Potential Mac OS X Mouse Acceleration Solution

So... in a previous post, I discussed more about the ongoing Mac OS X mouse acceleration problem. Most notably that the OS does not have a means of turning this feature off.

I just found this:


It appears Razer has made a mouse driver for one of their mice that allows us to turn off acceleration! It's called the DeathAdder, and here's a link to it that works at the time of writing.

I know that USB Overdrive and MouseFix allow us to do that, but USB Overdrive's speed is too low, and MouseFix gets broken as soon as you adjust the mouse speed.

It's still not as good as if Apple were to let us choose how to use our mice in the first place. But I personally find Apple's mice poor for gaming, and I always buy an after-market mouse anyway. I also need a replacement for my Logitech MX Revolution. I really like it, but it's too heavy and is bothering my wrist.

Anyway, if I get one of these, I'll post a review after I try it out.

EVE Online: BM2 Update

Some readers have said they have more fun reading my EVE posts than playing it. So here's an update on what my corp is up to.

Recently, we started BM2 Project 2. I called for an investment from our members. They could buy shares in the project for 500,000 ISK each (which is a reasonable price for anyone who has been in the game for more then 2-3 months). We issued 14,000 shares, so the initial capital investment was 7 billion ISK. We limited the investments per member to 250 million ISK for each round, with each round lasting about 4 days to give everyone a chance.

The 7 billion came in very quickly, as I have developed a lot of trust among the membership. As a side note, the shares were issued from a separate holding company. The problem is that if a member has 5% of the shares in a company, they can call a vote to replace the CEO. So I'm not ever going to issue shares in BM2 so that I'm guaranteed to remain CEO. It also makes accounting easier.

With the capital, we bought 3 POSs (Player-Owned Stations), and set them up to "run reactions." This just converts raw materials into secondary materials. As you need a POS in nullsec (lawless space where anyone can shoot at anything without legal repercussion) to run reactions, the profit margin is pretty decent.So one trusted member is responsible for fueling the POSs and keeping them stocked on materials, and I help sell the results and do the accounting. Each month, 10% of the profits go to us two for running the project, and the rest is paid back as dividends on the purchased shares. Several billion ISK worth of materials goes through the project each month, and profits are just starting to come in.

We have also colonized Wormhole space. In a recent expansion, CCP added randomly-located bits of null-sec space which are only connected to "known space" (or k-space) by wormholes. These are also randomly located, and can only be found by scanning. Once you find one, you can enter it, and you end up in hidden solar system that has no security. Below is a view from the X-Large Ship Assembly Array at the POS:


The tricky thing is that 24 hours after a wormhole is used, it disappears and moves to some other random location in the galaxy. So if you enter a wormhole from one solar system, then 24 hours later the exit from the hidden system will have moved so that you would come out somewhere else. Wormholes also disappear after a certain amount of mass has passed through them, which makes it quite hard to get a large fleet into a wormhole.

A while back a few of our members decided to colonize a wormhole by installing a POS there, despite my warning that I thought it was a bad idea. I was really wrong about that one. Once they were established there, they started mining very high-value ores and doing Sleeper Missions, which are PvE missions against a new type of AI that is generally smarter and more dangerous. The corp started paying for the fuel to run the POS out there, and now takes a share of what goes on in the hole.

We had a security issue with some ships being stolen, so we installed a smaller insecure POS and locked down security on the larger one. Fuel runs us about 250 million per month, but we earn quite a bit more than that on our 10% share of operations there.

Our alliance has just made a very good rental deal for some nullsec space. So we've now put up a POS out in the Scalding Pass region. We're starting to get organized there as well. I've made the trip out there, and have installed jump clones so I can pop back easily at any time. Here is the route I took from our HQ to get there:



One more thing: I am now a Capital Ship pilot. We built a Thanatos carrier in our wormhole space. We have quite a few assets there now, and we need to protect them from people who might want to kick us out to have the hole as their own. We will be building several capital ships there, and will slowly develop a bit of a capital fleet to protect our interests. I had never actually seen one of these, since Capitals can only be uses in low- and null-sec space. Here's a pic of me in a Thanatos for the first time:



The funny thing is that in this picture, the carrier has no modules or fighters equipped; I would be capable of dealing exactly zero damage were I to get in a fight with it. At this time I was just moving it from where it was built to where it will be parked. This ship cost roughly a billion ISK, and so I need to be very careful with it. Especially since I didn't pay for it.

That's all for now.

EVE is such a good game

What sets EVE apart from other MMOs I've tried is the strength of its social structures. I'm the CEO of a corporation, which is a group of pilots who work together. There are security measures in place so that new members don't have access to many assets, others have access to more, and still others have access to a lot of assets.

Previously, we had a Director, who has almost as much power as the CEO, and can access anything the corp owns and can give members access to things as well. This director was known to me in Real Life, so I assumed I could trust him with all this power. It turns out I could. He no longer plays a lot, so he is no longer Director.

Over the last four years of running my corp, the operation has grown considerably. We used to be a small safe-space mining corp. Now we have highsec operations, several stations in a wormhole, and we are beginning operations with our alliance in lawless nullsec space. We also are running a 7 billion credit investment project which is now paying dividends to shareholders.

The time has come to appoint a Director (two, actually) that I do not know in Real Life. One has been with the corp for a year, the other for two separate periods of time adding up to about 19 months. Over time, these people have proven that they can be trusted with large assets. It's true that some of EVE's bigger scams were over a year in the making. But our operation isn't big enough to warrant that kind of infiltration, so I don't expect that is going to happen to us yet.

I had to consider whether the membership would trust these people, and if I was leaving someone else out who might be better suited to the position. It's a decision that took me a few weeks of occasional contemplation to arrive at.

Here is the letter I wrote to the corp as a whole informing everyone of the promotions. I think it illustrates the depth and complexity of the relationships between players in this game. Sure, mining and running missions in the game is ultimately not that much fun. But the bonds that form between players, co-operational or adversarial , are real; these are what make the game worth playing.

Directors
From: Norjia Blacksteel
Sent: 2010.05.08 16:11
To: Blacksteel Mining and Manufacturing

Hello,

After long consideration, I have appointed two Directors: Sachiko and Roarke. They can do anything I can, except appoint more Directors. I have done this because the corp has grown beyond the small empire-mining corp it once was, and our command structure needs to grow.

The corp remains a semi-dictatorship with important decisions and policy decided by me, but you can ask the Directors for help with issues only I could handle previously.

This is a big step for me, since one of BM2's founding principles was that there would never be a Director that I didn't know in real life. But since I'm the only person I know who has really stuck with the game (with the exception of Mejiityr, who currently doesn't play enough to take the role), I've had to let that idea go.

It's also hard for me as my role in the corp will shift further away from daily operational duties to directional decision making, accounting and diplomacy. But ultimately this is necessary because BM2 is successful, and that's pretty cool.

I still remember the guy in chat before I founded the corp who said, "Why does every noob who comes into this game think they can run a corp?" I wonder where he is now.

So congratulations are in order for Sachiko and Roarke, and to everyone who has made this move necessary by contributing to BM2's continued success.

Norjia