Placing video advertisements before the desired content guarantees that my viewing goes from infrequent to almost never. Except there is no video advertisement before the desired content. I know it's odd to expect people to RTFA, but really... It's a small graphic overlay at the bottom of the video that can be dismissed.
mod = module, and yes, it is technically an "optional" component, but it is so ubiquitous at this stage as to be considered standard. I have yet to run across a decently sized webhosting company that doesn't have it on their Apache install, and every (admittedly only two, so not exactly a definitive sample pool) IIS server I've been on has had no equivalent third-party plug-in installed.
Both web hosts also transferred my client's domains to LAMP (or MAMP, in one case) servers when I inquired about how often they patched their IIS servers with security updates.
Well, I'd definitely prefer not to use.Net, that's for sure.;P
The IIS servers I've worked with have been using MySQL and, admittedly, have been very limited in terms of configuration, but if the baseline configuration is as much less usable than even the most limited LAMP configurations I've worked on, I still have issues with IIS relating to the capabilities of the "standard" platform I can expect to run into.
And honestly, a lot of those have to do with the limits and inconvenience of running on a Windows-based server vs. any flavor of *nix. (available command-line tools, etc.)
I care about integration. A third-party solution doesn't do me any good if my client's server doesn't support the third-party module for such a basic concept. By the by, if FOSS is important to you, that's a strike AGAINST IIS, rather than for it.
4:33 was exactly the piece I was thinking of when I used Cage as an example. The entire performance is not only defined by the audience's interaction, it is never the same twice, and in fact can't really exist (as art or otherwise) as a solitary entity. It exists COMPLETELY in the context of its relationship with the audience, which is, I think, a hallmark of a video game as well.
The idea that interactivity and "player" or "viewer control over the outcome of an experience precludes something from being fine art is ludicrous.
John Cage's work was regularly defined by the audience. Many artists use interactive installations, or interactive performance art. Closer to Ebert's home, there are any number of critics and scholars that believe that Shakespeare's plays exist solely as they are performed. That the text on the page is simply a blueprint, highly mutable depending on the needs of the production company and the artist, and that when discussing the plays, one needs to refer to a specific production to define the boundaries of the discussion.
The funny thing is, you couldn't even be bothered finding a comparison that wasn't already used in Taco's editorial.
I know, I know... It wasn't worth your time to read his post before you complained. Why is it worth your time to sit here and complain if Slashdot sucks so much? I have to wonder how much different the world would be if people wandered off to find more positive things to do with their time when they stopped enjoying something.
You know they're friends, yes? In fact, Gaiman wrote a short story called "One Life, Furnished in Early Moorcock," for an Elric tribute anthology back in the mid-nineties.
If you've never heard of Neil Gaiman, you're missing out. He wrote the DC/Vertigo series Sandman, the BBC miniseries (and novel) Neverwhere, American Gods (and its sequel, Anansi Boys), MirrorMask, with Dave McKean, Good Omens, with Terry Pratchett, Stardust, the film adaptation of which is coming out soon, with Robert DeNiro and Claire Danes, and Coraline, the film version of which is in production, directed by the director of Nightmare Before Christmas.
There's a lot more, but that's what I thought of off the top of my head.
And apparently you need to look up the definition of civility.
I'm a writer, not an economist, I'll acknowledge that I missed the specific meaning of the term, but I would still argue (and agree with the other poster in this discussion) that continuing support after purchase should count toward the "marginal" cost of production. Even when a piece of commercial software exists in the wild, neither development or support for that product ceases.
If this concept "breaks" basic economy, then basic economy has been broken for a very long time. There are any number of pre-information age services that break this definition.
I would disagree that the "marginal cost of production of a unit of software is damn near 0," when you take into account the man-hours required to create the software in the first place. No, the jewelcase/cardboard/CD/DVD/Bandwidth costs are not that intense, but the time required to create that software has value.
Beyond anything else, mostly because I'm at work, and can't play...:P
Orcs weren't created by Tolkien from "whole-cloth" as you say, they appeared previously in Beowulf.
Regardless, look up vampires some time. A vampiric creature has existed in every culture's myths, throughout history, and yet Stoker and LeFanu's "invention" of the vampire a little over a century ago has become the "standard" by which vampires are judged. Their vampires (Carmilla and Dracula) flew in the face of the conventional vampire, who was little more than a ravening zombie up until that point. They were neither cunning nor beautiful, and they certainly didn't hide among us. Bram Stoker and Sheridan LeFanu are singularly responsible for redefining what vampires "are" in popular culture. Does this mean that anything that came before (such as the Penangallan, or Lhiannon Sidhe) has been subsumed into the "popular culture" myth of the vampire as a decayed noble, intent on dressing well and seducing women? No. Vampires still appear in a varied array of faces, some angsty, some predatory, some just trying to get by... Some even working as police detectives on the night shift. To adapt a Jefferson quote about spelling: The world would be a sad place indeed, if one could only think of one way to portray a fictional creature.
Come on, don't insult our intelligence. You and I and everyone else reading this knows that WCIII is not the beginning of Warcraft. It doesn't matter where WC3 fits in chronologically, the point is they already had Humans and Orcs established in WC1 and 2... or so we were supposed to think. But then WC3 comes out and suddenly Humans and Orcs change into something different. For myself, I never really liked WC3 and never played it much. Maybe that's where the real deviation from the original Warcraft came from more than in WoW.
So basically, what you're saying is that since you and I and everyone else reading this knows that Boromir was seduced by the ring and madly tried to get it back, he couldn't grow and change enough to redeem himself before he died? Stories, like life, evolve. Allegiances change, nuances are uncovered. If things were exactly the same in every Warcraft game, there would be no reason to continue. You've already seen all there is to see. If you consider Warcraft III a departure from the world of the other two games (I don't, but that's neither here nor there), then just assume that the code split, as it were, and World of Warcraft is based on the narrative branch that Warcraft III started.
Yeah, which is just another facet of why I don't give two figs about World of Warcraft's "lore" - because if there's any one thing the game is not it's the world of Warcraft (certainly not the world of WC1 and 2). I'm not saying that makes it a bad game - it just makes me disinclined to give any real credence to the WoW "lore".
Then don't give credence to it, but when you're arguing that the Horde are evil, you should take the source material into account. I'm not a Christian, but I'm not going to say that God is a big pink and purple polka-dotted hedgehog simply because I think that makes for a better religion than what is in the Bible.
Yes yes, we know. But that's only because Warhammer was a PC game series already around that was based on Tolkien's fantasy elements. Which says a good deal about the quality of Tolkien's work. It's not like there weren't already other fantasy worlds around before Tolkien. Arthurian legend has been around quite some time, and Elves and Dwarfs in fantasy were really quite something different from what they became in Tolkien's world. Interestingly though, almost everyone now uses Tolkien's iteration rather than the old ones, except for in the cases of Santa's Elves and the Dwarfs in Snow White. (Which now exist primarily as Christmas ornaments and Disney animated movies.)
Apparently you don't know, then, because Warhammer was (and is) a tabletop miniatures game. The orcs in it bear pretty little resemblance to the orcs in Tolkien, beyond being green and brutal. The races in Tolkien's world are largely based on Norse myths, so if anything, you can say that Tolkien was simply building on what came before as well. To deny that Tolkien's books had a huge (and if anything, debilitating) effect on the Fantasy genre would be asinine. But to expect everything in the fantasy genre to remain faithful to Tolkien's canon and not deviate, despite using elements, is likewise asinine.
I guess the thing that bugs me most about Blizzard's changes (as well as Peter Jackson's version of LotR) is how they made everything cute and cuddly to be acceptable for the masses, and completely left behind the nitty-gritty and epic (no, "epic" does not mean "purple gear"...) parts that make up good fantasy.
They aren't changes. It's not an adaptation of Lord of the Rings. Azeroth is Blizzard's world, it is NOT Middle Earth. Simply because there are common elements such as Orcs and Elves and such doesn't make it an adaptation, and no amount of wishing will make it so. Orcs and Elves are a part of the global consciousness now. They appear in stories as disparate as Poison Elves, the various settings of D&D (some of whic
Since the Horde was formed in Warcraft III, it was never the "total bad guys," because it was already when we were getting to play the game from Thrall's point of view, and moral relativism had been introduced to the story. And the Orcs before that were under the influence of demonic masters. And no single faction can be considered the "good" guys so long as they tolerate warlocks in their ranks. Whether you can reconcile the changes and evolution of Azeroth throughout the games or not is up to you, and while it can affect your enjoyment of the game, it really doesn't change what the story is as it is presented at the current time. I wasn't arguing that the game line has been totally consistent, or whether it was even well written, but simply that defining the Horde as presented in World of Warcraft as evil is inaccurate.
By the way, the first Warcraft game wasn't based on Tolkien's work, it was based on Warhammer.
I read your post, and the simple, inescapable conclusion is that you are blatantly, by your own admission, ignoring what the Orcs and Trolls are in World of Warcraft in favor of an intertextual interpretation based on your own image of how things should be, because of your preference for the works of Tolkien.
That's fine, but arguing that the Horde is evil because you want them to be or because you disagree with Blizzard's execution or simply because you don't find it as well-written as another author's works is silly. World of Warcraft's story is Blizzard's to create. It is what it is, regardless of your preference that it were otherwise. If you don't like their choices, good on you. There are things I don't like about World of Warcraft, but I don't deny that they exist simply because I don't think that Blizzard's writers are as good as Tolkien or China Mieville or Mark Z. Danielewski, or Margaret Atwood, or Neil Gaiman, or Michael Moorcock, or any number of other wonderful writers out there.
And I've read most of Tolkien's work, including the Silmarillion. I wouldn't call them the holy gospel, but they're very good books. My biggest gripe is that Tolkien sometimes fell to digression and rambling in a way that made the story drag. But thanks for assuming.
So basically, you ignore the story and then argue that things in World of Warcraft are the way that you imagine they should be based on the (unrelated in all but the most general of ways) works of another author that died twenty years before Warcraft existed, despite the fact that they blatantly aren't.
Which is why World of Warcraft's orcs, trolls, and even Forsaken, to a point, are interesting. They break the mold. You may not see it, because you assume they fit old stereotypes, but they don't. The Orcs, Tauren and Trolls are all generally honorable races. In some ways, they are more "good" than either the humans or the elves.
Humans have enslaved Orcs and humiliated them for years, they kept them in concentration camps. Not to mention that one of their faction leaders is Onyxia. Night Elves are selfish and desperate, and they even made it possible for the Burning Legion to attack. Dwarves are nearly as bad as the Venture Co. at destroying the environment they live in, and therefore they clash with the nature-loving Tauren. Gnomes IRRADIATED their own city to drive out invaders, and now they sponge off the Dwarves. The Draenei are the opposite of the Blood Elves, in that they are ostensibly the only race in the game that can be called unreservedly "good." (This kind of falls flat when you consider hints that the Naaru aren't exactly the angels they're cracked up to be, and the Draenei become simply "naive" rather than truly "chosen" or anything of the sort.)
Orcs were oppressed, put into concentration camps and simply want their own homeland where people will leave them alone now. Sound familiar? Tauren are members of the Horde because the orcs saved them from the centaurs that were invading their home. They are extremely honorable. The Darkspear Trolls have forsaken cannibalism and embraced the Shamanistic culture of the Orcs. The Forsaken have a faction that wants to kill everyone, yes, but other members are described by humans near Dalaran as "possessing more humanity than my fellow humans." The Blood Elves are, arguably, the only truly "evil" race in the game. But even they are portrayed as more or less out of control, rather than blatantly malicious.
Everyone in Azeroth is generally far more nuanced than simple "good" or "evil." If you choose to only see the races as Tolkienn portrayed them, you're missing out on a lot of the story of World of Warcraft.
Slashdot Mirror
mod = module, and yes, it is technically an "optional" component, but it is so ubiquitous at this stage as to be considered standard. I have yet to run across a decently sized webhosting company that doesn't have it on their Apache install, and every (admittedly only two, so not exactly a definitive sample pool) IIS server I've been on has had no equivalent third-party plug-in installed.
Both web hosts also transferred my client's domains to LAMP (or MAMP, in one case) servers when I inquired about how often they patched their IIS servers with security updates.
Well, I'd definitely prefer not to use .Net, that's for sure. ;P
The IIS servers I've worked with have been using MySQL and, admittedly, have been very limited in terms of configuration, but if the baseline configuration is as much less usable than even the most limited LAMP configurations I've worked on, I still have issues with IIS relating to the capabilities of the "standard" platform I can expect to run into.
And honestly, a lot of those have to do with the limits and inconvenience of running on a Windows-based server vs. any flavor of *nix. (available command-line tools, etc.)
I care about integration. A third-party solution doesn't do me any good if my client's server doesn't support the third-party module for such a basic concept. By the by, if FOSS is important to you, that's a strike AGAINST IIS, rather than for it.
There is no integrated mod_rewrite solution on IIS.
That's enough of a dealbreaker for me.
4:33 was exactly the piece I was thinking of when I used Cage as an example. The entire performance is not only defined by the audience's interaction, it is never the same twice, and in fact can't really exist (as art or otherwise) as a solitary entity. It exists COMPLETELY in the context of its relationship with the audience, which is, I think, a hallmark of a video game as well.
;P
OK, maybe not Xenogears.
The idea that interactivity and "player" or "viewer control over the outcome of an experience precludes something from being fine art is ludicrous.
John Cage's work was regularly defined by the audience. Many artists use interactive installations, or interactive performance art. Closer to Ebert's home, there are any number of critics and scholars that believe that Shakespeare's plays exist solely as they are performed. That the text on the page is simply a blueprint, highly mutable depending on the needs of the production company and the artist, and that when discussing the plays, one needs to refer to a specific production to define the boundaries of the discussion.
Not only do people whine about "subsidizing" Blizzard on top of paying their monthly fee, Blizzard makes patches available via alternate means.
And sometimes, just sometimes, something can be successful BECAUSE it's good.
I wish it wasn't cool to be a curmudgeon.
The funny thing is, you couldn't even be bothered finding a comparison that wasn't already used in Taco's editorial.
I know, I know... It wasn't worth your time to read his post before you complained. Why is it worth your time to sit here and complain if Slashdot sucks so much? I have to wonder how much different the world would be if people wandered off to find more positive things to do with their time when they stopped enjoying something.
Why couldn't he have all three?
I'm a little out of it, but I'm not sure what I'm missing, here.
You know they're friends, yes? In fact, Gaiman wrote a short story called "One Life, Furnished in Early Moorcock," for an Elric tribute anthology back in the mid-nineties.
If you've never heard of Neil Gaiman, you're missing out. He wrote the DC/Vertigo series Sandman, the BBC miniseries (and novel) Neverwhere, American Gods (and its sequel, Anansi Boys), MirrorMask, with Dave McKean, Good Omens, with Terry Pratchett, Stardust, the film adaptation of which is coming out soon, with Robert DeNiro and Claire Danes, and Coraline, the film version of which is in production, directed by the director of Nightmare Before Christmas.
There's a lot more, but that's what I thought of off the top of my head.
I'm a 12st Century Digital Boy.
I don't know how to live, but I've got a lot of toys...
You realize, I hope, that the "powerMac" line is the MacPro line?
Those options have not changed.
Entertaining is a subjective term. I, for one, find Dostoevsky's works entertaining.
More importantly, I'm not sure I understand your criteria, if you would consider 1984 to have "no artistic component," but Brave New World does?
Have you seen someone actually playing DDR on hard or so?
:P
There's nothing dancelike about it... Epileptic, maybe.
And apparently you need to look up the definition of civility.
I'm a writer, not an economist, I'll acknowledge that I missed the specific meaning of the term, but I would still argue (and agree with the other poster in this discussion) that continuing support after purchase should count toward the "marginal" cost of production. Even when a piece of commercial software exists in the wild, neither development or support for that product ceases.
If this concept "breaks" basic economy, then basic economy has been broken for a very long time. There are any number of pre-information age services that break this definition.
I would disagree that the "marginal cost of production of a unit of software is damn near 0," when you take into account the man-hours required to create the software in the first place. No, the jewelcase/cardboard/CD/DVD/Bandwidth costs are not that intense, but the time required to create that software has value.
Beyond anything else, mostly because I'm at work, and can't play... :P
Orcs weren't created by Tolkien from "whole-cloth" as you say, they appeared previously in Beowulf.
Regardless, look up vampires some time. A vampiric creature has existed in every culture's myths, throughout history, and yet Stoker and LeFanu's "invention" of the vampire a little over a century ago has become the "standard" by which vampires are judged. Their vampires (Carmilla and Dracula) flew in the face of the conventional vampire, who was little more than a ravening zombie up until that point. They were neither cunning nor beautiful, and they certainly didn't hide among us. Bram Stoker and Sheridan LeFanu are singularly responsible for redefining what vampires "are" in popular culture. Does this mean that anything that came before (such as the Penangallan, or Lhiannon Sidhe) has been subsumed into the "popular culture" myth of the vampire as a decayed noble, intent on dressing well and seducing women? No. Vampires still appear in a varied array of faces, some angsty, some predatory, some just trying to get by... Some even working as police detectives on the night shift. To adapt a Jefferson quote about spelling: The world would be a sad place indeed, if one could only think of one way to portray a fictional creature.
So basically, what you're saying is that since you and I and everyone else reading this knows that Boromir was seduced by the ring and madly tried to get it back, he couldn't grow and change enough to redeem himself before he died? Stories, like life, evolve. Allegiances change, nuances are uncovered. If things were exactly the same in every Warcraft game, there would be no reason to continue. You've already seen all there is to see. If you consider Warcraft III a departure from the world of the other two games (I don't, but that's neither here nor there), then just assume that the code split, as it were, and World of Warcraft is based on the narrative branch that Warcraft III started.
Then don't give credence to it, but when you're arguing that the Horde are evil, you should take the source material into account. I'm not a Christian, but I'm not going to say that God is a big pink and purple polka-dotted hedgehog simply because I think that makes for a better religion than what is in the Bible.
Apparently you don't know, then, because Warhammer was (and is) a tabletop miniatures game. The orcs in it bear pretty little resemblance to the orcs in Tolkien, beyond being green and brutal. The races in Tolkien's world are largely based on Norse myths, so if anything, you can say that Tolkien was simply building on what came before as well. To deny that Tolkien's books had a huge (and if anything, debilitating) effect on the Fantasy genre would be asinine. But to expect everything in the fantasy genre to remain faithful to Tolkien's canon and not deviate, despite using elements, is likewise asinine.
They aren't changes. It's not an adaptation of Lord of the Rings. Azeroth is Blizzard's world, it is NOT Middle Earth. Simply because there are common elements such as Orcs and Elves and such doesn't make it an adaptation, and no amount of wishing will make it so. Orcs and Elves are a part of the global consciousness now. They appear in stories as disparate as Poison Elves, the various settings of D&D (some of whic
Since the Horde was formed in Warcraft III, it was never the "total bad guys," because it was already when we were getting to play the game from Thrall's point of view, and moral relativism had been introduced to the story. And the Orcs before that were under the influence of demonic masters. And no single faction can be considered the "good" guys so long as they tolerate warlocks in their ranks. Whether you can reconcile the changes and evolution of Azeroth throughout the games or not is up to you, and while it can affect your enjoyment of the game, it really doesn't change what the story is as it is presented at the current time. I wasn't arguing that the game line has been totally consistent, or whether it was even well written, but simply that defining the Horde as presented in World of Warcraft as evil is inaccurate.
By the way, the first Warcraft game wasn't based on Tolkien's work, it was based on Warhammer.
I read your post, and the simple, inescapable conclusion is that you are blatantly, by your own admission, ignoring what the Orcs and Trolls are in World of Warcraft in favor of an intertextual interpretation based on your own image of how things should be, because of your preference for the works of Tolkien.
That's fine, but arguing that the Horde is evil because you want them to be or because you disagree with Blizzard's execution or simply because you don't find it as well-written as another author's works is silly. World of Warcraft's story is Blizzard's to create. It is what it is, regardless of your preference that it were otherwise. If you don't like their choices, good on you. There are things I don't like about World of Warcraft, but I don't deny that they exist simply because I don't think that Blizzard's writers are as good as Tolkien or China Mieville or Mark Z. Danielewski, or Margaret Atwood, or Neil Gaiman, or Michael Moorcock, or any number of other wonderful writers out there.
And I've read most of Tolkien's work, including the Silmarillion. I wouldn't call them the holy gospel, but they're very good books. My biggest gripe is that Tolkien sometimes fell to digression and rambling in a way that made the story drag. But thanks for assuming.
So basically, you ignore the story and then argue that things in World of Warcraft are the way that you imagine they should be based on the (unrelated in all but the most general of ways) works of another author that died twenty years before Warcraft existed, despite the fact that they blatantly aren't.
I see.
Never mind, carry on.
Which is why World of Warcraft's orcs, trolls, and even Forsaken, to a point, are interesting. They break the mold. You may not see it, because you assume they fit old stereotypes, but they don't. The Orcs, Tauren and Trolls are all generally honorable races. In some ways, they are more "good" than either the humans or the elves.
Humans have enslaved Orcs and humiliated them for years, they kept them in concentration camps. Not to mention that one of their faction leaders is Onyxia.
Night Elves are selfish and desperate, and they even made it possible for the Burning Legion to attack.
Dwarves are nearly as bad as the Venture Co. at destroying the environment they live in, and therefore they clash with the nature-loving Tauren.
Gnomes IRRADIATED their own city to drive out invaders, and now they sponge off the Dwarves.
The Draenei are the opposite of the Blood Elves, in that they are ostensibly the only race in the game that can be called unreservedly "good." (This kind of falls flat when you consider hints that the Naaru aren't exactly the angels they're cracked up to be, and the Draenei become simply "naive" rather than truly "chosen" or anything of the sort.)
Orcs were oppressed, put into concentration camps and simply want their own homeland where people will leave them alone now. Sound familiar?
Tauren are members of the Horde because the orcs saved them from the centaurs that were invading their home. They are extremely honorable.
The Darkspear Trolls have forsaken cannibalism and embraced the Shamanistic culture of the Orcs.
The Forsaken have a faction that wants to kill everyone, yes, but other members are described by humans near Dalaran as "possessing more humanity than my fellow humans."
The Blood Elves are, arguably, the only truly "evil" race in the game. But even they are portrayed as more or less out of control, rather than blatantly malicious.
Everyone in Azeroth is generally far more nuanced than simple "good" or "evil." If you choose to only see the races as Tolkienn portrayed them, you're missing out on a lot of the story of World of Warcraft.