Thats a shame, because I think 'locks are still really valuable for summoning. More zones than not don't have a summoning stone, and many of them are big enough to be damn annoying to run into.
If nothing else you're useful to all the Night Elves and Dranaei who want to play with their human/dwarven friends.
I agree with virtually every point, though I still think the tool is better than the default global channel.
I also wish they would ease up on meeting stone summoning requirements. I realize they then run the risk of meeting stones becoming the new flightpaths, but so what? Its not like there're that many warpable locations that make it really valuable. Especially not with the 2 people on the other end requirement.
My biggest hope is that Blizz doesn't think this is it and stop working on tweaking LFG/LFM.
I disagree. I started using LFG the day it came out, and have found it to be a steadily improving resource. I dunno if its useful for endgame instances, however up through SM and Uldaman level instances its highly useful. You don't need it to be a chat channel as you're already advertising your interest in one or more instances through the tool, instead I wish it was more dynamic (clicking refresh gets annoying) and I wish you could view the queue for more than 1 instance at a time.
Very, very few of the kill for drops quests have low drop rates if you pay attention to which mobs to kill. Even Westfall stew is now quickly do-able if you pay attention to the levels of the mobs. Perhaps I've just been lucky in this (though I also run mobinfo2, so after running a quest once or twice I have good stats on drop rates and can become much more efficient).
The only one I've run across (though I've yet to play a BE) that had a really bad drop rate was the various pieces of the Warrior quest for the big 2hander at 30, and since it is a totally optional quest with real value only for PVPers (particularly twinks) its not that big a deal.
Why not? If you're so sure the trend would hold, then please find the statistics. But a naive controlling for income would obviously reverse your findings (since standard of living is so much higher in places like NYC than most of the South).
I don't think either of us has the time or inclination to back this up with real facts, however I do think assuming the standard of living is higher in NYC than most of the South is equally naive. The majority of NYC isn't rich Manhattan, its Spanish Harlem and the Bronx.
As for hating a certain class of person? Yes, I hate hypocrisy. I think it is one of the most destructive behaviors practiced by human beings. I don't hate southerners (as I've now stated several times) and am pretty well positive I've never said I did. What does hypocrisy have to do with the South? As I pointed out I believe quite a bit. I think religion is actually the larger driver, it just happens that religion is a more prominent piece of life in the average south than the average north. I don't even hate religion, though I often take exception to many tenets of many religions. I certainly don't hate religious people.
I don't think being pro-life makes someone a fundie Neither do I, which is why I made that 1 entry in a list. You and I obviously see the coloring of your blog entries by religion differently, probably because I'm not in your head hearing the bits you didn't type. Vice versa I would imagine on my "rant". I do think you're absolutely, utterly wrong on the issue but it is one I don't really feel is worth discussing.
You seem like a reasonably intelligent, rational person and it wasn't my intent to slam you personally so I apologize if it came off that way. I do think you were short sighted in your dismissal of the website originally prompting this, and I do think you're not quite seeing yourself in the same way as people might view you but then that's true for all of us. I think though that you may benefit from taking a long hard look at the people around you and see if you really want to be blindly defending them the way you have.
There're a lot of great things about the South, and southern states were my faves to deal with when I worked in air freight because I knew I'd get a friendly voice on the other end of the phone 100% of the time when I called.
Wow. So because I dislike hypocrisy and am tired of a segment of the population attempting to foist it on me I'm a bigot? Ok, fine. I do in fact hate hypocrites.
Yes, fundies come from everywhere, however they don't control politics around here (Chicago) as they do down there. There are plenty of nice people in the South, and I said I don't hate the south in general. I do think the website in question makes some very good points, and that dismissing it over nitpicking like which state has the oldest settlement is silly.
I also dislike the way we distribute funds in this country such that the TVA gets to provide virtually free electricity and my rates go up 50% overnight. I hate paying over $1 in taxes for every $1 in federal services I might receive (though I know some inequity is inevitable). I'm especially sick of politicians from the South painting us Northern folk as bleeding heart liberals who sacrifice babies on the altar of Capitalism in order to increase our Federal handouts when absolutely none of it is true.
Gee, reading your blog the judgemental, prejudiced hate was pretty obvious. And by my standards you are a fundie. You're vehemently pro-life, you bring religion into discussions of most things (from the page or two I read), etc.
As for controlling for income? Lets not go there. If you look at state level statistics the crime, divorce, teen pregnancy, etc rates are atrocious in the Carolinas, Virginia, West Virginia, Tennessee, etc. This is doubly true when paired up with the purported morals of the majority from those states. I'm also willing to bet that if you tracked by income group you'd find the same to hold true. We do, in fact, have poor people in the north ya know.
Also, judging me by 1 post on slashdot is rather amusing. I'm sure you'd be hard pressed to point out anything else of mine you'dve read or heard to back those statements up.
You seem not to be the mold I'm arguing against, but to try and claim that fuckthesouth has it all wrong is pretty out there.
Also, I seem to recall saying I don't hate the south, merely that I'm sick of the hypocrisy.
Finally, while I think it was a mistake to fight to keep the South in the union I'm also not some idiot Yankee who thinks we fought it over slaves. I think the North was wrong for economically strangling the South instead of just booting them if they were that unwanted.
I notice you chose to pick nits with the page rather than argue any of the salient points. Things like which states pay more than they receive in Federal taxes, who has the worst crime rates, etc. The South is an open, cancerous wound on the underbelly of the Union and I'm really sad a man from my own state fought so damn hard to keep you people around.
I personally don't hate the South, I'm just sick and tired of paying for them and especially sick of a small proportion of them trying to strong arm our politics back into the stone ages. Thats an issue we're obviously really likely to disagree on, given your moniker. Even more so after reading your blog.
The biggest thing I agree with that the aforementioned website (the good one, not your blog) makes mention of is the ridiculous hypocrisy of this group. All of you fundies are from down there, and espouse a fairly consistent set of 10 Commandments based morality. Except you all fuck each others wives more often, kill each other more often, steal from each other more often, and the way you treat NCAA football and basketball its hard to imagine you couldn't be accused of idolatry too.
No, you just don't understand how good laws work. Did you notice it designates a specific regulatory body to formulate, promulgate and enforce rules? This means people who actually get the environment (in this case librarians) get to define how to make this work. The law is simply stipulating an end goal. In my opinion this is exactly how legislation of this sort should work.
This bill is an acknowledgement of that fact. This bill is intended to remove libraries and schools as a way to get unrestricted internet access for kids.
Some libraries have already solved this, some haven't. The some that haven't are those people targeted for remedy by this legislation.
Nobody has asked them to make it harder to lie to pick up chicks on myspace. What has been asked of them is to make it harder for 13 year old girls to create accounts without their parents knowing. With the advent of free internet access in schools, libraries, etc it has become far more difficult for a parent to police all of the traffic their children generate on the net. I think the flat prohibition is a mistake, but I don't think this is a horrible idea. The motive really isn't government saying yes or no, its more about removing government's role of automatically saying yes and over ruling any attempt at no from the parents.
Re:For great justice...
on
Game Writing
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· Score: 5, Insightful
How shocking that the majority of anything is crap. The majority of books written are crap, as are the majority of television shows and movies. At least in my opinion. Hell, the majority of SHAKESPEARE is crap. He wrote a dozen fantastic plays, one hundred and fifty odd brilliant sonnets, and a whole heaping pile of cow shit smeared on parchment.
Also, don't knock the original Rambo. Just because the subsequent movies were over the top action flicks with little merit aside from their entertainment value does not mean that the original movie was not a solid screenplay as well as a solid film. It is easy to forget today that Rambo really broadened the action genre, allowing for a developing embrace of the anti-hero who transitions to actual hero by virtue of bucking the system. It also explored the treatment of a segment of the American population when they returned home from an unpopular conflict with personal demons that we as a society demanded they lock away.
You can dance around the semantics all you want, but the parent had validity. My company lost out on candidate B who was 99% as good as candidate A because A took so long deciding not to take the job. You can't offer it to both, because what if they accept?
Sure we found another good candidate, but things really do work better for everyone when we all treat each other like adult professionals.
The reason many of the projects that tried to dominate the people to lift them out of squalor failed for exactly that reason. It just isn't possible for a company in Canada to understand the water economics of indigenous villages in South America, and you end up with policies that make drinking the water out of a bucket in the backyard illegal unless you pay them for it. The good thing though is that they did fail.
The reason its so exciting to see philanthropy dominated by folks like Bill Gates or Mark Shuttleworth is that they're smart enough to know they don't know everything. They go out and hire the top percentage of specialists for the problem they want solved and they ruthlessly weed out the failed ideas as soon as failure is obvious.
Its not their tech savvy thats exciting, its their business savvy and the fact that it is obviously working better than what we had. Witness Warren Buffett, arguably the best investor of his generation, plowing all of his money into the Gates Foundation.
Further, witness the really fundamental change from the status quo of them stating that by a given moment in time all of their money will be gone. Recognizing that they are about solving specific problems and that when those problems are gone so should the money be.
It claims both the 3d model of her avatar plus the digital textures wrapping the model. Yeah, its total bs. The couture analogy in TFA is incredibly apt I think.
Not only no good grips, but weight distribution from hell. If you happen to be 6'4"+ you might be able to get your arms around it such that the 80% of the weight being in 20% of the depth helps but otherwise its a bitch and a half.
The differences between Amazon and WoW is intuitively obvious. Amazon is a web delivered service, and therefor is statefulness wrapped around a stateless protocol. The statelessness of HTTP allows for tons of easy solutions to maintenance for virtually every component.
The second major difference is that nobody using Amazon affects anybody else using it. With the exception of inventory updates which can be cached on virtually every item Amazon deals in due to the volumes they're handling nothing any one user on Amazon does has a direct impact on any other user. This allows for easy scale out.
Contrast that with WoW, which is predicated entirely upon the opposite. Every user can directly impact the universe of every other user. This requires a comparatively huge amount of synchronization.
I've never been terribly accepting of WoW's maintenance schedule, and I'm happy to see them making this improvement. I do however have a decent understanding of the problem and recognize its hardly trivial to solve.
I'm not too worried about the collective Prolog and Joy production shops out there. While I'm sure somebody can point to more than 1 of each, and they're probably even doing cool shit, they're just not relevant examples.
The parent's parent had a very good point in that a great many professional programmers lack the skills to elevate their game to that of developer. The world is worse off for this as well.
I'm lucky enough to work with several guys who are genuine senior developers. I'm not a coder, but I've worked with quite a few and had to support code that ranged from beautiful to amazingly awful so I have some idea of where I speak. When a coder is lead on a project I make sure to spend a lot of time in the beginning making sure they have some concept of the real world that their app will be living and the needs of that world in terms of visibility and maintainability of their app.
When a developer is lead on a project I try to hang around them as much as possible because their vision of how that app is going to work on its own as well as co-exist with the rest of our software world its really impressive and beautiful.
These folks also learn protocols, languages, etc from the specs. They don't need someone holding their hand. Nothing wrong with folks who do need it, but I'd rather have the folks who don't writing my software.
Slashdot Mirror
Thats a shame, because I think 'locks are still really valuable for summoning. More zones than not don't have a summoning stone, and many of them are big enough to be damn annoying to run into.
If nothing else you're useful to all the Night Elves and Dranaei who want to play with their human/dwarven friends.
I agree with virtually every point, though I still think the tool is better than the default global channel.
I also wish they would ease up on meeting stone summoning requirements. I realize they then run the risk of meeting stones becoming the new flightpaths, but so what? Its not like there're that many warpable locations that make it really valuable. Especially not with the 2 people on the other end requirement.
My biggest hope is that Blizz doesn't think this is it and stop working on tweaking LFG/LFM.
That would be a really nice hybrid.
I also wish there was a "looking for runthrough" that was separate from LFG.
I disagree. I started using LFG the day it came out, and have found it to be a steadily improving resource. I dunno if its useful for endgame instances, however up through SM and Uldaman level instances its highly useful. You don't need it to be a chat channel as you're already advertising your interest in one or more instances through the tool, instead I wish it was more dynamic (clicking refresh gets annoying) and I wish you could view the queue for more than 1 instance at a time.
Very, very few of the kill for drops quests have low drop rates if you pay attention to which mobs to kill. Even Westfall stew is now quickly do-able if you pay attention to the levels of the mobs. Perhaps I've just been lucky in this (though I also run mobinfo2, so after running a quest once or twice I have good stats on drop rates and can become much more efficient). The only one I've run across (though I've yet to play a BE) that had a really bad drop rate was the various pieces of the Warrior quest for the big 2hander at 30, and since it is a totally optional quest with real value only for PVPers (particularly twinks) its not that big a deal.
Why not? If you're so sure the trend would hold, then please find the statistics. But a naive controlling for income would obviously reverse your findings (since standard of living is so much higher in places like NYC than most of the South).
I don't think either of us has the time or inclination to back this up with real facts, however I do think assuming the standard of living is higher in NYC than most of the South is equally naive. The majority of NYC isn't rich Manhattan, its Spanish Harlem and the Bronx.
As for hating a certain class of person? Yes, I hate hypocrisy. I think it is one of the most destructive behaviors practiced by human beings. I don't hate southerners (as I've now stated several times) and am pretty well positive I've never said I did. What does hypocrisy have to do with the South? As I pointed out I believe quite a bit. I think religion is actually the larger driver, it just happens that religion is a more prominent piece of life in the average south than the average north. I don't even hate religion, though I often take exception to many tenets of many religions. I certainly don't hate religious people.
I don't think being pro-life makes someone a fundie
Neither do I, which is why I made that 1 entry in a list. You and I obviously see the coloring of your blog entries by religion differently, probably because I'm not in your head hearing the bits you didn't type. Vice versa I would imagine on my "rant". I do think you're absolutely, utterly wrong on the issue but it is one I don't really feel is worth discussing.
You seem like a reasonably intelligent, rational person and it wasn't my intent to slam you personally so I apologize if it came off that way. I do think you were short sighted in your dismissal of the website originally prompting this, and I do think you're not quite seeing yourself in the same way as people might view you but then that's true for all of us. I think though that you may benefit from taking a long hard look at the people around you and see if you really want to be blindly defending them the way you have.
There're a lot of great things about the South, and southern states were my faves to deal with when I worked in air freight because I knew I'd get a friendly voice on the other end of the phone 100% of the time when I called.
Wow. So because I dislike hypocrisy and am tired of a segment of the population attempting to foist it on me I'm a bigot? Ok, fine. I do in fact hate hypocrites.
Yes, fundies come from everywhere, however they don't control politics around here (Chicago) as they do down there. There are plenty of nice people in the South, and I said I don't hate the south in general. I do think the website in question makes some very good points, and that dismissing it over nitpicking like which state has the oldest settlement is silly.
I also dislike the way we distribute funds in this country such that the TVA gets to provide virtually free electricity and my rates go up 50% overnight. I hate paying over $1 in taxes for every $1 in federal services I might receive (though I know some inequity is inevitable). I'm especially sick of politicians from the South painting us Northern folk as bleeding heart liberals who sacrifice babies on the altar of Capitalism in order to increase our Federal handouts when absolutely none of it is true.
Gee, reading your blog the judgemental, prejudiced hate was pretty obvious. And by my standards you are a fundie. You're vehemently pro-life, you bring religion into discussions of most things (from the page or two I read), etc.
As for controlling for income? Lets not go there. If you look at state level statistics the crime, divorce, teen pregnancy, etc rates are atrocious in the Carolinas, Virginia, West Virginia, Tennessee, etc. This is doubly true when paired up with the purported morals of the majority from those states. I'm also willing to bet that if you tracked by income group you'd find the same to hold true. We do, in fact, have poor people in the north ya know.
Also, judging me by 1 post on slashdot is rather amusing. I'm sure you'd be hard pressed to point out anything else of mine you'dve read or heard to back those statements up.
You seem not to be the mold I'm arguing against, but to try and claim that fuckthesouth has it all wrong is pretty out there.
Also, I seem to recall saying I don't hate the south, merely that I'm sick of the hypocrisy.
Finally, while I think it was a mistake to fight to keep the South in the union I'm also not some idiot Yankee who thinks we fought it over slaves. I think the North was wrong for economically strangling the South instead of just booting them if they were that unwanted.
I notice you chose to pick nits with the page rather than argue any of the salient points. Things like which states pay more than they receive in Federal taxes, who has the worst crime rates, etc. The South is an open, cancerous wound on the underbelly of the Union and I'm really sad a man from my own state fought so damn hard to keep you people around.
I personally don't hate the South, I'm just sick and tired of paying for them and especially sick of a small proportion of them trying to strong arm our politics back into the stone ages. Thats an issue we're obviously really likely to disagree on, given your moniker. Even more so after reading your blog.
The biggest thing I agree with that the aforementioned website (the good one, not your blog) makes mention of is the ridiculous hypocrisy of this group. All of you fundies are from down there, and espouse a fairly consistent set of 10 Commandments based morality. Except you all fuck each others wives more often, kill each other more often, steal from each other more often, and the way you treat NCAA football and basketball its hard to imagine you couldn't be accused of idolatry too.
No, you just don't understand how good laws work. Did you notice it designates a specific regulatory body to formulate, promulgate and enforce rules? This means people who actually get the environment (in this case librarians) get to define how to make this work. The law is simply stipulating an end goal. In my opinion this is exactly how legislation of this sort should work.
This bill is an acknowledgement of that fact. This bill is intended to remove libraries and schools as a way to get unrestricted internet access for kids.
Some libraries have already solved this, some haven't. The some that haven't are those people targeted for remedy by this legislation.
Thats all wonderful. Do you ask children if their parents have given permission to be on myspace?
Nobody has asked them to make it harder to lie to pick up chicks on myspace. What has been asked of them is to make it harder for 13 year old girls to create accounts without their parents knowing. With the advent of free internet access in schools, libraries, etc it has become far more difficult for a parent to police all of the traffic their children generate on the net. I think the flat prohibition is a mistake, but I don't think this is a horrible idea. The motive really isn't government saying yes or no, its more about removing government's role of automatically saying yes and over ruling any attempt at no from the parents.
How shocking that the majority of anything is crap. The majority of books written are crap, as are the majority of television shows and movies. At least in my opinion. Hell, the majority of SHAKESPEARE is crap. He wrote a dozen fantastic plays, one hundred and fifty odd brilliant sonnets, and a whole heaping pile of cow shit smeared on parchment.
Also, don't knock the original Rambo. Just because the subsequent movies were over the top action flicks with little merit aside from their entertainment value does not mean that the original movie was not a solid screenplay as well as a solid film. It is easy to forget today that Rambo really broadened the action genre, allowing for a developing embrace of the anti-hero who transitions to actual hero by virtue of bucking the system. It also explored the treatment of a segment of the American population when they returned home from an unpopular conflict with personal demons that we as a society demanded they lock away.
You can dance around the semantics all you want, but the parent had validity. My company lost out on candidate B who was 99% as good as candidate A because A took so long deciding not to take the job. You can't offer it to both, because what if they accept?
Sure we found another good candidate, but things really do work better for everyone when we all treat each other like adult professionals.
The reason many of the projects that tried to dominate the people to lift them out of squalor failed for exactly that reason. It just isn't possible for a company in Canada to understand the water economics of indigenous villages in South America, and you end up with policies that make drinking the water out of a bucket in the backyard illegal unless you pay them for it. The good thing though is that they did fail.
The reason its so exciting to see philanthropy dominated by folks like Bill Gates or Mark Shuttleworth is that they're smart enough to know they don't know everything. They go out and hire the top percentage of specialists for the problem they want solved and they ruthlessly weed out the failed ideas as soon as failure is obvious.
Its not their tech savvy thats exciting, its their business savvy and the fact that it is obviously working better than what we had. Witness Warren Buffett, arguably the best investor of his generation, plowing all of his money into the Gates Foundation.
Further, witness the really fundamental change from the status quo of them stating that by a given moment in time all of their money will be gone. Recognizing that they are about solving specific problems and that when those problems are gone so should the money be.
It claims both the 3d model of her avatar plus the digital textures wrapping the model. Yeah, its total bs. The couture analogy in TFA is incredibly apt I think.
That just shows a lack of creativity. Not sure though if it'd be on his part or that of the Romans.
Too cheap to buy a $600 Vizeo 32" LCD that looks fantastic? Wow.
I'm not saying I didn't manage my 27" Trinitron. I did. I just hated every second of it, and my 26" Aquos is a dream comparatively.
Also, its now time for the obligatory reminder that this IS slashdot afterall, of course most of us are wimps.
Not only no good grips, but weight distribution from hell. If you happen to be 6'4"+ you might be able to get your arms around it such that the 80% of the weight being in 20% of the depth helps but otherwise its a bitch and a half.
The differences between Amazon and WoW is intuitively obvious. Amazon is a web delivered service, and therefor is statefulness wrapped around a stateless protocol. The statelessness of HTTP allows for tons of easy solutions to maintenance for virtually every component.
The second major difference is that nobody using Amazon affects anybody else using it. With the exception of inventory updates which can be cached on virtually every item Amazon deals in due to the volumes they're handling nothing any one user on Amazon does has a direct impact on any other user. This allows for easy scale out.
Contrast that with WoW, which is predicated entirely upon the opposite. Every user can directly impact the universe of every other user. This requires a comparatively huge amount of synchronization.
I've never been terribly accepting of WoW's maintenance schedule, and I'm happy to see them making this improvement. I do however have a decent understanding of the problem and recognize its hardly trivial to solve.
I'm not too worried about the collective Prolog and Joy production shops out there. While I'm sure somebody can point to more than 1 of each, and they're probably even doing cool shit, they're just not relevant examples.
The parent's parent had a very good point in that a great many professional programmers lack the skills to elevate their game to that of developer. The world is worse off for this as well.
I'm lucky enough to work with several guys who are genuine senior developers. I'm not a coder, but I've worked with quite a few and had to support code that ranged from beautiful to amazingly awful so I have some idea of where I speak. When a coder is lead on a project I make sure to spend a lot of time in the beginning making sure they have some concept of the real world that their app will be living and the needs of that world in terms of visibility and maintainability of their app.
When a developer is lead on a project I try to hang around them as much as possible because their vision of how that app is going to work on its own as well as co-exist with the rest of our software world its really impressive and beautiful.
These folks also learn protocols, languages, etc from the specs. They don't need someone holding their hand. Nothing wrong with folks who do need it, but I'd rather have the folks who don't writing my software.
Apparently Lamarck wasn't totally off base.
Variety is the spice of life. Or there's always cyber: http://crystaltips.typepad.com/wonderland/2006/01/ world_of_warcra.html