In the UK, city councils have an obligation to provide land for allotments - garden plots - for their residents. These are always hugely oversubscribed and there are never enough to go around. They're an excellent idea, provide urban green spaces, allow people to grow their own fruit & veg and are a big net win all round. Why not do that with this reclaimed land?
Given that you can't play World of Warcraft at all without a monthly account, why do I have to buy the game on CD, in the shops? Why can't I just download the.iso from blizzard? As I've got the pain-in-the-ass 5 CD version, re-installing is quite time consuming. Or why can't I download a tiny little 500Kb wow-install.exe from you, which prompts me for my account credentials, authenticates me and then downloads and installs the latest, fully patched version or whatever I've paid for?
This leads me to my next point...
Patching WoW
This is an extremely annoying and time consuming process. Quite often when logging on to WoW, I'm immediately kicked out so that it can download and install a patch. This can be anything from a few MB's to a few GB's. When this is done, I can log in again - only to be chucked out immediately so the next patch can download. Why doesn't blizzard use a repository-like system which just downloads the latest version in one go, rather than endless patches?
Speaking of which...
The blizzard downloader
Blizzard appear to be doing quite well, financially speaking, from $10 * 10 million subscribers a month. It would be nice if they would pony up a little bit of that for some bandwidth for patch downloading. I'm not expecting patches via ftp, but if the peer-to-peer is being slow, maybe blizard's http download stream in the downloader could help out a little bit more than ~20kbps?
Torrent
Also - why is the blizzard downloader only faux bittorrent? When you're using it, it only seems to talk to other Blizzard downloader clients, not bittorent clients in general. If you swipe the.torrent file from drive_c/Program Files/Program Files/World of Warcraft/Cache (I think) and load it into a real bittorrent client, you get the opposite effect - normal torrent users will talk to you, but blizzard clients won't.
Last one...
WoW is a very well behaved piece of windows software - you can run it from anywhere, you don't have to install it - you can just copy the folder. It's so well behaved that it even runs fine on Linux under Wine - this works out of the box for me with recent version of Linux, Wine & Wow. It's not perfect - but it's pretty good.
Bearing this in mind, it wouldn't seem like a big leap to suggest releasing a pre-packaged Linux version, bundling WoW+Wine into a.deb/rpm for install either via your distro's repositories, or a blizzard repository. This is the approach that Google takes with Picasa - the Linux version is just the windows version bundled with Wine.
A native version would be very nice, but this would be better than the current situation, for many people.
Current version of Opera can do this. You can drag tabs to order them, drag them between windows and drag a tab off, creating a new window. Don't think you can reverse the last one though.
Slashdot Mirror
Great - the Cultural Revolution 2.0 - along with vigilantism, denouncements & public humiliation. Awesome, just what everyone needed; yay China. Sigh.
In the UK, city councils have an obligation to provide land for allotments - garden plots - for their residents. These are always hugely oversubscribed and there are never enough to go around. They're an excellent idea, provide urban green spaces, allow people to grow their own fruit & veg and are a big net win all round. Why not do that with this reclaimed land?
Getting WoW
Given that you can't play World of Warcraft at all without a monthly account, why do I have to buy the game on CD, in the shops? Why can't I just download the .iso from blizzard? As I've got the pain-in-the-ass 5 CD version, re-installing is quite time consuming. Or why can't I download a tiny little 500Kb wow-install.exe from you, which prompts me for my account credentials, authenticates me and then downloads and installs the latest, fully patched version or whatever I've paid for?
This leads me to my next point...
Patching WoW
This is an extremely annoying and time consuming process. Quite often when logging on to WoW, I'm immediately kicked out so that it can download and install a patch. This can be anything from a few MB's to a few GB's. When this is done, I can log in again - only to be chucked out immediately so the next patch can download. Why doesn't blizzard use a repository-like system which just downloads the latest version in one go, rather than endless patches?
Speaking of which...
The blizzard downloader
Blizzard appear to be doing quite well, financially speaking, from $10 * 10 million subscribers a month. It would be nice if they would pony up a little bit of that for some bandwidth for patch downloading. I'm not expecting patches via ftp, but if the peer-to-peer is being slow, maybe blizard's http download stream in the downloader could help out a little bit more than ~20kbps?
Torrent
Also - why is the blizzard downloader only faux bittorrent? When you're using it, it only seems to talk to other Blizzard downloader clients, not bittorent clients in general. If you swipe the .torrent file from drive_c/Program Files/Program Files/World of Warcraft/Cache (I think) and load it into a real bittorrent client, you get the opposite effect - normal torrent users will talk to you, but blizzard clients won't.
Last one...
WoW is a very well behaved piece of windows software - you can run it from anywhere, you don't have to install it - you can just copy the folder. It's so well behaved that it even runs fine on Linux under Wine - this works out of the box for me with recent version of Linux, Wine & Wow. It's not perfect - but it's pretty good.
Bearing this in mind, it wouldn't seem like a big leap to suggest releasing a pre-packaged Linux version, bundling WoW+Wine into a .deb/rpm for install either via your distro's repositories, or a blizzard repository. This is the approach that Google takes with Picasa - the Linux version is just the windows version bundled with Wine.
A native version would be very nice, but this would be better than the current situation, for many people.
What do you think?
Current version of Opera can do this. You can drag tabs to order them, drag them between windows and drag a tab off, creating a new window. Don't think you can reverse the last one though.
Without even looking at the URL, this could only have been produced at the BBC. One of the few remaining reasons to be proud to be British.