How does that disprove what I said? If cooperative downloading of that patch took that long whilst you and the world tried to download it just think how much longer it would have taken if you were all trying to download it directly from the same servers.
Uh, they do provide bandwidth of their own. But it's a fact that downloading the WOW beta or WOW patches via BitTorrent is a lot faster than a direct download, and no amount of bandwidth that Blizzard could establish would make a blind bit of difference to that reality.
You seem to be forgetting the huge installed user base of WOW players. Were talking about approaching 1 million (if not already past that figure) players worldwide. Can you imagine the chaos that would ensue if 1 million people were to try to directly download even a modest patch (say, 5MB) on the day it was applied?
By the way, I have no doubt that $15 a month leaves Blizzard with some profit, but I think you (and others with fixations about how much Blizzard is or isn't making from WOW) forget that a large chunk of that will go on the infrastructure (bandwidth, servers, big realtime databases, GMs, technical and other support) that's required to keep the game running.
Bottom line: patching via BitTorrent is the best solution for WOW or any other game with such a large installed user base.
Hell, the people being held there had been kept against their will under US jurisdiction for so long some of them could probably soon become US citizens.
It's disgusting that a so-called "war on terrorism/war for freedom" is being fought by the very country that is ignoring basic human rights and basic international conventions itself. The US government is on record as saying that even if prisoners (let's cut out all this "detainees" crap) held at Camp X-Ray are found not guilty of any crimes that they are brought up on in US military courts (where they have no say in their legal representation) that there is a high likelyhood that they will still won't be let free.
Saddam Hussein pulls this kind of shit and he's the devil himself. The US proudly does it in full view of the world and it's somehow OK? Talk about hypocrisy and double standards.
That's great but, in the real world, people don't use NSA-designed builds, so only testing with those will tell you how you patch/fix/whatever works with NSA-designed builds but not whether it will cause major headaches for the other 99 percent of your installed user base.
Well, it certainly existed by the time they were selling Quadras. And definitely a long time before they started selling Power Macs, if I remember correctly.
Exactly. I read the grandparent comment and the first thing I thought of was "SCSI on the desktop".
Apple pushed SCSI but, apart from in servers, it never really was more than a niche in the Wintel world. IDE (and its successors) had the lion's share of the storage market, and parallel (and then later USB) and other interfaces had the lion's share of the market for peripherals such as scanners.
SCSI in the average desktop was an Apple-only thing. (Atari and Commodore don't really count in this debate, because the number of ST and Amiga users that had SCSI storage devices was statistically insignificant compared to the market as a whole.)
yeah i saw that episode of west wing last night too smartass.
As big a fan of The West Wing as I am, I try not to limit myself to using television as my classroom. Believe it or not, some people go to university, read books, newspapers, listen to lectures, observe the world around them and draw their own conclusions.
Some of them (though, it would seem, not very many) even find time to post on Slashdot. Weird, huh?
If you disagree with what I've written then why not write a reply that outlines where exactly it's wrong?
You and your AC friend, who between you have dismissed my post as "satirical", "propaganda" and "Hindu revisonism" are quick with your criticism but not so quick with even a single word explaining where my post is factually incorrect, let alone any evidence to back it up.
Please, for my benefit if nobody else's, tell this agnostic, Kashmir referendum-supporting fool where his brief history lapses into satire, propaganda or revisionism.
With reports that illegal torrent usage may be more than a third of Internet traffic...
Sorry, but how the hell are the people who come up with the numbers able to differentiate between legal and illegal torrents?
First of all, how do you tell between traffic that's due to Linux ISOs and traffic that's due to the latest movie release? Secondly, how do you differentiate between copying of material that may be legal in one country and copying of the same material that may be illegal in another one?
I'm not saying that legal torrent usage is greater than illegal torrent usage (any more than I would say that more drivers stick to speed limits than break them) but it seems to me that there's no real way of differentiating between the two, so all those reports are arguably just speculation.
White collar jobs being shipped overseas made the recent Presidential debates, with John Kerry raising the issue as a major concern. Blue collar jobs being shipped overseas rarely have the same impact, except when it suits politicians' purposes to play the patriotism card.
India hasn't stolen the jobs, US companies have shipped them there. And US tax loopholes have helped them do it too. Believe me, if it wasn't India, they would have found somewhere else that would have taken the jobs.
But those are the joys of capitalism and the global economy. Funny thing though, when it was blue collar jobs that were being shipped elsewhere no one really gave two hoots (when was the last time you bought clothes that were 100 percent made in the US, with US-sourced materials?), but now it's white collar jobs it's suddenly some sort of travesty.
Uh, I'm guessing you have no idea about the history behind the India-Pakistan conflict over Kashmir because, if you did, you'd know it's not that simple.
When India was struggling to achieve independence, it became clear that the religious unrest would likely drive the country apart. The solution to this was partition, which divided India into two countries, India and Pakistan (literally "land of the pure"). Kashmir, which was then a kingdom, decided that it didn't like either choice, and its ruler declared Kashmiri independence for itself.
Everyone accepted Kashmir's position but shortly after independence and partition took place, Pakistan unilaterally invaded Kashmir claiming it for itself. Kashmir, with no hope of surviving by itself, and with no other help coming from elsewhere, asked India for assistance. This call for help put India in a bind, because it didn't want to provoke Pakistan unnecessarily (partition itself had been a bloody affair) and so it presented Kashmir with the only viable option: become part of the sovereign state of India.
Kashmir chose India over Pakistan, and officially became part of India. Hence, legally at least, Kashmir is Indian territory. However, Pakistan didnt (and still doesnt) accept this, and refused to withdraw its claim on the region.
Whether or not Kashmir should become independent is a very stickly question. Personally, I'd like to see it happen but, frankly, there's too much at stake - not least of all national pride - for either India or Pakistan to seriously consider it. So the status quo, with part of still Kashmir occupied by Pakistan, remains and probably will continue to do so for some considerable time. Certainly, until Pakistan readopts democracy, its unlikely to change.
By the way, while the India-Pakistan division was based on religion, it's a fact that India now has a bigger Muslim population than Pakistan. And, apart from a few religious zealots on either side, most Hindus and Muslims (and Christians, Buddhists, etc) manage to co-exist peacefully in India.
Again, you're talking about a plug-in, whereas with Opera the feature is built in (and has been for some time now).
Given that this particular thread started as a discussion about unnecessary bloat, and that Opera default has a smaller footprint than Firefox default, isn't that just more proof that Firefox isn't as efficient as it could be?
(By the way, reordering tabs has been a standard part of Opera since I can remember. So that particular function of miniT is yet another catch-up to a very old Opera feature.)
Yes, rarely. As in "not very often". Certainly not once a day like you experienced. Maybe something more like once or twice a month, and I'm talking about Opera 8.0 beta here.
And at least I'm not like some people, so blind that I claim that my browser of choice runs "without any problems, crashes, or anything". Apparently honesty counts for nothing as far as you're concerned.
So Firefox is stable for you and problem free? Well good for you. That's certainly not the experience that some people have had. Or don't you believe that Firefox is capable of being fallable?
Seriously, apart from bitching about how Opera crashed on you regularly who knows how long ago (And what version exactly was that? How long ago? A year? Two years? Have you even seen how stable it is nowadays?) what else do you have to contribute to this discussion?
You're in the minority then. I run Opera constantly and it rarely crashes on me.
On the other hand, Firefox has well known problem with memory leaks. As one person commented elsewhere in the broader discussion, getting Firefox to run for 24 hours is nigh on impossible.
Oh, and on the rare occasions that it does crash, Opera remembers the exact combination of windows and tabs that were open when it crashed so you loose nothing apart from the time it takes to restart because all the content that was there when it crashed will reappear from its cache once it's restarted. Tell me, does Firefox do that for you? No, it doesn't, does it?
Uh, what the AC was referring to is the default skin, which I'll admit isn't pretty compared to the alternatives.
However, if you think that a bad skin is the same as a poor user interface then you are very much mistaken. In fact, Opera's UI is so good that Mozilla/Firefox have borrowed most of its elements (tabbed browsing, mouse gestures, etc).
Clearly they wouldn't be copying what Opera's done if it didn't work: after all, imitation is the highest form of flattery.
Expect a round two after that particular loophole in Russian copyright law has been closed. I don't see Allofmp3.com winning after that's happened, do you?
And a brick can be used as a backscratcher but that doesn't change the fact that it's almost invariably going to be used as a building block, does it?
For 99.9 percent of users, Firefox is a web browser, Opera is a web browser, MSIE is a web browser, Safari is a web browser, etc, etc. So calling them all web browsers and comparing them to one another is a fair thing to do.
Wow. Well done for not being able to compare apples with apples.
The Opera installer that you're talking about is the one with Java, hence the "j" in its name. There are installers without Java too, you know. On the other hand, the installer for Firefox that you're talking about is without Java, so your comparison is meaningless.
Also, you're not even comparing a recent version of Opera, are you? The latest non-beta version of Opera is 7.54u2, which is a 3.6MB download for the Windows version, compared to a 4.7MB download for Firefox 1.0.1 for Windows.
Hmmm, which is bigger, 3.6MB or 4.7MB? That's a real toughie, isn't it?
Uh, compared to at least one of its rivals, Mozilla/FireFox is bloated.
Compare the feature sets of FireFox and Opera. Now compare their relative footprints when installed (or even the size of the downloads). Pound for pound, Opera is faster, lighter and does more (it even includes mail and IRC clients in it's small size).
Also, almost without exception, those features that are common to both (a great many of which were browser innovations by Opera itself) are far better implemented in Opera than they are in FireFox.
So, Opera seems to be proof that you can have your cake and eat it too. It's small, fast, powerful and bloat-free. If the guys at Opera can do it, then other people can do it too, can't they?
Uh, I'll take that bet. The average person has a lot easier time visualising double digits than they do treble digits, so I doubt that the example you use will show that people in general will have a "much easier time" with your three digit example just because one of the numbers is a multiple of 100. (By the way, when you're dealing with three digit numbers, multiples of 100 aren't that common.)
To be honest, I think you severely underestimate the number of people who can't take 2 away from 27 and get the right answer. And I think you're also forgetting that, when comparing two temperatures, people most commonly compare a temperature to freezing point than anything else. Hmmm, 27 - 0: that's a real toughie, isn't it?
Anyhow, the example you give isn't relevant here. Unless you can change the freezing and boiling points of water as they're defined in SI terms relative to absolute zero, those points are still going to be 273K and 373K respectively, which means that someone trying to working out how much above (or below) freezing it is outside is still having to deal with one relatively unwieldy three digit number (and, by unwieldy, I mean one that's not easy for most people to parse quickly, like 300).
Maybe this is the kick in the pants that NASA, ESA, JSA, and others need to ensure that they stop leaving junk up there.
Satellites and other space-borne objects need to be equipped with some means of safely deorbiting them, or else we're soon going to find that putting anything up in orbit and having it say there unharmed will be nigh on impossible.
I think you are missing the point. Anyone with the enough disposable income to afford even a basic laptop has enough money to pay $0.50 per hr themselves.
$0.50 is equivalent to about Rs. 20. That's about the cost of a 15 minute ride in an autorickshaw, which is well within the reach of anyone who's got enough money to buy a laptop. Heck, even 1 hour of broadband access in a Reliance WebWorld internet cafe will cost you Rs. 50.
Trust me, I know what I'm talking about here. I just got back from a holiday in India less than a week ago.
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How does that disprove what I said? If cooperative downloading of that patch took that long whilst you and the world tried to download it just think how much longer it would have taken if you were all trying to download it directly from the same servers.
Uh, they do provide bandwidth of their own. But it's a fact that downloading the WOW beta or WOW patches via BitTorrent is a lot faster than a direct download, and no amount of bandwidth that Blizzard could establish would make a blind bit of difference to that reality.
You seem to be forgetting the huge installed user base of WOW players. Were talking about approaching 1 million (if not already past that figure) players worldwide. Can you imagine the chaos that would ensue if 1 million people were to try to directly download even a modest patch (say, 5MB) on the day it was applied?
By the way, I have no doubt that $15 a month leaves Blizzard with some profit, but I think you (and others with fixations about how much Blizzard is or isn't making from WOW) forget that a large chunk of that will go on the infrastructure (bandwidth, servers, big realtime databases, GMs, technical and other support) that's required to keep the game running.
Bottom line: patching via BitTorrent is the best solution for WOW or any other game with such a large installed user base.
Hell, the people being held there had been kept against their will under US jurisdiction for so long some of them could probably soon become US citizens.
It's disgusting that a so-called "war on terrorism/war for freedom" is being fought by the very country that is ignoring basic human rights and basic international conventions itself. The US government is on record as saying that even if prisoners (let's cut out all this "detainees" crap) held at Camp X-Ray are found not guilty of any crimes that they are brought up on in US military courts (where they have no say in their legal representation) that there is a high likelyhood that they will still won't be let free.
Saddam Hussein pulls this kind of shit and he's the devil himself. The US proudly does it in full view of the world and it's somehow OK? Talk about hypocrisy and double standards.
That's great but, in the real world, people don't use NSA-designed builds, so only testing with those will tell you how you patch/fix/whatever works with NSA-designed builds but not whether it will cause major headaches for the other 99 percent of your installed user base.
Well, it certainly existed by the time they were selling Quadras. And definitely a long time before they started selling Power Macs, if I remember correctly.
Exactly. I read the grandparent comment and the first thing I thought of was "SCSI on the desktop".
Apple pushed SCSI but, apart from in servers, it never really was more than a niche in the Wintel world. IDE (and its successors) had the lion's share of the storage market, and parallel (and then later USB) and other interfaces had the lion's share of the market for peripherals such as scanners.
SCSI in the average desktop was an Apple-only thing. (Atari and Commodore don't really count in this debate, because the number of ST and Amiga users that had SCSI storage devices was statistically insignificant compared to the market as a whole.)
yeah i saw that episode of west wing last night too smartass.
As big a fan of The West Wing as I am, I try not to limit myself to using television as my classroom. Believe it or not, some people go to university, read books, newspapers, listen to lectures, observe the world around them and draw their own conclusions.
Some of them (though, it would seem, not very many) even find time to post on Slashdot. Weird, huh?
If you disagree with what I've written then why not write a reply that outlines where exactly it's wrong?
You and your AC friend, who between you have dismissed my post as "satirical", "propaganda" and "Hindu revisonism" are quick with your criticism but not so quick with even a single word explaining where my post is factually incorrect, let alone any evidence to back it up.
Please, for my benefit if nobody else's, tell this agnostic, Kashmir referendum-supporting fool where his brief history lapses into satire, propaganda or revisionism.
With reports that illegal torrent usage may be more than a third of Internet traffic...
Sorry, but how the hell are the people who come up with the numbers able to differentiate between legal and illegal torrents?
First of all, how do you tell between traffic that's due to Linux ISOs and traffic that's due to the latest movie release? Secondly, how do you differentiate between copying of material that may be legal in one country and copying of the same material that may be illegal in another one?
I'm not saying that legal torrent usage is greater than illegal torrent usage (any more than I would say that more drivers stick to speed limits than break them) but it seems to me that there's no real way of differentiating between the two, so all those reports are arguably just speculation.
White collar jobs being shipped overseas made the recent Presidential debates, with John Kerry raising the issue as a major concern. Blue collar jobs being shipped overseas rarely have the same impact, except when it suits politicians' purposes to play the patriotism card.
India hasn't stolen the jobs, US companies have shipped them there. And US tax loopholes have helped them do it too. Believe me, if it wasn't India, they would have found somewhere else that would have taken the jobs.
But those are the joys of capitalism and the global economy. Funny thing though, when it was blue collar jobs that were being shipped elsewhere no one really gave two hoots (when was the last time you bought clothes that were 100 percent made in the US, with US-sourced materials?), but now it's white collar jobs it's suddenly some sort of travesty.
Uh, I'm guessing you have no idea about the history behind the India-Pakistan conflict over Kashmir because, if you did, you'd know it's not that simple.
When India was struggling to achieve independence, it became clear that the religious unrest would likely drive the country apart. The solution to this was partition, which divided India into two countries, India and Pakistan (literally "land of the pure"). Kashmir, which was then a kingdom, decided that it didn't like either choice, and its ruler declared Kashmiri independence for itself.
Everyone accepted Kashmir's position but shortly after independence and partition took place, Pakistan unilaterally invaded Kashmir claiming it for itself. Kashmir, with no hope of surviving by itself, and with no other help coming from elsewhere, asked India for assistance. This call for help put India in a bind, because it didn't want to provoke Pakistan unnecessarily (partition itself had been a bloody affair) and so it presented Kashmir with the only viable option: become part of the sovereign state of India.
Kashmir chose India over Pakistan, and officially became part of India. Hence, legally at least, Kashmir is Indian territory. However, Pakistan didnt (and still doesnt) accept this, and refused to withdraw its claim on the region.
Whether or not Kashmir should become independent is a very stickly question. Personally, I'd like to see it happen but, frankly, there's too much at stake - not least of all national pride - for either India or Pakistan to seriously consider it. So the status quo, with part of still Kashmir occupied by Pakistan, remains and probably will continue to do so for some considerable time. Certainly, until Pakistan readopts democracy, its unlikely to change.
By the way, while the India-Pakistan division was based on religion, it's a fact that India now has a bigger Muslim population than Pakistan. And, apart from a few religious zealots on either side, most Hindus and Muslims (and Christians, Buddhists, etc) manage to co-exist peacefully in India.
Again, you're talking about a plug-in, whereas with Opera the feature is built in (and has been for some time now).
Given that this particular thread started as a discussion about unnecessary bloat, and that Opera default has a smaller footprint than Firefox default, isn't that just more proof that Firefox isn't as efficient as it could be?
(By the way, reordering tabs has been a standard part of Opera since I can remember. So that particular function of miniT is yet another catch-up to a very old Opera feature.)
Yes, rarely. As in "not very often". Certainly not once a day like you experienced. Maybe something more like once or twice a month, and I'm talking about Opera 8.0 beta here.
And at least I'm not like some people, so blind that I claim that my browser of choice runs "without any problems, crashes, or anything". Apparently honesty counts for nothing as far as you're concerned.
So Firefox is stable for you and problem free? Well good for you. That's certainly not the experience that some people have had. Or don't you believe that Firefox is capable of being fallable?
Seriously, apart from bitching about how Opera crashed on you regularly who knows how long ago (And what version exactly was that? How long ago? A year? Two years? Have you even seen how stable it is nowadays?) what else do you have to contribute to this discussion?
You're in the minority then. I run Opera constantly and it rarely crashes on me.
On the other hand, Firefox has well known problem with memory leaks. As one person commented elsewhere in the broader discussion, getting Firefox to run for 24 hours is nigh on impossible.
Oh, and on the rare occasions that it does crash, Opera remembers the exact combination of windows and tabs that were open when it crashed so you loose nothing apart from the time it takes to restart because all the content that was there when it crashed will reappear from its cache once it's restarted. Tell me, does Firefox do that for you? No, it doesn't, does it?
Uh, what the AC was referring to is the default skin, which I'll admit isn't pretty compared to the alternatives.
However, if you think that a bad skin is the same as a poor user interface then you are very much mistaken. In fact, Opera's UI is so good that Mozilla/Firefox have borrowed most of its elements (tabbed browsing, mouse gestures, etc).
Clearly they wouldn't be copying what Opera's done if it didn't work: after all, imitation is the highest form of flattery.
Expect a round two after that particular loophole in Russian copyright law has been closed. I don't see Allofmp3.com winning after that's happened, do you?
And a brick can be used as a backscratcher but that doesn't change the fact that it's almost invariably going to be used as a building block, does it?
For 99.9 percent of users, Firefox is a web browser, Opera is a web browser, MSIE is a web browser, Safari is a web browser, etc, etc. So calling them all web browsers and comparing them to one another is a fair thing to do.
Wow. Well done for not being able to compare apples with apples.
The Opera installer that you're talking about is the one with Java, hence the "j" in its name. There are installers without Java too, you know. On the other hand, the installer for Firefox that you're talking about is without Java, so your comparison is meaningless.
Also, you're not even comparing a recent version of Opera, are you? The latest non-beta version of Opera is 7.54u2, which is a 3.6MB download for the Windows version, compared to a 4.7MB download for Firefox 1.0.1 for Windows.
Hmmm, which is bigger, 3.6MB or 4.7MB? That's a real toughie, isn't it?
Wow. Finding skins for Opera is so hard, isn't it? It's not like you're not shown how to do this when you first install it, is it?
Really, how hard do you find going to the Preferences menu then clicking two more buttons (Skin > Get Skin)? It's, like, sooo challenging, isn't it?
Uh, what exactly do you think that people do with Firefox? They browse the web, just like they do with Opera.
When you think of it in those terms, it's kinda not that hard to compare them, ya know?
Uh, compared to at least one of its rivals, Mozilla/FireFox is bloated.
Compare the feature sets of FireFox and Opera. Now compare their relative footprints when installed (or even the size of the downloads). Pound for pound, Opera is faster, lighter and does more (it even includes mail and IRC clients in it's small size).
Also, almost without exception, those features that are common to both (a great many of which were browser innovations by Opera itself) are far better implemented in Opera than they are in FireFox.
So, Opera seems to be proof that you can have your cake and eat it too. It's small, fast, powerful and bloat-free. If the guys at Opera can do it, then other people can do it too, can't they?
Uh, I'll take that bet. The average person has a lot easier time visualising double digits than they do treble digits, so I doubt that the example you use will show that people in general will have a "much easier time" with your three digit example just because one of the numbers is a multiple of 100. (By the way, when you're dealing with three digit numbers, multiples of 100 aren't that common.)
To be honest, I think you severely underestimate the number of people who can't take 2 away from 27 and get the right answer. And I think you're also forgetting that, when comparing two temperatures, people most commonly compare a temperature to freezing point than anything else. Hmmm, 27 - 0: that's a real toughie, isn't it?
Anyhow, the example you give isn't relevant here. Unless you can change the freezing and boiling points of water as they're defined in SI terms relative to absolute zero, those points are still going to be 273K and 373K respectively, which means that someone trying to working out how much above (or below) freezing it is outside is still having to deal with one relatively unwieldy three digit number (and, by unwieldy, I mean one that's not easy for most people to parse quickly, like 300).
Maybe this is the kick in the pants that NASA, ESA, JSA, and others need to ensure that they stop leaving junk up there.
Satellites and other space-borne objects need to be equipped with some means of safely deorbiting them, or else we're soon going to find that putting anything up in orbit and having it say there unharmed will be nigh on impossible.
I think you are missing the point. Anyone with the enough disposable income to afford even a basic laptop has enough money to pay $0.50 per hr themselves.
$0.50 is equivalent to about Rs. 20. That's about the cost of a 15 minute ride in an autorickshaw, which is well within the reach of anyone who's got enough money to buy a laptop. Heck, even 1 hour of broadband access in a Reliance WebWorld internet cafe will cost you Rs. 50.
Trust me, I know what I'm talking about here. I just got back from a holiday in India less than a week ago.