H1B fears the truth...