Thank you, he is the very same one whose ideas evaporated 200M+ in VC money on Caspian, right? They were across the highway from me for years when I was in the valley. plus ca change...
You appear to have selected and orc hunter, about as bland an experience as possible.
Level 1-6 should take about an hour and take place all in a tiny portion of one zone (of which there are 40-60 in the game, with everything from lush jungle to winter wonderland, to medieval castles, to strange biodomes)
You gave up on a game after an hour? I assume you are not a big devotee of the original Warcraft series (the RTS), or the lore/storyline that goes with them? As you advance along, there really is a plot describing what is happening in the world and the different conflicts that are playing out before you. In the end-game you are actually part of the conflict.
In the "modern" era of the Provisional IRA about ~1800 people have been killed, not including ~300 IRA members themselves killed in the conflict. About half of the 1800 were military or paramilitary personnel. Another ~6000 military/paramilitary were injured, and ~14000 (fourteen thousand) civilians were injured over the ~40 year period. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Provisional_IRA_campaign_1969-1997 )
I'm a US citizen and yes, 9/11 was a horrible, awful tragedy that I will remember for the rest of my life, but I believe that we belittle the tragedies and conflicts that other nations have lived through in the way we treat the events of that day as being the most awful tragedy ever to occur.
I believe that roughly ten times as many people die in car accidents on US roads each year than died on 9/11, for example. (NHTSA reports numbers between 36k and 39k per year in the last decade)
[quote] Maybe if a student is actually pirating interesting stuff -- V for Vendetta, Ghost in the Shell, Firefly, Mythbusters, or take your pick -- it would be part of their education. I don't mean officially, but maybe these kids would actually take something from what they pirate. Given that they're starving college students, it's not like they have the spare cash to spend on all of these things, especially if they only buy a few (I wouldn't have bought Firefly if I didn't see it somewhere first). [/quote]
Eh? Library? Shared rental from blockbuster, 3 guys chip in a buck or two? House netflix subscription?
And I'm pretty skeptical of the "educational" value of anything mass-marketed/produced.
ugh. RTFA. for the first year the fees go to the student government, not to Stanford. Stanford is not "having the college students pay $1000's of dollars" -- it's the RIAA. The school is "taking money from them" to defray the costs of dealing with takedown notices. Your other choice is that they raise the overall tuition an additional 0.1% across the board to cover expenses, which do you want? Someone has to pay for it. If you don't like the DMCA (like me), keep voting for people who will change it.
And "your university" IT dept probably visited Stanford sometime in the past 10 years to understand how to actually implement student internet connections on a mass scale (1000's of connects changed on an annual basis). When Stanford first offered them (un-firewalled, un-filtered, direct-to-the-Internet with a static IP) in ~1992, it was considered rather novel at the time. I worked on setting them up then, and lots and lots of universities thought this was a minor miracle, and also rather a ridiculous luxury.
It's arena matches (especially among top-ranked players) that people care about. It's very different to know that 3 of the 5 opponents have engineering, therefore some crazy trinkets, and oh, that rogue is mutilate-build vs combat, or that mage is frost/fire/arcane spec'd. You might figure it out within 10 seconds of the match starting but if the match lasts 60 seconds tops, you lost a decent fraction of time to figuring it out, and probably didn't play the optimum counter-strategy.
For the median player, or at least median arena participant it's a non-issue. It's only at the very top of the arena rankings (which are now going to be done like chess rankings...) that anyone will care. Those players will probably just respec before any match anyway so not as big a deal.
2) A fair number of ethernet switches exist for ~500 nodes @ 1Gbps that will have predictable latency, like the force10 you are describing. 900 nodes would be tough, admittedly, at the moment. Also, I don't think you meant to say "router" -- you almost certainly are switching if it's all configured right.
3) Myrinet is very specialized and uses cut-through switching. Ethernet is a generalized protocol that can be used on a WAN, and is almost always store-and-forward. Store-and-forward scales better to distance, and under massive load. If your input bandwidth is able to oversubscribe your switch fabric in a cut-through switch, the performance will decline horribly, and the distribution of latencies almost random. Store-and-forward will decline gradually and (usually) have monotonic increasing latency under load.
grandparent is not BS, raiding is hellaciously expensive. 1g for 100 DI Residue? So I need about 1000/night, just for my personal repair bills? A full repair on my mix of purple/blue plate is about 9g when I am DPS'ing. I have 3 sets of gear at this point (Defense, DPS, Fire Resist) and I've got about half of a Nature Resist set. 10g for a night is about normal between all the items.
For typical guild MC run I suspect we use about 100-200 greater fire pots, 50-100 shadow, 150ish greater healing, and probably 300+ greater mana pots. For BWL its much worse, add lots of flasks at 100's of gold each (or equivalent in mats). All those other pots are at least 1g+ each on my server.
I am in a guild that has Ragnaros on farm status with its first 40-man crew, can almost kill Rag with a second 40-man crew made of alts and later-joins, and has killed Nefarian several times now. We spend thousands of gold per week just making potions for raiding. We had to institute a policy of everyone contributing dreamfoil/darkironore/fire pots/etc every week just so it didn't break down. And we are selling lots of BoE epics and blues that drop in MC and BWL on the AH to get money. Even then raiding was gold-flow-negative for us.
Re:Unrealistic representation of a game
on
WoW the Next "Golf"?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
If you are in a high-end raiding guild, you can find out a -lot- about someones leadership ability, I assure you.
How they handle adversity, boredom, burnout, etc. is very critical to the success of the guild, especially when you get to BWL-type raiding (or even putting MC on farm status).
We (as one of these guilds) have seen all these problems and more. Running a high-end raiding guild means coordinating 40-80 people's schedules (for MC/BWL/ZG/WorldBoss/etc), getting them to show up dependably and on-time, having a reasonable system for rewarding the members, convincing them to continue to work at an encounter after 6 hours and countless wipes, and managing what most "real" businesses call a supply chain. Except ours consists of Greater Fire Protection Pots, Flasks of Titans, and Dark Iron Ore.
Personally I can tell the difference between people who could be directors or managers that you would want to work for in an IT/Engineering context and those that would have people quitting in droves. Wouldn't that be a useful thing to know in your Engineering organization?
I wrote the first reply before Cisco's earnings call yesterday. Here's what Chambers said on the call (this is from the story over at lightreading.com today) -- I think it almost exactly mirrors what I said:
"It is extremely unlikely for us to ever do a large acquisition. My view is, most all of them fail," Chambers said.
Chambers described Cisco's ideal acquisition target as being just about the opposite of publicly traded, 55,500-employee Nokia. "We prefer small acquisitions, private. Ideal target: 100 to 200 people," Chambers noted. He added that Cisco likes an acquiree to be in the early stages of revenues; Nokia fits that bill like Tatum O'Neal fits her old Bad News Bears uniform.
Not convinced? There's more: "We like geographic proximity, similar culture, and we like an environment that is already in a location where we have a very large presence." So... not Finland?
"While we do not want to get in the habit of commenting on rumors, I was surprised the credibility the market gave to some of the recent rumors," he said.
The laughing is because "How well did it work out for Cisco, its shareholders, and customers?" in the grandparent post sounded like you didn't think it was a good deal. Maybe I just misread an honest question as criticism.
From what I can tell Nokia's market cap and value is heavily tied up in its worldwide brand, and the marketing and OEM relationship required to sustain it with various telcos, cell carriers, etc. I doubt that is an incredibly interesting asset to Cisco, since it's not really compatible with their style of business. Yes the switches would be interesting for 3G, but why would they pay 50-100B to get the tiny fraction they were interested in? They could develop a competitive equivalent for 10B or less, I suspect. And if Cisco understands their VoIP markets well and how they interact with 3G they may be able to "head them off at the pass" in 3-5 years.
As far as Selsius being French, that's kind of right. They were a division of a French company, but based in Dallas. Cisco has (had?) a sizeable presence in Texas at that point, in both Richardson and in Austin (I believe). The geographic colocation was normally based around areas Cisco had already invested in: San Jose/Silicon Valley, Ottawa, RTP/North Carolina, Chelmsford-Massachusetts/NH, Sydney Australia, and Amsterdam(?) Netherlands.
After an acquisition Cisco would typically try to move the office of the startup into the closest development office in pretty short order. If leases made that impractical it could stay physically separate for about a year or so. But a big guiding principle was to try to get them in physical proximity fairly quickly, and get them assimilated.
I never met the Selsius guys, just used their original phones for a while (man the original ones were ugly as hell). I think Cisco took the guts of the phone (and the software stack), sent it out to IDEO and got a nice sexy IP phone out it.
Those criteria have been reiterated over and over again as the "process of acquistion" by Chambers, Volpi, etc in business magazines, books and interviews for many years now. I think Cisco did 40 acquisitions while I was there, and most of them seemed to follow the plan (of course there are always exceptions).
Cisco is now the #1 seller of VoIP phones in the world. I recall numbers like $4B per year in VoIP gear, including handsets. Selsius was the beginning of this but Cisco acquired several other VoIP companies both in hardware and software, while I was working there (96-01).
Cisco and Nokia is a cruel joke made up by an analyst. Cisco's stated theory of acquisition is to never buy a big company, never buy someone who isnt geographically colocated, and never buy anyone who doesn't have a "cultural" match with their style of business. Nokia fails at least 2 of those tests, I don't know enough of their culture to speak to the third.
Cisco -might- buy the Nokia development lab in Mountain View, and move all the engineers to San Jose. That would be at least semi-plausible, but that's really just the old IPsilon team, plus whatever they have done in 6 years. I still doubt that one though.
Analysts make up crappy stories like this all the time. Very very few of them are true.
You can buy Redhat Enterprise Linux WS for well under a thousand dollars. If you have lots of 4GB -plus RAM machines to admin in a cluster (like I do), you would know that the OS cost is a drop in the bucket compared to the memory and server costs, much less the application software running on top of it. (I know you can run WS on a 32GB system -- I do it right now, today)
Our application vendors would look at me like I was insane if I tried to file a bug report and told them I was using Centos. They wouldn't take it and probably would never look at my issue.
The price you are complaining about is the price of a standard. I'm happy they at least chose a standard, and it's readily available and supported.
And this is the true problem. I also run a sim farm (but not as big as the parent's). State of the art linux machines can run 2x to 3x faster than a top-of-the-line Solaris machine, and the licenses are cheaper in some/many cases.
If Sun starts to offer Opteron grids, give me a call.
An ESOP (employee stock option plan) is a radically different animal than the options that are traded at the CBOE and you can get quoted on Yahoo Finance.
The ESOP (or ISO, incentive stock option) is not a liquid security for one (i.e. you can't just call up Schwab and sell them your options). Black-Scholes is designed to model a freely traded derivative type of option, so a lot of the parameters that go into the model are going to be fudge-factor-central when the thing you are trying to model doesn't really fit the model...
That's why they are thinking of changing the model for ISO/ESOP (Employee Stock Option Plans).
This whole change really only affects employees of public companies. Early-stage startups have accounting that barely makes any sense to begin with, they are running at a huge loss usually since no revenues but paying salary means loss -- the people who acquire or fund such companies are already going to be familiar with the accounting and have ways to adjust their pro forma estimates accordingly.
It's going to screw the rank and file at Fortune 1000 tech firms most likely. You may find your options go away, you get less of them, they are given to fewer people, or you get restricted stock awards instead (which have much worse tax consequences for the employee, and less flexibility, but are more determistic for the company's financial statements).
As an investor, I cheer. As a potential employee, it sucks. Guess it's back to the early-stage startups for me again...:)
1. That quest cycle goes away after about lvl 20 or so. The lvl 30+ quests start to become a little different.
2. You were in the knee of the mining curve. It's horrible around silver. It gets better at iron/mithril again (though it looks like truesilver might be another knee in the curve).
Oh, and helpful advice: Keep all your moss agate, it's ridiculously more valuable than you first realize.
3. What you say is basically true, there are some problems with the usefulness of the talents (I'm assuming you are playing a melee class, particularly if you are playing warrior like me). You are almost better served by farming mobs and hitting the AH for better gear.
(for what it's worth, I'm level 38 warrior on PvE server, smithing (180) and mining (200), I've already been good for 4 months of subscription for Blizz since I'm on the 3-at-a-time plan, and wouldn't be surprised if that stretches to 7)
(I also haven't slept well in a month because of this game...)
Never used SDT/PCB386, but if your idea of new, modern is a 6-layer board, uhh... we have some 22-24 layer stackups for you to look at with several hundred thousand nets that need hand-routing. Oh and lots/most of them need balanced lengths (sometimes across a 64-bit bus) to within a couple mils, but the contstraints are normally specified on a timing budget basis and have to backed out to an impedance/distance spec, and possible field-solved first. Basically, these boards are starting to look like chips.
I doubt you are such a masochist. (We use Cadence Allegro for this, and it actually works...)
Slashdot Mirror
Thank you, he is the very same one whose ideas evaporated 200M+ in VC money on Caspian, right? They were across the highway from me for years when I was in the valley. plus ca change...
You appear to have selected and orc hunter, about as bland an experience as possible.
Level 1-6 should take about an hour and take place all in a tiny portion of one zone (of which there are 40-60 in the game, with everything from lush jungle to winter wonderland, to medieval castles, to strange biodomes)
You gave up on a game after an hour? I assume you are not a big devotee of the original Warcraft series (the RTS), or the lore/storyline that goes with them? As you advance along, there really is a plot describing what is happening in the world and the different conflicts that are playing out before you. In the end-game you are actually part of the conflict.
In the "modern" era of the Provisional IRA about ~1800 people have been killed, not including ~300 IRA members themselves killed in the conflict. About half of the 1800 were military or paramilitary personnel. Another ~6000 military/paramilitary were injured, and ~14000 (fourteen thousand) civilians were injured over the ~40 year period. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Provisional_IRA_campaign_1969-1997 )
I'm a US citizen and yes, 9/11 was a horrible, awful tragedy that I will remember for the rest of my life, but I believe that we belittle the tragedies and conflicts that other nations have lived through in the way we treat the events of that day as being the most awful tragedy ever to occur.
I believe that roughly ten times as many people die in car accidents on US roads each year than died on 9/11, for example. (NHTSA reports numbers between 36k and 39k per year in the last decade)
Based on a 4-digit SlashID, I'd say not...
[quote]
Maybe if a student is actually pirating interesting stuff -- V for Vendetta, Ghost in the Shell, Firefly, Mythbusters, or take your pick -- it would be part of their education. I don't mean officially, but maybe these kids would actually take something from what they pirate. Given that they're starving college students, it's not like they have the spare cash to spend on all of these things, especially if they only buy a few (I wouldn't have bought Firefly if I didn't see it somewhere first).
[/quote]
Eh? Library? Shared rental from blockbuster, 3 guys chip in a buck or two? House netflix subscription?
And I'm pretty skeptical of the "educational" value of anything mass-marketed/produced.
ugh. RTFA. for the first year the fees go to the student government, not to Stanford. Stanford is not "having the college students pay $1000's of dollars" -- it's the RIAA. The school is "taking money from them" to defray the costs of dealing with takedown notices. Your other choice is that they raise the overall tuition an additional 0.1% across the board to cover expenses, which do you want? Someone has to pay for it. If you don't like the DMCA (like me), keep voting for people who will change it.
And "your university" IT dept probably visited Stanford sometime in the past 10 years to understand how to actually implement student internet connections on a mass scale (1000's of connects changed on an annual basis). When Stanford first offered them (un-firewalled, un-filtered, direct-to-the-Internet with a static IP) in ~1992, it was considered rather novel at the time. I worked on setting them up then, and lots and lots of universities thought this was a minor miracle, and also rather a ridiculous luxury.
It's arena matches (especially among top-ranked players) that people care about. It's very different to know that 3 of the 5 opponents have engineering, therefore some crazy trinkets, and oh, that rogue is mutilate-build vs combat, or that mage is frost/fire/arcane spec'd. You might figure it out within 10 seconds of the match starting but if the match lasts 60 seconds tops, you lost a decent fraction of time to figuring it out, and probably didn't play the optimum counter-strategy.
For the median player, or at least median arena participant it's a non-issue. It's only at the very top of the arena rankings (which are now going to be done like chess rankings...) that anyone will care. Those players will probably just respec before any match anyway so not as big a deal.
Yes, it is. I went to college with him and he was (and is) a damn good journalist.
1) Neat stuff in your cluster.
2) A fair number of ethernet switches exist for ~500 nodes @ 1Gbps that will have predictable latency, like the force10 you are describing. 900 nodes would be tough, admittedly, at the moment. Also, I don't think you meant to say "router" -- you almost certainly are switching if it's all configured right.
3) Myrinet is very specialized and uses cut-through switching. Ethernet is a generalized protocol that can be used on a WAN, and is almost always store-and-forward. Store-and-forward scales better to distance, and under massive load. If your input bandwidth is able to oversubscribe your switch fabric in a cut-through switch, the performance will decline horribly, and the distribution of latencies almost random. Store-and-forward will decline gradually and (usually) have monotonic increasing latency under load.
grandparent is not BS, raiding is hellaciously expensive. 1g for 100 DI Residue? So I need about 1000/night, just for my personal repair bills? A full repair on my mix of purple/blue plate is about 9g when I am DPS'ing. I have 3 sets of gear at this point (Defense, DPS, Fire Resist) and I've got about half of a Nature Resist set. 10g for a night is about normal between all the items.
For typical guild MC run I suspect we use about 100-200 greater fire pots, 50-100 shadow, 150ish greater healing, and probably 300+ greater mana pots. For BWL its much worse, add lots of flasks at 100's of gold each (or equivalent in mats). All those other pots are at least 1g+ each on my server.
I am in a guild that has Ragnaros on farm status with its first 40-man crew, can almost kill Rag with a second 40-man crew made of alts and later-joins, and has killed Nefarian several times now. We spend thousands of gold per week just making potions for raiding. We had to institute a policy of everyone contributing dreamfoil/darkironore/fire pots/etc every week just so it didn't break down. And we are selling lots of BoE epics and blues that drop in MC and BWL on the AH to get money. Even then raiding was gold-flow-negative for us.
If you are in a high-end raiding guild, you can find out a -lot- about someones leadership ability, I assure you.
How they handle adversity, boredom, burnout, etc. is very critical to the success of the guild, especially when you get to BWL-type raiding (or even putting MC on farm status).
We (as one of these guilds) have seen all these problems and more. Running a high-end raiding guild means coordinating 40-80 people's schedules (for MC/BWL/ZG/WorldBoss/etc), getting them to show up dependably and on-time, having a reasonable system for rewarding the members, convincing them to continue to work at an encounter after 6 hours and countless wipes, and managing what most "real" businesses call a supply chain. Except ours consists of Greater Fire Protection Pots, Flasks of Titans, and Dark Iron Ore.
Personally I can tell the difference between people who could be directors or managers that you would want to work for in an IT/Engineering context and those that would have people quitting in droves. Wouldn't that be a useful thing to know in your Engineering organization?
Cheers _Anarchy_ -- you deserve it...
"Managing Director of Computer People" translated from UK-ese means: CEO of (a firm called) Computer People.
CEO is a fairly American-ish job title.
Doc
I wrote the first reply before Cisco's earnings call yesterday. Here's what Chambers said on the call (this is from the story over at lightreading.com today) -- I think it almost exactly mirrors what I said:
"It is extremely unlikely for us to ever do a large acquisition. My view is, most all of them fail," Chambers said.
Chambers described Cisco's ideal acquisition target as being just about the opposite of publicly traded, 55,500-employee Nokia. "We prefer small acquisitions, private. Ideal target: 100 to 200 people," Chambers noted. He added that Cisco likes an acquiree to be in the early stages of revenues; Nokia fits that bill like Tatum O'Neal fits her old Bad News Bears uniform.
Not convinced? There's more: "We like geographic proximity, similar culture, and we like an environment that is already in a location where we have a very large presence." So... not Finland?
"While we do not want to get in the habit of commenting on rumors, I was surprised the credibility the market gave to some of the recent rumors," he said.
The laughing is because "How well did it work out for Cisco, its shareholders, and customers?" in the grandparent post sounded like you didn't think it was a good deal. Maybe I just misread an honest question as criticism.
From what I can tell Nokia's market cap and value is heavily tied up in its worldwide brand, and the marketing and OEM relationship required to sustain it with various telcos, cell carriers, etc. I doubt that is an incredibly interesting asset to Cisco, since it's not really compatible with their style of business. Yes the switches would be interesting for 3G, but why would they pay 50-100B to get the tiny fraction they were interested in? They could develop a competitive equivalent for 10B or less, I suspect. And if Cisco understands their VoIP markets well and how they interact with 3G they may be able to "head them off at the pass" in 3-5 years.
As far as Selsius being French, that's kind of right. They were a division of a French company, but based in Dallas. Cisco has (had?) a sizeable presence in Texas at that point, in both Richardson and in Austin (I believe). The geographic colocation was normally based around areas Cisco had already invested in: San Jose/Silicon Valley, Ottawa, RTP/North Carolina, Chelmsford-Massachusetts/NH, Sydney Australia, and Amsterdam(?) Netherlands.
After an acquisition Cisco would typically try to move the office of the startup into the closest development office in pretty short order. If leases made that impractical it could stay physically separate for about a year or so. But a big guiding principle was to try to get them in physical proximity fairly quickly, and get them assimilated.
I never met the Selsius guys, just used their original phones for a while (man the original ones were ugly as hell). I think Cisco took the guts of the phone (and the software stack), sent it out to IDEO and got a nice sexy IP phone out it.
Those criteria have been reiterated over and over again as the "process of acquistion" by Chambers, Volpi, etc in business magazines, books and interviews for many years now. I think Cisco did 40 acquisitions while I was there, and most of them seemed to follow the plan (of course there are always exceptions).
Excuse me while I laugh for a while.
Okay, back.
Cisco is now the #1 seller of VoIP phones in the world. I recall numbers like $4B per year in VoIP gear, including handsets. Selsius was the beginning of this but Cisco acquired several other VoIP companies both in hardware and software, while I was working there (96-01).
Cisco and Nokia is a cruel joke made up by an analyst. Cisco's stated theory of acquisition is to never buy a big company, never buy someone who isnt geographically colocated, and never buy anyone who doesn't have a "cultural" match with their style of business. Nokia fails at least 2 of those tests, I don't know enough of their culture to speak to the third.
Cisco -might- buy the Nokia development lab in Mountain View, and move all the engineers to San Jose. That would be at least semi-plausible, but that's really just the old IPsilon team, plus whatever they have done in 6 years. I still doubt that one though.
Analysts make up crappy stories like this all the time. Very very few of them are true.
The part of this story that I like the best is that Ladbroke's and all the other betting houses had to set odds "due to public demand"
The British will wager on literally anything, it seems. God bless them.
wait.
someone who knows something about the topic posted on slashdot.
i think the world is ending.
(seriously, thank you, that's a great post)
You can buy Redhat Enterprise Linux WS for well under a thousand dollars. If you have lots of 4GB -plus RAM machines to admin in a cluster (like I do), you would know that the OS cost is a drop in the bucket compared to the memory and server costs, much less the application software running on top of it. (I know you can run WS on a 32GB system -- I do it right now, today)
Our application vendors would look at me like I was insane if I tried to file a bug report and told them I was using Centos. They wouldn't take it and probably would never look at my issue.
The price you are complaining about is the price of a standard. I'm happy they at least chose a standard, and it's readily available and supported.
Those of us "implementing foss" use Firefox with Adblock and never see what you are talking about.
Duh.
And this is the true problem. I also run a sim farm (but not as big as the parent's). State of the art linux machines can run 2x to 3x faster than a top-of-the-line Solaris machine, and the licenses are cheaper in some/many cases.
If Sun starts to offer Opteron grids, give me a call.
An ESOP (employee stock option plan) is a radically different animal than the options that are traded at the CBOE and you can get quoted on Yahoo Finance.
:)
The ESOP (or ISO, incentive stock option) is not a liquid security for one (i.e. you can't just call up Schwab and sell them your options). Black-Scholes is designed to model a freely traded derivative type of option, so a lot of the parameters that go into the model are going to be fudge-factor-central when the thing you are trying to model doesn't really fit the model...
That's why they are thinking of changing the model for ISO/ESOP (Employee Stock Option Plans).
This whole change really only affects employees of public companies. Early-stage startups have accounting that barely makes any sense to begin with, they are running at a huge loss usually since no revenues but paying salary means loss -- the people who acquire or fund such companies are already going to be familiar with the accounting and have ways to adjust their pro forma estimates accordingly.
It's going to screw the rank and file at Fortune 1000 tech firms most likely. You may find your options go away, you get less of them, they are given to fewer people, or you get restricted stock awards instead (which have much worse tax consequences for the employee, and less flexibility, but are more determistic for the company's financial statements).
As an investor, I cheer. As a potential employee, it sucks. Guess it's back to the early-stage startups for me again...
1. That quest cycle goes away after about lvl 20 or so. The lvl 30+ quests start to become a little different.
2. You were in the knee of the mining curve. It's horrible around silver. It gets better at iron/mithril again (though it looks like truesilver might be another knee in the curve).
Oh, and helpful advice: Keep all your moss agate, it's ridiculously more valuable than you first realize.
3. What you say is basically true, there are some problems with the usefulness of the talents (I'm assuming you are playing a melee class, particularly if you are playing warrior like me). You are almost better served by farming mobs and hitting the AH for better gear.
(for what it's worth, I'm level 38 warrior on PvE server, smithing (180) and mining (200), I've already been good for 4 months of subscription for Blizz since I'm on the 3-at-a-time plan, and wouldn't be surprised if that stretches to 7)
(I also haven't slept well in a month because of this game...)
I'm not allowed to say, but you are right, it's not FR-4. :)
Never used SDT/PCB386, but if your idea of new, modern is a 6-layer board, uhh... we have some 22-24 layer stackups for you to look at with several hundred thousand nets that need hand-routing. Oh and lots/most of them need balanced lengths (sometimes across a 64-bit bus) to within a couple mils, but the contstraints are normally specified on a timing budget basis and have to backed out to an impedance/distance spec, and possible field-solved first. Basically, these boards are starting to look like chips.
I doubt you are such a masochist. (We use Cadence Allegro for this, and it actually works...)