Email response
on
Worst Buy
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Still waiting for mine!;-)
--
From: onlinestore@bestbuy.com To: <ajs@ajs.com> Subject: BestBuy.com Backorder Notice Date: Mon, 11 Feb 2002 05:32:13 -0600 Message-ID: <EC0250S603avN3qljWw0001d1ed@ec0250s603.xbby.co m>
Dear Aaron Sherman,
Thank you for shopping at BestBuy.com!
Unfortunately, the following item(s) are still unavailable to be shipped, but we hope to be able to ship this item(s) to you soon.
If you prefer to cancel this item from your order, please contact our Customer Care representatives at onlinestore@bestbuy.com or call our Online Store help center toll-free at 1-888-BESTBUY (1-888-237-8289).
We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.
ORDER NUMBER: 213**** Order Date: Feb 6, 2002 Credit Card Used: ****************
Item Description Type Qty Web Price Total Status
VisionTek Xtasy GeForce4 Ti 46 --- 1 $129.99 $129.99 On Backorder
And you still can do that. If you want to. If you chose to use a GNOME-compliant program you can create a defaults file for it like so:
usegeometry=80x63+85+174 class=Class-MAIL termin al_id=0 command=ssh -C user@example.com font=-schumacher-clean-medium-r- normal-*-*-80-*-*- c-*-iso646.1991-irv
This is an example from my gnome-terminal config that is used to start up the login shell to my home machine. Only that class of terminal is affected, of course....
GNOME is very easy to configure in a large number of ways. You should try it out!
X standardised Xt,And UNIX standardized dd, but we don't use it for backups anymore do we?
a standard for toolkit interoperability at the component level (it is possible to embedd an Xaw component in a Motif application, for example).
And Xt is about 60% of the reason that Motif blows chunks. There are several serious, objective reasons for this:
The resource database was difficult to manage because it required encoding large amounts of inherently non-string oriented data into strings
It was an early attempt to develop an OO model in C. The inheritance model was cumbersome and required far more code to manage than the application itself in almost all cases
Xt attempted to manipulate events in ways that were terribly inefficient. Especially high on this list of problems were the atificial events created by the widget heirarchy. This above all else made Xt (and thus Xaw and Motif) a painful user experience, and an endless optimization quest for the programmer.
I will not speak of Qt, because I have limited knowledge of it. However, Gtk+ and later GNOME addressed many of these shortcomings in ways that made a great deal of sense. It also did so in ways that were portable to Windowing systems that were either variants of The X-Window System or different altogether, but still provided the basiscs of display manipulation and event model.
The core X Protocol is a wonderful way for applicaiton and display server to talk. XLib is painful, but you can abstract it and still live with it reasonably. Xt was simply unworkable.
Of course, these points are moot. Gtk+ today along with GNOME do much more than Xt or Xaw or Motif ever did, and there's simply no going back. Color management, font management, internationalization, window manager interaction, system- and user-level configuration: These are all things that todays toolkits do far better than was ever available in the bad old days.
Unfortunately, neither Gtk nor Qt honour Xt, nor X's excellent "resource database" generalised configuration and theming (yes, theming!) system.
Of course the way your modern audience here on Slashdot thinks of theming, this is terribly misleading. You could build wildly complex resource configurations that would hand-tweek the widget heirarchy of a specific application. You could also set background colors and such, but since there were no solid conventions (not at all in Xt, and not enough in Motif and Xaw), these were of limited usefulness.
First off, understand that truepath.com is just a christian hosting service. They are not the ones saying this. The "member" in question (the one who runs "Objective") has been ranting about the Internet being a christian-founded network that should be purged of non-christian thoughts for a long time. The creationism section is run (in theory) by yet another guy who thinks that creationists won't be able to have a fair debate until they define thier own terms (you see, "species" is an evolutionist term... ignore the fact that the term pre-dates the theory of either evolution or natural selection or the origin of species).
Also, note that the folks ranting here seem unaware that their complaints about communist OSes are being made on a site which runs Linux/Apache;-)
I think Christians can be, and usually are, good people. However, it really gets me hot under the collar when folks mis-use doctrin that millions hold sacred like this. It's shameless and someone ought to throw a pie at this nutter instead of Bill Gates!
Also on the humerous side, I just hit the front page and saw this:
Apple: Apple Deals with Devil [...] ( Read More... | 67 of 666 comments | Apple )
if a company used GPL'd software, and declined to release the source, they'd have two options [...]
Not quite accurate. It a company used GPL'd software and then chose to distribute it (in original or modified form), you are correct. If I use GPLed software, the GPL holds no sway over what I do with it, as log as I remain withing the confines of copyright law.
As soon as I do something which, under copyright law, is illegal, my only legal recourses are to comply with the GPL or seek alternate licensing from the copyright holder.
What if a kid in seventh grade was trying to do some research for school, say on World War I
Let's try to think back five years ago for the answer... Yep, they'd be restricted (in school, anyway) to the research materials provided (and sanitized) for them. Now,.kids would be much better because it would be a global pool of such research materials (among many other things, I'm sure) and much worse because it would have to maintain some LCD of community standards for children.
So, children in schools would be better off than before, but perhaps not as well off as if we were to grow up and let them be exposed to material that would cause them to ask pointed and perhaps uncomfortable questions.
And please don't assume that people think in "such convuluted ways" just because they've been elected.
Of course not. They do so because they are part of a beuracracy. It's classic FUD thinking. We see this sort of save the children by making adults behave in child-safe ways all the time.
I understand your point of view, and how you got there. However, you should consider that there are other paths to walk than the one you have gone down.
When I was a first year student, it went very poorly because I was excited about learning, and the school wanted to break me of it. Large lecture halls were not a place to ask questions; data structures courses were not a place to question why teaching linked list handling in a language that didn't support pointers was wise; etc. In the end, I dropped out and worked for the school for two years, maintaining their systems and writing code for funded research projects.
If schools think of freshmen as a crowd of clean slates that can be penned up for a semester or two for forced-rationing of rote learning, they're going to get graduates who are equal to the challenge of those first few semesters. Perhaps a few gems will squeek through, but I'll guarantee you that all of THOSE students will either test out of the first few classes or will "cheat" by discussing new concepts as they learn them. My great and little gods, can you imagine being a talented programmer who just learned what a hash is, and not being allowed to talk to anyone about it!? I was practically on the rooftops screaming when I learned what a hash was and why it was so beautiful!
Please, if anyone at any school with a policy like this reads this message, consider the point of view of the first year student who has been prepped all through high school to believe that college is where the rubber hits the road, learning-wise. When you hit them with more rote, mindless sentence memorization than they had in high school, what do you think the impact on the brightest, most promising students will be?
Just a couple more thoughts here, after playing some more last night. I really love the way that from 30 to 50, you get less capable solo, but more capable in groups (for most classes). I'm actually able to save my fellow group members' butts on a regular basis by expending a little effort above-and-beyond the basic grouping tactics, and they can save mine in the same ways.
I'm also seriously in love with the idea of long and complex quests that pretty much require a group. The WIS shield quest in Katta (a new Luclin city) is like this. We get together and camp the mob de jour. We pull whatever we can to make the time pass and gab and get some ok quest armor drops. We just finished our druid's skull collection last night, so the next step is to get a larger group together and go to Katta to turn in the skulls. As soon as we do, we'll get 8 of the mobs that the skulls dropped from, which we have to take out at once!
This sort of thing is what I pay my monthly EQ fee for. It's adventure, pure and simple, from the 8th dimension!
There's no dichotomy here. A very large number of the stories we tell are not just a "journey", but the mythic hero's journey. That is to say that they tell the story of a hero who comes from humble beginnings (but likely has some tie to leadership or royalty), leaves his comfortable surroundings in a quest for some key ability or knowledge that will overcome a great injustice or evil, is trained and finally returns to his people to achive his ultimate goals.
The transformation of the hero is at the core of a huge amount of our storytelling. It seems to be a very male-centric form of storytelling in the west, but other cultures have told female versions as well. Examples of the hero story are Star Wars (along with a staggering percentage of what hollywood produces), Superman (along with much of the comic book world), The Odessey (along with much of traditional storytelling), the stories of Jesus, Buddha, Mohamed and many other central religios figures (you can decide which ones are just stories on your own).
Every story is a journey, but a suprising number of those are the story of the journey of the hero.
Ok, there's radical Campbell (2nd half of Hero, etc) and there's basic Campbell. I tend to agree with basic Campbell, which I think isn't too much of a leap.
Basic Campbell is best seen in the first half of Hero. He introduces the idea of the hero's journey which we see in everything from The Odessey to the enlightenment of The Buddha and just about every heroic story that we've ever told. Very rarely do we tell the story of a hero who is already truely a hero. If we do, we feel a deep need to break down this hero and pass him(?) back through the mechanism of the hero's journey.
A great example of this is one of U.S. culture's most recognizable hero myths: Superman. Over and over the story of Superman is re-told and each time we re-evaluate how he came to be a hero as in Superman: The Movie, Smallville, etc. Or we break him down and watch him re-emerge as the hero: Superman II, Superman: Man of Steel (comic re-interpreatation/revision of Superman in the late 80s). Sometimes we tell a non-hero story, using a well established hero (Lois and Clark), but only if we feel the hero is entrenched in our popular myth structure, and we accept his credentials as a hero.
I use Superman because it's pop culture, and we're discussing Star Wars here. Star Wars too was an exploration of the hero's journey portion of Campbell's work, not of the more controvercial elements of his ideas. Luke is introduced as a boy and through the application of training and the loss of innocence/conflict becomes a hero/man, capable of drawing on his "pure" essense (the force and his destined ability to wield it) to accomplish the seemingly impossible and save "us all".
Star Wars is a simple interpretation of the hero's journey, but accurate as far as it goes.
Everquest is still wracked with huge bugs, many of which were introduced with the SoL expansion.
As with the rest of your message, you're quite vague and don't seem to want to brook any sort of disagreement. The major bugs that I know of that were introduced with SoL have all been fixed. The biggest concern that I've heard from the user-base recently continues to revolve around changes that HAVEN'T been made (e.g. lack of new interface and Bazaar, which were supposed to be part of Luclin)
Most of the new player models from SoL are horrible to look at, although a few are nice upgrades from the old models,
Ok, I guess this is your call, but when I look at side-by-side comparisons, I can't imagine that you found any of the old models more appealing than what we have now. I would still love to see improvements for: Hafling, Dwarf and High Elf, but those races do look better, IMHO, than they did pre-SoL.
and virtually all of the animations are very badly done making the characters very gimpy looking when animated.
Compared to what? It doesn't make any sense to compare EQ to Q3 or Unreal. When's the last time you played Q3, moving across 200 levels with a couple thousand of your best friends logged in? The limitations imposed by having textures and models for thousands of items, dozens of character models, hundreds of type of terrain, etc are going to have an impact on the overall look of the game.
Of course, you can go the DAoC route and have a much more cartoony, hybrid 3D look. That's not a bad solution, and it's working well for them. EQ went for a much more realistic rendering model, and I think that helps gameplay a whole lot.
VI/SOE still hates their paying customers
Again, you're making an assertion about how they feel, but you don't give any evidence to back it up.
and the "new content" of SoL isn't much different that the what was there before.
Ah! Still subjective, but you make a point. Let's look:
* New race unlike any previous * New class -- hybrid of previous, but unique play none the less. * Ring events -- definitely new and changes the high-end game quite a bit over waiting for spawns! * Mid-level scripted wars -- this take content that used to be reserved for the very highest level characters and makes it available to nearly everyone.
How are these things not new? Are you complaining that you want *more* that's new? Have you gone to CT? Have you tried Legends?
Definitely don't come back if you've left, try a different game from a company that actually appreciates your business... almost any of eq's competitors will do.
Here's the crux. You want people to play the other games. Cool, that's fine. But don't rag on a game you clearly have unfounded personal feelings about without doing some research.
Yes, but the EQ economy is still quite good. Don't know why you had problems. I've made an awful lot of plat selling everything from newbie items to high-end spell drops.
Mozilla is starting to run into an odd problem here. Back at 0.8, and even as late as 0.9.2, there were enough bug-fixes coming in for enough major bugs that it was well worth the time of the average well-clued user to run nightlies instead of releases. The nightlies would only be truely unstable for a week or two after a release (as the flood gates opened up), but then they would stabalize, and I found them very usable.
Now, though, the 0.9.8 and 0.9.9 releases have been so stable that I haven't wanted to load a nightly. It hasn't been helped by the fact that Mozillazine used to do a great job of reviewing each set of nightlies, but they've been falling WAY behind for a while now.
I've got work to do, and was really only a tester because being one got me a better browser than NS4. I wonder how many other folk are equally lazy...?
Another thing thats kinda exciting is trying to trek from freeport to quenos in a small low level group... LOL. Screw teleports, lets adventure!
Heh... sounds like a fun player event. Call it the newbie marathon! I can just see 100 characters from 1-15 running across the continent. You'd have to do a few things. First, you'd want spotters along the way to make sure there was no cheating. Then bind everyone who wants to race at the starting point (no fair binding in the target city and then letting an orc pawn kill you).
I've heard of events like this. Usually you have to get naked first, since there are various items that would make it easier.
Advancement past 60 is not leveling. It's more skill-based (it's called "alternate advancement"). It's a very cool addition to the game, and makes raiding for experience post-60 make sense.
If you see EQ as a single-player game, it sucks after about level 40 or so. If you see it as an opportunity to cooperate and game with lots of others, it only starts to get interesting around those levels.
Many people who play past about 35 get stuck in what's called the "experience grinder". They think that the game doesn't begin until 60, so they have to just sit there and weather the next 25 levels. Unfortunately, they find that that's very boring and stop, or worse, they get to 60 and find that it's just more of the same (in some ways).
What people like myself find is that EQ presents almost too much variety, and if you just spend all of your time going into the 5-10 zones that EVERYONE is in, and grouping up with fast pullers, you're missing 90% of the game.
I too think that TiVo needs some competition. They're a good company with smart folks, but management will inevitably want to slow down and focus on profits. If they have inovative competition, they may have to play catch-up with some of the features (while stressing thier own unique strengths).
This keeps everyone happy, and let's face it: I think TiVo will stay on top for the forseeable future. They just need to keep thier eye as firmly placed on the audience as they always have.
This is not EverQuest as you may know it. This world will not overlap with standard EverQuest. There will be a limited race/class selection, and the world will not require zoning. You will also not get to interact with the rest of the EverQuest player base
EverQuest in its current form has much improved graphics over what you're used to from the days of Kunark (which was release something like 2 years ago).
If you haven't tried EQ since Kunark, you're missing much more than just graphics. There's a new playable class (Beastlord), a new race (Vah Shir: the cat people), post-60 advancement, new types of quests and scripted events (zone-wide wars, ring quests/scripts), chat channels (user created), and many more nifty features that older EQ players may want to come back and try out.
If you decide to come back, come look me up. I'm on 7th Hammer, and play Miskaton or Deepone.
Yep, it should just send a message to syslog once a day or so after it reaches a crittical age. The question is, what software do you do this for. Here's some that you really should
openssl, openssh, gnupg, etc -- Anything that thinks about data encryption should be updated regularly because you expect advances in cryptography and crypanalysis to make your current version less secure
gaim, pilot, etc -- Any software that is trying to grok a third party interface or protocol without official specs and/or support will probably have to be updated regularly.
ftpd, sendmail, etc -- Software that is known to be a favorite target of script-kiddies should be updated as frequently as you can afford to in your environment.
This is a nice thing to do if you plan on your machine being mostly desktop-oriented, but it doesn't address the basic non-PC-hardware orientation of an X server. X was designed for VAXes and later tweeked for Suns, HPs, etc.
Only after about 6 years did X first start to become a PC display server (SCO was the pioneer, I think). Today's high-end graphics cards for PCs bear some resemblance to the VAX and Suns of old, but not enough to make X as efficient for PCs as Windows which has only ever been for PC-style cards (even in the Alphas that NT was ported to, the graphics cards were PC graphics cards).
Yes. What I meant was that they ents don't play a major part in the progression of this war. They could easily have been Men or Dwarves or Elves. The roll of the Hobbits, OTOH, could not have been filled by any other race.
It's been said that the X11/Gtk stuff doesn't help either.
You're close. You'd be more correct to say that X11 (Gtk+ really doesn't enter into it) doesn't help much and Windows helps a whole lot.
Windows does a few things well, and graphics card support is one of them (mostly because they have the graphics car manufacturers doing the work for them). So, MS is using every trick in the book to speed display of new windows, rendering of images and fonts, etc.
Here are some things that X could do to improve the speed of applications:
Hardware-accelerated font handling
Re-write of the XImage code to allow more PC graphics card friendly image transmission to the server. There was a project to do this a while back, and it involved the KGI work that later became DRI. Does anyone know what happened to it?
Re-write the DD layer of the X reference server for XFree86, and provide an interface that is more of an abstraction of PC graphics cards.
X is a great graphics server overall, it just needs to be updated to take advantage of what graphics cards do today.
The atrocious content of your sig not-withstanding, I ask that you read the whole article before quoting part of it in a reply.
Your comments were echoed by said editorial staff in the article as it appears on the front page.
Meanwhile, could someone moderate this karma-bomb down? I'd like to think that swearing a lot and then repeating a standard slashot rant (right or wrong) is not woth a positive moderation.
Bombadil is an important character, but only as a gentle intro to some of the back-story. The ents are sort of the same. They don't serve a big roll in the books other than to show you that there's many pockets of different races living all over, and most of them are VERY old.
The idea was supposed to be that the forces behind Sauron (read the Sim. if you haven't) keep trying to take over and destroy the symetry of Middle Earth, but it's exactly that symetry that defeats each effort. Each time evil gets an upper hand, something totally unexpected and different thwarts it. The elves were one such suprise. The last one before the LotR was men. Now, it's hobbits.
Really, if Sauron had a clue, he'd pause, look around for a race that seems weak and harmless that has never been involved in any of the great battles before and nuke them into oblivion before starting.
Woefully, he isn't that smart or it'd be a Robert Jordan novel written by someone who actually knows how pace an epic story (which Jordan missed the boat on about 7 books ago in the WoT series).
Tolkein started a very interesting sub-genre of fantasy that has sort of over-shadowed the whole genre. I kind of wish people would get over him and start to explore other angles more (which people like Gaiman and Straczynski have been doing to an extent).
Slashdot Mirror
Still waiting for mine! ;-)
--
From: onlinestore@bestbuy.com
To: <ajs@ajs.com>
Subject: BestBuy.com Backorder Notice
Date: Mon, 11 Feb 2002 05:32:13 -0600
Message-ID: <EC0250S603avN3qljWw0001d1ed@ec0250s603.xbby.co m>
Dear Aaron Sherman,
Thank you for shopping at BestBuy.com!
Unfortunately, the following item(s) are still unavailable to be shipped, but we hope to be able to ship this item(s) to you soon.
If you prefer to cancel this item from your order, please contact our Customer Care representatives at onlinestore@bestbuy.com or call our Online Store help center toll-free at 1-888-BESTBUY (1-888-237-8289).
We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.
ORDER NUMBER: 213****
Order Date: Feb 6, 2002
Credit Card Used: ****************
Item Description Type Qty Web Price Total Status
VisionTek Xtasy GeForce4 Ti 46 --- 1 $129.99 $129.99 On Backorder
[................] SNIP!
And you still can do that. If you want to. If you chose to use a GNOME-compliant program you can create a defaults file for it like so:
n al_id=0- normal-*-*-80-*-*- c-*-iso646.1991-irv
usegeometry=80x63+85+174
class=Class-MAIL
termi
command=ssh -C user@example.com
font=-schumacher-clean-medium-r
This is an example from my gnome-terminal config that is used to start up the login shell to my home machine. Only that class of terminal is affected, of course....
GNOME is very easy to configure in a large number of ways. You should try it out!
I will not speak of Qt, because I have limited knowledge of it. However, Gtk+ and later GNOME addressed many of these shortcomings in ways that made a great deal of sense. It also did so in ways that were portable to Windowing systems that were either variants of The X-Window System or different altogether, but still provided the basiscs of display manipulation and event model.
The core X Protocol is a wonderful way for applicaiton and display server to talk. XLib is painful, but you can abstract it and still live with it reasonably. Xt was simply unworkable.
Of course, these points are moot. Gtk+ today along with GNOME do much more than Xt or Xaw or Motif ever did, and there's simply no going back. Color management, font management, internationalization, window manager interaction, system- and user-level configuration: These are all things that todays toolkits do far better than was ever available in the bad old days.
Of course the way your modern audience here on Slashdot thinks of theming, this is terribly misleading. You could build wildly complex resource configurations that would hand-tweek the widget heirarchy of a specific application. You could also set background colors and such, but since there were no solid conventions (not at all in Xt, and not enough in Motif and Xaw), these were of limited usefulness.
First off, understand that truepath.com is just a christian hosting service. They are not the ones saying this. The "member" in question (the one who runs "Objective") has been ranting about the Internet being a christian-founded network that should be purged of non-christian thoughts for a long time. The creationism section is run (in theory) by yet another guy who thinks that creationists won't be able to have a fair debate until they define thier own terms (you see, "species" is an evolutionist term... ignore the fact that the term pre-dates the theory of either evolution or natural selection or the origin of species).
;-)
Also, note that the folks ranting here seem unaware that their complaints about communist OSes are being made on a site which runs Linux/Apache
I think Christians can be, and usually are, good people. However, it really gets me hot under the collar when folks mis-use doctrin that millions hold sacred like this. It's shameless and someone ought to throw a pie at this nutter instead of Bill Gates!
Also on the humerous side, I just hit the front page and saw this:
Apple: Apple Deals with Devil [...]
( Read More... | 67 of 666 comments | Apple )
Heh.
if a company used GPL'd software, and declined to release the source, they'd have two options [...]
Not quite accurate. It a company used GPL'd software and then chose to distribute it (in original or modified form), you are correct. If I use GPLed software, the GPL holds no sway over what I do with it, as log as I remain withing the confines of copyright law.
As soon as I do something which, under copyright law, is illegal, my only legal recourses are to comply with the GPL or seek alternate licensing from the copyright holder.
What if a kid in seventh grade was trying to do some research for school, say on World War I
.kids would be much better because it would be a global pool of such research materials (among many other things, I'm sure) and much worse because it would have to maintain some LCD of community standards for children.
Let's try to think back five years ago for the answer... Yep, they'd be restricted (in school, anyway) to the research materials provided (and sanitized) for them. Now,
So, children in schools would be better off than before, but perhaps not as well off as if we were to grow up and let them be exposed to material that would cause them to ask pointed and perhaps uncomfortable questions.
And please don't assume that people think in "such convuluted ways" just because they've been elected.
Of course not. They do so because they are part of a beuracracy. It's classic FUD thinking. We see this sort of save the children by making adults behave in child-safe ways all the time.
I understand your point of view, and how you got there. However, you should consider that there are other paths to walk than the one you have gone down.
When I was a first year student, it went very poorly because I was excited about learning, and the school wanted to break me of it. Large lecture halls were not a place to ask questions; data structures courses were not a place to question why teaching linked list handling in a language that didn't support pointers was wise; etc. In the end, I dropped out and worked for the school for two years, maintaining their systems and writing code for funded research projects.
If schools think of freshmen as a crowd of clean slates that can be penned up for a semester or two for forced-rationing of rote learning, they're going to get graduates who are equal to the challenge of those first few semesters. Perhaps a few gems will squeek through, but I'll guarantee you that all of THOSE students will either test out of the first few classes or will "cheat" by discussing new concepts as they learn them. My great and little gods, can you imagine being a talented programmer who just learned what a hash is, and not being allowed to talk to anyone about it!? I was practically on the rooftops screaming when I learned what a hash was and why it was so beautiful!
Please, if anyone at any school with a policy like this reads this message, consider the point of view of the first year student who has been prepped all through high school to believe that college is where the rubber hits the road, learning-wise. When you hit them with more rote, mindless sentence memorization than they had in high school, what do you think the impact on the brightest, most promising students will be?
wx is a cross-platform toolkit, but it is not toolkit independant.
Again, to use the database analogy, that's like saying, "you've got the Oracle module, and Oracle runs on both kinds of systems, UNIX *and* Windows."
Circa 1995 I was saying this about Java....
C# is new, and so it has a less established user base. Never assume that that means it will be a smaller user base for long.
Just a couple more thoughts here, after playing some more last night. I really love the way that from 30 to 50, you get less capable solo, but more capable in groups (for most classes). I'm actually able to save my fellow group members' butts on a regular basis by expending a little effort above-and-beyond the basic grouping tactics, and they can save mine in the same ways.
I'm also seriously in love with the idea of long and complex quests that pretty much require a group. The WIS shield quest in Katta (a new Luclin city) is like this. We get together and camp the mob de jour. We pull whatever we can to make the time pass and gab and get some ok quest armor drops. We just finished our druid's skull collection last night, so the next step is to get a larger group together and go to Katta to turn in the skulls. As soon as we do, we'll get 8 of the mobs that the skulls dropped from, which we have to take out at once!
This sort of thing is what I pay my monthly EQ fee for. It's adventure, pure and simple, from the 8th dimension!
There's no dichotomy here. A very large number of the stories we tell are not just a "journey", but the mythic hero's journey. That is to say that they tell the story of a hero who comes from humble beginnings (but likely has some tie to leadership or royalty), leaves his comfortable surroundings in a quest for some key ability or knowledge that will overcome a great injustice or evil, is trained and finally returns to his people to achive his ultimate goals.
The transformation of the hero is at the core of a huge amount of our storytelling. It seems to be a very male-centric form of storytelling in the west, but other cultures have told female versions as well. Examples of the hero story are Star Wars (along with a staggering percentage of what hollywood produces), Superman (along with much of the comic book world), The Odessey (along with much of traditional storytelling), the stories of Jesus, Buddha, Mohamed and many other central religios figures (you can decide which ones are just stories on your own).
Every story is a journey, but a suprising number of those are the story of the journey of the hero.
Ok, there's radical Campbell (2nd half of Hero, etc) and there's basic Campbell. I tend to agree with basic Campbell, which I think isn't too much of a leap.
Basic Campbell is best seen in the first half of Hero. He introduces the idea of the hero's journey which we see in everything from The Odessey to the enlightenment of The Buddha and just about every heroic story that we've ever told. Very rarely do we tell the story of a hero who is already truely a hero. If we do, we feel a deep need to break down this hero and pass him(?) back through the mechanism of the hero's journey.
A great example of this is one of U.S. culture's most recognizable hero myths: Superman. Over and over the story of Superman is re-told and each time we re-evaluate how he came to be a hero as in Superman: The Movie, Smallville, etc. Or we break him down and watch him re-emerge as the hero: Superman II, Superman: Man of Steel (comic re-interpreatation/revision of Superman in the late 80s). Sometimes we tell a non-hero story, using a well established hero (Lois and Clark), but only if we feel the hero is entrenched in our popular myth structure, and we accept his credentials as a hero.
I use Superman because it's pop culture, and we're discussing Star Wars here. Star Wars too was an exploration of the hero's journey portion of Campbell's work, not of the more controvercial elements of his ideas. Luke is introduced as a boy and through the application of training and the loss of innocence/conflict becomes a hero/man, capable of drawing on his "pure" essense (the force and his destined ability to wield it) to accomplish the seemingly impossible and save "us all".
Star Wars is a simple interpretation of the hero's journey, but accurate as far as it goes.
Everquest is still wracked with huge bugs, many of which were introduced with the SoL expansion.
... almost any of eq's competitors will do.
As with the rest of your message, you're quite vague and don't seem to want to brook any sort of disagreement. The major bugs that I know of that were introduced with SoL have all been fixed. The biggest concern that I've heard from the user-base recently continues to revolve around changes that HAVEN'T been made (e.g. lack of new interface and Bazaar, which were supposed to be part of Luclin)
Most of the new player models from SoL are horrible to look at, although a few are nice upgrades from the old models,
Ok, I guess this is your call, but when I look at side-by-side comparisons, I can't imagine that you found any of the old models more appealing than what we have now. I would still love to see improvements for: Hafling, Dwarf and High Elf, but those races do look better, IMHO, than they did pre-SoL.
and virtually all of the animations are very badly done making the characters very gimpy looking when animated.
Compared to what? It doesn't make any sense to compare EQ to Q3 or Unreal. When's the last time you played Q3, moving across 200 levels with a couple thousand of your best friends logged in? The limitations imposed by having textures and models for thousands of items, dozens of character models, hundreds of type of terrain, etc are going to have an impact on the overall look of the game.
Of course, you can go the DAoC route and have a much more cartoony, hybrid 3D look. That's not a bad solution, and it's working well for them. EQ went for a much more realistic rendering model, and I think that helps gameplay a whole lot.
VI/SOE still hates their paying customers
Again, you're making an assertion about how they feel, but you don't give any evidence to back it up.
and the "new content" of SoL isn't much different that the what was there before.
Ah! Still subjective, but you make a point. Let's look:
* New race unlike any previous
* New class -- hybrid of previous, but unique play none the less.
* Ring events -- definitely new and changes the high-end game quite a bit over waiting for spawns!
* Mid-level scripted wars -- this take content that used to be reserved for the very highest level characters and makes it available to nearly everyone.
How are these things not new? Are you complaining that you want *more* that's new? Have you gone to CT? Have you tried Legends?
Definitely don't come back if you've left, try a different game from a company that actually appreciates your business
Here's the crux. You want people to play the other games. Cool, that's fine. But don't rag on a game you clearly have unfounded personal feelings about without doing some research.
Yes, but the EQ economy is still quite good. Don't know why you had problems. I've made an awful lot of plat selling everything from newbie items to high-end spell drops.
Mozilla is starting to run into an odd problem here. Back at 0.8, and even as late as 0.9.2, there were enough bug-fixes coming in for enough major bugs that it was well worth the time of the average well-clued user to run nightlies instead of releases. The nightlies would only be truely unstable for a week or two after a release (as the flood gates opened up), but then they would stabalize, and I found them very usable.
Now, though, the 0.9.8 and 0.9.9 releases have been so stable that I haven't wanted to load a nightly. It hasn't been helped by the fact that Mozillazine used to do a great job of reviewing each set of nightlies, but they've been falling WAY behind for a while now.
I've got work to do, and was really only a tester because being one got me a better browser than NS4. I wonder how many other folk are equally lazy...?
Another thing thats kinda exciting is trying to trek from freeport to quenos in a small low level group... LOL. Screw teleports, lets adventure!
Heh... sounds like a fun player event. Call it the newbie marathon! I can just see 100 characters from 1-15 running across the continent. You'd have to do a few things. First, you'd want spotters along the way to make sure there was no cheating. Then bind everyone who wants to race at the starting point (no fair binding in the target city and then letting an orc pawn kill you).
I've heard of events like this. Usually you have to get naked first, since there are various items that would make it easier.
Advancement past 60 is not leveling. It's more skill-based (it's called "alternate advancement"). It's a very cool addition to the game, and makes raiding for experience post-60 make sense.
If you see EQ as a single-player game, it sucks after about level 40 or so. If you see it as an opportunity to cooperate and game with lots of others, it only starts to get interesting around those levels.
Many people who play past about 35 get stuck in what's called the "experience grinder". They think that the game doesn't begin until 60, so they have to just sit there and weather the next 25 levels. Unfortunately, they find that that's very boring and stop, or worse, they get to 60 and find that it's just more of the same (in some ways).
What people like myself find is that EQ presents almost too much variety, and if you just spend all of your time going into the 5-10 zones that EVERYONE is in, and grouping up with fast pullers, you're missing 90% of the game.
Good, solid logic. Thanks for the quality post.
I too think that TiVo needs some competition. They're a good company with smart folks, but management will inevitably want to slow down and focus on profits. If they have inovative competition, they may have to play catch-up with some of the features (while stressing thier own unique strengths).
This keeps everyone happy, and let's face it: I think TiVo will stay on top for the forseeable future. They just need to keep thier eye as firmly placed on the audience as they always have.
- This is not EverQuest as you may know it. This world will not overlap with standard EverQuest. There will be a limited race/class selection, and the world will not require zoning. You will also not get to interact with the rest of the EverQuest player base
- EverQuest in its current form has much improved graphics over what you're used to from the days of Kunark (which was release something like 2 years ago).
- If you haven't tried EQ since Kunark, you're missing much more than just graphics. There's a new playable class (Beastlord), a new race (Vah Shir: the cat people), post-60 advancement, new types of quests and scripted events (zone-wide wars, ring quests/scripts), chat channels (user created), and many more nifty features that older EQ players may want to come back and try out.
If you decide to come back, come look me up. I'm on 7th Hammer, and play Miskaton or Deepone.This is a nice thing to do if you plan on your machine being mostly desktop-oriented, but it doesn't address the basic non-PC-hardware orientation of an X server. X was designed for VAXes and later tweeked for Suns, HPs, etc.
Only after about 6 years did X first start to become a PC display server (SCO was the pioneer, I think). Today's high-end graphics cards for PCs bear some resemblance to the VAX and Suns of old, but not enough to make X as efficient for PCs as Windows which has only ever been for PC-style cards (even in the Alphas that NT was ported to, the graphics cards were PC graphics cards).
Yes. What I meant was that they ents don't play a major part in the progression of this war. They could easily have been Men or Dwarves or Elves. The roll of the Hobbits, OTOH, could not have been filled by any other race.
You're close. You'd be more correct to say that X11 (Gtk+ really doesn't enter into it) doesn't help much and Windows helps a whole lot.
Windows does a few things well, and graphics card support is one of them (mostly because they have the graphics car manufacturers doing the work for them). So, MS is using every trick in the book to speed display of new windows, rendering of images and fonts, etc.
Here are some things that X could do to improve the speed of applications:
- Hardware-accelerated font handling
- Re-write of the XImage code to allow more PC graphics card friendly image transmission to the server. There was a project to do this a while back, and it involved the KGI work that later became DRI. Does anyone know what happened to it?
- Re-write the DD layer of the X reference server for XFree86, and provide an interface that is more of an abstraction of PC graphics cards.
X is a great graphics server overall, it just needs to be updated to take advantage of what graphics cards do today.Mr. Pig Hogger,
The atrocious content of your sig not-withstanding, I ask that you read the whole article before quoting part of it in a reply.
Your comments were echoed by said editorial staff in the article as it appears on the front page.
Meanwhile, could someone moderate this karma-bomb down? I'd like to think that swearing a lot and then repeating a standard slashot rant (right or wrong) is not woth a positive moderation.
Thanks.
Bombadil is an important character, but only as a gentle intro to some of the back-story. The ents are sort of the same. They don't serve a big roll in the books other than to show you that there's many pockets of different races living all over, and most of them are VERY old.
The idea was supposed to be that the forces behind Sauron (read the Sim. if you haven't) keep trying to take over and destroy the symetry of Middle Earth, but it's exactly that symetry that defeats each effort. Each time evil gets an upper hand, something totally unexpected and different thwarts it. The elves were one such suprise. The last one before the LotR was men. Now, it's hobbits.
Really, if Sauron had a clue, he'd pause, look around for a race that seems weak and harmless that has never been involved in any of the great battles before and nuke them into oblivion before starting.
Woefully, he isn't that smart or it'd be a Robert Jordan novel written by someone who actually knows how pace an epic story (which Jordan missed the boat on about 7 books ago in the WoT series).
Tolkein started a very interesting sub-genre of fantasy that has sort of over-shadowed the whole genre. I kind of wish people would get over him and start to explore other angles more (which people like Gaiman and Straczynski have been doing to an extent).