Apparently there were no network upgrades. The Netflix deal sounds like what happened is that Netflix is paying Comcast to allow them to hook up servers directly to Comcast's network instead of having to route in from outside Comcast. Which would explain why it happened within a month, if all Netflix did was set up some new servers inside some Comcast data centers.

Well, not just from Netflix, what they really want is to make the Netflix experience so terrible that you'd rather buy pay-per-view movies from Comcast instead. Barring that, they'll take money from Netflix if they can get that, too.

Comcast's end game is being your only source of content. Internet, TV, movies, music, phone service, all through Comcast and no one else. If they have to break Netflix and Skype to do that - "oops." After all, net neutrality is currently unenforceable in the United States.

In one of the earlier Eich threads, I speculated that he was kicked out less because of his former gay marriage-related politics (he did, after all, indicate he wouldn't change Mozilla's LGBT-related policies) and more because the board wanted someone who could better monetize Mozilla. Don't forget, the board members that quit over Eich's appointment didn't quit due to the LGBT nonsense, they quit because they wanted someone "outside the organization who could provide a new business strategy."

With this new appointment, it sounds like I was right: Eich was kicked out not over the Twitter whine-storm, but due to internal politics that want to see Mozilla turned into a money-making "product."

Losing Eich is going to be the worst thing to ever happen to Mozilla, mark my words.

Or, to put it another way, "he apologized, so now we're moving the goalposts so we can get him fired anyway."

It wouldn't have been. How do I know? Because he did, and that didn't stop the criticism.

He pledged not to change Mozilla's current policies towards LGBT individuals. It wasn't enough, and the OKCupid thing happened in spite of his assurances that nothing was going to change under his leadership.

Now you're probably right that his personal views didn't change, but he was committed to not changing Mozilla as an organization. It still wasn't enough to stop OKCupid's childish little ploy.

I have a suspicion that the whole "Prop 8 support" thing is a smokescreen for the real reason he stepped down. It makes a great bone to support to the LGBT crowd and let's them have a "win."

However, three members the Mozilla board quit after Eich was named CEO - and they did that before the OKCupid stuff and have said it was entirely unrelated to his support for Prop 8. (Apparently one was planning on quitting after the CEO selection anyway, but the reasons for the other two leaving aren't known.)

So it's entirely possible that Eich left less over the Prop 8 stuff and more over internal politics. Apparently there was a group inside Mozilla that wanted an outside CEO to be named in order to better monetize Mozilla. (And if that's the case, losing Eich may be the worst thing that's ever happened to Mozilla.)

Which, incidentally, is essentially what MyCloud is. I have a Western Digital MyCloud sitting at home and I never even noticed the outage. If you don't bother trying to access it from outside your home network, it's basically just a little NAS device.

Yeah, this deserves reiteration. I'm not sure where the hell Yoshida got the idea that part of the problem was they were "stuck focusing on lessons from XI" from given that XIV basically ignored everything that made XI good, but it's his claim.

The scary thought is that he may be right, that XIV really did represent what they learned from XI, which, honestly, really does explain quite a bit about Square Enix's recent releases.

Well, it wasn't so much that you couldn't figure it out, is that it was entirely random.

OK, first off, I have to explain that you have two levels: your character level and your class level. Your character level would slowly go up by getting regular old XP. Your class level involved getting "SP" and SP was randomly rewarded by doing actions related to the class.

And I mean that literally. Using a class's action had a random chance of gaining SP, depending on the level of the target the action was being used on.

Now you might assume based on what I just described that "character level" was like a traditional RPG level and that "class level" would be used to unlock skills or something. Nope. All the "character level" did was unlock attribute points you can use to increase attributes whose meaning was never explained. The "class level" was your traditional RPG level - increasing it would increase all your attributes on a set growth curve. (In addition to being used to unlock skills.) And leveling that up was, quite literally, random.

The random factor was what was patched out a few months after release, they changed it so that killing enemies always generated SP. As far as I know, they never got rid of the "character" level, whose sole purpose was granting "bonus" attribute points.

I agree, I'm not sure I understand Yoshida's comment about them being "too focused on FFXI" because if anything the problem was that they essentially looked at FFXI and decided they were going to try and be as different as possible from it. (Well, at least in some aspects, considering they wholesale lifted things like the various player races from XI.)

People were looking for an updated XI for the then-next gen consoles, and instead of doing that, they did everything they could to distance the mechanics for XIV from XI, and it just didn't work.

Imagine instead of being a long series of hallways that you were linearly lead down, you were instead dumped into a large maze of nearly identical hallways and given absolutely no direction...

The federal regulations required to allow people to receive subsidies under Obamacare. In order for people to fall under Obamacare, they had to re-signup using a website that had to be rewritten from the ground-up to use the new Obamacare subsidies. Basically, none of the existing site could be used because it was state-only, and they had to remake the entire thing to work with the new fed system.

And, when making this decision a year ago, who better to do that than the people building the Healthcare.gov site? Oops!