Re:Horde IS supposed to be evil ?!?!?!
on
Stereotyping the Horde
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· Score: 2, Interesting
They are still evil. just, many people want to play 'evil' for the 'thrill' and 'charisma' of it, but being good in heart deep down, and hence couldnt be able to accept playing an evil character consciously, they twist it.
Er... No.
While WoW has a superficial impression of Good vs Evil, it's really rather morally ambiguous, and is better categorized as Us vs Them. Saying that Horde is evil because of the mythological sources is inaccurate, simply because Blizzard is no longer using the mythological sources to define the racial behavior. Arguing the interpretation based on the old definition won't get you anywhere simply because it no longer applies.
With that said, I think you've nailed the reason why Blizzard made both sides morally ambiguous - it lets the players be all heroic (or villainous) on either side without restriction. The distinction is that this is something Blizzard did by design, not something that the players are attempting to superimpose on the game.
Huh. I'd always assumed it was a translation screw up. Basically mixing up Final and, for example, Ultimate. Basically words that are synonyms in some cases and not in others.
"Ultimate Fantasy" has that cheesy console RPG ring to it.
You're already dealing with a self-selecting group for the audience rating, and that's going to skew the numbers into the meaningless range, worse still since it's on the internet. Literally, the way to read that would be "Movies were rated at 69% by people who have internet access and found this site. Actual viewing of the movie is not required." I don't know if IMDB subscribes to the practice, but a number of sites even allow you to rate things that haven't been released yet - you end up with the rabid fans running the numbers up and the rabid detractors running them down.
The only way to get real numbers would be to do audience polling, and that hasn't been a widespread practice in a long time. (Key word: Widespread.)
Also, one of the elements suggested in these articles is that part of the decline this year is caused by last year's movies being crappy. In order to check/account for that, you *do* need to account for previous years. It's entirely plausible that the movies might actually be rated better this year but fewer people are seeing them due to the influence of last year's selection.
With all that said, my gut instinct is that you're generally right. Movie quality only matters to people who watch movies based on quality, which, in turn, is actually a relatively small part of the audience. There are many reasons that ticket sales are down - this is not a simple, linear problem, and anyone who claims that it's just because of crappy movies is extremely naive.
Wow, that is funny, because I was in a nearly identical situation. I went to a doctor for a small infection, and returned because it didn't heal well/respond well to treatment. He announced that I was diabetic and proceeded to test my blood sugar - both the quick test and a lab test.
Results came back normal.
Over the course of the next month (as the infection slowly got better), I saw him and/or his assistants twice a week on average. They took blood for testing every time. On a couple of occasions they had me fast, come in for testing, go have a meal, and come back for more testing.
Results still came back normal.
At the end, after the infection was completely gone and I'd been through around twenty blood tests, all with normal results, he still insisted that I had to be diabetic. I changed doctors and have never been diagnosed as diabetic since then.
As a result of that experience, I have a tendency to disregard any diagnosis that has little/no supporting evidence beyond matching a few superficial symptoms. If a doctor wants to drug me, especially if it's for the rest of my life, I expect a detailed justification of it and a marked improvement in my health from being medicated.
This may come back and bite me in the ass eventually, but I'd rather not be on medication I don't need.
For native on the server solutions, you might also want to look at the filtering in Routing & Remote Access, which is present in both W2K server and W2K3 servers without SP1. The XP/W2K3 SP1 firewall is much simpler, but SP1 isn't always an option.
However, after the broadcast flag becomes effective, Viacom may start pressuring Comcast to deploy DRM restrictions, at which point TiVo becomes the hero, and shores up market share.
TiVo has already demonstrated that they're perfectly willing to hop into bed with content providers so as to not make waves.
I'm a TiVo fan too, had my series one boxes for years now. Trusting that TiVo will do the right thing just because they're not part of a media conglomerate is a mistake.
Mistake number 1. If you smell smoke, go for the plug, not Sandra!!
Mistake 1a: If for some reason you go for software after smelling the smoke, don't compound the error by then posting dumbass questions on a tech forum.
I can just see the next "Ask Slashdot" now: "I'm on fire. Should I get a bigger fan or try out some of that fancy water-cooling?"
the people who put porn up on the net aren't trying to "trap" or "trick" anyone into looking at it.
Actually, they do. Whitehouse.com is a prime example of this, but there are others. The reasoning is something along the lines of "Get as many people to look at it as you can - some will stay (and pay!) for whatever reason."
It's not good reasoning, and you're absolutely right that it causes problems for them in the long run, but it does happen.
Adblock is an independent project and it's still somewhat buggy. Tremendously useful, yes, but it's not mozilla.org/Firefox's fault that the old version didn't work properly with the new extension manager.
Also, in case you haven't seen it yet, there's (finally) a new version of Adblock out at its mozdev home.
I'm not sure which is funnier - the troll of an original question ("I want Windows, only not") or the volley of "Keep using Windows" advice that followed.
You want to know why MS has a monopoly? You want to know why Linux isn't ready for primetime? Go back and read over the responses here. Even the most gung-ho Linux responses amounted to "This will be broken, these other things will require a lot of fiddling, some things may work, more or less, out of the box, and your children will be social outcasts because they don't use the same OS as everyone else."
Maybe our next milestone should be to make Linux kid friendly, where "kid" is NOT someone capable of recompiling and tweaking source code. A free alternative is a lot less compelling when it doesn't work as well as the paid options, and technical superiority amounts to a hill of beans when Linux is a painful experience for normal families.
Meanwhile, chalk me up on the "Keep using Windows" side. It's not exactly a case of "If it ain't broke, don't fix it," but Windows is probably less broken than Linux in this situation.
Actually, there's no such thing as "standard TiVo resolution." The onboard mpeg encoder does a variety of formats, including 720x480. The defaults even vary depending on the selected recording quality and the selected input. (The settings for both that and bitrate can be tweaked through the TiVoWeb resource editor screen.)
Still not HDTV format, but still quite a bit better than 480x480.
Slashdot Mirror
While WoW has a superficial impression of Good vs Evil, it's really rather morally ambiguous, and is better categorized as Us vs Them. Saying that Horde is evil because of the mythological sources is inaccurate, simply because Blizzard is no longer using the mythological sources to define the racial behavior. Arguing the interpretation based on the old definition won't get you anywhere simply because it no longer applies.
With that said, I think you've nailed the reason why Blizzard made both sides morally ambiguous - it lets the players be all heroic (or villainous) on either side without restriction. The distinction is that this is something Blizzard did by design, not something that the players are attempting to superimpose on the game.
Huh. I'd always assumed it was a translation screw up. Basically mixing up Final and, for example, Ultimate. Basically words that are synonyms in some cases and not in others.
"Ultimate Fantasy" has that cheesy console RPG ring to it.
You're already dealing with a self-selecting group for the audience rating, and that's going to skew the numbers into the meaningless range, worse still since it's on the internet. Literally, the way to read that would be "Movies were rated at 69% by people who have internet access and found this site. Actual viewing of the movie is not required." I don't know if IMDB subscribes to the practice, but a number of sites even allow you to rate things that haven't been released yet - you end up with the rabid fans running the numbers up and the rabid detractors running them down.
The only way to get real numbers would be to do audience polling, and that hasn't been a widespread practice in a long time. (Key word: Widespread.)
Also, one of the elements suggested in these articles is that part of the decline this year is caused by last year's movies being crappy. In order to check/account for that, you *do* need to account for previous years. It's entirely plausible that the movies might actually be rated better this year but fewer people are seeing them due to the influence of last year's selection.
With all that said, my gut instinct is that you're generally right. Movie quality only matters to people who watch movies based on quality, which, in turn, is actually a relatively small part of the audience. There are many reasons that ticket sales are down - this is not a simple, linear problem, and anyone who claims that it's just because of crappy movies is extremely naive.
MC
Wow, that is funny, because I was in a nearly identical situation. I went to a doctor for a small infection, and returned because it didn't heal well/respond well to treatment. He announced that I was diabetic and proceeded to test my blood sugar - both the quick test and a lab test.
Results came back normal.
Over the course of the next month (as the infection slowly got better), I saw him and/or his assistants twice a week on average. They took blood for testing every time. On a couple of occasions they had me fast, come in for testing, go have a meal, and come back for more testing.
Results still came back normal.
At the end, after the infection was completely gone and I'd been through around twenty blood tests, all with normal results, he still insisted that I had to be diabetic. I changed doctors and have never been diagnosed as diabetic since then.
As a result of that experience, I have a tendency to disregard any diagnosis that has little/no supporting evidence beyond matching a few superficial symptoms. If a doctor wants to drug me, especially if it's for the rest of my life, I expect a detailed justification of it and a marked improvement in my health from being medicated.
This may come back and bite me in the ass eventually, but I'd rather not be on medication I don't need.
MC
For native on the server solutions, you might also want to look at the filtering in Routing & Remote Access, which is present in both W2K server and W2K3 servers without SP1. The XP/W2K3 SP1 firewall is much simpler, but SP1 isn't always an option.
MC
TiVo has already demonstrated that they're perfectly willing to hop into bed with content providers so as to not make waves.
I'm a TiVo fan too, had my series one boxes for years now. Trusting that TiVo will do the right thing just because they're not part of a media conglomerate is a mistake.
MC
Looking at the screenshots at Digital Bits, at least Jabba doesn't look like the Golgothan any more.
Ok, ok, in all fairness, the Golgothan looks better than Jabba '97.
I, for one, welcome our new microbial overlords.
Sorry, had to be said.
I can just see the next "Ask Slashdot" now: "I'm on fire. Should I get a bigger fan or try out some of that fancy water-cooling?"
It's not good reasoning, and you're absolutely right that it causes problems for them in the long run, but it does happen.
MC
Adblock is an independent project and it's still somewhat buggy. Tremendously useful, yes, but it's not mozilla.org/Firefox's fault that the old version didn't work properly with the new extension manager.
Also, in case you haven't seen it yet, there's (finally) a new version of Adblock out at its mozdev home.
HTH.
MC
I'm not sure which is funnier - the troll of an original question ("I want Windows, only not") or the volley of "Keep using Windows" advice that followed.
You want to know why MS has a monopoly? You want to know why Linux isn't ready for primetime? Go back and read over the responses here. Even the most gung-ho Linux responses amounted to "This will be broken, these other things will require a lot of fiddling, some things may work, more or less, out of the box, and your children will be social outcasts because they don't use the same OS as everyone else."
Maybe our next milestone should be to make Linux kid friendly, where "kid" is NOT someone capable of recompiling and tweaking source code. A free alternative is a lot less compelling when it doesn't work as well as the paid options, and technical superiority amounts to a hill of beans when Linux is a painful experience for normal families.
Meanwhile, chalk me up on the "Keep using Windows" side. It's not exactly a case of "If it ain't broke, don't fix it," but Windows is probably less broken than Linux in this situation.
MC
Actually, there's no such thing as "standard TiVo resolution." The onboard mpeg encoder does a variety of formats, including 720x480. The defaults even vary depending on the selected recording quality and the selected input. (The settings for both that and bitrate can be tweaked through the TiVoWeb resource editor screen.)
Still not HDTV format, but still quite a bit better than 480x480.
MC