A decently managed XP box could do the same. Hell a well managed 95/98 box could keep highish uptimes as well. The 95/98 still were not in the same league with *nix at the time but still.
I say this as a fan of *nix and someone who is no fan of MS's policies/politics but having worked with their software for...man I feel old now...too long they have done OK on the desktop as far as it goes. The idea of setting up some end user back in the day with a Slackware install vs 98? Yeah I know there were the hardcore who forced it on their friends/relatives and they "managed" to get buy. I still doubt were as happy as they would have been with a 98 install AND its faults.
The who trend of pushing smartphone/tablet UI's on to the desktop is the current problem. A bad one that is self inflicted by in large.
Welcome to them forcing a square peg into a round hole! There is no need for the "cloud computing" in the instance of a single player game. Sure they can handwave "reasons" why they did things in a way but, and this may come as a shock, companies/people are not always honest.
There is no, justifiable, technical reason for them to implement the "single player" game mode in the way that they did. Oh sure they did a lot of handwaving about how because it is really not ever a single player game that you "need" the servers that EA is hosting. But it is clearly bullshit.
And while they are being able to better copy-protect their game that is not their real intent. It is all about building micro-transactions into every game they make.
I can't see the link between my opinion and your conclusion.
As long you you didn't pay for the "retail" version (a.k.a. DVD / Blueray delivered ones), I don't see a problem. The developers has to be paid somehow, and if some people wants to pay for their games this way, no problem.
But if I pay the full retail price, I expect to be able to enjoy the game in full experience. Paying twice for the privilege of playing an already paid game is not an option for me. It shouldn't even be allowed, at first place.
As long you you didn't pay for the "retail" version (a.k.a. DVD / Blueray delivered ones), I don't see a problem. The developers has to be paid somehow, and if some people wants to pay for their games this way, no problem.
So you are against the First-sale Doctrine. Ok. That is a common thing these days from people who don't fully understand and or have a much more right wing view of copyright.
I assume you are looking to repeal that also so that books, movies, and all the other things that it covers are changed as well?
No, you kissed your privacy goodbye when you started interacting with others.
And by you mean being born.
Be it from Experian, Equifax, TransUnion, and or Innovis. From something like LexisNexis or another background check type company. Or say even your past employers who have HR files on you. There are collections of data about you out there and often it is indeed for sale.
Here is the thing. While there has been a successful effort to deregulate everything and anything, and any attempts at trying to regulate anything is met by fierce and well funded oppression, by in large the things I listed above still have some regulation tied to it. All the more so when the companies involved are looking to sell/share that information.
"Social media" information however by enlarge unregulated data that is being sold/traded/hacked. That is what most of us who know more than just, "Durrrrr your information is out there anyway so who cares what I do online," understand. And why we tend to have some serious issues that we feel need to be discussed about the way this data is being gathered and analyzed without any oversight.
iOS and Android are great, but they're starting to get long in the tooth. They ride the cutting edge, but eventually that will show it's age. Blackberry started over the beginning to build an OS for the next 10 years.
Huh? Android, their version spread issues not withstanding, has had continued innovation. With everything from "under the hood" improvements to UI updates. iOS has been doing the same but with more an eye on keeping their experience very unified and the learning curve when they do update things low.
Windows Mobile was in dire need of an update and it remains to be seen if they can leverage Win8 along with their new tablets to take some of the market away from iOS and Android. And then in dead last is BB10 which again could be a case of being too late to the party.
The thing is we don't need change for the sake of change. The tablet/smartphone UI has been pretty well fleshed out. There are tweaks here and there but overall using a tablet/smartphone with a touchscreen is in a pretty good spot. Just as the WIMP interface for a desktop is...
However some people want to try and force a round peg in a square hole by making the desktop UI something it does not need to be. There have been all sorts of reasons trotted out but none of them ring true. A good CLI and WIMP interface when you have access to a keyboard and mouse works well.
These days I know of few people that have stuck with BB while they stagnated. Their BES still does offer some utility over Exchange but will that be enough? My guess would be no but we will see.
A while ago my Blackberry was not only pretty dated but out of its contract. I still was on a contract billing plan, something I did not fully appreciate until today in fact, but I could a) get a new subsidized phone from Sprint and begin a new contract, b) continue on with my old BB, or c) leave Sprint.
Sprint's service in my area and monthly charge were both good enough such that I tried plan A for a while. However due to the fact that my F&F plan just had a BB data add on fee they told me that if I was going to get any current model smartphone that I would have to move to a data plan. And of course that change would up my monthly bill overall with no added service.
They tried to justify that increase in cost to me by saying that a more modern smartphone "used more data". Asked them to provide proof of that from my old BB to a current one and they could not. They did point to iPhones and Androids as syncing data and when I asked if that was new they would just go back to the line that newer phones do it moar!
This caused me not to do anything until my old BB finally died. At which point I was plenty pissed at Sprint and set about looking at other options. I ended up going with a pre-paid/no-contract carrier where I had to buy my phone with cash. However my bill went down by a very good amount, my overall user experience stayed the same (it actually went up but that had to do with moving to Android over a BB), and the only negative was that I lost the ability to roam.
I can't honestly see myself going back to a contracted experience at this point. To me the US cell market's business model is very bad for customers but hides that fact well.
Oh, and you might consider being less rude, in particular if you simply don't know the facts.
I asked you to cite facts. And then to explain why you think that something that has been established as a civil case should result in jail time. And you think I'm rude?
wartz actually faced a maximum sentence of about three years.
Cite your sources.
He had been offered a deal of six months in a minimum security prison by the prosecutor. Realistically, that's also about the maximum term a court would have imposed anyway.
Do it again here. And further explain why he should have had to spend day 1 in jail for the 'crime' he committed.
Part of the move to allow carry in luggage was airlines using what used to be dedicated passenger luggage space for cargo.
They saw a) space in the passenger luggage area that was not being used and b) that people liked being able to bypass having to wait for their luggage.
However now that they have that revenue stream from selling the cargo space they want the best of both worlds. Selling the cargo space and charging people for their luggage. The airline industry is not the pure good guys you are trying to make them out to be.
What I've observed is that there seems to be an uptick in the current failure rate of all drives. Both WD and Seagate have plenty of issues when you read the reviews on Newegg.
My personal theory, and I have 0 facts to back this up so take it for what you will, is that they have salvaged what they could from the fab plants that went under water. They then gave the best of their stock to the OEMs and are selling the rest as over the counter OEM/retail.
Their reasoning being that while their OEMs have contracts/constant cash flow/etc, end users who buy a drive here or there they could care less about. If a drive fails well you get to ship it back to them, on your dime, and cross your fingers that what they send you back will work any better.
My hope is that this will clear up after they burn though the stock of salvaged parts...but given that the market has allowed to become a duopoly I'm not sure what to say.
I remember running a gateway/NAT 486SX with as much RAM as I could, but even still not a lot, with a very stripped down RH 6.2 for a number of years. Barebones install then manually stripping away RPMs until just what was needed remained. The machine had dual ISA NICs and I had a 10MB switch I had scrounged up. Why? Because this was when DSL/Cable was still pretty new such that the term "router" still typically meant a thousand(s) dollar unit.
Clearly today that type of solution would be silly...at least in that application. Today I see household diskless! NAS units going for far higher than the cost of building a low powered PC. Sure they are pretty much plug and play but wow the markup.
My point, which I'll admit is a bit far afield of ditching 386 support (hey you have to draw the line at some point, I support this change), is that market forces sometimes can offer older things (software and hardware) new life. I've got some older hardware on Craigslist right now that I'd be tempted to build into a NAS unit if I could find some sort of plausible excuse for it. (I really can't thou...I've got plenty of storage so oh wells.)
That is really all I should need to say. It does not matter what an organization is doing now. If they do not implement things that safeguard things in the long term there is no telling what will happen.
Hell how many movies have been made about good ol' Company X that gets taken over by Evil Guy Y only to be saved by the Goofy but Loveable Z and his Nerdy Sidekick? How many times have we seen this played out in every fashion imaginable? Enron? Bernie Madoff? The GOP? All the moreso as we have allowed the power to be consolidated into the hands of the few will Tone at the top ring even truer.
Those running companies that are doing things less evil than say Sony or Ubisoft with their DRM are still only a change of hands away from going to someone like Ubisoft. Just like what is happening with GameSpy. And that is what you should always temper your loyalty with. Yeah it sucks that we can't have the childlike sense of wonder at seeing the world as black and white, but cest la vie.
Replying to all the posts here on this subject. I will stand corrected. Given that it was just a port to me the number seemed very high. However in light of the fact that they had to port to not only another platform but in effect a whole other style of programming I can accept the fact that there was more than just tweaks that had to be done.
That being said those that want to factor in the dev kit costs...no not buying that argument. And or licensing costs...eh I suppose it is possible that they were not smart enough to buy outright whatever assets (artwork/sound) their games would be using. However that strikes me as unlikely.
Still again I will mea culpa this one. It just struck me as such a glib round figure for a port.
There is no way I believe the £10,000 dev costs number. Not a chance in hell. And right there with that lie whatever sympathy I might have had went away. It is way too easy a number to make up and then if challenged on it make up even more lies, or half-truths at best, to cover the lie.
Given the immediate backpeddle once MS called and likely paid him off, and I wonder what that actual number was, the story is clearly not about the dev here.
Rather, as most of us who are/were not fanboys/paid shills observed, that MS has a very tough lift with this and it will be interesting to see how much capital they dump into it. Ah la XBox fame.
So, just under 10 years ago, before HD got standardized and DVDs were still the best you could get for personal video content I got a Netflix account. I abused that sucker pretty hard, and when they eventually throttled me I quit, and in doing so ended up with a binder of decrypted DVDs. Now those DVDs, while decrypted, are also of a lower quality than many of the originals since most of the original DVDs were dual layer and I was burning them to a single layer DVD-R.
That being said I had been moving around the HTPC concept for a while, used a WD TV Live system, but now I have a full fledged HTPC that I am putting my movie library on. Overall I have been very pleased with the results save for the fact of Blu-Ray integration. Given that my HTPC is hooked up to a huge 1080p TV via HDMI one would think that a Windows 7 machine should be able to easily move to the next level of tech...but no. We are in a war right now with content manufactors, hardware manufacturers, the software, and of course the DRM that is quite frankly a mess.
And I'm going to say right now I have no moral qualms about abusing whatever media I want to consume. You can call me a pirate (factually correct only in a digital context), call me a thief (factually wrong), call me whatever. Fuck you and the DRM you rode in on. The day the content manufacturers allow Fair Use and reasonable copyright lengths I will cede the high moral ground I stand on. Until then, bite me.
So back to the point. I am in the process of ripping that library to the HTPC, via Handbrake, and are using an old Sony (lols) DVD-ROM. It is actually rather good at doing its job and once I am done I plan on putting a real drive in there such that the box will be able to burn stuff as well. But for now why would I want to use up the mechanicals, and from taking apart many many many CD/DVD drives (and I have no great hope that Blu-Ray drives will be of any better quality unless I spend a grand+ for them), the gears are going to be plastic. The belts are going to be high quality rubber at best. I'm gonna burn up this old drive ripping my stuff then put in the burner when it is done.
And another aside, omg Yamaha, I had a Yamaha front loading (no tray) drive at one point. Clearly at one point a group of their engineers set out to make some kick ass CD-ROM drives and they did so with a gusto. Best drive I have had to date.
Moving parts suck. I will never forget what Google said about hard drives, they suck. When you look at them across a huge sample size...wow. But I always temper myself by thinking about ME's when I talk about rate of failure. When I run into a ME and start talking about HD failure rates they give me a rather patronizing look as if that valve they just bought for $1231232967.99 should not fail within 30s of being put under pressure. Brings me back to reality.
And finally as such we have to then look to what drives/parts are going to be best to handle a job that the OP wants? Further what is the CBA of what drives will do such a job? Is it best to get an industrial level drive that has metal gears, belts that have nylon in them, and so on? Or is it better to get 5x consumer grade drives? I've already done enough damage with this post and this thread is likely going to head off the front page so I'll leave those questions to another day.
Your argument, if I am understanding you correctly, is that this is the only path they can take? That the only way forward for them as a company is to push this tablet UI onto the desktop?
Because that is what I keep seeing people say but is it true? Could they have gone other ways or is forcing this UI change the ONLY way forward?
Of course, this isn't the first time we've heard complaints of a steep learning curve in Windows 8. When CNET senior editor Seth Rosenblatt reviewed the operating system last month, he noted that "the learning curve is steep and in-app navigation isn't obvious." Overall, however, he gave the operating system four stars out of five, earning it an "excellent" rating.
Normally I steer clear of the shills at C|Net. But since a good Win8/MS bashing is fun I followed the link.
That 2nd to last paragraph however did remind me that they are indeed total shills. Well played C|Net.
The only thing more disgusting is the fact Romney would have been far worse.
Romney? What about McCain and [shudder] Palin?!
We have gotten so far right in the US that what passes for the left here is a joke. My main hope is that the pendulum will swing back the other way in my lifetime.
As much as I'd love to spend every one of my 15 mod points furiously thrashing this whole thread, I think a much better justice will be done by first asking:
1. Really? Now you are going to post a review on a game that has been out for almost a month? Nevermind that the beta was well published and visited by many who got to buy their way in. Nevermind that WoW at this point has almost more websites devoted to it than cats. Nevermind that the game itself is PTR testing the next major patch. Now, now/. is going to grace us with a thread about WoW? Really?
Now that I've gotten that out of the way I'll give a few more points in no order.
2. IMO this is the 1st major version of WoW that Greg Street (AKA Ghostcrawler) has had total control over the game. And it shows. Daily quests are now pretty much mandatory, much to the PR arm's (which includes cleverly the use of their fans), denial. Of course even Greg is not stupid, he does have a PhD in Biology (and that makes him a Lead Dev in an MMO...why?), so he (or someone smarter than him) eventually lifted the Justice Points rep grind on gear.
And actually in Breaking News!, one of the major topics on the General Forums as of last night was Blizzard actually willing to talk about how people are not happy with the rep grind in the game. Seems that after this game has been around for so many years and that people who have fleets of toons at this point are not happy that it is going to take them a metric fuckton of time to get each one of those toons all the rep they need is not popular!
They are still playing this one as Risk Management 101 in which I will refer to you to Mass Effect 3 if you want a primer on how that works.
3. The gameplay is actually not bad. As are the visuals and, if you again have a metric fuckton of time to spend, you can actually get some really cool stuff. There are also some pretty neat additions to the game with turn based pet battles, farming, and some actually neat play mechanics for all the classes.
4. However there are still bugs and while that is to be expected modern MMOs have reduced their downtime/hotfix window much more than Blizzard has. Now I know that dealing with legacy code is annoying at best. But given the cash flow that Blizzard has enjoyed over the years, that we still have to deal with Tuesday outages, sometimes that last 8+ hours, is unacceptable.
They have said before that 'hiring more programmers won't just fix things'. Well, not really Blizzard. There are whole sets of methodology of how you program code to make it bug free. And with the amount of revenue you have you should make it happen. Your business should not be all about getting your execs their next new BMW.
5. Overall Mists is OK. Again another linear quest path to the level cap, however pretty. I've got an 85 (some 90 now) of every class save a Monk and the gameplay is actually good on some of them. On others needs work but that is something that I've learned to accept since vanilla. However the grind, and this is coming from someone who did the TBC grind, is unacceptable.
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Who is telling you that you NEED to upgrade your phone every year outside of marketing droids?
Unless you are hearing voices in your head via some Jedi mind trick suggestion. "This IS the droid you are looking for."
A decently managed XP box could do the same. Hell a well managed 95/98 box could keep highish uptimes as well. The 95/98 still were not in the same league with *nix at the time but still.
I say this as a fan of *nix and someone who is no fan of MS's policies/politics but having worked with their software for...man I feel old now...too long they have done OK on the desktop as far as it goes. The idea of setting up some end user back in the day with a Slackware install vs 98? Yeah I know there were the hardcore who forced it on their friends/relatives and they "managed" to get buy. I still doubt were as happy as they would have been with a 98 install AND its faults.
The who trend of pushing smartphone/tablet UI's on to the desktop is the current problem. A bad one that is self inflicted by in large.
Welcome to them forcing a square peg into a round hole! There is no need for the "cloud computing" in the instance of a single player game. Sure they can handwave "reasons" why they did things in a way but, and this may come as a shock, companies/people are not always honest.
There is no "truth" in your post. There is clearly your opinion but it is a poorly informed one at best.
There is no, justifiable, technical reason for them to implement the "single player" game mode in the way that they did. Oh sure they did a lot of handwaving about how because it is really not ever a single player game that you "need" the servers that EA is hosting. But it is clearly bullshit.
And while they are being able to better copy-protect their game that is not their real intent. It is all about building micro-transactions into every game they make.
I can't see the link between my opinion and your conclusion.
As long you you didn't pay for the "retail" version (a.k.a. DVD / Blueray delivered ones), I don't see a problem. The developers has to be paid somehow, and if some people wants to pay for their games this way, no problem.
But if I pay the full retail price, I expect to be able to enjoy the game in full experience. Paying twice for the privilege of playing an already paid game is not an option for me. It shouldn't even be allowed, at first place.
Note the bold there.
As long you you didn't pay for the "retail" version (a.k.a. DVD / Blueray delivered ones), I don't see a problem. The developers has to be paid somehow, and if some people wants to pay for their games this way, no problem.
So you are against the First-sale Doctrine. Ok. That is a common thing these days from people who don't fully understand and or have a much more right wing view of copyright.
I assume you are looking to repeal that also so that books, movies, and all the other things that it covers are changed as well?
No, you kissed your privacy goodbye when you started interacting with others.
And by you mean being born.
Be it from Experian, Equifax, TransUnion, and or Innovis. From something like LexisNexis or another background check type company. Or say even your past employers who have HR files on you. There are collections of data about you out there and often it is indeed for sale.
Here is the thing. While there has been a successful effort to deregulate everything and anything, and any attempts at trying to regulate anything is met by fierce and well funded oppression, by in large the things I listed above still have some regulation tied to it. All the more so when the companies involved are looking to sell/share that information.
"Social media" information however by enlarge unregulated data that is being sold/traded/hacked. That is what most of us who know more than just, "Durrrrr your information is out there anyway so who cares what I do online," understand. And why we tend to have some serious issues that we feel need to be discussed about the way this data is being gathered and analyzed without any oversight.
iOS and Android are great, but they're starting to get long in the tooth. They ride the cutting edge, but eventually that will show it's age. Blackberry started over the beginning to build an OS for the next 10 years.
Huh? Android, their version spread issues not withstanding, has had continued innovation. With everything from "under the hood" improvements to UI updates. iOS has been doing the same but with more an eye on keeping their experience very unified and the learning curve when they do update things low.
Windows Mobile was in dire need of an update and it remains to be seen if they can leverage Win8 along with their new tablets to take some of the market away from iOS and Android. And then in dead last is BB10 which again could be a case of being too late to the party.
The thing is we don't need change for the sake of change. The tablet/smartphone UI has been pretty well fleshed out. There are tweaks here and there but overall using a tablet/smartphone with a touchscreen is in a pretty good spot. Just as the WIMP interface for a desktop is...
However some people want to try and force a round peg in a square hole by making the desktop UI something it does not need to be. There have been all sorts of reasons trotted out but none of them ring true. A good CLI and WIMP interface when you have access to a keyboard and mouse works well.
These days I know of few people that have stuck with BB while they stagnated. Their BES still does offer some utility over Exchange but will that be enough? My guess would be no but we will see.
A while ago my Blackberry was not only pretty dated but out of its contract. I still was on a contract billing plan, something I did not fully appreciate until today in fact, but I could a) get a new subsidized phone from Sprint and begin a new contract, b) continue on with my old BB, or c) leave Sprint.
Sprint's service in my area and monthly charge were both good enough such that I tried plan A for a while. However due to the fact that my F&F plan just had a BB data add on fee they told me that if I was going to get any current model smartphone that I would have to move to a data plan. And of course that change would up my monthly bill overall with no added service.
They tried to justify that increase in cost to me by saying that a more modern smartphone "used more data". Asked them to provide proof of that from my old BB to a current one and they could not. They did point to iPhones and Androids as syncing data and when I asked if that was new they would just go back to the line that newer phones do it moar!
This caused me not to do anything until my old BB finally died. At which point I was plenty pissed at Sprint and set about looking at other options. I ended up going with a pre-paid/no-contract carrier where I had to buy my phone with cash. However my bill went down by a very good amount, my overall user experience stayed the same (it actually went up but that had to do with moving to Android over a BB), and the only negative was that I lost the ability to roam.
I can't honestly see myself going back to a contracted experience at this point. To me the US cell market's business model is very bad for customers but hides that fact well.
What?
Oh, and you might consider being less rude, in particular if you simply don't know the facts.
I asked you to cite facts. And then to explain why you think that something that has been established as a civil case should result in jail time. And you think I'm rude?
Really?
wartz actually faced a maximum sentence of about three years.
Cite your sources.
He had been offered a deal of six months in a minimum security prison by the prosecutor. Realistically, that's also about the maximum term a court would have imposed anyway.
Do it again here. And further explain why he should have had to spend day 1 in jail for the 'crime' he committed.
Part of the move to allow carry in luggage was airlines using what used to be dedicated passenger luggage space for cargo.
They saw a) space in the passenger luggage area that was not being used and b) that people liked being able to bypass having to wait for their luggage.
However now that they have that revenue stream from selling the cargo space they want the best of both worlds. Selling the cargo space and charging people for their luggage. The airline industry is not the pure good guys you are trying to make them out to be.
What I've observed is that there seems to be an uptick in the current failure rate of all drives. Both WD and Seagate have plenty of issues when you read the reviews on Newegg.
My personal theory, and I have 0 facts to back this up so take it for what you will, is that they have salvaged what they could from the fab plants that went under water. They then gave the best of their stock to the OEMs and are selling the rest as over the counter OEM/retail.
Their reasoning being that while their OEMs have contracts/constant cash flow/etc, end users who buy a drive here or there they could care less about. If a drive fails well you get to ship it back to them, on your dime, and cross your fingers that what they send you back will work any better.
My hope is that this will clear up after they burn though the stock of salvaged parts...but given that the market has allowed to become a duopoly I'm not sure what to say.
I remember running a gateway/NAT 486SX with as much RAM as I could, but even still not a lot, with a very stripped down RH 6.2 for a number of years. Barebones install then manually stripping away RPMs until just what was needed remained. The machine had dual ISA NICs and I had a 10MB switch I had scrounged up. Why? Because this was when DSL/Cable was still pretty new such that the term "router" still typically meant a thousand(s) dollar unit.
Clearly today that type of solution would be silly...at least in that application. Today I see household diskless! NAS units going for far higher than the cost of building a low powered PC. Sure they are pretty much plug and play but wow the markup.
My point, which I'll admit is a bit far afield of ditching 386 support (hey you have to draw the line at some point, I support this change), is that market forces sometimes can offer older things (software and hardware) new life. I've got some older hardware on Craigslist right now that I'd be tempted to build into a NAS unit if I could find some sort of plausible excuse for it. (I really can't thou...I've got plenty of storage so oh wells.)
Tone at the top.
That is really all I should need to say. It does not matter what an organization is doing now. If they do not implement things that safeguard things in the long term there is no telling what will happen.
Hell how many movies have been made about good ol' Company X that gets taken over by Evil Guy Y only to be saved by the Goofy but Loveable Z and his Nerdy Sidekick? How many times have we seen this played out in every fashion imaginable? Enron? Bernie Madoff? The GOP? All the moreso as we have allowed the power to be consolidated into the hands of the few will Tone at the top ring even truer.
Those running companies that are doing things less evil than say Sony or Ubisoft with their DRM are still only a change of hands away from going to someone like Ubisoft. Just like what is happening with GameSpy. And that is what you should always temper your loyalty with. Yeah it sucks that we can't have the childlike sense of wonder at seeing the world as black and white, but cest la vie.
Replying to all the posts here on this subject. I will stand corrected. Given that it was just a port to me the number seemed very high. However in light of the fact that they had to port to not only another platform but in effect a whole other style of programming I can accept the fact that there was more than just tweaks that had to be done.
That being said those that want to factor in the dev kit costs...no not buying that argument. And or licensing costs...eh I suppose it is possible that they were not smart enough to buy outright whatever assets (artwork/sound) their games would be using. However that strikes me as unlikely.
Still again I will mea culpa this one. It just struck me as such a glib round figure for a port.
There is no way I believe the £10,000 dev costs number. Not a chance in hell. And right there with that lie whatever sympathy I might have had went away. It is way too easy a number to make up and then if challenged on it make up even more lies, or half-truths at best, to cover the lie.
Given the immediate backpeddle once MS called and likely paid him off, and I wonder what that actual number was, the story is clearly not about the dev here.
Rather, as most of us who are/were not fanboys/paid shills observed, that MS has a very tough lift with this and it will be interesting to see how much capital they dump into it. Ah la XBox fame.
1. 7 Digit UID, check.
2. Bashing non-conservative talking points, check.
3. Talking about the stock market as if it is not a rigged game for the rich, check.
Why is this post not at -1?
So, just under 10 years ago, before HD got standardized and DVDs were still the best you could get for personal video content I got a Netflix account. I abused that sucker pretty hard, and when they eventually throttled me I quit, and in doing so ended up with a binder of decrypted DVDs. Now those DVDs, while decrypted, are also of a lower quality than many of the originals since most of the original DVDs were dual layer and I was burning them to a single layer DVD-R.
That being said I had been moving around the HTPC concept for a while, used a WD TV Live system, but now I have a full fledged HTPC that I am putting my movie library on. Overall I have been very pleased with the results save for the fact of Blu-Ray integration. Given that my HTPC is hooked up to a huge 1080p TV via HDMI one would think that a Windows 7 machine should be able to easily move to the next level of tech...but no. We are in a war right now with content manufactors, hardware manufacturers, the software, and of course the DRM that is quite frankly a mess.
And I'm going to say right now I have no moral qualms about abusing whatever media I want to consume. You can call me a pirate (factually correct only in a digital context), call me a thief (factually wrong), call me whatever. Fuck you and the DRM you rode in on. The day the content manufacturers allow Fair Use and reasonable copyright lengths I will cede the high moral ground I stand on. Until then, bite me.
So back to the point. I am in the process of ripping that library to the HTPC, via Handbrake, and are using an old Sony (lols) DVD-ROM. It is actually rather good at doing its job and once I am done I plan on putting a real drive in there such that the box will be able to burn stuff as well. But for now why would I want to use up the mechanicals, and from taking apart many many many CD/DVD drives (and I have no great hope that Blu-Ray drives will be of any better quality unless I spend a grand+ for them), the gears are going to be plastic. The belts are going to be high quality rubber at best. I'm gonna burn up this old drive ripping my stuff then put in the burner when it is done.
And another aside, omg Yamaha, I had a Yamaha front loading (no tray) drive at one point. Clearly at one point a group of their engineers set out to make some kick ass CD-ROM drives and they did so with a gusto. Best drive I have had to date.
Moving parts suck. I will never forget what Google said about hard drives, they suck. When you look at them across a huge sample size...wow. But I always temper myself by thinking about ME's when I talk about rate of failure. When I run into a ME and start talking about HD failure rates they give me a rather patronizing look as if that valve they just bought for $1231232967.99 should not fail within 30s of being put under pressure. Brings me back to reality.
And finally as such we have to then look to what drives/parts are going to be best to handle a job that the OP wants? Further what is the CBA of what drives will do such a job? Is it best to get an industrial level drive that has metal gears, belts that have nylon in them, and so on? Or is it better to get 5x consumer grade drives? I've already done enough damage with this post and this thread is likely going to head off the front page so I'll leave those questions to another day.
Your argument, if I am understanding you correctly, is that this is the only path they can take? That the only way forward for them as a company is to push this tablet UI onto the desktop?
Because that is what I keep seeing people say but is it true? Could they have gone other ways or is forcing this UI change the ONLY way forward?
Of course, this isn't the first time we've heard complaints of a steep learning curve in Windows 8. When CNET senior editor Seth Rosenblatt reviewed the operating system last month, he noted that "the learning curve is steep and in-app navigation isn't obvious." Overall, however, he gave the operating system four stars out of five, earning it an "excellent" rating.
Normally I steer clear of the shills at C|Net. But since a good Win8/MS bashing is fun I followed the link.
That 2nd to last paragraph however did remind me that they are indeed total shills. Well played C|Net.
The only thing more disgusting is the fact Romney would have been far worse.
Romney? What about McCain and [shudder] Palin?!
We have gotten so far right in the US that what passes for the left here is a joke. My main hope is that the pendulum will swing back the other way in my lifetime.
As much as I'd love to spend every one of my 15 mod points furiously thrashing this whole thread, I think a much better justice will be done by first asking:
1. Really? Now you are going to post a review on a game that has been out for almost a month? Nevermind that the beta was well published and visited by many who got to buy their way in. Nevermind that WoW at this point has almost more websites devoted to it than cats. Nevermind that the game itself is PTR testing the next major patch. Now, now /. is going to grace us with a thread about WoW? Really?
Now that I've gotten that out of the way I'll give a few more points in no order.
2. IMO this is the 1st major version of WoW that Greg Street (AKA Ghostcrawler) has had total control over the game. And it shows. Daily quests are now pretty much mandatory, much to the PR arm's (which includes cleverly the use of their fans), denial. Of course even Greg is not stupid, he does have a PhD in Biology (and that makes him a Lead Dev in an MMO...why?), so he (or someone smarter than him) eventually lifted the Justice Points rep grind on gear.
And actually in Breaking News!, one of the major topics on the General Forums as of last night was Blizzard actually willing to talk about how people are not happy with the rep grind in the game. Seems that after this game has been around for so many years and that people who have fleets of toons at this point are not happy that it is going to take them a metric fuckton of time to get each one of those toons all the rep they need is not popular!
They are still playing this one as Risk Management 101 in which I will refer to you to Mass Effect 3 if you want a primer on how that works.
3. The gameplay is actually not bad. As are the visuals and, if you again have a metric fuckton of time to spend, you can actually get some really cool stuff. There are also some pretty neat additions to the game with turn based pet battles, farming, and some actually neat play mechanics for all the classes.
4. However there are still bugs and while that is to be expected modern MMOs have reduced their downtime/hotfix window much more than Blizzard has. Now I know that dealing with legacy code is annoying at best. But given the cash flow that Blizzard has enjoyed over the years, that we still have to deal with Tuesday outages, sometimes that last 8+ hours, is unacceptable.
They have said before that 'hiring more programmers won't just fix things'. Well, not really Blizzard. There are whole sets of methodology of how you program code to make it bug free. And with the amount of revenue you have you should make it happen. Your business should not be all about getting your execs their next new BMW.
5. Overall Mists is OK. Again another linear quest path to the level cap, however pretty. I've got an 85 (some 90 now) of every class save a Monk and the gameplay is actually good on some of them. On others needs work but that is something that I've learned to accept since vanilla. However the grind, and this is coming from someone who did the TBC grind, is unacceptable.
I think that this is a nod to the idea that BGP is still the foundation of the internet.
If the real world knew how the inet worked and that trust between actual human beings was a factor they would freak out.
So is Google trying to slowly try to tell the populace that BGP is real? I would say yes.