Previous ISP (TeliaSonera) told me that they gave out IPv6 blocks for free to business customers but refused to do so for residental customers except for their "tester" customers (and they didn't want more of those).
Switched to Bahnhof a while back and as great as they are they can't offer native IPv6 access where I live because the open citynet I get their connection through (city owns the last mile and the ISPs hook into the city's network for a small fee per subscriber) refuses to play ball. Apparently they'd love to offer all their customers IPv6 access but a lot of the citynets have no interest in changing their config files...
Not that the latter surprises me, I used to work for a similar citynet that had made a managerial decision that there was no demand for IPv6 and therefore they wouldn't let any ISPs offer that service (kind of silly from my POV as I spoke to reps from at least three ISPs that wanted to know why they couldn't offer their customers IPv6 access in that citynet).
Oh get over yourself. Anyone who has a speciality gets asked questions, or for advice.
That goes for plumbers, and electricians. As well as doctors, and lawyers.
So, people expect their plumber friend to spend hours and hundreds of dollars in materials fixing their plumbing? Or for their electrician friend to rewire their home just because he's an electrician? Or their doctor friend to give out free CAT scans and hospital visits? Because that's the level of "advice" a lot of computer geeks are expected to offer. If it was just ten-fifteen minutes of advice that'd be one thing, but often it's ten-fifteen minutes of advice, another twenty minutes trying to explain the advice and then three hours just doing it for them because you gave up on trying to get them to click "Start".
Do you think your MD friend would give out quick tips on how to deal with the symptoms of a cold if "drink lots of fluids" constantly resulted in you and others immediately trying to drink two gallons of drain cleaner?
...the usa may be the exeption to it due to are free speech right...
Please note that the US is by no means the only country in the world that has free speech in its constitution, and despite some americans claiming otherwise there are plenty of countries that have equivalents of the US constitution, it's just that we don't refer to it as "The constitution", here in Sweden it's "Grundlagarna" but they're still equivalent to the constitution.
Also, please do something about your spelling and grammar, your post is barely readable.
Why is 30 Mbps sustained transfer rate "completely crazy"? I have a 100/100 Mbps connection and I routinely have higher sustained download speeds when downloading things from servers that have the bandwidth for it. And when it comes to p2p the main problem I have seems to be that I'm using ZFS with RAIDZ and doing 100 Mbps worth of random writes while simultaneously seeding various things at 10-20 Mbps generally makes it pretty slow (I noticed after doing some cleanup of the filesystem that as long as I keep utilization under 75-80% this isn't really a problem, it's when the filesystem is beginning to fill up that performance starts to suffer which makes all other processes that rely on disk I/O sluggish too).
Bugs aren't really part of the game as it is intended to function.
Imagine for example an online MMORPG where it is generally accepted that a maxed-out player character does approximately 20k "hit points" of damage per second while attacking another player if his/her attacks aren't interrupted. A player figuring out how to trick the game into either boosting this to a ridiculous 200k hit points of damage per second or simply make it so other players can't interrupt his/her attacks by doing something which clearly only had this effect as an unintended side-effect is clearly cheating. The cheater may excuse it with "but the game allowed me to do this!" but the user was still clearly trying to exploit bugs to his/her advantage and in most games this is the sort of thing that at the very least earns you a warning (at least unless you happen to be the first player to discover the bug and your exploitation of it can reasonably be excused as testing to make sure it really is a bug before reporting it).
Basically, when playing online games against other humans the rules of the game aren't just "what the game engine lets me do".
Don't know how it works in the US actually but over here in Europe things like emergency calls and communications vital to national security and such tend to always have priority. So you could just make a law that says you can't mess with the flow of traffic unless it is necessary in order to ensure that emergency calls get through (with proper legalese wording of course).
Periodically they announce "Oh Noes! We are about to run out of IPv4 space any minute now!
No they don't. What has been said over and over again is that we will run out of IPv4 address space and the "when" hasn't really moved much, it's just that every time the warning come up the "32 bits is just fine besides I don't understand this new-fangled eye-pee-vee-SIX thing and new things scare me, also, we locked ourselves into IPv4-only network gear because we're idiots who don't really know what we're doing"-crowd start screaming that those trying to get IPv6 adoption going are just alarmists.
Unless you have no understanding of networking (or you're an ISP) you really really really don't want ISP-wide NAT.
I thought the only people who still used any variation of VB were the "oldtimers" who picked up coding in the 90s while dreaming of making lots of money. At least those are the only people I see still coding in VB.NET and the like these days, pretty much all the real geeks I know tend to have pet languages that they're not allowed to use at work (Python, Ruby, asm for some arcane old CPU or something completely different) and code C#.NET or Java for a living...
In TFA it states that the recruiter that posted the ad for the job made the ad specific enough with regards to location, qualifications, what the company did and what they were offering as a starting salary that the senior developer was able to quickly deduce that the ad concerned the company he worked at.
I believe the point in TFA was that the senior developer who complained about the new hires being paid much more than him really was as valuable to the company as the new hires, if not more so. It sounds like he just wasn't important for that specific non-critical project and someone high up in the company had decided it was ok to pay whatever it took to get their pet project up and running ASAP (and had already decided it wasn't "cost effective" to pay for training in the necessary tech for existing employees).
The problem with Star Wars is that damn near anything in any way related to Star Wars seems to be canon, even when it makes absolutely no sense (like ordinary laser cannons with enough power to destroy planets because someone made up some numbers and someone else declared those numbers canon. Or, well, all of the xmas special). As contrast in the Trek universe they are a bit more conservative about what is canon. Not to mention that they at least try for suspension of disbelief to some degree while Star Wars is more "Suspension of what? Here, have some explosions and lightsaber fights!").
Sure they are but legally they are only entitled to one vote per person, not ten thousand times the political influence of the average voter by virtue of being a major shareholder in a corporation that "owns" a bunch of politicians.
And have we revoked the right of people to associate as they see fit, which implies the right to form corporations to pursue common business interests?
Well, you are free to hang out with anyone you want to but maybe it's time to return the corporation to its roots, when the purpose of a corporation wasn't "maximize profit for the shareholders regardless of legal or ethical implications" but rather to provide a product or service that would be beneficial to the community.
...or on an old Mac ( just acquired an old Mac a few nights ago).
I have yet to be able to install Silverlight on my 27" iMac (latest iteration from this summer), the installer just crashes. So as far as I'm concerned Silverlight is pretty much not cross-platform at all, it runs on Windows and that's it.
And h.264 is no more proprietary than Flash with the added advantage that the standard isn't controlled by a single company well-known for producing buggy insecure software...
I've actually found the tablet+pen combo to be more precise and efficient for everyday GUI work with xterms or other terminal emulators (not for games though). Of course, it takes a little while to get used to and you need a good tablet, if you buy the cheapest used Trust tablet you can find you'll probably end up frustrated by it.
That said, I'm still waiting for a direct mind-machine interface with the visual output hooked up directly to either the optic nerve or the optic centre in the brain. Hopefully by then we'll also have (good) cybernetic eyes (higher res, better light sensitivity, capable of seeing a wider frequence range than our regular squishy eyes).
Either you stopped paying attention around 12/14 or so, or you're repeating something you've heard somewhere else.
I assume you mean 2010-12-14 (or 14/12 if you want to, the year does not have 14 months).
And I'm still hearing complaints about how the leveling experience is now "too easy" for the hated "casuals" (with scare quotes because people who don't spend all their time awake playing WoW are clearly inferior subhumans according to some of the "hardcore" WoW players I know).
From what I've gathered from the "hardcore" players I know there is definitely a lot of elitism among them. Now, I remember when just getting to 60 took ages, when dodging crocolisks on foot in Wetlands was part of the experience and it seems a lot of these "hardcore" players hate the idea that someone could actually level to 85 without experiencing every part of the game at its hardest. It just seems to me that they're forgetting what a pain in the ass it is to do your first time (or first time on a new realm) with no guild or main char to back you up. Yes, after the shattering it's a lot easier but it's also a lot more fun. These days Outland and Northrend are the slow and boring zones (currently have a dwarf hunter alt on a new realm at lvl 75, three more levels until I can get out of Northrend).
I just don't get the hatred for anything that makes the leveling experience less of a boring long-winded grind.
As for heroics, yes they are hard. The issue I'm having is that there seems to be a "hardcore" clique of WoW gamers (like a couple of guys I know who actually used up vacation days to spend the entire cata release week getting to 85 on as many chars as possible) who absolutely hate the idea that others may be able to get close to them in level, gear and skill without first playing for as long as they have.
I definitely disagree about the quest changes being bad. The old world (lvl 1-60) pre-shattering was horrible. Even though they kept upping the XP gained and nerfing the XP needed to level it was still slow and cumbersome. With the changes they also finally got rid of a lot of the old "fedex quests" where you had to spend 45 minutes traveling from one end of the world to the other, give someone a bracelet, travel back and then finally get the next "real" quest in the quest chain which also required 15 minutes of travel. I'm glad those elements are gone, the new reshaped world is fun to play in, you can go exploring if you want to but you can also level quickly and smoothly if you want to.
That's not mentioning that they added more flightmasters so you no longer have trek all over the place while leveling. Of course, I know plenty of people (read:no-lifers) who are complaining about cataclysm, these are the same players who swore they'd quit when Blizzard decided to make mounts cheaper since it "encouraged casuals", again when they moved the lowest level for mounts down to 20 (from 40) because it "encouraged casuals", when BC was released because all their fancy purples became useless which was just "catering to casuals", again when WoTLK was released they complained about how WoTLK gear was better than BC gear was "catering to casuals".
There's a reason Blizzard generally ignores these loud complaints from the "hardcore" players, the complaints are coming from a bunch of people who feel that the game would be perfect if it involved 200+ pointless and boring hours of leveling and running PUGs until you could play with the "big boys". Although if anyone took away their heirloom items they'd rage all over the internet since that would mean their leveling experience would be more like that of the hated "casuals". It'd be even funnier if Blizzard figured out a way to make it hard to "pull" lower level characters with the help of a level capped guildie (or to mail items/gold that had at any time been in the hands of one of your alts or one of your alts' guildies). I know, they'd never do that but oh boy would the "hardcore" crowd whine and moan, it wouldn't be so easy to brag about all your level 85 alts then (since they'd have to experience the whole grind to 85 without assistance).
Well, it is true that there are plenty of things that aren't helped by having more RAM.
I was thinking in a more general sense. Ever since the late 90s I've seen way too many users, both "regular people" and people who should know better, who have nowhere near the amount of RAM they should have.
For most people it seems RAM is still the main bottleneck when it comes to getting decent performance, and there's really no reason for this anymore. Back in the days when a 4 MB SIMM would cost as much as a netbook loaded with 2 GB costs these days RAM shortage was just something you had to live with but it's 2011 now, you can get a couple of 2 GB DIMMs for well under $100.
Still, most people seem more willing to spend their money on an SSD than on more RAM even though they'd get more of a performance boost from more RAM. Not that I don't use SSDs, I just think it's an unnecessary expense for those who use it to compensate for not having enough RAM.
You're still using a mechanical hard-disk, right? That's the component that's bottle-necking your PC, not programmers!
Actually, if you're having performance issues on a modern computer that are solved by swapping out your system/application disk with an SSD chances are your real problem is that you're low on RAM.
The issue most people have is that they're using all of their RAM or close to all of it with just their active applications (active here meaning "the window at the top, those other apps that are running are all swapped out") so every time they hit alt-tab/cmd-tab or start another app the disk starts churning like crazy. Or maybe they just entered a menu that belongs to a part of the app that's been swapped out because the OS decided that it hadn't been used for 30 seconds (one of my main issues with Windows btw, it will do this even when there should be plenty of available RAM because apparently disk caching of apps that haven't been started in days or weeks is clearly more important than the currently active app not grinding to a halt).
Lately I've begun splitting what people call sci-fi into three different subgroups.
First up is Hard sci-fi. I'm a bit more liberal with this definition than some hard sci-fi fans in that I can actually accept premises like "If we assume this theoretically possible thing/event is possible practically..." while many hard sci-fi fans seem stuck in some strange rigid world where anything that hadn't been discovered or invented by 1973 is completely outrageous and clearly not deserving of being called hard sci-fi.
Then there's plain Sci-fi, this is anything from stuff that's not quite realistic enough to be called Hard sci-fi all the way down through the regular wagon train to the stars stuff and "What if...?" movies that are to say the least a bit rough around the edges when it comes to scientific accuracy.
Finally there's Hollywood/Action sci-fi. This is where about 90% of the movies labeled "Sci-fi" tend to belong. It's either "movie from $other_genre, IN SPACE/THE FUTURE/THE PAST/THE WORLD OF FAIRIES AND ELVES!!11one" or genre mashup movies along the lines of "Let's take this sci-fi idea and make it more action-oriented to draw in the 15 to 30 year old male demographic, add some romance for the girlfriends, some comic relief for the kids and..." that just happen to take place in a "typical" sci-fi setting.
Yes, I'm a bit bitter, Hollywood is butchering sci-fi with every new movie and if I ever open my mouth about it to friends and acquaintances they immediately start namedropping movies from the third category as examples of how there are plenty of good sci-fi movies being made...
My experience is that those who use "executive smartphones" (like blackberrys) are generally quite inept when it comes to tech but "compensate" for it by yelling at those geeks in the IT department whenever something goes wrong (which also results in them getting as much preemptive CYA protection as possible from the IT geeks).
iPhone users on the other hand tend to be "regular people" without magic CxO powers which means they're left to fend for themselves.
If everyone on the quiet car thinks that he can make one important call, then the car isn't quiet anymore.
While true in the most extreme sense this makes me think of those who feel that you should be ticketed if you cross a street when the light is red, even if it's 04:00 and not a single car can be seen.
For me the main problem with quiet train cars is the subset of passengers who are, for lack of a better term, "silence fascists". They are the ones that look at you with derision if you clear your throat once, typing on a quiet laptop keyboard will get you complaints to the train staff. I've tried riding in the quiet cars on occasion but after getting dirty looks from several other passengers every time I so much as turned a page in the book I was reading I just gave up. Well, I hope you get what I'm saying.
I'd love to ride in the quiet cars to get away from the screaming infants, barking dogs, teenagers who won't stop talking loudly on their cellphones, drunk students on their way home or to a party and all the other actual loud annoyances but I don't want to have to be afraid to clear my throat or answer an emergency phone call.
Society works if people don't think they are so special that they deserve an exception.
There are always legitimate exceptions. But as I stated, the problem is that most people think that their trivial issues regarding where to have dinner are important enough for an exception while someone else getting a phone call informing them that their mother was just killed in a car accident is clearly pointless dribble...
Try it, you'll be surprised how sensitive cell phone microphones are and how good they can filter out background noise.
I know they're supposed to be sensitive but on my current phone there's something wrong with the mic, since a few months back I've been forced to raise my voice to make myself heard. I should probably get a new phone (it's too old to be covered by warranty) but it works well enough.
On one hand I can understand why it's annoying when people use their cellphones in quiet train cars (even though I never use them myself), on the other hand I can understand how people may be reasoning that the purpose of the quiet cars isn't to enforce complete silence but rather to get away from the teenager who insists on chatting on his/her cellphone non-stop and similar annoyances. That is to say, people probably figure "it's supposed to be a quiet car but this call is very important". The problem of course being that what a lot of people consider "important" to themselves just isn't.
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That's about on-par with my experiences.
Previous ISP (TeliaSonera) told me that they gave out IPv6 blocks for free to business customers but refused to do so for residental customers except for their "tester" customers (and they didn't want more of those).
Switched to Bahnhof a while back and as great as they are they can't offer native IPv6 access where I live because the open citynet I get their connection through (city owns the last mile and the ISPs hook into the city's network for a small fee per subscriber) refuses to play ball. Apparently they'd love to offer all their customers IPv6 access but a lot of the citynets have no interest in changing their config files...
Not that the latter surprises me, I used to work for a similar citynet that had made a managerial decision that there was no demand for IPv6 and therefore they wouldn't let any ISPs offer that service (kind of silly from my POV as I spoke to reps from at least three ISPs that wanted to know why they couldn't offer their customers IPv6 access in that citynet).
Oh get over yourself. Anyone who has a speciality gets asked questions, or for advice. That goes for plumbers, and electricians. As well as doctors, and lawyers.
So, people expect their plumber friend to spend hours and hundreds of dollars in materials fixing their plumbing? Or for their electrician friend to rewire their home just because he's an electrician? Or their doctor friend to give out free CAT scans and hospital visits? Because that's the level of "advice" a lot of computer geeks are expected to offer. If it was just ten-fifteen minutes of advice that'd be one thing, but often it's ten-fifteen minutes of advice, another twenty minutes trying to explain the advice and then three hours just doing it for them because you gave up on trying to get them to click "Start".
Do you think your MD friend would give out quick tips on how to deal with the symptoms of a cold if "drink lots of fluids" constantly resulted in you and others immediately trying to drink two gallons of drain cleaner?
...the usa may be the exeption to it due to are free speech right...
Please note that the US is by no means the only country in the world that has free speech in its constitution, and despite some americans claiming otherwise there are plenty of countries that have equivalents of the US constitution, it's just that we don't refer to it as "The constitution", here in Sweden it's "Grundlagarna" but they're still equivalent to the constitution.
Also, please do something about your spelling and grammar, your post is barely readable.
Why is 30 Mbps sustained transfer rate "completely crazy"? I have a 100/100 Mbps connection and I routinely have higher sustained download speeds when downloading things from servers that have the bandwidth for it. And when it comes to p2p the main problem I have seems to be that I'm using ZFS with RAIDZ and doing 100 Mbps worth of random writes while simultaneously seeding various things at 10-20 Mbps generally makes it pretty slow (I noticed after doing some cleanup of the filesystem that as long as I keep utilization under 75-80% this isn't really a problem, it's when the filesystem is beginning to fill up that performance starts to suffer which makes all other processes that rely on disk I/O sluggish too).
Bugs aren't really part of the game as it is intended to function.
Imagine for example an online MMORPG where it is generally accepted that a maxed-out player character does approximately 20k "hit points" of damage per second while attacking another player if his/her attacks aren't interrupted. A player figuring out how to trick the game into either boosting this to a ridiculous 200k hit points of damage per second or simply make it so other players can't interrupt his/her attacks by doing something which clearly only had this effect as an unintended side-effect is clearly cheating. The cheater may excuse it with "but the game allowed me to do this!" but the user was still clearly trying to exploit bugs to his/her advantage and in most games this is the sort of thing that at the very least earns you a warning (at least unless you happen to be the first player to discover the bug and your exploitation of it can reasonably be excused as testing to make sure it really is a bug before reporting it).
Basically, when playing online games against other humans the rules of the game aren't just "what the game engine lets me do".
That was a Berlusconi reference. Try googling "bunga bunga party".
Don't know how it works in the US actually but over here in Europe things like emergency calls and communications vital to national security and such tend to always have priority. So you could just make a law that says you can't mess with the flow of traffic unless it is necessary in order to ensure that emergency calls get through (with proper legalese wording of course).
Periodically they announce "Oh Noes! We are about to run out of IPv4 space any minute now!
No they don't. What has been said over and over again is that we will run out of IPv4 address space and the "when" hasn't really moved much, it's just that every time the warning come up the "32 bits is just fine besides I don't understand this new-fangled eye-pee-vee-SIX thing and new things scare me, also, we locked ourselves into IPv4-only network gear because we're idiots who don't really know what we're doing"-crowd start screaming that those trying to get IPv6 adoption going are just alarmists.
Unless you have no understanding of networking (or you're an ISP) you really really really don't want ISP-wide NAT.
I thought the only people who still used any variation of VB were the "oldtimers" who picked up coding in the 90s while dreaming of making lots of money. At least those are the only people I see still coding in VB.NET and the like these days, pretty much all the real geeks I know tend to have pet languages that they're not allowed to use at work (Python, Ruby, asm for some arcane old CPU or something completely different) and code C#.NET or Java for a living...
In TFA it states that the recruiter that posted the ad for the job made the ad specific enough with regards to location, qualifications, what the company did and what they were offering as a starting salary that the senior developer was able to quickly deduce that the ad concerned the company he worked at.
I believe the point in TFA was that the senior developer who complained about the new hires being paid much more than him really was as valuable to the company as the new hires, if not more so. It sounds like he just wasn't important for that specific non-critical project and someone high up in the company had decided it was ok to pay whatever it took to get their pet project up and running ASAP (and had already decided it wasn't "cost effective" to pay for training in the necessary tech for existing employees).
The problem with Star Wars is that damn near anything in any way related to Star Wars seems to be canon, even when it makes absolutely no sense (like ordinary laser cannons with enough power to destroy planets because someone made up some numbers and someone else declared those numbers canon. Or, well, all of the xmas special). As contrast in the Trek universe they are a bit more conservative about what is canon. Not to mention that they at least try for suspension of disbelief to some degree while Star Wars is more "Suspension of what? Here, have some explosions and lightsaber fights!").
Wait, are shareholders not people now?
Sure they are but legally they are only entitled to one vote per person, not ten thousand times the political influence of the average voter by virtue of being a major shareholder in a corporation that "owns" a bunch of politicians.
And have we revoked the right of people to associate as they see fit, which implies the right to form corporations to pursue common business interests?
Well, you are free to hang out with anyone you want to but maybe it's time to return the corporation to its roots, when the purpose of a corporation wasn't "maximize profit for the shareholders regardless of legal or ethical implications" but rather to provide a product or service that would be beneficial to the community.
...or on an old Mac ( just acquired an old Mac a few nights ago).
I have yet to be able to install Silverlight on my 27" iMac (latest iteration from this summer), the installer just crashes. So as far as I'm concerned Silverlight is pretty much not cross-platform at all, it runs on Windows and that's it.
And h.264 is no more proprietary than Flash with the added advantage that the standard isn't controlled by a single company well-known for producing buggy insecure software...
I've actually found the tablet+pen combo to be more precise and efficient for everyday GUI work with xterms or other terminal emulators (not for games though). Of course, it takes a little while to get used to and you need a good tablet, if you buy the cheapest used Trust tablet you can find you'll probably end up frustrated by it.
That said, I'm still waiting for a direct mind-machine interface with the visual output hooked up directly to either the optic nerve or the optic centre in the brain. Hopefully by then we'll also have (good) cybernetic eyes (higher res, better light sensitivity, capable of seeing a wider frequence range than our regular squishy eyes).
It's old alright, we have a bunch of similar devices where I work.
Either you stopped paying attention around 12/14 or so, or you're repeating something you've heard somewhere else.
I assume you mean 2010-12-14 (or 14/12 if you want to, the year does not have 14 months).
And I'm still hearing complaints about how the leveling experience is now "too easy" for the hated "casuals" (with scare quotes because people who don't spend all their time awake playing WoW are clearly inferior subhumans according to some of the "hardcore" WoW players I know).
From what I've gathered from the "hardcore" players I know there is definitely a lot of elitism among them. Now, I remember when just getting to 60 took ages, when dodging crocolisks on foot in Wetlands was part of the experience and it seems a lot of these "hardcore" players hate the idea that someone could actually level to 85 without experiencing every part of the game at its hardest. It just seems to me that they're forgetting what a pain in the ass it is to do your first time (or first time on a new realm) with no guild or main char to back you up. Yes, after the shattering it's a lot easier but it's also a lot more fun. These days Outland and Northrend are the slow and boring zones (currently have a dwarf hunter alt on a new realm at lvl 75, three more levels until I can get out of Northrend).
I just don't get the hatred for anything that makes the leveling experience less of a boring long-winded grind.
As for heroics, yes they are hard. The issue I'm having is that there seems to be a "hardcore" clique of WoW gamers (like a couple of guys I know who actually used up vacation days to spend the entire cata release week getting to 85 on as many chars as possible) who absolutely hate the idea that others may be able to get close to them in level, gear and skill without first playing for as long as they have.
I definitely disagree about the quest changes being bad. The old world (lvl 1-60) pre-shattering was horrible. Even though they kept upping the XP gained and nerfing the XP needed to level it was still slow and cumbersome. With the changes they also finally got rid of a lot of the old "fedex quests" where you had to spend 45 minutes traveling from one end of the world to the other, give someone a bracelet, travel back and then finally get the next "real" quest in the quest chain which also required 15 minutes of travel. I'm glad those elements are gone, the new reshaped world is fun to play in, you can go exploring if you want to but you can also level quickly and smoothly if you want to.
That's not mentioning that they added more flightmasters so you no longer have trek all over the place while leveling. Of course, I know plenty of people (read:no-lifers) who are complaining about cataclysm, these are the same players who swore they'd quit when Blizzard decided to make mounts cheaper since it "encouraged casuals", again when they moved the lowest level for mounts down to 20 (from 40) because it "encouraged casuals", when BC was released because all their fancy purples became useless which was just "catering to casuals", again when WoTLK was released they complained about how WoTLK gear was better than BC gear was "catering to casuals".
There's a reason Blizzard generally ignores these loud complaints from the "hardcore" players, the complaints are coming from a bunch of people who feel that the game would be perfect if it involved 200+ pointless and boring hours of leveling and running PUGs until you could play with the "big boys". Although if anyone took away their heirloom items they'd rage all over the internet since that would mean their leveling experience would be more like that of the hated "casuals". It'd be even funnier if Blizzard figured out a way to make it hard to "pull" lower level characters with the help of a level capped guildie (or to mail items/gold that had at any time been in the hands of one of your alts or one of your alts' guildies). I know, they'd never do that but oh boy would the "hardcore" crowd whine and moan, it wouldn't be so easy to brag about all your level 85 alts then (since they'd have to experience the whole grind to 85 without assistance).
Well, it is true that there are plenty of things that aren't helped by having more RAM.
I was thinking in a more general sense. Ever since the late 90s I've seen way too many users, both "regular people" and people who should know better, who have nowhere near the amount of RAM they should have.
For most people it seems RAM is still the main bottleneck when it comes to getting decent performance, and there's really no reason for this anymore. Back in the days when a 4 MB SIMM would cost as much as a netbook loaded with 2 GB costs these days RAM shortage was just something you had to live with but it's 2011 now, you can get a couple of 2 GB DIMMs for well under $100.
Still, most people seem more willing to spend their money on an SSD than on more RAM even though they'd get more of a performance boost from more RAM. Not that I don't use SSDs, I just think it's an unnecessary expense for those who use it to compensate for not having enough RAM.
You're still using a mechanical hard-disk, right? That's the component that's bottle-necking your PC, not programmers!
Actually, if you're having performance issues on a modern computer that are solved by swapping out your system/application disk with an SSD chances are your real problem is that you're low on RAM.
The issue most people have is that they're using all of their RAM or close to all of it with just their active applications (active here meaning "the window at the top, those other apps that are running are all swapped out") so every time they hit alt-tab/cmd-tab or start another app the disk starts churning like crazy. Or maybe they just entered a menu that belongs to a part of the app that's been swapped out because the OS decided that it hadn't been used for 30 seconds (one of my main issues with Windows btw, it will do this even when there should be plenty of available RAM because apparently disk caching of apps that haven't been started in days or weeks is clearly more important than the currently active app not grinding to a halt).
Lately I've begun splitting what people call sci-fi into three different subgroups.
Yes, I'm a bit bitter, Hollywood is butchering sci-fi with every new movie and if I ever open my mouth about it to friends and acquaintances they immediately start namedropping movies from the third category as examples of how there are plenty of good sci-fi movies being made...
My experience is that those who use "executive smartphones" (like blackberrys) are generally quite inept when it comes to tech but "compensate" for it by yelling at those geeks in the IT department whenever something goes wrong (which also results in them getting as much preemptive CYA protection as possible from the IT geeks).
iPhone users on the other hand tend to be "regular people" without magic CxO powers which means they're left to fend for themselves.
If everyone on the quiet car thinks that he can make one important call, then the car isn't quiet anymore.
While true in the most extreme sense this makes me think of those who feel that you should be ticketed if you cross a street when the light is red, even if it's 04:00 and not a single car can be seen.
For me the main problem with quiet train cars is the subset of passengers who are, for lack of a better term, "silence fascists". They are the ones that look at you with derision if you clear your throat once, typing on a quiet laptop keyboard will get you complaints to the train staff. I've tried riding in the quiet cars on occasion but after getting dirty looks from several other passengers every time I so much as turned a page in the book I was reading I just gave up. Well, I hope you get what I'm saying.
I'd love to ride in the quiet cars to get away from the screaming infants, barking dogs, teenagers who won't stop talking loudly on their cellphones, drunk students on their way home or to a party and all the other actual loud annoyances but I don't want to have to be afraid to clear my throat or answer an emergency phone call.
Society works if people don't think they are so special that they deserve an exception.
There are always legitimate exceptions. But as I stated, the problem is that most people think that their trivial issues regarding where to have dinner are important enough for an exception while someone else getting a phone call informing them that their mother was just killed in a car accident is clearly pointless dribble...
Try it, you'll be surprised how sensitive cell phone microphones are and how good they can filter out background noise.
I know they're supposed to be sensitive but on my current phone there's something wrong with the mic, since a few months back I've been forced to raise my voice to make myself heard. I should probably get a new phone (it's too old to be covered by warranty) but it works well enough.
On one hand I can understand why it's annoying when people use their cellphones in quiet train cars (even though I never use them myself), on the other hand I can understand how people may be reasoning that the purpose of the quiet cars isn't to enforce complete silence but rather to get away from the teenager who insists on chatting on his/her cellphone non-stop and similar annoyances. That is to say, people probably figure "it's supposed to be a quiet car but this call is very important". The problem of course being that what a lot of people consider "important" to themselves just isn't.