Ok... all right, fine, you've convinced me. I go to Costco all the time, I'll pick some Feits up next time.
In my home theater, I have recessed can lights with GE "Reveal" color-graded incandescent bulbs, and I was wondering what I could use to replace those bulbs if the incandescent bulbs become harder to find. My only problem with the LED bulbs -- they are just much dimmer than either the incandescent and CFL bulbs. IE, from the link you gave, it's a "45 watt replacement." A 45 watt incandescent is just not a very bright light bulb. I hadn't seen a bulb that dim in actual use (as opposed to sitting on the store shelf) for years. 60 watt is an absolute minimum, 100 watts is better for a lamp when you actually want to see the room. I replaced some of the CFLs in my bathroom lights with LEDs and the room is noticeably dimmer. Maybe a more directional light will work for the cans, like others in this thread have said.
I really want to like LEDs, but them being unable to put out the same lumens as incandescents or cfls makes me think they're not -quite- ready as drop-in replacements yet.
A few coworkers got some (super-expensive) bulbs from LIFX. They were a bit of a pain to set up (they are wireless controlled, so you CANNOT have them in a lamp with a metal enclosure around the base) but they are bright, can change to any color on the fly, and are controlled by smart phone software that you can set up to change automatically depending on the time of day.
Not in my experience. They withstand sudden shocks better (falling lamp, etc), but not so much sustained lower amplitude vibrations where it's a lot more hit-or-miss. I've even seen some specifically warn against installing in ceiling fan units.
Weird. In my house, the ones in the ceiling fans are the only ones that last an appreciable number of years.
However, we usually don't have the fan and the lights it houses on at the same time.
Why the fuck does Congress get their nose in to Pro sports so much? Why is there a fucking hearing every other month about some sport related bullshit?
Because your opinion is an extreme minority and very few people agree with you?
I am of native descent. I do not find the name offensive in the slightest.
That's fine. There are some black people who call each other "nigger" too, but they'd certainly be up in arms if a white guy renamed his team the Philadelphia Niggers.
Also, I love the comment someone left on the Washington Redskins page on the brilliant "Why your team sucks" blog.
Alton wrote: Did you know that the DC metro area, especially the garbage heaps known as Prince George's County, MD and Prince William County, VA, is home to the highest concentration of people with Native American heritage in the country!? It's true! Just listen to 106.7 The Fan any afternoon to hear their proud proclamations of "HEY WHADDUP LEVAR YOU THE MAN I JUS WANNA SAY I'M 1/32 CHEROKEE OR CHOCTAW OR SOMETHIN AND I AINT OFFENDED BY THAT NAME! IT'S JUST ALL ABOUT PRIDE, MAN, AND IF YOU CAN'T SEE THAT, THEN, UH...YOU'RE THE RACIST."
It's like the fanbase is 90% Fake Chiefs. The other 10% are dead-ender white military contractor and lawyer jackasses like the asshole that started a Redskins Pride Caucus in the Virginia legislature (during the middle of intense debate over MEDICAID they did this!).
I guess I'm struggling to see the pro-communist message in Flappy Bird. Or the feminist movement buried in that 3rd shuffle of Solitaire. If anything, we have MORE entertainment out there that is rather mindless and without a hidden agenda, not less.
He's probably referring to "any game that tries to have a plot." There's a lot of intersection between games and movies these days, with fpses trying to be an action film, RPGs with worlds-spanning conflicts, etc.
And what precisely is the "SJW" movement. As far as I can tell, the so called "SJW" movent may as well be called the "don't be a cunt" movement. Somehow this is being portrayed as a bad thing by some people.
The SJW movement refers to large groups of people who are outsiders wading into a conflict without knowing anything about the people involved, dealing solely with stereotypes. In this case, the SJW would assume the woman is automatically correct and all the men involved are misogynistic gamer assholes. They will throw straw-man insults and arguments at the person they have stereotyped, try to ruin reputations and careers, and basically shit on everything until the discussion area is a husk. It's an ill-informed lynch mob howling for justice.
"Swarm cyber-shaming" isn't a bad phrase to use, as Andrew Fox called it when a mob ran amuck in the SFWA. Malzberg and Resnick didn't handle this as well as they could have, but no way did they deserve the building, escalating firestorm of a reception that they got.
"Hey guys, when you're alone on an elevator with a woman you've never met before, leaning in close and inviting her to an orgy is kinda creepy. Don't do that."
Yes, and that's a fairly insulting thing to say to a stranger. It's like if I walked up to you and asked you to stop beating your wife and neglecting your daughter. It presupposes: 1) That you obviously ARE a wife beater, and 2) that you must stop that. If you show insult, the response to that only mentions point #2: "What, so you think beating your wife is okay? Are you just a complete asshole?" The incorrectness of point #1 is not questioned, nor is the insult that assuming that people in a group conform to a stereotype of a small minority.
So yeah, go into a large group of people and shout "Jesus, why are all you people such fucking assholes??" Yeah, it should come as no surprise that you get a negative reaction.
just think how well you could hack the gibson if you had full 3d representation of the file system
I tried that once. It was SGI's Fsn ("Fusion") which I installed on one of the SGI workstations in college. It was a real product, featured prominently as the computer interface controlling computers and security in Jurassic Park. What a surprise, the "cool" factor wore off quickly and you started to get irritated at the time the system took to pan around between folders when trying to select something, or the time taken to "zoom in" when you wanted to open something. It was all flash, and eventually you want the flashiness to get out of the way and just be faster and more responsive.
You're not really "giving up" anything. You don't turn on the computer to play Operating System. You do it to run applications. So Windows requires a low overhead? Well that's great, an operating system SHOULD have a low overhead because it's supposed to get out of the way, not use resources. Your computer is a zero-sum game, memory and CPU that is taken by the OS is usually unavailable to your apps, the things that are actually important (barring, of course, apps that don't multi-thread and can only use part of the CPU, etc).
I suppose we have this fantasy of rotating windows, whiz-bang effects, SFX on the window borders on the desktop.. what do you really get from that? Anything beyond saying "oh that's cool" when you see a demo on the store shelf or a flashy yet impractical interface on a TV show? I know what I got from that -- an annoyance with Gnome 3, GPU memory reserved by the f*%^ing interface, and a lot of time spent figuring out how to turn that nonsense off (thank God Gnome's extensions make that easier to do that now than it was a few years ago!).
Maybe a simpler interface is better. Maybe an interface that doesn't try to do too much visually results in a more USABLE experience. More bells and whistles are not better.
Hai does not exactly mean yes in Japanese. It _can_ mean yes, but it more often is just an acknowledgment that someone is listening to you.
So it has the various meanings that the English 'yes' does.:-) 'Yes' can mean... well, 'yes' as in the acknowledgement of correctness or truth, or it can be an agreement, but it's often used as a grunt acknowledging that you're just listening and have attention.
Just because there was "a plan" does not mean it was either a good plan or a feasible plan.
Let's admit that the space program of the 60s had a goal, and that goal was not bettering humanity, scientific exploration, or even just being able to say we had done it. The moon mission came about because we hated and feared the Russians, and the notion that they would be first to the moon sent chills down the spine. There was the real feeling that the US could "lose" space and lose the Cold War.
It would take that sort of pressure again, and that's hard to muster these days, especially since Mars is not as immediate (locationwise, threat-wise, etc) as the moon is.
in both the ray rice and this case, you have a group or individual in power to affect someone else's life looking at something on a screen, instantly finding it distasteful, and relegating the person to a professional junkyard and a life of struggle without really ANY facts about the situation, the history, etc etc
If by 'group' you mean almost the entire news-watching population of the US, that would be correct. Ray Rice was the scandal, the NFL saw the tape early on, tried to hush it up and protect him, but once the footage was leaked, there was no holding back the outrage. Ray Rice doesn't belong along with the persecuted whistle-blowers any more than Nixon's campaign workers who broke into the Watergate offices did. He was taken down because a whistle-blower made his wrongdoing public.
Maybe mother theresa didn't do that many bad things a whistleblower could tell the others?
You don't know much about the story of Mother Teresa, did you?
The obvious criticisms that wouldn't surprise would be her objection to contraception and abortion, calling abortion the ultimate evil, and that the 450,000 women raped in Bangladesh be forced to have those children.
More notable though would be her attitude that suffering is good. Suffering brings you closer to God, so it is good that the poor suffered. Of course it wasn't good to make suffering happen through evil acts, but to her it was better that the poor accepted their suffering. Because of that, her charity missions did not properly stock painkillers, as it was better for a terminally ill patient to suffer near death... nor did the nurses discriminate between curable and incurable ailments, again because suffering and death is just spiritually better for you.
There were other allegations like her coziness with Charles Keating (she accepted a lot of money he stole, and she refused to give it back), but other than her refusal to return stolen money, those allegations are hard to prove and feel he-said, she-said. Being close to communist dictators and honoring them was also just something she had to do to operate in communist countries.
As far as I can tell, there are generally two things that can be rescued from a cancelled game:
1) The game engine, if it was unique to the game. Of course if you're using someone else's engine this point doesn't apply. 2) Story lines, either the overall story line, or minor subplots. Works best if this is a part of a franchise, otherwise your mileage may vary for what can be salvaged.
Art is such a mixed bag. If you can immediately yank something to put into a game in a similar genre, great, though the longer you wait, the more the technical hurdles end up outweighing the usability of the assets, such that it's better to redesign from scratch.
Diablo 3 was a big disappointment to me on launch. But I think the game has made great strides and is pretty good now. And the new ladder season means everyone in the same ladder starts out on the same level.
I also missed my chance to try out the market when it was still usable.
You didn't miss out. The market was the biggest reason why regular D3 was such a disappointment.
The first time it was officially announced that Ghost was canceled was yesterday in the article linked to in this slashdot topic. Previously it had been on hold indefinitely with the last official statement coming in 2008. So sometime in the past six years it was cancelled without much fanfare. Of course, it had been considered vaporware for some time before the 2008 announcement.
At least with Starcraft: Ghost, they had playable demos at Blizzcon.
> WoW's real game always only really starts at level cap.
So basically all the fun a person has while leveling doesn't count ??
Way back in 2005 in the earlier days of vanilla, I was told over and over again that the "real game" begins at level 60. Keep adding more tiers of endgame (60-70, 70-80, 80-85, 85-90, and now 90-100) and you have to start compressing that 1-60 experience or it really will take ages to get to the endgame.
That being said, I'm not a fan of how the Cataclysm-redesigned leveling zones turned out. I like a bit more challenge and more exploration. I'm just happy they didn't touch Outland.
WoW has turned into one major grind-fest.
The comments here are funny. I see a bunch of people on one side who claim that any semblance of a grind has been wiped out, and other people complaining that WoW is nothing but grind.
Grind for gear while the next patch nullifies and obsoletes it
Well geez, what do you propose that would be better? If new gear isn't better than the old gear, then there's no reason to try to get the new gear. No reason to really try to progress -- in fact, progression would be way too fast, and you'd be sitting around doing nothing for 6 months because everything was easily beatable when it came out. That's the price for making different gear tiers equivalent.
That, and it would lead to trying to grind old dungeons for the best gear, and that WOULD be an exercise in frustration that would dwarf anything in the game now.
It was this way right from the very start, too. Good luck trying to beat C'Thun if your whole party is wearing items from Scholomance. Naxx40 if you've just barely beaten Molten Core? Good luck. And should shoulder pads looted from a level 40 instance really be as good as those from a level 60 instance? Almost every RPG from the last 30 years is built around the idea that dungeons closer to the end of game give you better items, and that you discard/sell/shard the previous gear that you'd gotten. I'm not sure what sort of a game we'd have if we eliminated 60+ progression, but I doubt it would have lasted more than a year. I'm not sure I really understand the mind-set where getting new gear to replace old gear is a bad thing.
and basically turning "raid finder" raids into the step-up Heroics.
Well, they're not changing that much (unless you have an established group) from the current system other than relabeling what the raids are called. Warlords's "heroic raids" will be the same difficulty as Pandaria's "normal raids," Warlords's "normal raids" will be the same difficulty as Pandaria's "flex raids." The new Mythic Raids fulfill the same difficulty level as the old Heroics. "Raid Finder" remains unchanged. So there are the same four raid tiers that there are now.
The reason for the change is that since flex scaling was added to the next raid tier as well (what used to be 'normal'), it didn't make much sense to call a raid tier "Flex Raids" anymore, as if that designation was special or unique to the tier.
Slashdot Mirror
Ok... all right, fine, you've convinced me. I go to Costco all the time, I'll pick some Feits up next time.
In my home theater, I have recessed can lights with GE "Reveal" color-graded incandescent bulbs, and I was wondering what I could use to replace those bulbs if the incandescent bulbs become harder to find. My only problem with the LED bulbs -- they are just much dimmer than either the incandescent and CFL bulbs. IE, from the link you gave, it's a "45 watt replacement." A 45 watt incandescent is just not a very bright light bulb. I hadn't seen a bulb that dim in actual use (as opposed to sitting on the store shelf) for years. 60 watt is an absolute minimum, 100 watts is better for a lamp when you actually want to see the room.
I replaced some of the CFLs in my bathroom lights with LEDs and the room is noticeably dimmer. Maybe a more directional light will work for the cans, like others in this thread have said.
I really want to like LEDs, but them being unable to put out the same lumens as incandescents or cfls makes me think they're not -quite- ready as drop-in replacements yet.
A few coworkers got some (super-expensive) bulbs from LIFX. They were a bit of a pain to set up (they are wireless controlled, so you CANNOT have them in a lamp with a metal enclosure around the base) but they are bright, can change to any color on the fly, and are controlled by smart phone software that you can set up to change automatically depending on the time of day.
Not in my experience. They withstand sudden shocks better (falling lamp, etc), but not so much sustained lower amplitude vibrations where it's a lot more hit-or-miss. I've even seen some specifically warn against installing in ceiling fan units.
Weird. In my house, the ones in the ceiling fans are the only ones that last an appreciable number of years.
However, we usually don't have the fan and the lights it houses on at the same time.
A non-profit is not a charity, and the two should not be confused.
Why the fuck does Congress get their nose in to Pro sports so much? Why is there a fucking hearing every other month about some sport related bullshit?
Because your opinion is an extreme minority and very few people agree with you?
I am of native descent. I do not find the name offensive in the slightest.
That's fine. There are some black people who call each other "nigger" too, but they'd certainly be up in arms if a white guy renamed his team the Philadelphia Niggers.
Also, I love the comment someone left on the Washington Redskins page on the brilliant "Why your team sucks" blog.
Alton wrote:
Did you know that the DC metro area, especially the garbage heaps known as Prince George's County, MD and Prince William County, VA, is home to the highest concentration of people with Native American heritage in the country!? It's true! Just listen to 106.7 The Fan any afternoon to hear their proud proclamations of "HEY WHADDUP LEVAR YOU THE MAN I JUS WANNA SAY I'M 1/32 CHEROKEE OR CHOCTAW OR SOMETHIN AND I AINT OFFENDED BY THAT NAME! IT'S JUST ALL ABOUT PRIDE, MAN, AND IF YOU CAN'T SEE THAT, THEN, UH...YOU'RE THE RACIST."
It's like the fanbase is 90% Fake Chiefs. The other 10% are dead-ender white military contractor and lawyer jackasses like the asshole that started a Redskins Pride Caucus in the Virginia legislature (during the middle of intense debate over MEDICAID they did this!).
I guess I'm struggling to see the pro-communist message in Flappy Bird. Or the feminist movement buried in that 3rd shuffle of Solitaire. If anything, we have MORE entertainment out there that is rather mindless and without a hidden agenda, not less.
He's probably referring to "any game that tries to have a plot." There's a lot of intersection between games and movies these days, with fpses trying to be an action film, RPGs with worlds-spanning conflicts, etc.
And what precisely is the "SJW" movement. As far as I can tell, the so called "SJW" movent may as well be called the "don't be a cunt" movement. Somehow this is being portrayed as a bad thing by some people.
The SJW movement refers to large groups of people who are outsiders wading into a conflict without knowing anything about the people involved, dealing solely with stereotypes. In this case, the SJW would assume the woman is automatically correct and all the men involved are misogynistic gamer assholes. They will throw straw-man insults and arguments at the person they have stereotyped, try to ruin reputations and careers, and basically shit on everything until the discussion area is a husk. It's an ill-informed lynch mob howling for justice.
"Swarm cyber-shaming" isn't a bad phrase to use, as Andrew Fox called it when a mob ran amuck in the SFWA. Malzberg and Resnick didn't handle this as well as they could have, but no way did they deserve the building, escalating firestorm of a reception that they got.
"Hey guys, when you're alone on an elevator with a woman you've never met before, leaning in close and inviting her to an orgy is kinda creepy. Don't do that."
Yes, and that's a fairly insulting thing to say to a stranger. It's like if I walked up to you and asked you to stop beating your wife and neglecting your daughter. It presupposes: 1) That you obviously ARE a wife beater, and 2) that you must stop that. If you show insult, the response to that only mentions point #2: "What, so you think beating your wife is okay? Are you just a complete asshole?" The incorrectness of point #1 is not questioned, nor is the insult that assuming that people in a group conform to a stereotype of a small minority.
So yeah, go into a large group of people and shout "Jesus, why are all you people such fucking assholes??" Yeah, it should come as no surprise that you get a negative reaction.
Talk about depressing. That last picture is the worst. The very worst.
just think how well you could hack the gibson if you had full 3d representation of the file system
I tried that once. It was SGI's Fsn ("Fusion") which I installed on one of the SGI workstations in college. It was a real product, featured prominently as the computer interface controlling computers and security in Jurassic Park. What a surprise, the "cool" factor wore off quickly and you started to get irritated at the time the system took to pan around between folders when trying to select something, or the time taken to "zoom in" when you wanted to open something. It was all flash, and eventually you want the flashiness to get out of the way and just be faster and more responsive.
You're not really "giving up" anything. You don't turn on the computer to play Operating System. You do it to run applications. So Windows requires a low overhead? Well that's great, an operating system SHOULD have a low overhead because it's supposed to get out of the way, not use resources. Your computer is a zero-sum game, memory and CPU that is taken by the OS is usually unavailable to your apps, the things that are actually important (barring, of course, apps that don't multi-thread and can only use part of the CPU, etc).
I suppose we have this fantasy of rotating windows, whiz-bang effects, SFX on the window borders on the desktop.. what do you really get from that? Anything beyond saying "oh that's cool" when you see a demo on the store shelf or a flashy yet impractical interface on a TV show? I know what I got from that -- an annoyance with Gnome 3, GPU memory reserved by the f*%^ing interface, and a lot of time spent figuring out how to turn that nonsense off (thank God Gnome's extensions make that easier to do that now than it was a few years ago!).
Maybe a simpler interface is better. Maybe an interface that doesn't try to do too much visually results in a more USABLE experience. More bells and whistles are not better.
transmogrification ? ? ?
Sure. John Calvin was a big figure in 16th century religious thought. He was Protestant, though...
Hai does not exactly mean yes in Japanese. It _can_ mean yes, but it more often is just an acknowledgment that someone is listening to you.
So it has the various meanings that the English 'yes' does. :-) 'Yes' can mean... well, 'yes' as in the acknowledgement of correctness or truth, or it can be an agreement, but it's often used as a grunt acknowledging that you're just listening and have attention.
Just because there was "a plan" does not mean it was either a good plan or a feasible plan.
Let's admit that the space program of the 60s had a goal, and that goal was not bettering humanity, scientific exploration, or even just being able to say we had done it. The moon mission came about because we hated and feared the Russians, and the notion that they would be first to the moon sent chills down the spine. There was the real feeling that the US could "lose" space and lose the Cold War.
It would take that sort of pressure again, and that's hard to muster these days, especially since Mars is not as immediate (locationwise, threat-wise, etc) as the moon is.
By participating you're part of the problem, not the solution.
The creed of the lazy slacker who never does shit.
in both the ray rice and this case, you have a group or individual in power to affect someone else's life looking at something on a screen, instantly finding it distasteful, and relegating the person to a professional junkyard and a life of struggle without really ANY facts about the situation, the history, etc etc
If by 'group' you mean almost the entire news-watching population of the US, that would be correct. Ray Rice was the scandal, the NFL saw the tape early on, tried to hush it up and protect him, but once the footage was leaked, there was no holding back the outrage. Ray Rice doesn't belong along with the persecuted whistle-blowers any more than Nixon's campaign workers who broke into the Watergate offices did. He was taken down because a whistle-blower made his wrongdoing public.
Maybe mother theresa didn't do that many bad things a whistleblower could tell the others?
You don't know much about the story of Mother Teresa, did you?
The obvious criticisms that wouldn't surprise would be her objection to contraception and abortion, calling abortion the ultimate evil, and that the 450,000 women raped in Bangladesh be forced to have those children.
More notable though would be her attitude that suffering is good. Suffering brings you closer to God, so it is good that the poor suffered. Of course it wasn't good to make suffering happen through evil acts, but to her it was better that the poor accepted their suffering. Because of that, her charity missions did not properly stock painkillers, as it was better for a terminally ill patient to suffer near death... nor did the nurses discriminate between curable and incurable ailments, again because suffering and death is just spiritually better for you.
There were other allegations like her coziness with Charles Keating (she accepted a lot of money he stole, and she refused to give it back), but other than her refusal to return stolen money, those allegations are hard to prove and feel he-said, she-said. Being close to communist dictators and honoring them was also just something she had to do to operate in communist countries.
And it's one reason why I never ever use my debit card like it was a credit card. Debit cards just don't have the protections that credit cards do.
That's like believing that all women who are feminists believe 90% of men should be phased out.
Ah yes! I remember SCUM :-)
As far as I can tell, there are generally two things that can be rescued from a cancelled game:
1) The game engine, if it was unique to the game. Of course if you're using someone else's engine this point doesn't apply.
2) Story lines, either the overall story line, or minor subplots. Works best if this is a part of a franchise, otherwise your mileage may vary for what can be salvaged.
Art is such a mixed bag. If you can immediately yank something to put into a game in a similar genre, great, though the longer you wait, the more the technical hurdles end up outweighing the usability of the assets, such that it's better to redesign from scratch.
Diablo 3 was a big disappointment to me on launch. But I think the game has made great strides and is pretty good now. And the new ladder season means everyone in the same ladder starts out on the same level.
I also missed my chance to try out the market when it was still usable.
You didn't miss out. The market was the biggest reason why regular D3 was such a disappointment.
The first time it was officially announced that Ghost was canceled was yesterday in the article linked to in this slashdot topic. Previously it had been on hold indefinitely with the last official statement coming in 2008. So sometime in the past six years it was cancelled without much fanfare. Of course, it had been considered vaporware for some time before the 2008 announcement.
At least with Starcraft: Ghost, they had playable demos at Blizzcon.
> WoW's real game always only really starts at level cap.
So basically all the fun a person has while leveling doesn't count ??
Way back in 2005 in the earlier days of vanilla, I was told over and over again that the "real game" begins at level 60. Keep adding more tiers of endgame (60-70, 70-80, 80-85, 85-90, and now 90-100) and you have to start compressing that 1-60 experience or it really will take ages to get to the endgame.
That being said, I'm not a fan of how the Cataclysm-redesigned leveling zones turned out. I like a bit more challenge and more exploration. I'm just happy they didn't touch Outland.
WoW has turned into one major grind-fest.
The comments here are funny. I see a bunch of people on one side who claim that any semblance of a grind has been wiped out, and other people complaining that WoW is nothing but grind.
Grind for gear while the next patch nullifies and obsoletes it
Well geez, what do you propose that would be better? If new gear isn't better than the old gear, then there's no reason to try to get the new gear. No reason to really try to progress -- in fact, progression would be way too fast, and you'd be sitting around doing nothing for 6 months because everything was easily beatable when it came out. That's the price for making different gear tiers equivalent.
That, and it would lead to trying to grind old dungeons for the best gear, and that WOULD be an exercise in frustration that would dwarf anything in the game now.
It was this way right from the very start, too. Good luck trying to beat C'Thun if your whole party is wearing items from Scholomance. Naxx40 if you've just barely beaten Molten Core? Good luck. And should shoulder pads looted from a level 40 instance really be as good as those from a level 60 instance? Almost every RPG from the last 30 years is built around the idea that dungeons closer to the end of game give you better items, and that you discard/sell/shard the previous gear that you'd gotten. I'm not sure what sort of a game we'd have if we eliminated 60+ progression, but I doubt it would have lasted more than a year. I'm not sure I really understand the mind-set where getting new gear to replace old gear is a bad thing.
and basically turning "raid finder" raids into the step-up Heroics.
Well, they're not changing that much (unless you have an established group) from the current system other than relabeling what the raids are called. Warlords's "heroic raids" will be the same difficulty as Pandaria's "normal raids," Warlords's "normal raids" will be the same difficulty as Pandaria's "flex raids." The new Mythic Raids fulfill the same difficulty level as the old Heroics. "Raid Finder" remains unchanged. So there are the same four raid tiers that there are now.
The reason for the change is that since flex scaling was added to the next raid tier as well (what used to be 'normal'), it didn't make much sense to call a raid tier "Flex Raids" anymore, as if that designation was special or unique to the tier.