There's no way static electricity could create several thousand new rows in a database, the odds of bits being flipped randomly in the correct format are extremely low.
You don't have a clue about how computers and/or electronic devices actually work, do you?
The static electricity is going to hit the input device and generate odd input.
Example: You start voting your ballot, top down. Vote, vote, vote ZAP! (also generates a voter done event), vote, vote, vote ZAP! (also generates a voter done event). Poorly coded software could easily generate more than one ballot with identical entries at the top.
This is Slashdot, so I'm not going to read the article, but if it suggested anything along the lines you wrote, that's just plain braindead.
I regularly ZAP hand held devices due to static electricity. When I'm entering an automobile or exiting an automobile I regularly get ZAPped by the metal in the door. I've learned to touch my key or something else metallic lightly to the frame before getting into a car so I do not get ZAPped.
This is probably a software issue, but has absolutely nothing to do with the spreadsheet or database software itself. Nothing.
The multiple ZAP scenario is not so farfetched. I'm a pacer and I have backed away from a voting machine before to think more before casting an individual vote. There's another guy at work who paces like me too, don't know what his behavior is like in the voting booth though.
We are treating E voting like a minor IT procurement project, when we should be treating it as Democracy's Manhattan Project.
I presume the "Nixon" number refers to the 1960 election, stolen in Chicago by a handful of votes?
Right idea, wrong project. The Manhattan Project was a massively funded, mad dash for survival and let's face it, E-voting just is not that important. Ideally it would be more like the mission to the moon, which was also massively funded, but each step of the way was carefully and meticulously planned and tested before being deployed.
As a matter of fact, it's really not a problem worth spending money on solving. There are some things that are done better by hand and counting election ballots is one of them.
He obtained his first patent on his first "real" invention, an automatic vote-recording machine. However, as with many inventors first attempts, it was not well received and turned out to be unmarketable. This was not because it did not work; it worked well, it was because the market was not receptive to the invention.
The way I first read about this was more instructive, but I cannot find where the more detailed reference is. Edison was taken aside by one lawmaker in Washington who explained to him that if counting votes in Congress was too fast, they could well wind up voting for legislation that should not pass.
There is no need to rush the process. There is no need to declare elections over a month before votes are cast. There is no need to declare a winner before all voters have voted when votes are being cast. There is no NEED for E-voting. 12-24 hours to handcount paper ballots is sufficient and also enough to have the counting audited/supervised by independent parties.
In the earliest IBM PCs, no. As a matter of fact, there was some magic involved in the memory check and if all of memory was not at least scanned, a parity bit or something did not get set right and you got effectively a hardware crash.
My hardware at the time was a Sun 3 workstation on my desk and an M68k Unix workstation at home, neither of which I ever booted often enough to care how long they took to boot. The annoying forced fsck at boot was not solved until much, much later and that's part of what this article is about. You no longer need to fsck your disks all the time.
In my view, boot time must consist of the time between hitting the power switch and being able to type at a login prompt. So yes, any BIOS initialization must necessarily be counted.
I think x86 boxes still do an abbreviated memory check at BIOS initialization. And no, I do not think 1, 2 seconds of boot even for what is more properly called a monitor rather than an O/S was attainable. My GBA does not even boot that fast (s/login prompt/see game cartridge splash screen/.
The distinction between monitor and O/S is important because a monitor has much, much less to do by the time its code gets called in the bootstrap. The guy I responded to doesn't like O/Ses. Nothing wrong with that. But MS DOS cannot be considered an O/S. It solved a different problem domain and comparing it to O/Ses is comparing apples and oranges.
Another example, somebody pull out an old MS DOS 3.0 system image and boot it on a modern machine. How much, if any of the hardware usable? I don't think he likes hardware manufacturers. Nothing wrong with that actually, either.
MS-DOS 3.0 was up and running in 1-2 seconds (assuming you had a hard drive and empty config.sys and autexec.bat).
There's more to it than that and you're looking at the past with rose colored glasses. Standard at that time was for the BIOS to perform a memory check and that was annoyingly s l o o o o o o o w.
"There is some evidence that NASA et al has had astronauts have sex in space, all in the name of science, of course--so I think exoatmospheric porn has already been made."
Sources, please. I have suspicions, but it is just a guess. When I saw the list of shuttle astronauts with pictures from an internal NASA news letter in the early 1980's I circled one picture. http://space.about.com/cs/deceasedastronaut/a/judithresnik.htm
Check the stats for accidents, as a percentage of drivers on the road, the elderly have far fewer accidents than the young.
Those numbers do not mean very much. Based on actuarial statistics, there are going to be a higher percentage of drivers 20-30 than drivers 70-80, unless there has been very steep drop in birth rate.
Simple example: out of 1000 total drivers, 400 20-30 and 50 70-80, if half of the older set had accidents versus 50 of the younger had accidents, the total percentage of accidents of the older drivers compared to the total number of drivers would be half as much even though 1/2 of the older drivers had accidents and 1/8 of younger drivers.
A better statistic would be looking at the total number of accidents versus the age of the driver at fault. What percentage of accidents were caused by drivers 70-80 versus 20-30 and adjusted for the relative numbers of each. Or some computation like I made above.
The common wisdom over here is that differences in speed are more dangerous than speed itself.
Yup, but that's true anywhere.
Driving style is very much a cultural thing.... And you have to adapt to them as you encounter them.
Adding another story to the list:
Speed limits on Philippine roads, even if they are posted, mean nothing because nearly no commercial vehicle, including all passenger buses, have working speedometers.
Commercial passenger traffic varies from the surplus bus recycled from Japan that goes at high speed, to the jeepney (recycled military vehicle from WWII) that goes at medium speeds, to the tricycle (three wheeled motorcycle with side car) that goes at very low speed.
I coped by taking out my GBA and shutting out the road. Large speed differences are dangerous, it's just that it's not illegal every where (until you have an accident).
You could argue they shouldn't pass on the right, but that's not a practical expectation in th real world.
In California, that's ticket bait and if a police officer sees you and has the opportunity, he will give you one. Of course all the freeways have copious numbers of Slower Traffic Keep Right signs.
Most drivers, especially truckers, see my rate and react accordingly.
The speed limit for big trucks is different than passenger vehicles. They always have a maximum speed limit of 55 whether or not it's posted. (Unless the laws have been changed or that was just a California-only law).
imagine being able to literally smell a good or bad sample in data processing, etc.
I never wanted to be a programmer. Never. In the fields I tried first in college (Physics and Electronics) I had absolutely no intuition when it came down to dealing with harder stuff. Programming though, is different for me. I can walk into a large scale project to firefight, read a little source code to get a bit of understanding of what's going on, ask some questions and get straight to the real problem fairly quickly. I can't explain it other than the brain works differently for different people.
And speaking of smell and for all the Emacs/XEmacs haters if you have used Neutrogena shampoos, soaps, etc. since 1995+ that was my code mixing the ingredients together in the factory. I don't know if they replaced the system after 2000, but it was Y2K proof.
Disadvantages: 1) An artificial nose will never go on walks with you. 2) An artificial nose will never jump up and down and all over you when you go near him and he hasn't seen you in a few minutes. 3) An artificial nose cannot walk your children to school and find his way home on his own.
Sort of related, I have no sense of smell, at all. I was probably close on 20 years old before that fact actually sunk in.
None, at all? I have a weak sense of smell as judged by criticisms of an ex-wife, but I can still smell things if they're strong enough. The time my dog delighted himself in rolling around a field fertilized by something very close to pure crap and I carried him home[1] to get him cleaned up, I knew he stunk, but my ex-wife burned the clothes I had been wearing and I ended up bathing 3 or 4 times before she was satisfied.
I have a relatively weak sense of taste too. A real break through will be when someone can devise standardized tests like they do now with vision to determine the strength or weakness of other senses.
[1] He loved and protected the kids. Things are different in provincial Mindanao and a four-legged body guard that I had trained was most convenient.
In an out-of-memory situation, there is very little that an app can do to shut down gracefully, unless the application is essentially trivial.
In which case it doesn't matter and probably does not do much to alleviate OOM. It is decidedly "non-trivial" to decide which process(es) should be shut down to do minimal damage to the system.
Now, if we just had a computer like Multivac, we could ask it to design an optimum OOM algorithm... (and hope to get the answer before Asimov's Multivac came up with one).
Is there any kernel out there that gets all of this right? I don't know. But at least those I know about can be tweaked to do pretty well.
You have answered your own question. The answer is load specific. It's a hard problem.
I'll admit to one of the meanest things I did to a visiting speaker. There was a company seminar that invited folks from AT & T to speak to interested employees regarding the internals of Unix System V/R3, particularly with respect to the implementation of STREAMS and virtual memory. I asked him point blank at an inconvenient moment if he was saying that Unix no longer crashed when going OOM and got a "deer in the headlights" look back.
I still feel bad about that.
It's a hard problem and the optimum solution appears to be, as you wrote, give the admin the flexibility to tune the system.
With a 750GB [newegg.com] hard drive selling under $100, what has changed?
The relative speeds of disks and memory have changed.
The economics have changed too. Does anyone else remember the comment, I think in/usr/include/sys/vm.h that defined memory pressure parameters and related them to (then) current core and disk prices on a VAX? This would be around the System V/R2, 4.2 BSD, SunOS 3 and 4 days. Or better still, knows who wrote it?
You are unlikely to be able to see all of your RAM unless you have PAE (CONFIG_HIGHMEM64G) enabled. Any memory mapped above 4G will be invisible otherwise.
Available swap will be used when there's memory pressure so that's a different issue.
This thread is already inside google, so I will post a summary and shut up.
I retract the general statement I made earlier in the thread and summarize the information here.
This a Mac Powerbook Pro purchased at Fries Electronics in San Jose in July 2007 with Mac OS X 10.4. It was booted for the first time outside the store.
It was upgraded to 10.5 with a shrink-wrapped box purchased in Manila, Philippines from an official Apple store this past July, before the hardware problems listed below manifested.
I had the show password hints option set.
I do not have a password hint on my account.
When I clicked show hint at the login screen, my password was displayed.
The machine is now out of service with a bad motherboard that is being replaced. It is possible there was some kind of hardware problem.
The system may have been booted into Safe Mode. I do not recall. One aspect of the dying mother board was that the airport was being misdetected at system boot.
This was an administrative account.
The software was purchased in the Philippines. It may or may not be the same image sold in the United States.
All music, videos, and most games sold in the Philippines are counterfeit, pirated or both. I have no idea how much of shrink wrapped software for sale is counterfeit.
I cannot reproduce the issue at the moment because my wife's Macbook is 7000 miles away and mine is in the shop for repairs.
An Apple person with a Macbook and a spare partition is welcome to call me at the office in order to borrow the Philippine 10.5 DVD long enough to install it on the empty partition and duplicate the same steps described above.
I like Macs. I'm not a fanboy, but it's Unix inside and my wife loves her Mac. I would love to be proved wrong, or demonstrate to someone that bad Apple system software is being sold in the Philippines.
I will shut up until I get my Powerbook back and have had a chance to redo the steps myself.
I absolutely HATE asking someone who no doubt has better things to do with his time to walk me through an insanely boring instance...
True, so do I. There're a few questlines that are required though. I can't think of one offhand in the 1-60 range.
After getting repeatedly pwned in the high level instances, it's nice to hit a low level instance, pull massive aggro, and have the baddies fail to hurt you at all.
Heh.
Ogri'La rep (I love the Bomb them Again! and nether ray wrangling dailies), Netherwing rep and the Fel Reaver (just because they've killed me so many times) will still be worth doing after the expansion.
I don't think the low levels are that deserted now. There appear to be a lot of people doing the same thing I am - frantically leveling alts before the expansion comes out (at least on a PvE server). My wife surprised me the other day when she managed to get into a group doing Black Fathom Depths. I was going to run her through on one of my level 70s, but she didn't need the help.
I'm sooo looking forward to this expansion. I'm with the same guild I was in when BC came out, but THIS time I get to level the new content with everyone else.
I can't frankly imagine what it must be like in the 1-60 right now, even with the massive boost to gained XP. Just skip the instances and the group quests, because there is just no point.
They nerfed the hardest group quests. I did the elite Murloc quest both before and after the great nerfing and as much as I hate Murlocs, it was kind of sad doing them non-elite.
There's little point in doing the instances other than for rep. But if you must, it's easy enough to find a bored fellow guildie to run you through.
In the new expansion (Wrath of the Lich King) they'll make travel to the new area easy from a major city. Apparently a side-effect of this will also make it easier for low-level characters to get from continent to continent.
The easiest way to get around is to set your hearthstone to Shattrath, even for level 1 characters. Get a friendly lock in your guild to port you there, or buy a port for the first trip.
It's got instant portals to all capital cities and the one hour cooldown does not really matter. How much easier can they make it?
There's probably some real cap on how much money or xp it is possible to earn in an hour. Say the best possible critter out there drops 10g a kill...and you can kill one a minute...so that gives you roughly 60g (or xp, or whatever) in an hour. So this means that you could theoretically earn 1440g in one day.
I don't think so. XP gain from a kill is graded solely on level difference between you and the mob. No soloable mob drops anywhere near 10g per kill.
Throughout the time I've been playing (I started a few weeks before BC) Blizzard has made it successively easier to earn money. The Quel'Danas patch added a bunch of extremely profitable daily quests. Daily quests are by far the quickest way to earn gold and raising the limit to 25 was almost overkill.
Your number is somewhat close though. I figure with an appropriate number of level 70 characters, doing the max 25 daily quests each day, 4 hours, 300g, one could earn 1800g doing dailies in a 24 hour run. The actual number would be higher due to additional drops.
That's four months, at $15 a month, or $60 income for Blizzard. With MMOGlider theoretically cutting that time in half, Blizzard is out $30.
Ignoring completely the amount of money Blizzard has to spend fielding complaints from legitimate players over bots...
That a computer can play the game better than a human is a good sign of a bad game. That people actually want a computer to play for them is a sign of a really badly designed game.
And that justifies doing that against people who just want to play the game?
Lots of folks here do not like WoW. Fine. Do not play it. For those of us who do play and enjoy WoW, is it too much to ask to be left alone to play a fair game?
Slashdot Mirror
"Solar flares"... nah,
The bit density and capacity of modern computers has gone up so much that that's not so farfetched any more.
There's no way static electricity could create several thousand new rows in a database, the odds of bits being flipped randomly in the correct format are extremely low.
You don't have a clue about how computers and/or electronic devices actually work, do you?
The static electricity is going to hit the input device and generate odd input.
Example: You start voting your ballot, top down. Vote, vote, vote ZAP! (also generates a voter done event), vote, vote, vote ZAP! (also generates a voter done event). Poorly coded software could easily generate more than one ballot with identical entries at the top.
This is Slashdot, so I'm not going to read the article, but if it suggested anything along the lines you wrote, that's just plain braindead.
I regularly ZAP hand held devices due to static electricity. When I'm entering an automobile or exiting an automobile I regularly get ZAPped by the metal in the door. I've learned to touch my key or something else metallic lightly to the frame before getting into a car so I do not get ZAPped.
This is probably a software issue, but has absolutely nothing to do with the spreadsheet or database software itself. Nothing.
The multiple ZAP scenario is not so farfetched. I'm a pacer and I have backed away from a voting machine before to think more before casting an individual vote. There's another guy at work who paces like me too, don't know what his behavior is like in the voting booth though.
We are treating E voting like a minor IT procurement project, when we should be treating it as Democracy's Manhattan Project.
I presume the "Nixon" number refers to the 1960 election, stolen in Chicago by a handful of votes?
Right idea, wrong project. The Manhattan Project was a massively funded, mad dash for survival and let's face it, E-voting just is not that important. Ideally it would be more like the mission to the moon, which was also massively funded, but each step of the way was carefully and meticulously planned and tested before being deployed.
As a matter of fact, it's really not a problem worth spending money on solving. There are some things that are done better by hand and counting election ballots is one of them.
Thomas Edison's first invention was an automatic vote recorder for legislatures. It failed to generate any interest.
http://www.conservapedia.com/Thomas_Edison
He obtained his first patent on his first "real" invention, an automatic vote-recording machine. However, as with many inventors first attempts, it was not well received and turned out to be unmarketable. This was not because it did not work; it worked well, it was because the market was not receptive to the invention.
The way I first read about this was more instructive, but I cannot find where the more detailed reference is. Edison was taken aside by one lawmaker in Washington who explained to him that if counting votes in Congress was too fast, they could well wind up voting for legislation that should not pass.
There is no need to rush the process. There is no need to declare elections over a month before votes are cast. There is no need to declare a winner before all voters have voted when votes are being cast. There is no NEED for E-voting. 12-24 hours to handcount paper ballots is sufficient and also enough to have the counting audited/supervised by independent parties.
In the earliest IBM PCs, no. As a matter of fact, there was some magic involved in the memory check and if all of memory was not at least scanned, a parity bit or something did not get set right and you got effectively a hardware crash.
My hardware at the time was a Sun 3 workstation on my desk and an M68k Unix workstation at home, neither of which I ever booted often enough to care how long they took to boot. The annoying forced fsck at boot was not solved until much, much later and that's part of what this article is about. You no longer need to fsck your disks all the time.
In my view, boot time must consist of the time between hitting the power switch and being able to type at a login prompt. So yes, any BIOS initialization must necessarily be counted.
I think x86 boxes still do an abbreviated memory check at BIOS initialization. And no, I do not think 1, 2 seconds of boot even for what is more properly called a monitor rather than an O/S was attainable. My GBA does not even boot that fast (s/login prompt/see game cartridge splash screen/.
The distinction between monitor and O/S is important because a monitor has much, much less to do by the time its code gets called in the bootstrap. The guy I responded to doesn't like O/Ses. Nothing wrong with that. But MS DOS cannot be considered an O/S. It solved a different problem domain and comparing it to O/Ses is comparing apples and oranges.
Another example, somebody pull out an old MS DOS 3.0 system image and boot it on a modern machine. How much, if any of the hardware usable? I don't think he likes hardware manufacturers. Nothing wrong with that actually, either.
MS-DOS 3.0 was up and running in 1-2 seconds (assuming you had a hard drive and empty config.sys and autexec.bat).
There's more to it than that and you're looking at the past with rose colored glasses. Standard at that time was for the BIOS to perform a memory check and that was annoyingly s l o o o o o o o w.
"There is some evidence that NASA et al has had astronauts have sex in space, all in the name of science, of course--so I think exoatmospheric porn has already been made."
Sources, please. I have suspicions, but it is just a guess. When I saw the list of shuttle astronauts with pictures from an internal NASA news letter in the early 1980's I circled one picture. http://space.about.com/cs/deceasedastronaut/a/judithresnik.htm
A lifetime of playing GTA should actually make your insurance go up in price, well, at least if you were to ask Jack Thompson anyway.
Be careful about jokes like that. He needs a new career and could well end up selling car insurance.
Check the stats for accidents, as a percentage of drivers on the road, the elderly have far fewer accidents than the young.
Those numbers do not mean very much. Based on actuarial statistics, there are going to be a higher percentage of drivers 20-30 than drivers 70-80, unless there has been very steep drop in birth rate.
Simple example: out of 1000 total drivers, 400 20-30 and 50 70-80, if half of the older set had accidents versus 50 of the younger had accidents, the total percentage of accidents of the older drivers compared to the total number of drivers would be half as much even though 1/2 of the older drivers had accidents and 1/8 of younger drivers.
A better statistic would be looking at the total number of accidents versus the age of the driver at fault. What percentage of accidents were caused by drivers 70-80 versus 20-30 and adjusted for the relative numbers of each. Or some computation like I made above.
So if you thought that Allstate (the "insurers" in this article) was going to give discounts to WOW players, think again.
Dang. Well, I tend to run off the side of the path on a ground mount anyway ...
On the other hand, given all the time I've spent on flying quests, can I count that towards a pilot's license?
The common wisdom over here is that differences in speed are more dangerous than speed itself.
Yup, but that's true anywhere.
Driving style is very much a cultural thing. ... And you have to adapt to them as you encounter them.
Adding another story to the list:
Speed limits on Philippine roads, even if they are posted, mean nothing because nearly no commercial vehicle, including all passenger buses, have working speedometers.
Commercial passenger traffic varies from the surplus bus recycled from Japan that goes at high speed, to the jeepney (recycled military vehicle from WWII) that goes at medium speeds, to the tricycle (three wheeled motorcycle with side car) that goes at very low speed.
I coped by taking out my GBA and shutting out the road. Large speed differences are dangerous, it's just that it's not illegal every where (until you have an accident).
You could argue they shouldn't pass on the right, but that's not a practical expectation in th real world.
In California, that's ticket bait and if a police officer sees you and has the opportunity, he will give you one. Of course all the freeways have copious numbers of Slower Traffic Keep Right signs.
Most drivers, especially truckers, see my rate and react accordingly.
The speed limit for big trucks is different than passenger vehicles. They always have a maximum speed limit of 55 whether or not it's posted. (Unless the laws have been changed or that was just a California-only law).
imagine being able to literally smell a good or bad sample in data processing, etc.
I never wanted to be a programmer. Never. In the fields I tried first in college (Physics and Electronics) I had absolutely no intuition when it came down to dealing with harder stuff. Programming though, is different for me. I can walk into a large scale project to firefight, read a little source code to get a bit of understanding of what's going on, ask some questions and get straight to the real problem fairly quickly. I can't explain it other than the brain works differently for different people.
And speaking of smell and for all the Emacs/XEmacs haters if you have used Neutrogena shampoos, soaps, etc. since 1995+ that was my code mixing the ingredients together in the factory. I don't know if they replaced the system after 2000, but it was Y2K proof.
Benefits of an artificial nose over a dog ...
Disadvantages:
1) An artificial nose will never go on walks with you.
2) An artificial nose will never jump up and down and all over you when you go near him and he hasn't seen you in a few minutes.
3) An artificial nose cannot walk your children to school and find his way home on his own.
Dogs are probably more fun to play with though :).
Yup.
Sort of related, I have no sense of smell, at all. I was probably close on 20 years old before that fact actually sunk in.
None, at all? I have a weak sense of smell as judged by criticisms of an ex-wife, but I can still smell things if they're strong enough. The time my dog delighted himself in rolling around a field fertilized by something very close to pure crap and I carried him home[1] to get him cleaned up, I knew he stunk, but my ex-wife burned the clothes I had been wearing and I ended up bathing 3 or 4 times before she was satisfied.
I have a relatively weak sense of taste too. A real break through will be when someone can devise standardized tests like they do now with vision to determine the strength or weakness of other senses.
[1] He loved and protected the kids. Things are different in provincial Mindanao and a four-legged body guard that I had trained was most convenient.
In an out-of-memory situation, there is very little that an app can do to shut down gracefully, unless the application is essentially trivial.
In which case it doesn't matter and probably does not do much to alleviate OOM. It is decidedly "non-trivial" to decide which process(es) should be shut down to do minimal damage to the system.
Now, if we just had a computer like Multivac, we could ask it to design an optimum OOM algorithm ... (and hope to get the answer before Asimov's Multivac came up with one).
Is there any kernel out there that gets all of this right? I don't know. But at least those I know about can be tweaked to do pretty well.
You have answered your own question. The answer is load specific. It's a hard problem.
I'll admit to one of the meanest things I did to a visiting speaker. There was a company seminar that invited folks from AT & T to speak to interested employees regarding the internals of Unix System V/R3, particularly with respect to the implementation of STREAMS and virtual memory. I asked him point blank at an inconvenient moment if he was saying that Unix no longer crashed when going OOM and got a "deer in the headlights" look back.
I still feel bad about that.
It's a hard problem and the optimum solution appears to be, as you wrote, give the admin the flexibility to tune the system.
With a 750GB [newegg.com] hard drive selling under $100, what has changed?
The relative speeds of disks and memory have changed.
The economics have changed too. Does anyone else remember the comment, I think in /usr/include/sys/vm.h that defined memory pressure parameters and related them to (then) current core and disk prices on a VAX? This would be around the System V/R2, 4.2 BSD, SunOS 3 and 4 days. Or better still, knows who wrote it?
You are unlikely to be able to see all of your RAM unless you have PAE (CONFIG_HIGHMEM64G) enabled. Any memory mapped above 4G will be invisible otherwise.
Available swap will be used when there's memory pressure so that's a different issue.
This thread is already inside google, so I will post a summary and shut up.
I retract the general statement I made earlier in the thread and summarize the information here.
This a Mac Powerbook Pro purchased at Fries Electronics in San Jose in July 2007 with Mac OS X 10.4. It was booted for the first time outside the store.
It was upgraded to 10.5 with a shrink-wrapped box purchased in Manila, Philippines from an official Apple store this past July, before the hardware problems listed below manifested.
I had the show password hints option set.
I do not have a password hint on my account.
When I clicked show hint at the login screen, my password was displayed.
The machine is now out of service with a bad motherboard that is being replaced. It is possible there was some kind of hardware problem.
The system may have been booted into Safe Mode. I do not recall. One aspect of the dying mother board was that the airport was being misdetected at system boot.
This was an administrative account.
The software was purchased in the Philippines. It may or may not be the same image sold in the United States.
All music, videos, and most games sold in the Philippines are counterfeit, pirated or both. I have no idea how much of shrink wrapped software for sale is counterfeit.
I cannot reproduce the issue at the moment because my wife's Macbook is 7000 miles away and mine is in the shop for repairs.
An Apple person with a Macbook and a spare partition is welcome to call me at the office in order to borrow the Philippine 10.5 DVD long enough to install it on the empty partition and duplicate the same steps described above.
I like Macs. I'm not a fanboy, but it's Unix inside and my wife loves her Mac. I would love to be proved wrong, or demonstrate to someone that bad Apple system software is being sold in the Philippines.
I will shut up until I get my Powerbook back and have had a chance to redo the steps myself.
I absolutely HATE asking someone who no doubt has better things to do with his time to walk me through an insanely boring instance...
True, so do I. There're a few questlines that are required though. I can't think of one offhand in the 1-60 range.
After getting repeatedly pwned in the high level instances, it's nice to hit a low level instance, pull massive aggro, and have the baddies fail to hurt you at all.
Heh.
Ogri'La rep (I love the Bomb them Again! and nether ray wrangling dailies), Netherwing rep and the Fel Reaver (just because they've killed me so many times) will still be worth doing after the expansion.
I don't think the low levels are that deserted now. There appear to be a lot of people doing the same thing I am - frantically leveling alts before the expansion comes out (at least on a PvE server). My wife surprised me the other day when she managed to get into a group doing Black Fathom Depths. I was going to run her through on one of my level 70s, but she didn't need the help.
I'm sooo looking forward to this expansion. I'm with the same guild I was in when BC came out, but THIS time I get to level the new content with everyone else.
I can't frankly imagine what it must be like in the 1-60 right now, even with the massive boost to gained XP. Just skip the instances and the group quests, because there is just no point.
They nerfed the hardest group quests. I did the elite Murloc quest both before and after the great nerfing and as much as I hate Murlocs, it was kind of sad doing them non-elite.
There's little point in doing the instances other than for rep. But if you must, it's easy enough to find a bored fellow guildie to run you through.
In the new expansion (Wrath of the Lich King) they'll make travel to the new area easy from a major city. Apparently a side-effect of this will also make it easier for low-level characters to get from continent to continent.
The easiest way to get around is to set your hearthstone to Shattrath, even for level 1 characters. Get a friendly lock in your guild to port you there, or buy a port for the first trip.
It's got instant portals to all capital cities and the one hour cooldown does not really matter. How much easier can they make it?
Your reasoning is flawed.
There's probably some real cap on how much money or xp it is possible to earn in an hour. Say the best possible critter out there drops 10g a kill...and you can kill one a minute...so that gives you roughly 60g (or xp, or whatever) in an hour. So this means that you could theoretically earn 1440g in one day.
I don't think so. XP gain from a kill is graded solely on level difference between you and the mob. No soloable mob drops anywhere near 10g per kill.
Throughout the time I've been playing (I started a few weeks before BC) Blizzard has made it successively easier to earn money. The Quel'Danas patch added a bunch of extremely profitable daily quests. Daily quests are by far the quickest way to earn gold and raising the limit to 25 was almost overkill.
Your number is somewhat close though. I figure with an appropriate number of level 70 characters, doing the max 25 daily quests each day, 4 hours, 300g, one could earn 1800g doing dailies in a 24 hour run. The actual number would be higher due to additional drops.
That's four months, at $15 a month, or $60 income for Blizzard. With MMOGlider theoretically cutting that time in half, Blizzard is out $30.
Ignoring completely the amount of money Blizzard has to spend fielding complaints from legitimate players over bots ...
That a computer can play the game better than a human is a good sign of a bad game. That people actually want a computer to play for them is a sign of a really badly designed game.
And that justifies doing that against people who just want to play the game?
Lots of folks here do not like WoW. Fine. Do not play it. For those of us who do play and enjoy WoW, is it too much to ask to be left alone to play a fair game?