Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering AWS re-invent 2017, presented by AWS, Intel, and our ecosystem of partners.  Happy to welcome back to the program, Rishi Yadav, who's the CEO of Zettabyte and Bart Hickenlooper, who is the SVP of Client Services, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you Stu. So Rishi, yesterday you were on the other set with John Furrier and with Justin, and we were really excited to really launch Zettabytes, help you bring the company out. We've known InfoObjects in your company for a while, so of course we want people to go check out the other interview, but in today's kind of hybrid, multi-cloud world, we've seen Amazon kind of slowly moderating a little bit the way they discuss it, but why don't you bring us inside a little bit? What are you hearing from customers and what kind of led to the creation of Zettabytes? Yeah, so what we're hearing from customers is that, I mean there's a lot of talk about the cloud and the AWS, right, the challenge is that what I discussed yesterday also was that how do I take those baby steps towards adoption of the cloud? And that's where the challenge comes, right? On one side they say everything on-prem is bad, everything on cloud is good, I mean those kind of statements are okay, but somebody who has got billions of dollars of business running, right, for them it doesn't make any sense, they want to have logical steps and they also want to have with every step what value they're adding, yeah. Yeah. But we always hear, right, we dig in, it's like all in on any one thing, oh come on, you're using various SaaS providers, you probably have multiple cloud providers, yes you've still got something sitting in the back end of your data center or many things and that migration takes time. What kind of strategy and tactics do you hear customers doing that gets at a bite engaged? Yeah, well what we see in most enterprises is an effort to really modernize their applications, right? And they want to make those so that they're cloud native, leveraging really the innovation that's taken place in the cloud. And so that application modernization is really what's driving an enterprise to do some things and move quickly to the cloud, it's no longer the economics of moving to the cloud but that innovation engine that can be really ignited with those technologies. Getting there from their legacy platforms is a little tricky, they need a development cycle that works in a hybrid fashion to really go cloud native with those applications. So when they're starting off on that journey, where are you finding customers starting with? Like what are the applications that they do first and what are the functions that they use from AWS? Are they going with just EC2 type things? Are they using S3 for storage? What do they start with? So that's a good point that with the first phase of the cloud adoption, most of the work was on IAS, I mean you just, whatever you have on-prem, you just put that on the cloud, right? And then obviously you use S3 storage and things like that, right? And that's where there was a lot of talk. I mean if you remember a few years back, everybody would say, cloud is not cheap, cloud is costly and I was like, as Bart said, it's not about economics, right? It's always about convenience, it's always about the value add, right? And especially when enterprises started getting into the cloud, started adopting cloud a few years back, that's where those things became very important, right? Because that's what they wanted. I mean, you just cannot save someone 20% in an infrastructure cost and that may not even come, right? And say that it's worth the adoption of the cloud. Yeah. So we were talking yesterday about the 100 services, the number of services that you as an organization have to wrap your brain around and one of the things that Zeta Bytes helps with that is to kind of give you some focus. So again, what are the things that Zeta Bytes is focusing on that they find that customers actually really, really want from cloud? Because Amazon is so huge, making sense of the whole thing is quite tricky. Yeah, when you talk about application modernization, if you have a monolithic application, EC2 and S3 are great. If you're going to migrate it, you can do that. What we're seeing is really a switch to DevOps for application development, microservices development that leverage certain platform services from Amazon that are specific to enable an application. And those are things like Lambda, Kinesis, right? Elastic Search, and you can write microservices that consume those services in addition to your traditional storage and compute and really get cloud native. So we've selected those services on our platform to help with that application modernization and really enable a customer to make applications with microservices, enablement. So, you know, Wikibon's been looking at many years really, what's happening to kind of the transformation in the data center, the research we put out a few years ago is what we call true private cloud. Because we said what was happening, you know, kind of the virtualization plus, I mean, look, love virtualization. I spent 15 years on that wave, but it wasn't enough. And even when we started simplifying and even some automation on there, that application journey, and how do we get ready for modern applications even in, I worked a lot on kind of the HCI wave, it was let's modernize their infrastructure and then we'll worry about the application stuff later and maybe it's not a fit. So, what's different now? What are the toolings available? Why is now, you know, can I put that stuff? I mean, it's cloud native, isn't it? That means it should all live in a public cloud, no? Or can it live, you know, in many places? So I think that's a great point. So three pieces of the puzzle, the infrastructure, data and the applications. So there has been a lot of talk about infrastructure and not having infrastructure. Data, every other company in the Bay Area is backup and restore company, right? Nobody's talking about the applications. Yes, they are SaaS players, right? Where like, okay, we'll just host application for you and you don't have to worry about anything else. But what about a lot of these legacy applications which have been built over the last 20, 30 years, right? Nobody's talking about that. Everybody talks about green field applications, right? Whatever you start new, right? Everything is going to be the cloud, it's going to be cloud native, everything is awesome and then clients say yes, but I already invested $500 million in the applications in last 10 years. What's going to happen to them? Yeah, like I like to say that the first 80% of writing software is putting the bugs in and then the second 80% of writing software is taking them out again. So if you have to completely start with these core business applications that are generating revenue, there's a lot of risk there in going to something brand new. And I mean, we have Andy Jassy talking about if I was starting the company again today, I'd go completely all serverless. And then really, right now in 2017, is it really that established in that great way? What's your take on that? For an enterprise that has this investment already, should they be going completely all into serverless or should they be picking off some of these other more mature services, do you think? Yeah, I would say it would be really application-specific. If it's traditional transactional, you may or may not want to go serverless, right? Because you've got that relational database really kind of structure around it. If it's a modern application and you're a company that has, for example, a brand new mobile application, you're going to want to leverage things like Lambda in that application development. So you can trigger the correct service to spin up in that application. So I think modernization is really specific to the use case. What we're seeing is a digital transformation in most companies where they're really requiring some newer applications to leverage past services like Lambda, Elasticsearch, Kinesis and other things. So Rishi, one of the things that we've heard from customers for many years is they say that they'd like to have really the same in their data center as in the public cloud. We did a survey years ago and it was like 80% said that and then say, what do you have? Well, I've got VMware here and I've got AWS there. So is it about having the whole stack? Are APIs enough? How much commonality do you need? How does ZetaBytes look at this and how do you help customers kind of bridge this model? Yes, absolutely. So number one is that the VMware type of solution is still pretty much, I like VMware, but it's pretty much infrastructure as a service based. Second thing is the reason we have come up with our platform is that few core services and for few key workloads, IoT is being one of them, low latency workloads being another of them, few workloads which need special type of security and governance which clients are used to from last 20 years, right? So yes, AWS has amazing security and governance, no doubt about that, but still part of the workload they may want to run locally and they should at least have that freedom. So only those part of workloads are going to be run on ZetaBytes appliance, but rest of, but the API compatibility will provide complete. So whether you want to run it on ZetaBytes or on AWS, most of the workloads are going to run on AWS and that you can run from our platform. Yeah, I want to key off a word you mentioned there. You mentioned appliances. So we've seen lots of solutions over the last decade. It's done quite well with appliances, talk about kind of the HCI, talk about and kind of the back of recovery, lots of things there, but it's a software world now. Hex serverless, Andy Jazzy says we'll build serverless. Why an appliance? Talk a little bit about kind of the go to market. What do people get today? How do they buy it? Why does that make sense for your customers? Yes, absolutely, but we'll add it more from the sales perspective, but appliance from the optimization perspective is perfect. So in our case, yes, we have figured out a spec which is perfect, the perfectly optimized for to run our software platform and we can provide it to the clients. If they want to have the similar stack build themselves, that's perfectly okay. But the idea is that hardware has equally important role to play as the software has, right? So that's it. When you think about the platform services that we have, like S3, RDS and others, you definitely need hardware to support a real workload and for us to really standardize on something that someone can do, true development, with that depth on the platform is really critical. They can do, you can go to GitHub and get open source S3 and work around it, but it's a mock. Really what you need is a platform to develop the application. On the other thing is, I worked for Cisco for 10 years and the channel there is extremely powerful with companies like CDW, WWT. The route to market there is really compelling for a combined solution and I think part of the reason you've seen success with those combined solutions is the customers are used to a service model where it's one throat to choke on those types of platforms and the channel is a trusted advisor. It's a great way for us to go to market. Yeah, just to give my two cents on that, people kind of conflate that we've had some commoditization of what's happening in infrastructure. Doesn't mean you just grab stuff off the shelf. I read an article four years ago, AWS infrastructure is hyper-optimized. If you went to the Tuesday night keynote, oh my gosh, they spend way more on hardware than anybody else in this ecosystem, I'm sure, and spend more on it so it's not that you have IP in hardware, if I'm not understanding, it's you're making sure you've got your software's match for the package, I can do it, somebody else can do it, right? Yeah, go ahead. Yes, absolutely, I think that part is very, very important that one throat to choke, one company that supports everything. So in our case, yes, if you want to have your own hardware, then you can do that, but in our case, if you take the whole appliance from us, then we are providing you complete support, right? Hardware, operating system, as well as the software, right? And we're, in a certain sense, we're really trying to, like you said, to match the performance of those optimized environments on AWS for a client, so they get a similar experience from our platform that they would get on AWS, and if they build something on Zettabytes and then deploy on AWS, they should get the same experience. Okay, I want to give you the last word, sure, lots of customers coming by your booth, which is not far from where we're sitting right now, what are some of the key things they're hearing, what's getting them kind of excited, interested that they want to follow up more with? Yes, so I think most of the customers, when we talk to them, we said, okay, are you using AWS? They say yes, because they are at re-event, and say, okay, how far you are in the AWS adoption, and that's where the devil comes in the details, okay? Yeah, these applications, we have been able to migrate, we are not able to migrate, we are building our expertise around it and things like that, and the question comes, do you really want to go too deep into figuring out the problems which the vendors have solved or you'd rather focus on your business problems? So that's what I would say, as I said, one package, one platform where you get to focus on your business problems and we take care of the rest. Yeah, and I think in the keynote yesterday, Andy Jassy said it's all about the analytics, and what we're hearing is we've given a lot of thought to putting together a platform that supports big data and analytics in addition to the AWS abstraction that we've done. So those analytics workloads are really intriguing to people that are talking with us, our support of machine learning, converting what it may be a traditional spark job into a Lambda function is really something people are raising their eyebrows about. Bart Hickamoper, Rishi Adave, asking how deep are we into AWS? Well, here at theCUBE we're about 60 interviews in, which means we have a few more hours left of great interviews here. So for Justin Warren, I'm Stu Miniman. Thank you so much for watching theCUBE.


Hi everybody, I'm Andreas and I'm here to talk about the Unix input and output system. There is one particular aspect about the Unix IO system that everybody kind of agrees on and the idea is that everything is a file. Usually when we talk about files, we think of entries in the file system, some path name that points to something that has bytes in it. So these dormant file system entries aren't the kind of file that I'll be talking about today. This talk is about the files that processes have opened that they are reading and writing. These are called file descriptors and I apologize for the quality of the drawings in these slides. So one day I was talking about Unix with my colleague Nelson whom you have heard of in Currence Talk. We all work on the systems team together and Nelson knows kernels and he sent me down the path to see what weird things Unix lets you do with IO and I have learned that Unix does not disappoint when it comes to weird things. I found mechanisms to circumvent limits and break down process isolation, ways to bring a machine to its knees and some very fun implementation details in the Linux and OS 10 kernels. So file descriptors are really the concept behind how Unix does input and output. To an application, there are just numbers but they hide a massive amount of complexity and they also let you do incredibly weird and funny things. So a number alone doesn't carry a whole lot of information. It's just a handle to an entry in a table summary that holds that file descriptor state and all other bookkeeping stuff that the operating system keeps for you. It's a primitive but simple API design. Numbers are very easy to pass around for programs and the OS can keep track of all that state on the table and easily retrieve it using that number as an offset. And they're also not just files, they can be pipe sockets terminals, all sorts of weirdo stuff and Linux. Basically any kind of input and output on Unix system goes through one. Let's look at an example. So here's the output of a program called LSOF. You probably can't see this in the back. I'll describe it in words. LSOF is short for List Open Files. It shows a bunch more stuff than just the open files but the last three lines, people sitting in front here, are the important ones that I'm gonna focus on. So I ran a command to grep from a pipe and direct the output of grep into another file. And you can see that grep has, or you could see if you could see in the back, I'm sorry, grep has a pipe opened as file descriptor zero and the output file opened as file descriptor one. And then there's also a third file descriptor number two which is standard error which goes to the terminal. All of these are conventions necessary for the C library. They're meaningful there. Everything after the file descriptor number two is up to the programmer. And also file descriptors that are opened by one process can be passed off to another. So the terminal in LSOF output was inherited from the shell. This is a process called inheritance. Child process will inherit apparent open files. Or you can pass file descriptors between arbitrary processes using UNIX domain sockets. The API is complicated, so I'm not gonna talk about that very much. But to a programmer, they look like these are the network sockets that you can connect to via a path name instead of a network address. So something like slash temp slash mysql.sock. They also work only on the local system, so never across a network. And because they work only on the local system, you're guaranteed to get every message out the other end that you send and always in order. That's kind of great. They're also kind of a wormhole. So they let you send files from one process to another. The process to do that is kind of complicated. Basically you send a message containing out of band data, containing control messages, mentioning those file descriptors, and out the other end, the process reads that message and as soon as it reads that message, it has the file descriptor on its file table. The timeline here though is interesting. The sending process could close that file before the receiving process picks it up. And it's kind of like time travel in a way. This gets pretty cool. So from this we learned that the kernel makes sure that the files stay open somehow. There must be some global table that holds all the state. And the kernel then closes them hopefully when all the references are closed. Hank, please don't read that section either. So yeah, so there are also file descriptors and you can totally send UNIX domain sockets down UNIX domain sockets. Socket recursion is totally a thing you can do. So people who design IO layers like UNIX, they love to put buffers and limits everywhere. Same for the number of files that the process can open. That is, there is an upper bound to that. And what if I told you that using UNIX domain sockets, you could circumvent that upper bound. You can totally circumvent that open file. Well, standard links have different defaults. So a standard comes with 7000, your Linux has 1,000. You can reset that as a system administrator. You can just bump that limit for any process. If the process needs more, you kind of have to budget. But what if you require them to remain open and you don't want to talk to the assistant? Well, there's a workaround. There is a workaround. You could make a pair of UNIX domain sockets that both connect to the same process. Then you send the file descriptor in one, close the file descriptor on your end, and then when you need it back again, you read it out the other end. Yeah, totally works. So a really little test program to do that. This illustration hopefully makes sense to somebody, maybe me. There's a great UNIX disk called SocketPair. You get two UNIX domain sockets that are connected to each other. Works exactly like it described it. Works across platforms, it's wonderful. So how many more files can you have opened? On Linux, about 500. That's when the buffer runs full or when the kernel tells you you're over the limit. On OS X, about one and a half thousand. That's kind of great, but can we take this further? Yup.  Totally works on Linux. Yeah, you can have 200,000 open files and then the operating system itself can no longer open files. This is really confusing to other processes. I'll also do the sysadmin. Since each of these file descriptors is no longer on your file table, LSF doesn't show them. All it shows is these weirdo sockets of which you have two. Yeah. So Linux is really cooperative with this. OS X does not like it. What worked was to send messages into the inner ring, then put it on the outer ring, close the inner ring, read that inner ring back from the outer ring, read messages from the inner ring, but those messages did not have file descriptors on them. So the only conclusion that I can draw, and I confirm this with Nelson, who knows kernels, by the way, is that these dear like kernels like OS X, close all sockets trapped in a pair of Linux domain sockets once you close both ends. So every time I close the inner ring, all its containing files were closed. It does not matter that the ring itself is trapped in another one. It's kind of reasonable behavior. It's like, do this if you don't want your operating system to run out of open files. It's great. And it's definitely better than leaking them, but what does that mean about Linux? So, does Linux do garbage collection? Yeah, it does. It totally marks and mark and sweeps from open sockets. It traverses each one to see which file descriptors are in there, and if they are Linux domain sockets, it recursively traverses those up to, I think, five of four layers deep. So yeah, that's market sweep garbage collection right there. And I find this kind of amazing. Linux has a garbage collector in it to ensure that my silly test program works. It's so considerate. It's really kind of weird. So what have I learned from this? Weird computer behavior is awesome. Building these tiny test programs and trying out how they break and what they break now allowed me to take a mostly opaque thing and figure out how it works. To even find some unintended consequences and pretty pathological behavior in the process. It's kind of awesome. This makes me really happy every time it happens. So thank you so much for listening to me. I hope you enjoyed my talk. If you want to try out my test code, go to boincorps.net-go-fd-fun. And if you do, I would really appreciate if you come talk to me, or if you hit me up on Twitter, I'm at Antifoose. Thank you so much again. Thank you.


Hello and welcome to the session I am Deepika here. Let's discuss the question which says evaluate the following definite integral from 0 to 1 x into e raise to power x square dx. Now in this question we will use the second fundamental theorem of integral calculus. So let's start the solution. Let i is equal to integral from 0 to 1 x into e raise to power x square dx. Now we will first solve the indefinite integral x into e raise to power x square dx. Here put k is equal to t then dx is equal to dt and x dx is equal to 1 by 2 dt. So this is equal to 1 by 2 into integral of h to power t and this is equal to 1 by 2 into e raise to power t. Now here we will resubstitute for the reliability that is this is equal to 1 by 2 into e raise to power x square this is rfx that is the anti derivative of the function x into e raise to power x square by the second fundamental theorem we get is equal to of 1 minus f of 0. So this is equal to 1 by 2 is to power 1 square which is 1 minus e raise to power this is again equal to 1 by 2 into e minus now e raise to power 0 is 1 hence the answer for the above question is 1 by 2 into e minus 1. I hope the solution is clear to you. Bye and take care.


Okay, welcome back to the Cube, this is SiliconANGLE's flagship program, we've got the advanced instructor from the North Island, John Furrier at SiliconANGLE. I'm joined on this segment with David Floyer, co-founder of Wikibon.org, chief technology officer of Wikibon, and one of our favorite guests, I think he's made a Cube debut two years ago here at Oracle Open World, Brian Bukowski, founder of Aerospike. Welcome back. Right, thanks to beer. So in memory, what a great focus for Oracle. To be talking about in memory and big focus, what's your take on this? I was saying you're in the... What's my take on it?  I've been a huge proponent of in memory from the day we founded Aerospike. So we saw it four or five years ago that rotational disk, the writing was on the wall that it was going to have a niche and that niche was going to be decreasing what we saw at the Flash Memory Summit a month ago from Samsung and Intel's roadmap as well is staggering and the writing's clearly on the wall now. Rotational is a smaller and smaller role to play and well-crafted software can really take advantage of in-memory computing, not just for key value store usage but also not just for fast analytics, but really for both. I wanted to bring that up in kind of tongue-in-cheek because one of the reasons why we wanted to bring you on the Cube early on was you were really early as one of the companies pioneering a lot of the in-memory when everyone else was kind of over the side. And so props to you guys, congratulations to Aerospike for doing that. But in all serious now, the debate we had earlier on with Dave on the Cube here was how early are we? Are we midstream or is it still early? Because Oracle's known to coming to the party a little bit just in time or late enough to be there. What's your take on that? I also want to get David Fleuys take on that as well. Well, let me ask a question slightly differently. Are they going to freeze the market for people like you with this grand vision of everything working together and everything being under Oracle?  Is that going to freeze the market for you or is that going to validate the market for you? So I believe it validates the market for us. We've been beating Oracle NoSQL in the field with customers for nearly a year and a half now. And that's based on our price, based on performance, based on not wanting to deal with Oracle's salespeople, based on the uptime and reliability we have. Reliability is huge. Once you have customers like we do running thousands of SSDs and large-scale deployments with zero downtime and tens and hundreds of terabytes of storage, that's the kind of lead that we have in terms of actually being out there in the marketplace. So Oracle is also, as you're saying, perhaps just about in time. They've caught along on with this at a point where folks are really starting to say, hey, what about that NoSQL stuff? I really got to learn about the power that in-memory flash computing can bring and start to actually use it. So I think they're hitting the market at a decent point, which their product was a little bit better, but they'll get there eventually, right? We don't know much about it yet, do we? Well, it's been out there. Yeah. Right, so Oracle NoSQL's been out there. They finally have their JSON interface and we'll see how it does. But what about other approaches? If you look at Big Data this year, it's amazing the number of SQL people that have come to the table and people like Clustrix who've got a very nice story with a flash, similar flash architecture to yourself who are going down the SQL path. Their reasoning being is that we can make it almost as good as NoSQL and that the programming is simpler and it's just easier to implement and it's easier to find the talent to do that. And they'd rather, especially in the enterprise space, not leave tidying up NoSQL out-of-line situations to the programmer. They'd like the database to do that. But any comments on that is do you see that as a threat or do you see that as a broadening of the marketplace? So the experience I've had when talking to enterprise customers who have a lot of installed-based SQL is that at some point they have to bite the bullet about whether they're going to stick with that SQL environment, SQL programmers or jump to an environment where they've got some Hadoop and they've got some NoSQL, right? And what I see is that at some point it's really, really hard to make that SQL scale for a bunch of reasons. And Oracle is finally getting past some of the simple implementation problems that they've had with NoSQL with their SQL implementation, right? And getting on the board with Flash and their Flash analytics, but they've still got the problem where you can express things in SQL, SQL is extraordinarily powerful, such as these large scale joins that simply will never scale with that kind of expression where it's very simple and everyone knows now how to build a boot cluster and how to build a NoSQL system that works properly. So David, I wanna get your take on Oracle's move. What's your assessment of the in-memory take? So my assessment of the whole Oracle strategy is that they want to carve out a single platform, both from a hardware point of view and a software point of view and integrate everything as much as they can. There's clearly a lot of SQL customers that they have. There's clearly a requirement in some organizations not for the level of data streaming requirement that many of the web-based people have, but for web streaming of some sort, streaming of some sort, not quite the same level. They'd like to integrate that in with analytics, do that in near real time, get that moving into it. There's clearly a demand now for that end-to-end type of system going in. And if they can make it work and if they can make it attractive and if they can package it up in a way that minimizes the cost of maintenance, et cetera, they will take a chunk of that market, but it's all gonna be about execution over the next two or three years. They can probably hold people off for two years, but beyond that, people will have to move. So I think the next three years is gonna be a very interesting time in the Oracle base. So I already see that there are plenty of folks who are out there building large adobe clusters and figuring out what's put in front of it. I think some of the most innovative work I'm seeing right now outside of the advertising industry is within both security and that there's a lot of different kinds of security out there, right? So there's transactional security for banking. There's fraud in advertising. There's fraud in online gaming. There's really fraud everywhere you look. And once there's money, there's fraud, right? So the ability to put together a adobe cluster that is looking for the big picture patterns. If I see this, that probably means fraud and then have a real-time flash-oriented no-SQL database really on the front side looking at every single moment of what's going on. That's what I see really winning the fraud battle. And SQL was what people used in fraud. Still I would say 80% of the market's using it, but those companies that are out there and have placed a bet on Hadoop are doing so much better job in detecting fraud at a reasonable price. It's hard, I think, for an architect right now to say, I'm starting a new project, I don't have a SQL base, I'm going to build this whole thing on SQL. People don't do that. They just start with Hadoop these days and then they put a fast database in front of it. That is the architecture right now if you do not have legacy code. I think that's very fair, but there are also people that are going to come the other way. Not starting with their problems, starting with their traditional system and wanting to add on the fraud detection and other things to that in a way. And the challenge of some industries, you can lose a piece of data and it doesn't matter. If you lose a bit of web data, it's not the end of the world. If you lose...  Dude, my pony. Come on. Just the web? If I lose a data and... I lose a penny in my bank account, that doesn't matter either. Well, if you don't reconcile properly in your bank, then they're a big difference. Look, the other point that people forget is banks don't really use SQL for their mainline transaction processing either. SQL isn't considered to be reliable enough. They use things like XA transactions, they have multiple transaction workflows and their databases make mistakes and then they go back and reconcile them. So even in those systems, they really look a lot more like IMS and they look a lot more like what we now call NoSQL than they do a traditional SQL story. That's the highest level of reliability is what one analyst at JPMorgan called forming pre-SQL. We use pre-SQL and that's what's reliable. So what's up with... Give us the update on Aerospike, what's happening? Guys, you have a new CEO, what else is new? So things are going very, very well, John. So at Aerospike, we recently released Aerospike 3 so that has secondary index capability, real-time map reduce, so being able to map reduce in millisecond range times over decent sets of data, use combining both the ability to index and the ability to run map reduce over it. So not just getting your fast user data storage but also the ability to do analytics on top of it with all of our usual capabilities in terms of flash support and flash integration with people like Violin and Fusion IO who I guess were guests here earlier as well as Intel, Samsung, Micron, all the usual suspects. What else is around the horizon for this industry that you see that you guys are working on that you think are, as a start of yours at the front lines? What do you see around the corner? So right now, concurrent with this is the high performance transaction processing symposium and those guys, there's a very interesting talk or they're earlier today about the future of data centers and data center integration and the entire idea that we can use much faster interconnect technology to build faster and better distributed systems, whether it be PCIe, there's different forms of new fast ethernet going way beyond InfiniBand, that's gonna really change the nature of distributed systems and allow us to build things we've never built before. When you start looking at four to five microsecond response times between systems and whole data center distributed systems as opposed to these computer things, it's a whole new world. So that'll be rolling out, that's pretty far looking, that'll happen probably over the next three or four years. Honestly, the entire industry has to adjust to and digest what's happening here at Oracle Open World and being able to bring together NoSQL, figure out how MySQL and NoSQL play together, how Hadoop works together. That's gonna take us a few years. David Florial, let's hear the final word in software-led infrastructure. Io, send your give-a-share as you're going back to your early work. What are you working on right now? What are you watching in this space on the infrastructure side? Well, the thing that I'm watching is very much what Brian was talking about, the potential of putting together systems of such size and potential amount of data that they cover, that they offer ability to design systems in a completely different way. Absolutely design systems with huge amounts of data, take out cost from the infrastructure of organizations, make single copies of data a reality in the marketplace, making them both a databases of record as well as databases of analytics as well. I think that the amount of change that's going on in the industry at the moment, when you consider that memory is changing, when you consider that the internet interconnect is changing, when you consider that the amount of processing power is changing, we've never seen such an enormous influx of change and capability and innovation that's happening in the industry at the moment.  The dead weight of disk technology that's been holding everything back as David Floyd says in memory, flash persistent, changing the software games all at the software. This is theCUBE live coverage from San Francisco. We'll be right back after this short break. Stay with us. Day one of three days of wall-to-wall live coverage Oracle Open World Live in San Francisco. We'll be right back. I'm John Furrier. We'll be right back.


Income tax 2022-2023, tax line 16, tax software example. Let's do some wealth preservation with some tax preparation. Here we are in our example Form 1040 populated with LASERT tax software. You don't need tax software to follow along but it's a great tool to run scenarios with. You can also get access to the Form 1040 related forms and schedules at the IRS website, irs.gov, irs.gov, starting point single filer Mr. Anderson Living Beverly Hills 90210. We've got the W-2 income at the 100,000 to start off with. We've got the standard deduction at the 12,250 for the single filer bringing us to the taxable income of 87,050. And our point of focus then is to look at page number two, the tax calculation, line number 16 at the 14,074. Now note, we have generally been relying on the tax software to do this tax calculation. It's great the tax software can do that but by being reliant on the tax software, we often kind of lose sight of what the actual calculation is, which makes it difficult for us to do projections out into the future and be able to explain the tax calculations as well as think about and plan on differences in taxes that could be a result of different tax treatment for things like capital gains, for things like qualified dividends. So remember that once we get to the actual tax, if we have an income support accounting instruction by clicking the link below giving you a free month membership to all of the content on our website broken out by category, further broken out by course. Each course then organized in a logical, reasonable fashion, making it much more easy to find what you need than can be done on a YouTube page. We also include added resources such as Excel practice problems, PDF files, and more like QuickBooks backup files when applicable. So once again click the link below for a free month membership to our website and all the content on it. Come tax type of system, we can often verify to some degree this number here, the 87,050, recalculating most of the line items to get to that number, which I think is a useful thing to do because that allows you to give kind of a double check to make sure you didn't do a data input error or something like that which is quite possible to do given the fact that we're not using a double entry accounting system here, we're just doing data inputs. We don't have that double entry accounting to kind of catch some of the errors. So having a double check putting it into two data inputs having someone else do the data input would be even better to kind of see if you come to the same number. And then page two oftentimes people don't recalculate the actual tax from this point, but let the software do it. But again, you kind of want to have a good understanding of what's taking place so that you can do projections into the future. We're then saying that we had 15,000 that was withheld and that gives us our 225, our 226. Now also note that this 14774 then is usually going to be based on a, it's going to be based on a progressive tax system, multiple tax rates being applied to the tax, taxable income. We might use tax tables to do that. That's one way you can, you can get that numbers, look at the tables, but you want to envision it as a progressive tax system, multiple tax rates being applied. That will give you some understanding. If I go to my tax worksheet of what it means to be a marginal tax rate and an effective tax rate, or in other words, the average tax rate versus the highest tax rate, which is important for planning purposes. Also note that we have a completely tax different tax structure for income that could come from capital gains. Usually that would be indicated by having a schedule D attached, as well as dividend income, which oftentimes would be indicated possibly by having a schedule B for dividend income. Alright, so let's kind of do some calculations over here and think about what this looks like in our worksheet. So we've mirrored the tax to do our double data input, so we can kind of check our taxable income, 100,000 income coming from the W-2 income. Then we have the 12,950 standard deduction coming from our table down here. That gets us to the 87,050, which we can easily verify. I can't just multiply that by a rate, I'm instead backing into this average rate. This is the average rate, not the marginal rate of the progressive rate, because I picked this number up relying on the software for that number. That's what I would normally do, but you might say, hey, let's do a worksheet to kind of see if we can get a concept, an idea of what that number is to double check it. It may not be perfect because I'm going to hit the plus button, because we're not going to be using the tax tables and they kind of round things off sometimes, but we can get a general idea using the tax brackets, which I think conceptually make the most sense. So what I'm going to do, add a new sheet. I'm going to call this the tax calc sheet. And I'm going to select the whole thing with a little triangle, right-click, and we're going to format the cells. Let's make it currency, negative numbers bracketed, and no dollar sign, I'll get rid of the decimals for now and add the decimals as needed. I'm going to scroll in a little bit. I'm just zooming in. You can do it down here as well. Going back up to A1. Now, when we think about the tax rates, I'm going to pull up my tax rate stuff here. These are basically the tax rates in the form of a progressive tax structure. So you can see that as the income goes up, we're basically applying different rates to different tiers of the taxes. Now, this gets more complicated because you have a single filer rates, then you also have different rates for married filers and head of household and possibly married filings separately. So, but I'm just going to look at the single filers now, and you can apply the same concept if you wanted to to other filing statuses. Then we have different tables for capital gains rates. So if we have long-term capital gains, they might have favorable rates to the ordinary income rates, and we might have different rates for the dividends. So the dividends that are qualified dividends might have favorable rates as well. So if I was to say, okay, let me see if I can understand. Understand? And what is happening here, I can go back on over here and say, okay, let's do my tax, I'll call this tax calculation.  I'm going to make the whole thing bold. So hopefully it'll stand out.  And then I'm going to bring in my, let's start with total income. Total income from all sources, which I'm just going to bring from page one of the 1040. So my total income is, or my taxable income, I should say is this number. I'm just going to bring that in. I'll say this is taxable income. And then I'm going to pull out of that number. I should pull this up a little bit. I'm going to pull out of that the qualified dividends and then qualify and then capital gains, which I'll deal with later. I'll just say that those are things that I might have to pull out of this taxable income to get the, the ordinary, ordinary income. So this is a general, just a general calculation. It's not going to be a perfect. There could be nuances within the calculations just to get a general idea here. I'm just going to try to reconstruct this. So we're going to say the 87,050 minus this minus this, there's nothing in there right now. So I'll just put zeros. We might go back to that in a second. And this would be my ordinary income. So then we got the single. So let's say ordinary income single calculation that'll have down here.  Okay. So I'm going to put the percent of each tier over here, 0.1%. I'll put it down here because I want to leave some room for a header. Home tab number group percent on that. And then I'm going to say that that is going to be there. And then I'm just going to pull down my ordinary income just so it's kind of clear. I'm going to call this or and then income.  I'm just going to pull this number down so we could see it. And then I'm going to compare that to the cap. I'm going to call this the cap. Cap per section per category, however you want to call it per row. And that is coming from our table. So the first cap for a single filer is the 10, 2, 7, 5. So I'm going to say, all right, 10, 2, 7, 5. And then I'm going to say take the lesser of, I'll call it say less so of, I might be able to get better headers here, but I'm just trying to get a general idea centering that black and white. I'm going to use the trustee men function equals the men of these two numbers. So I'm taking the lesser of those two numbers because I need to apply the tax on the lesser of those two numbers. I'm going to leave a little bit of space because the second tier is going to be a little bit more confusing. We'll have to figure it out. Hold on a second. I'm going to say this is going to be equal to the 10% times that number, the 10, 2, 7, 5. So that comes out to that. Notice that's the number that they use as the baseline for the 12% if you're in that bracket on the tables. So in other words, if I was to reconstruct this and say, okay, what if I'm also going to be taxed at the 12% because my income was above the threshold cap of 10,275? Well, then I got to tax some of it at the 12% too. So I'm going to say, all right, let's take the ordinary income again. And the cap for this one, this level goes up to the 41775. So I'm going to say, all right, 41775. And then now I'm going to take the lesser of equals the min function of those two. I'm taking the lesser of those two. But now I have to subtract out what the 10,000 that I already took last time. Now, the easiest place to do that on is on the cap, because if I'm over the cap, then the last section capped out at the cap. So I'm going to say this is going to be equal to that 41775 minus what I already taxed at the prior level, which is that 10,75. And that's going to be the taxable amount. So that's going to be tax amount per column or row. Let's make that like this. And let's over here just to make this consistent, I'm going to bring this one over this side. And so that the tax is always applied on the taxable amount. The taxable amount is this times that. And then I can have my running balance. So this is the tax per tier. Is that how you spell tier? I don't know. Maybe I'm crying. I don't know. Just bear with me. I'm not a speller guy over here. You could I'll fix the spell, check it later, spell, check it later. Then I got the running balance. And so let's make that black, white and center it. So the running balance is going to be that. And this is going to be equal to this plus this. So now the tax that we're at is the 4808, right? And so there's and that you could check that because that's the starting point for the next bracket in our little table calculation. So let's go. All right, let's go up to the 12. Let's go to the point two, two. And so I'm going to make that a percent. Same ordinary income. The cap here is at 89075. And I'm going to take the lesser of equals the sum. I'm sorry, not the sum equals the men of these two. And so now now this one is the men now. So this is the my marginal tax rate. This is my top tax rate, right? So now I'm going to say, OK, then we'll say this is going to be then the this amount minus the cap from the prior time frame. The 41 775 is what's going to be taxed at the 22 highest marginal rate, which is the 45 275, the tax per tier, the 22% times that 45 275. The running balance is the prior balance plus the current balance. There's the 14 7 765 68 is that close to what they calculated here 14 14777 14774 14768. Now, I don't it's not exact because we're basically using. We're not using the tax tables, which kind of which kind of those kind of take like brackets because they're trying to put every number on like a table. But we get a general idea. So they're saying the amount that I got from from here 14774 is this minus this at $6 different. So we get the general idea. Let's raise the income so that I can go all the way down to some of these higher tax brackets. Let's let's raise it to like 300,000 and and so I can see some of those other tax brackets. So let's or we can raise it all the way out to to 600,000. Let's say just so we can see the whole table. So let's say 600,000 making bank man. So then we're going to say, OK, then let's go to the 22. So now you got the 600 pulling down. Let's go to the 24.24%. Let's put some brackets on that. This is the same. I'm going to I'm going to say the cap thing of the 24 is 17050. Take them in which I can copy down the lesser of those two is going to be the cap the the amount of tax. I'm going to copy that one down, which is this minus this. So I'm going to tax the 800975 at the tax rate of 24 pulling that formula down. And then the running balance is at the 3035648. I can kind of double check that because that number what happened that number should be like 34647. 34648. Yeah, there it is. So then let's do the next tax bracket is 0.32%. So I could say, OK, 0.32% pulling these down. This is the same. The highest highest income there is 215950. So there we have it. It took the lesser of those two, the men. Then I'm going to take this is the taxable amount, this minus this. Multiply that times the rate. That's how much is going to be taxed at that level. And this is my running balance to where at 49335. So we basically recalculated this number 49335. And then let's do it again. This is going to go to 30.35. You can see how this is fairly complex to kind of think about, right? It's easy for a computer to do. But if you're trying to conceptually project into the future, this does complicate things greatly. Anyway, I won't get into my stories. This is copy this down and then multiply these out. Let's copy these two down. Boom, boom. And then there's the 162. So we recalculated this number. And then let's just do it one more time. So then I can say this is going to be the 0.37. Make that a percent. Bring this down. This is going to be... There is no cap now. So the cap is infinity at this point in time. So anything above this amount, we could put like a real... So this is going to... This one isn't really the lesser of... It's just going to be the... Like I could put a really big number here just to... Or I could just say the lesser of... It's not going to be the lesser of. It's just going to be this number. And then this is going to be the taxable amount, which is going to be this minus the prior cap, right? This is my prior cap. And then I pull this down and that would be the tax. Hopefully I did that right on the tax, on the last tier. Let's kind of double check that. Let's pretend I did that on my software over here. And I said that we earned 600,000. 600,000. Boom. And page 2, 180, 164. So 180, 164. Bam. Schlam. Schlackamam. So there we go. So I could put some brackets. Surround that. So you can see it does get quite complex to kind of double check that number.  So if I say... Let's say I'm going to go back on over here and say this is back down to 100,000. 100,000. And so then notice that the cap actually stops right here. So it would be at the 14 because then it goes negative. So really to make this work properly, we should have like if then functions. So it should be like if this number minus that number is greater than zero and blah, blah, right? So like let's try it equals if this number minus this number. And I got to put brackets around that maybe if that minus that bracketed is greater than zero then comma take take this number minus this number. But if not comma then put a zero there. Boom. Close up the brackets. Yes, please. Pour favor. And then I can copy that down. And so now it now you can see it kind of closes out right there. And that 14768 is still right. Am I right? Am I right? Am I wrong? No, you're not wrong.  So that was the one that was kind of close but 1477. It's not perfect because they used different methods but they used the tax tables and we did the calculation. But you get the general idea. Okay. So you could do that same process for the married, you know, make a little table for married filing joint and then the head of household and you can do a little double check of the tax calculation that the software is doing. And what you'll often find is if you add something like dividend income it's going to mess things up, right? So let's do that. Let's mess things up and see what happens. So I'm going to save this thing and let's go over here and say, let's say they had like dividend income, but it was special dividends that were qualified. So now we're going to say dividend income. So we're going to say stock one and we'll say that we had, let's make 10,000 of dividends so I can remember 10,000 of dividends and they're qualified dividends. So boom, we can check my income is now at the 110 for the tax, for the income minus the standard deduction. If I went over here and double check my data input, I would just say, okay, income, we had dividend income. That's no problem. That's on the schedule B where there it is dividends, schedule B and I'm just going to say we had 10,000. They were all qualified. So we get the, and then pull that over. So there it is. We're at 110, 12,950. We're at the 9750. I could double check that number. No problem. Let the software do the calculation, 16274 and just say, alright, 16274. But does that make sense in my little worksheet over here? If I do my tax calculation, because now I'm going to say that I had the 9750. If I just use that number and I don't pull out the qualified dividends, then I'm going to say I come out to this number versus what I got on the tax did, which was this number. And you can see I have a fairly substantial difference of 857, 857. And that's because I need to pull out the dividends. So if I pull out the qualified dividends and I say, okay, let's pull out the qualified dividends. What did I put the schedule B?  Can't you? Okay. Relax. Relax. It's going to be down. I'm going to sum it up down here. We'll sum this up down here equals the sum of those. So there's the qualified dividends. So now I can say, yeah, we pulled out the qualified dividends. So that would be like my ordinary income. And then I'd have to calculate my capital gains. Now the capital gains, like we could do a whole another table on the, because it has like a progressive rate of, you know, 0, 15 or 20%. So I could, I could do a whole another little table and try to, and say if it's in here, but generally this is a little bit easier of a table. You can usually get an idea of what the tax is based on the income level, because the rate, the rate that they're going to get should always be favorable, right? So if their highest rate is 22%, you would think that, that the favorable rate would be like, would be at the, you know, the lower rate of that, which would be the 15% or something. And that is indeed the case here. So I'm going to say, so I'm just going to multiply this times 15%. Just kind of want to build a whole another table because it'll take too long. You could do that if you want though, but I'm going to say this is going to be this times this. So now my total tax, so now my total tax is going to be something like what I got from here, plus that number and that is at least a lot closer. It may not be perfect because of the table usage is soft by that $6 again. So that looks about right, right? And so then I might also have capital gains, which can throw a loop, throw a loop in this stuff. So I can go back on over here and say, well, what if I had capital gains? And I can say, I sold some stocks, man, because I sell low by low sell high. That's my motto. And I came away with some hefty profits by low sell high. Where's, where do I, where's my, where do I put it in here? Where's my schedule D? There it is. So let's say I sold some stocks. And I'm just going to say company a date 060622 date acquired negative 020000 sales price. I'm going to say our 20,000 cost 5,000. So I've got a $5,000 profit. Boom. Cool. I mean a $15,000 profit coming away with a cool 15.  So then I'm going to go into the long term stock sales over in my, my, if I was doing my data input to double check the income. I would just say, say the sales price, sales price was 35. Was 20,000 cost 5,000 capital gains coming out to the 15,000. It's long term. And that pulls into my skit, my page one. So page one, I can double check it pretty easily now. I can say, all right. Now I've got the 100,000 up top. I've got the dividends that are included. And then I got the capital gains, which comes up to the 125. I mirrored that in my worksheet, double checked it. Everything's cool. And then I've got the 12,950, 12,950. And the bottom line taxable income, 12,50, 12,50. Good. I'll let the software do the tax. 19,828. So I'll put that in here. 19,828. But it's complicated. It's complicated because now you've got these two things. It's not just using the tax tables because now you've got these two things that have these different calculations. You can look at the worksheet here if you want to dive into it. But if I wanted to kind of double check myself and say, oh, does that make sense? Let me see if I can break, look at my worksheet and see if I can get a wrap my mind around what happened here. So if I was to just look at this item, I'd say there's that. This comes from this numbers from the tax formula. Hold on a second. I put them in here at short term somehow. Short term. I got my dates backwards. Okay. The date acquired is negative 020200. I sold them on 061522. Then we've got long term capital gains. Okay. That makes sense. And now, but my income is the same. Over here. Okay. So 11250, 11250. Double check that here. Sorry about that. 11250. Okay. So then if I go back to my tax calculation, I could say, okay, there's the 11250. I broke off the 10,000. And then there's the difference. But here's what I have here. And this is coming from. And then I'm going to put this number that was calculated is now the tax is now 18524. There it is. So there's the difference. So 18524. And so if I bring that over to my tax worksheet, so now I'm off because I need to say I get a beneficial rate for my capital gains. I'm going to say this equals from my capital gains worksheets, which is my capital gains long term capital gains is that number. I'll pull that out. So now this is the number that's being taxed at ordinary income. This is being taxed at my favorable rate for the dividends. And then my capital gains rates, you have a similar kind of situation on the capital gains. So the similar idea that you would think the rate would be favorable. So meaning if I'm at a marginal tax rate once again of 22, you would think that this would be like the 15 or something like that. But so I'm just going to make it uneasy. I'm not going to do a whole another table for these. I'm just going to say, let's do that. And this is this times this. So now my tax calculation is going to be this plus this plus this. And so now I come up to something that's close to that. It's off by that $6 again. So, you know, so you can, so you can get a general idea of how that tax is calculated. The reason that's important is you can double check the calculation. You can talk to your clients and be able to tell them, tell them, yeah, this is what the qualified dividend impact is. It's in this calculation. This is what the capital gains rate does. It's in this calculation. It's important. And then when you do tax planning going forward, you can understand the importance of the different tax rates that have applied to different income sources like qualified dividends and capital gains and so on. And you can also understand what the tax rates are going to do from a marginal tax rate perspective when you start increasing income. For example, projecting out into the future.


I think what I was finding as I was evaluating their writing was that they were tending to use more basic strategies of interpretation. So I'd see a lot of information dumping and a lot of quoting from other authors as though it reinforced my students own points where what we really want to do on our courses is stress critical reasoning and critical thinking and taking an original viewpoint and adding something to the discussion. So hypothesis I think what it what it helped me to do was really develop a pedagogy that would be organized around recentering reading in the classroom and thinking of it as a kind of sequential process that they could you know practice different skills varying from simpler to more complex, but really trying to help them think about what are other strategies available to you other than quoting and directly summarizing and paraphrasing. So I think I think that's where I kind of started with it and how I implemented it.


Ruin has come to our family. Hello and welcome to Darkest Dungeon in depth. I've spent dozens of hours over the last several weeks playing Darkest Dungeon. Spending so long with one game over a short period of time has left in me the desire to take a deep dive into the many facets of this excellent game of tactics, survival and Lovecraftian horror. This I will do in a series of videos released twice weekly over the next two to three weeks. Ever since before it was officially released I have thought that Darkest Dungeon is truly an exceptional game and once I heard about the announcement of the sequel I realised I'd never actually properly finished it. What is amazing about the Darkest Dungeon is that you can craft and tell so many stories about the horrible, terrible things that happen to your characters. But the thing is, it's a massive game. Especially if, like me, you don't want to just go through the easy, a radiant option. No, a game like this deserves an in-depth dive in more ways than one. I have spent over a hundred and forty-five hours playing it, nearly a hundred and fifty. And that is insane how long I have spent. I just look at some of my other favourite games of late. The Witcher 3, a hundred hours. Shadow of War, fifty hours. And now Assassin's Creed, sixty-five hours. And then we've got Darkest Dungeon, a shabby, tiny, no-name developer at the point of its release. And now it has actually got me hooked up for a hundred and fifty hours. That is impressive and it deserves praise. Disclaimer, though. Just because I have played it for a hundred and fifty hours does not mean that I am a particularly good player. I have made more mistakes than I would like to admit, but I am learning. And I have put a lot of research in each of the different sections of what will, a few weeks from now, turn out to be a fairly long video. All its parts combined. Anywhere from 45 minutes to an hour, I hope. But at any rate, without further ado, let's get into part one. Introduction and overview. Darkest Dungeon is, at its core, a game of resource management. These resources come in many forms. First and foremost, they come in the form of the dozens of adventurers you go through over the extent of your journey into the ancestors' estate. In the hamlets, the resources you manage are gold, in the four types of relics with which buildings are upgraded. Portraits, crests, deeds and busts. A fifth relic, pardon, a fifth sort of resource was recently introduced. Shards, but these I will not go too much into, because I don't particularly care about wave combat, and that's what's one of the two big pieces of DLC introduced to the game. At any point, resource management goes very deep indeed, where characters are concerned. Every class of our heroic champions has their strengths and weaknesses. The leper delivers devastating blows, but his accuracy is a problem, especially on higher level expeditions. The Helian has the ability to buff herself and her reach unlike most other melee characters, as well as take on three enemies at once in a massive assault with her glaive, but at the cost of lowered damage and speed. And the Vestal? Well, okay, she's the perfect virtuous healing machine. This isn't meant to go into the strengths and weaknesses of the different classes. Rather to reinforce my statement. Everything is resource management. The weaknesses I discussed can be neutralised with the use of Trinkets, as well as the locking in of positive quirks. Trinkets, I think, are self-explanatory. What's interesting about them is that the majority have not only a beneficiary effect, but also introduce some new weakness, some disadvantage taking away from character speed or their resistance at death's door, that is to say, when their HP is at zero and any of the next strikes they take might end up being fatal. And of course, they negatively impact an adventurer in all kinds of other nasty ways as well. Perks of the positive variety are meanwhile somewhat more interesting and they can allow for a good deal of herding customization. Using one of the buildings in town, the medical wards, you can strap under characters to fancy leather chairs and prod them with needles until the positive quirk is locked in. I.e. it won't ever be exchanged by something useless at the end of an expedition, which this game just loves doing for, well, the suffering of all of us players, I think. The process is obscenely. Expensive. Which is why I only began locking in positive quirks of characters once they had resolved level 5, i.e. became champions of their class. Definitely, because I hadn't yet realized what was a possibility by that time. Nope, I definitely did not miss that until a few hours in. To conclude on the topic of the original negative quirks, these range from mildly annoying to seriously debilitating, depending entirely on, once again, randomness and personal horrors, getting, you know, awful cuts while looking at different curios and just all sorts of horrors, really. You can also remove those in the medical ward, of course. So much for quirks, negative or positive. Resource management in town is kind of a pain, sometimes. Fully upgrading anyone building in the hamlet costs hundreds of crests and one additional of the collectible ancestral resources. Paintings are the most rare of these and are a nightmare to carry as they stack in trees. And with an inventory that only has as part of the 12 items, it's something of a mess. For reference, crests stack in twelves, while busts indeed stack in sixes in your inventory during an expedition. Not that there are in plenty of each, and as you'll be going on dozens of expeditions, or even hundreds, like I have, the hamlet will expand before your eyes in due time. In my view, the best buildings to work on are the blacksmith, the guild hall and the recruitment coach, on account of the fact that upgrading the first two allows for unlocking higher level skills, armor and weapon upgrades, as well as cheaper prices in terms of these upgrades. With these upgraded, the coach can in turn be, yes you guessed it, upgraded itself in order to offer a chance of recruitment of more experienced adventurers who come in with better gear and access to all combat skills at this level they are recruited at. While you'll never recruit a character above resolve level three, they still save a bunch of money in terms of investing into gear and skill upgrades, as well as a bunch of time in terms of apprentice level difficulty expeditions, which are kind of boring after, I don't know, about 50 hours of doing them. So much for resource management in town. Coming next, apprentice and veteran expeditions, and now I did not just do apprentice expeditions for 50 hours, that was sarcasm people, sarcasm. The apprentice expeditions in Darkest Dungeon are the easiest the game is ever going to get, but that doesn't mean they are challenge free, far from it. Apprentice expeditions will introduce you to the most common enemy types in each of the four zones of the estate, and no I'm not going to talk about the Crimson Curse DLC in the courtyard here, that topic will be spoken about in its own separate section, and you'll have to wait before you get to hear my righteous anger about the whole vampiric nightmare. Back to the topic at hand, apprentice expeditions are Darkest Dungeons who have teaching you the basics without pulling any punches.  You'll work out that grabbing a couple of bandages and vows of anti-venom before a mission is as important as anything in the world, especially in such places as the Cove which is filled with things that will cut you. As each week progresses and more adventurers come to test their luck, there's a general feeling of things beginning to click into place as you familiarize yourself with the different mechanics by the dozen also adventuring classes. The best and cruelest option you have, customization-wise, is the ability to name your characters after anyone you want. Friends, family, idols, book characters, only to watch them die or be overcome by stress and turn insane. Insanity comes in different forms, most of them unpleasant to watch happening to the adventurers you've grown to care about over several missions by now. Tortures are different, whether you want to fight under the somewhat reliable security of the light, or risk taking much greater stress and damage in the dark for the sake of greater reward really depends on the kind of player you are. I was much more comfortable in the light to start with, but as I progressed I took on greater and greater amounts of risk because I knew what I was doing and also I stopped caring how many of my crazy kids would die of a heart attack. In your exploration you'll eventually come across a horrid little curio that will ask you to sacrifice a torch. If you do, this shambler will appear to an unprepared player that little eldritch horror is absolutely nightmarish. He is in fact a lot worse than the apprentice level bosses or at any rate most of them. Apprentice level expeditions often don't demand much more than brute force, with some skill and a bit of luck you often find no need for the use of a dedicated healer such as the Vestal. Except for those quests that will give your first glimpse with the eight bosses across the ruins warrens well in the cove. I remember when I first faced these during the game's beta. They seemed considerably tougher than they did now, which leads me to the tone that I've either become a lot more skilled, possible, or at over the last three, four years, is it? The developers have scaled down the difficulty during these first encounters a fair amount. At any rate, each zone houses two bosses, most of whom are grotesque nightmarish masses of love, crafty and horror. Some are more dangerous than others and you better learn to deal with them early on, if you care about progressing at anything more than a snail space. Because veteran level expeditions, that's resolve level 3 and 4 respectively, are going to take the gloves off. New enemy types appear, and the old ones do more damage, inflict more stress and get a nice little boost in dodge, accuracy and every other stat conceivable. Sending in a party that doesn't have an upgraded set of weapons in the armor is ill-advised, as both the health and the additional damage are very much necessary to deal with these more powerful foes. An over-reliance and brute force won't necessarily cut it either. Too many foes have protection that will neglect most straight-out attacks. Damage over time begins to play a greater role, in classes like The Fludgerland, A Crimson Call deals too exclusive, and The Plague Doctor, with their massive reliance and bleed and blight respectively, will come in very handy indeed. Debuffs, marking targets, stunning them. The growing necessity for more complex strategies will make you much more conscious of the intricacy and depth of combat. Take Speed for example. I recall not caring particularly about the turns my characters took rather than to one another, whether my musketeer played first or last wasn't something I put too much thought in during apprentice expeditions. Well, now that I needed a bounty hunter or a houndmaster to mark a target for my musketeer or arbalist's most devastating attack to be truly efficient, I had to make sure that it was them that played first and not the musketeer. Say that my musketeer had a baseline speed higher than that of the bounty hunter, that meant that now I needed my bounty hunter to carry a trinket that would bump his speed above that of the musketeer in order to prepare a devastating attack for the enemy backline, which often is filled with all manner of nasties that will induce nightmarish amounts of stress, the kind of stress that tends to make you masochistic, sadistic, or just a bit of an abusive bully. The point of this video, if you don't want to actively endorse bullying within your adventuring parties, make sure you've got a firing squad lining their shots at the enemy backline at all times. Difficulty spike from the previous expeditions sparks much more of a challenge with these new expeditions, and I won't lie to you, when I encountered this it felt like a slap to the face. The new enemy types introduced and not the problem, no no, far from it, it's the familiar ones that had a problem, they are buffed so insanely much armed with the capability of doing nauseating amounts of health and stress damage in a very short span of time as little is over a single turn or two, but I thought I could handle it, judging from the few short expeditions I first tackled, which is why I decided I would attempt to get my grubby hands on the first of several of the highest quality trinkets in the game, the ancestral ones. My first few long champion level expeditions were really the point I realised how much more demanding the game had become. Demanding, it felt downright and fair, sadistic even, seeing some of my favourite longest serving adventurers be reduced to nothing in the span of a turn. Well, not nothing, I suppose they were reduced to a bunch of gravestones in my Hamlet's graveyard, but that still is not something you want to go home to, is it? It was a meat grinder in brutal and delusion of control over this game which was supposedly tactical, slipping away to reveal a marked lack of control, and worse than that, the deaths of several characters I had spent tens of hours levelling up and tens of thousands of gold in upgrades in terms of armour, weapons and skills. These deaths would have blatant disrespect of my time, and I finally felt like I had truly progressed towards besieging the darkest dungeon itself. After taking a few days long break, I went back into it, I had taken time to dink it over and… well, what were the most memorable moments I had? Hmm, let's see then. One of the eight bosses, the Swine God, nearly murdered my entire party for a mistake entirely of my own making. To explain what happened, I'll need to give you a bit of background first. At some point, during my experiences with the difficulty level, I finally noticed just how useful the highway man's repost ability is. Repost allows this dashing rogue to respond to any attack coming his way with an attack of his own. The highway man, buffed with sufficient amounts of melee damage and a hard chance to crit, is an absolute beast once the punches come rolling. With a few dodge buffs as well, as offered by classes such as the man at arms or the antiquarian, he'll deliver crit after crit with barely a scratch to show for it. That ability is useful in every feasible scenario I can tink of. Every scenario but one. And that one is, you guessed it, the bossbuffle with the Swine God. You see, this God of tits and swine is something of a mentally deficient beast, taking his order from the tiny but deadly Wilbur who marks the king's enemies for him. While I had forgotten in my infinite lack of wisdom was that killing Wilbur doesn t make the Swine God happy. In fact, it enrages him, and once he s enraged, he delivers ridiculously powerful attacks to the entire party, all of which have a very high chance of stunning. The fact that I survived that particular nastiness without any casualties makes me extremely lucky, if not for having alongside the highway man a leper who is without a doubt the most physically devastating character class you can have on your roster. I would have died horribly, horrendously, and I might as well have quit the game right then because I really liked that party. Another favorite moment of mine was when I nearly got partywiped while fighting the formless flesh. This was nearly at the end of the game, and I had allowed my recent successes over previous bosses in the Crimson Court's counters to get to my head. I thought I was immortal, you know, we re basically gods, and didn t spend too much time considering who would best do in my fight against the formless flesh. Not that losing three of my four characters was bad, at that point I truly had left caring about what happened far far behind me, and this had the added benefit of unlocking the lone survivor achievement I began worrying I would never get. It s an achievement you get for killing a boss with a one man left standing if it wasn t self-explanatory enough. The man of the hour, a flagellant who literally managed to bleed out the flesh with his techniques of ex-sanguination while he himself was perilously close to bleeding out. I particularly enjoyed listening to all the different boss entries, which finalized the Ancestors' myriad tales of how he managed to screw over just about every type of living being he met. Not a nice guy, my ancestor, till I could have guessed as much.  It was rewarding to at last unlock these pieces of the average puzzle.  This truly is among the best examples of how much atmosphere can be injected by the right narrator into a title that doesn t necessarily have much of a story to it.  But to return to the late game, I do think it borders on being tedious more than it should, for comfort s sake. More could have been done, perhaps, to make the game feel challenging in a way that doesn t also waste your time or give you the perception of wasting your time at any rate. At the end of the day, I do feel like with ample preparation and a careful team composition, a lot is in your control, but for a few in-game weeks there, I didn t. And that seeped away at the fun of it all and nearly made me reconsider doing this deep dive.  I absolutely loathe, loathe, loathe how having to do all the Crimson Curse supersedes everything else in the game. The reason? Blood Circus infest all of the estate zones over time. An indicator of just how flooded are the regions will be where the carriers of the Crimson Curse is on the right corner of the Expedition s menu. The more you ignore the exhausting boss maps that s involved probably a hundred rooms each, the more Blood Circus you ll end up having to face, which in turn means that before too long at all, no matter what level, your adventurers will be diseased blood craving lunatics, refusing to act stabbing others for a taste of blood and generally acting like the insane band of weirdos they usually are, but amped up on drugs. The Crimson Curse is a pain to manage. In all four stages, it weakens your resistance to bleed, blight and stun effects. It takes a percent of your maximum health away depending on whether you are diseased, craving the blood or wasting away for want of it. Unless you re in the Default Crimson Curse condition, chances are control of your character will occasionally be wrestled away in desperate search for the blood, which incidentally lowers the actual chances of finding blood. That is, as dungeons are explored, random characters will activate Curious before I ve had the opportunity to ensure the proper items are used to get the best loot possible. On and on this goes, it s almost as if the developers top to them themselves. Oh, what are the most annoying quirks an adventurer can get? Oh, here s an idea, let s stick all of them into one single, easily-transferable DZs. The boss battles themselves, though, are well designed and challenging in just the right way. The problem is that having to do five or more expeditions to get to the boss rooms wears you down. But in terms of design, as well as her place in the greater narratives of the estate, I thought the counters, the main antagonist in this DLC, shown. In her shift between different forms, delivering deadly attacks and debuffs, healing herself while seeping over the health bars of my characters, I will admit I felt a great sense of accomplishment at having managed to kill her on my first try, if barely. The battle that caused me the most grief has to be the one against the baron. Not only did I lose the most adventurers in the insane trek before I got to his room, but the first team I sent nearly got wiped off entirely. I think I managed to get nearly two full party wipes before I got him. That sure stung. Something else I love about this content update is the new classic introduced as part of the Crimson Curse, and of course it's all about blood, pain and agony. The Fludgeland is probably the most unique of the classes, because he works best when he is stressed out in a strike away from death. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, the Fludgeland is the best representation of the self-employed millennial. When he is on death's door, the Fludgeland gets buffed to her heaven. All the high quality Trinkets restricted to this class are all about greater resistance to death blows as well as higher damage, and unfortunately the Fludgeland isn't exactly immortal, even with these items on. The very first Fludgeland I leveled up all the way to champion received his death blow after two hits on death's door in the fight against the courtier's viscount. Oh sorry, viscount. There's also a fort boss that you can choose to beat up repeatedly for Crimson Court Trinkets after the Countess is defeated. It's a statue corrupted by the blood or some such thing, and I would most definitely categorise it as a mini-boss, compared to the insanity of the Baron, the Viscount and the Countess herself.  There is one more boss, the Fanatic, a madman who wanders through normal dungeons every once in a while with his own personalised stake to burn the disease done. That man dislikes the Crimson Curse nearly as much as I do, which makes me curious of one thing and one thing only. Whenever he is defeated he drops two vials of the Cure, the only thing in the game that can, you guessed it, cure infected players outside of defeating one of the three big bosses of the DLC up to the point you've defeated the Countess. Unfortunately, the cure doesn't make the one that drinks it immune to further infection down the line, so at the end of the day doesn't seem as valuable as I first thought it would be, but it does make me wonder. If he's got access to something like this, why not give it to the resident plague doctors in the Hamlet, see if they can produce a cauldron or two of it and make the infection an on-issue. Ah, game logic. Almost as twisted as a Fanatics logic. But what do I know? It's not like I'm cult leader or something. At the end of the day, however, the Crimson Curse experience was definitely the least fun I've had over my time with this game. That's largely due to the fact of being forced to cut short any personal goals that I might have placed for myself in order to deal with a major epidemic of diseased characters weakened by the Crimson Curse. In a game where player choice on several tactical and strategic layers is key, this piece of content more often than not took that choice away rather than add to it. The fact that the titular disease acts like an affliction, i.e. what your characters most often get when they reach a stress level of 100, means that you'll get penalized whether there are characters who are craving the blood or for those who've just drank a dose. The most jarring example in both cases whether blood thirsty or craving, there's a chance that your characters will attack others in the party. Imagine how frustrating it is to have a character on death's door only for a blood thirsty character to finish them off. And don't even get me started on all the characters that I have lost just because my reserves of the blood got extremely low and they decided to desecrate away and die. One last point to add. The trophies from these bosses are absolutely useless. I wasn't happy with the Crimson Curse. Its visuals, new narrative elements, music and flagellant were sweet, absolutely. But most other things were beyond draining and the fact that the main content of Darkest Dungeon becomes subservient to the DLC is an enormous minus to my mind. A better alternative I told is the colour of Madness DLC which is an endless mode with an interesting aesthetic of its own. Although much smaller, I do believe it's more enjoyable for itself contained nature. I would also say that once I play the Crimson Curse, the Darkest Dungeon, which I will not be going in-depth about, is a lot easier. All too easy in fact. It's not challenging at all compared to the insane amount of challenge that I face in the Cauchy Art. And this I'm afraid is where my critique comes to an end. I did originally mean and want to talk about the Darkest Dungeon itself but since all my footage has gone haywire, I've decided there's just no good way of going in-depth without it, not the way I'd have liked to. And going through another few dozens of hours just to redo these videos, that's not something I have the time for. I've always treasured a few memories, how I had to sacrifice two of my characters to defeat the endgame boss, or how a couple of Elvish cultists giving me the finger nearly had me foaming at them out. It's a long story, but a story that will ultimately remain untold. Thank you for watching. Please don't forget to subscribe, like this video, share. And if you want plenty more content, follow me on Twitter, WordPress, Facebook. See you next time. Bye. Don't forget to ring that bell.