That thinks this constant stream of blizzard/wow news is getting a little annoying on slashdot???
Granted, I've played and occaisionally play wow today, but when at work and when on slashdot, I'm not really that interested in that game. Maybe I'm just old or something.
At level 70, maybe you can go do those instances with only 25 (I know we can pretty much do MC with 25 today), but the word is that the old content is not changing.
I assume you've never been a pally at Chrommie, or a mage at Luci???
That's 40 man content that isn't going away and in large part was designed when decursive and it's ilk were made.
This, prevent gameplay automation argument is hogwash. The botting software, which is truly the thing Blizzard needs to stop doesn't use any client scripting (which decursive is).
The mac and OS X are merely a sum of the history of Apple. You know, before they had the Mac Mini and your beloved iPod, they actually did some interesting things with a few spare parts and couple of off-the-shelf chips.
No, I disagree with that completely. I'd rather do end-game raids with my guild than levelling a character. It's the grind that sucks for me and the reason why I DON'T have 100 alts laying around. Everytime I try to level another character I hit 30 and just say 'screw it' I'm sick of this.
"Satalite radio is not gaining popularity because it's digital, no one really cares that it's digital. The sound quality is the same as a strong FM signal."
Are you kidding? I have had both Sirius and XM and the sound quality is horrible. No highs, no lows and it sounds like it's being recorded behind a sheet of tin. I agree with everything else you said though. I actually never listen to my Sat radio and find myself only listening to the local NPR station which quite frankly is much more interesting and informative than the teen top 40s. I also dislike Howard Stern. The guy has funny moments, but overall his humor is tired and boring to me now. Only so many lesbian fart jokes I can take in a normal morning.
Basically what you are doing is similiar to what the long distance carriers used to do in the US. They would call you up almost nightly (although it was probably more like monthly) and harass you about how little or how much you could save switching to their various plans.
The point that telemarketers don't seem to get is that it doesn't matter, I don't want to talk to *you* about any of my personal business. I didn't call you, and there is absolutely no law that requires me to discuss it with you.
I feel much the same way about credit card offers made by telemarketers and the credit card companies themselves. Frankly, if it's something I need or care about I'll come around to it, otherwise my ignorance is my own problem, and not yours or anyone elses.
Geez... can't help but laugh at your retort. So in a nutshell you are saying something which I think I would even agree with:
'Let's try and make things better, rather than worse'
Okay, I dig that. The rest of your comments are either blatantly false or irrelevant.
From my experience, having spent large sums of time in Frankfurt/Paris and London, that it's more or less the same as it is in the US. If you live in Germany and something happens in France most will know about it. If something happens in Uzbekistan, 90% of the population would just go 'uhhhh'?
Look, my biggest gripe with the euros is the self-riteous BS that continues to spew from folks that haven't actually bothered to understand the issues and the various sides. It's true there is some of the same nonsense in the US, but for the most part the ignorant just don't bother to think about ir or as in your case make an ass of themselves on/.
Man, I was totally on your side until you made all the typical uniformed rants about Iraq. Iraq is a disaster, I'll side with you there, but over time it WILL settle down, NOT get worst. The Abu Ghraib hype was just that hype. There was NO abuse to the degree that it was made out to be abuse. Many of the techniques that were used at Abu Ghraib were tried and true methods of breaking the enemy to extract information. If you have a problem with that, then you won't like living in Europe or anywhere else on the planet where torture methods are either unchecked or much more drastic.
The people in Iraq are making an effort to support their puppet government (and I use puppet here to make you feel a little better about my statement). The sheer volume of folks who voted back in January is proof of that. Would you have done the same, knowing that you might be killed at the voting booth, or even worst that some gang of thugs might come down your street looking for voters.
You talk about thousands of lives. Most of which were military or insurgent (misanthropes) fighters. All this nonsense about civilian deaths is way overstated, not to say that those deaths aren't relevant, but it's a freaking war zone. People die in war zones! If you are a civilian and you know a battle is coming to your city, maybe you should get the hell out of there, because otherwise your just stupid, or you side with or are an active participant of the insurgency.
It's really insane the ignorance of people, and especially those in Europe. The sad thing is their memory is so short. WWII, Germans were sending rockets to London and blowing up entire cities on the easter front while at the same time exterminating all civilians who didn't agree with them. The French decimated villages under Napoleon. And Let's not even discuss the actions of the Ottoman's and before Roman empire.
The US forces compared to the brutality of these regimes (some not so many years ago) is really pretty lame, and governed by laws and rules, most of which no other nation on the planet abides by. Look at the Vietnam war for how well the Geneva convention was used by the enemy.
True they would have lost $375, however your friend might have just not purchased all the albums, meaning the artists that he liked never got a penny from him anyway.
The records companies need to die. That's the message that's ringing in the air. They've raped the artists long enough.
I only disagree about the commercials. The commerccials are not useful for the content, and if I pay to download the broadcast, I don't want to be hammered with ads for feminine products and crap cars.
There is also another aspect to this. They no longer pay nielsen's for ratings, and no telling who else for doing market research. downloading tv does cut out many middle men here, and you know what, I'm all for that.
The lack of commercials is only a small part of their issue. It's lack of control. Do you think they honestly don't have some idea about distribution on the net??? The issue is that they aren't making money off the distribution, and like all large organizations they move at a snail's pace.
Fortunately, I guess, the upside to this nonsense is more people will give up trying to find their favorite shows on the net and buy up the various hd capture cards out there, and we'll finally, and hopefully, see the rebirth of local broadcasting as people move to Antenna based tv viewing again.
I did just that 3 months ago and within about 5 minutes I can take the transport stream and pluck out the obnoxious commercials and then view it on my HTPC in raw transport-stream (I say raw, it's really mpeg2) which is actually better picture than most of the torrents even though it's usually 4-8GB an hour.
"syndication, they often cut 3-5 minutes of the episodes, and sometimes cut funny scenes. Most of the torrents still have the commercials in them, and are the syndication versions. Or, they have "ads" for all the warez kiddies who distribute them. I don't want to see that any more than I want to see ads for Pepsi when I pay $10 for a movie ticket."
Um...
I've never seen an ad in ANY of the 500 gig of TV shows I've downloaded. The warez kiddies don't insert their own, and the only case where I've seen one do that was a dvd rip I downloaded (which btw, I purchased after viewing and liking it).
And btw, I did download all of the Battlestar Galactica episodes, then tivo'd them when they FINALLY broadcast in the US and just recently purchased the DVD set of the season. Now multiply this experience to basically all the shows I've enjoyed this season, and you see the MPAA, NAB and all the other FBI wanna-be's are really just encouraging me to NOT give them money.
bingo... That's the key... keep it consistent with other like-minded software and you'll go a lot further than re-defining the usage paradigm.
My biggest complaint with most if not all Linux (and opensource software) is the massive amount of time spent on building fully themed customizable interfaces and virtually no time at all on making the mouse as responsive as it is in say windows. I spent an entire day a few months back trying to find a desktop environment/window manager for Linux that was as fast as my windows desktop on the same hardware. I failed in that task, but at the end I was looking at pure window managers with no 'extras' which is basically all that anyone needs.
Even MacOS X sucks in comparison to windows in feel and responsiveness.
Excellent comment. Gunsmoke lasted 25 or 26 years and it wasn't because the old-west was really that interesting, it was because Matt Dillon was the man everyone wanted to be, and the character sub-plots and interaction kept you coming back to see if kitty and Matt were ever going to get together and so on.
I've really enjoyed this years Enterprise or at least some of the more recent episodes because the show is getting back to the basics of ST and moving on from the xindi nonsense and the nightmare that was years 1 and 2 which I still actually enjoyed but weren't on par with Voyager or TNG.
The fact that Battlestar Galactica has had equal or more viewers during the same timeframe with Enterprise, and that's with stories that aren't nearly as interesting as some of the plots in Enterprise, tells you that the characters are the key.
Bacula and Blalok are great. I like all the enterprise characters but they have almost no depth and that's simply bad writing.
This is going to sound shallow and it's also been pounded into the ground time and time again, but seriously the theme song really sets the tone for the whole show. 99.9% of the time I try to fast forward through it so I don't get discouraged and go watch an infomercial or something. I guess if I could alter the show, I would dump the theme and resurrect the original ST theme. I would also try to work on the characters. Get them into something that we can relate to better.
You can take all the DHTML frankly and shove it. That is my biggest complaint with today's web is the incessant user-unfriendly and distracting 'extras' sites are adding. Since they've learned that pop-(up|down|under|around) ads are only 1% effective against the newer browsers they've started exploiting the features of DHTML.
The new pop-ups which slide on top of virtually half the news outlets news articles are far more annoying and disrupting than the crap we used to have to deal with.
What's sad is it doesn't do me or anyone any good to complain because marketers and worst still portal sites think it's their right to push that garbage on to my screen. Sort of like Scott Richter thinks he has a right to send me email I've never asked for.
Speaking of google, I'm over the google adwords thing. It was kind of cute, but now it's annoying and needs to be tossed.
While I'm ranting, I'm really over pdf. Some sites have just given up building proper web sites and gone to links to 100 page pdf files that take forever to download and have absolutely 0 rich content that would have required anything more than a pre tag. Most of these sites seem to also always be starving for bandwidth which shows just how truly informed these people were to begin with. And some actually think this is protecting their content somehow. What a sick sad world this has become!
Why are we wasting time on a project like this? Why not just fix and speed up Mozilla Mail? Same thing applies to Phoenix. I don't get why people are so quick to branch when they could actually do more good by fixing the broken code.
Seems to me, instead of moaning about the incidents (in this case restricting the sale of violent games) we should be thinking about how to restrict the lawmakers so they can't create more laws.
Of course this is revolutionary talk, and with our Homeland Security nonsense in place, I'm sure I'll be getting a visit from my local Citizen Corp (Gestapo) representative.
Thanks for the information, and this clears up the original comment for me.
I'm guessing that an MP3, since it's not either a copy or a 'remake' of the original song, could be considered a derivative work (lower bit rate, compressed etc).;)
Slashdot Mirror
That thinks this constant stream of blizzard/wow news is getting a little annoying on slashdot???
Granted, I've played and occaisionally play wow today, but when at work and when on slashdot, I'm not really that interested in that game. Maybe I'm just old or something.
At level 70, maybe you can go do those instances with only 25 (I know we can pretty much do MC with 25 today), but the word is that the old content is not changing.
wow...
I assume you've never been a pally at Chrommie, or a mage at Luci???
That's 40 man content that isn't going away and in large part was designed when decursive and it's ilk were made.
This, prevent gameplay automation argument is hogwash. The botting software, which is truly the thing Blizzard needs to stop doesn't use any client scripting (which decursive is).
Pretty common response from people today...
"The world didn't exist before OSX"
or... 15 years before that
"The world didn't exist before Macintosh"
The mac and OS X are merely a sum of the history of Apple. You know, before they had the Mac Mini and your beloved iPod, they actually did some interesting things with a few spare parts and couple of off-the-shelf chips.
What is this (UK) you speak of? Is that south of Texas?
No, I disagree with that completely. I'd rather do end-game raids with my guild than levelling a character. It's the grind that sucks for me and the reason why I DON'T have 100 alts laying around. Everytime I try to level another character I hit 30 and just say 'screw it' I'm sick of this.
"Satalite radio is not gaining popularity because it's digital, no one really cares that it's digital. The sound quality is the same as a strong FM signal."
Are you kidding? I have had both Sirius and XM and the sound quality is horrible. No highs, no lows and it sounds like it's being recorded behind a sheet of tin. I agree with everything else you said though. I actually never listen to my Sat radio and find myself only listening to the local NPR station which quite frankly is much more interesting and informative than the teen top 40s. I also dislike Howard Stern. The guy has funny moments, but overall his humor is tired and boring to me now. Only so many lesbian fart jokes I can take in a normal morning.
Yes, and it is bad.
Basically what you are doing is similiar to what the long distance carriers used to do in the US. They would call you up almost nightly (although it was probably more like monthly) and harass you about how little or how much you could save switching to their various plans.
The point that telemarketers don't seem to get is that it doesn't matter, I don't want to talk to *you* about any of my personal business. I didn't call you, and there is absolutely no law that requires me to discuss it with you.
I feel much the same way about credit card offers made by telemarketers and the credit card companies themselves. Frankly, if it's something I need or care about I'll come around to it, otherwise my ignorance is my own problem, and not yours or anyone elses.
"You can't miss the bear!"
Nah, you won't give them any of your time. We typically call those kinds of people bums.
Geez... can't help but laugh at your retort. So in a nutshell you are saying something which I think I would even agree with:
/.
'Let's try and make things better, rather than worse'
Okay, I dig that. The rest of your comments are either blatantly false or irrelevant.
From my experience, having spent large sums of time in Frankfurt/Paris and London, that it's more or less the same as it is in the US. If you live in Germany and something happens in France most will know about it. If something happens in Uzbekistan, 90% of the population would just go 'uhhhh'?
Look, my biggest gripe with the euros is the self-riteous BS that continues to spew from folks that haven't actually bothered to understand the issues and the various sides. It's true there is some of the same nonsense in the US, but for the most part the ignorant just don't bother to think about ir or as in your case make an ass of themselves on
Man, I was totally on your side until you made all the typical uniformed rants about Iraq. Iraq is a disaster, I'll side with you there, but over time it WILL settle down, NOT get worst. The Abu Ghraib hype was just that hype. There was NO abuse to the degree that it was made out to be abuse. Many of the techniques that were used at Abu Ghraib were tried and true methods of breaking the enemy to extract information. If you have a problem with that, then you won't like living in Europe or anywhere else on the planet where torture methods are either unchecked or much more drastic.
The people in Iraq are making an effort to support their puppet government (and I use puppet here to make you feel a little better about my statement). The sheer volume of folks who voted back in January is proof of that. Would you have done the same, knowing that you might be killed at the voting booth, or even worst that some gang of thugs might come down your street looking for voters.
You talk about thousands of lives. Most of which were military or insurgent (misanthropes) fighters. All this nonsense about civilian deaths is way overstated, not to say that those deaths aren't relevant, but it's a freaking war zone. People die in war zones! If you are a civilian and you know a battle is coming to your city, maybe you should get the hell out of there, because otherwise your just stupid, or you side with or are an active participant of the insurgency.
It's really insane the ignorance of people, and especially those in Europe. The sad thing is their memory is so short. WWII, Germans were sending rockets to London and blowing up entire cities on the easter front while at the same time exterminating all civilians who didn't agree with them. The French decimated villages under Napoleon. And Let's not even discuss the actions of the Ottoman's and before Roman empire.
The US forces compared to the brutality of these regimes (some not so many years ago) is really pretty lame, and governed by laws and rules, most of which no other nation on the planet abides by. Look at the Vietnam war for how well the Geneva convention was used by the enemy.
True they would have lost $375, however your friend might have just not purchased all the albums, meaning the artists that he liked never got a penny from him anyway.
The records companies need to die. That's the message that's ringing in the air. They've raped the artists long enough.
Good post.
I only disagree about the commercials. The commerccials are not useful for the content, and if I pay to download the broadcast, I don't want to be hammered with ads for feminine products and crap cars.
There is also another aspect to this. They no longer pay nielsen's for ratings, and no telling who else for doing market research. downloading tv does cut out many middle men here, and you know what, I'm all for that.
The lack of commercials is only a small part of their issue. It's lack of control. Do you think they honestly don't have some idea about distribution on the net??? The issue is that they aren't making money off the distribution, and like all large organizations they move at a snail's pace.
d p130.asp
Fortunately, I guess, the upside to this nonsense is more people will give up trying to find their favorite shows on the net and buy up the various hd capture cards out there, and we'll finally, and hopefully, see the rebirth of local broadcasting as people move to Antenna based tv viewing again.
I did just that 3 months ago and within about 5 minutes I can take the transport stream and pluck out the obnoxious commercials and then view it on my HTPC in raw transport-stream (I say raw, it's really mpeg2) which is actually better picture than most of the torrents even though it's usually 4-8GB an hour.
I went with an
http://www.digitalconnection.com/Products/Video/m
however, I'm preparing to build out a mythtv box with 3 pchdtv cards:
http://www.pchdtv.com/
Needless to say, I'm not going to subscribe to cable, and I let my DirecTV subscription end and now that Voom is gone, I have no pay-to-play tv.
"syndication, they often cut 3-5 minutes of the episodes, and sometimes cut funny scenes. Most of the torrents still have the commercials in them, and are the syndication versions. Or, they have "ads" for all the warez kiddies who distribute them. I don't want to see that any more than I want to see ads for Pepsi when I pay $10 for a movie ticket."
Um...
I've never seen an ad in ANY of the 500 gig of TV shows I've downloaded. The warez kiddies don't insert their own, and the only case where I've seen one do that was a dvd rip I downloaded (which btw, I purchased after viewing and liking it).
And btw, I did download all of the Battlestar Galactica episodes, then tivo'd them when they FINALLY broadcast in the US and just recently purchased the DVD set of the season. Now multiply this experience to basically all the shows I've enjoyed this season, and you see the MPAA, NAB and all the other FBI wanna-be's are really just encouraging me to NOT give them money.
bingo... That's the key... keep it consistent with other like-minded software and you'll go a lot further than re-defining the usage paradigm.
My biggest complaint with most if not all Linux (and opensource software) is the massive amount of time spent on building fully themed customizable interfaces and virtually no time at all on making the mouse as responsive as it is in say windows. I spent an entire day a few months back trying to find a desktop environment/window manager for Linux that was as fast as my windows desktop on the same hardware. I failed in that task, but at the end I was looking at pure window managers with no 'extras' which is basically all that anyone needs.
Even MacOS X sucks in comparison to windows in feel and responsiveness.
I would rather see a ST based in the mirror universe where everyone has beards and kills each other for power (more like the real world we live in).
Excellent comment. Gunsmoke lasted 25 or 26 years and it wasn't because the old-west was really that interesting, it was because Matt Dillon was the man everyone wanted to be, and the character sub-plots and interaction kept you coming back to see if kitty and Matt were ever going to get together and so on.
I've really enjoyed this years Enterprise or at least some of the more recent episodes because the show is getting back to the basics of ST and moving on from the xindi nonsense and the nightmare that was years 1 and 2 which I still actually enjoyed but weren't on par with Voyager or TNG.
The fact that Battlestar Galactica has had equal or more viewers during the same timeframe with Enterprise, and that's with stories that aren't nearly as interesting as some of the plots in Enterprise, tells you that the characters are the key.
Bacula and Blalok are great. I like all the enterprise characters but they have almost no depth and that's simply bad writing.
This is going to sound shallow and it's also been pounded into the ground time and time again, but seriously the theme song really sets the tone for the whole show. 99.9% of the time I try to fast forward through it so I don't get discouraged and go watch an infomercial or something. I guess if I could alter the show, I would dump the theme and resurrect the original ST theme. I would also try to work on the characters. Get them into something that we can relate to better.
You can take all the DHTML frankly and shove it. That is my biggest complaint with today's web is the incessant user-unfriendly and distracting 'extras' sites are adding. Since they've learned that pop-(up|down|under|around) ads are only 1% effective against the newer browsers they've started exploiting the features of DHTML.
The new pop-ups which slide on top of virtually half the news outlets news articles are far more annoying and disrupting than the crap we used to have to deal with.
What's sad is it doesn't do me or anyone any good to complain because marketers and worst still portal sites think it's their right to push that garbage on to my screen. Sort of like Scott Richter thinks he has a right to send me email I've never asked for.
Speaking of google, I'm over the google adwords thing. It was kind of cute, but now it's annoying and needs to be tossed.
While I'm ranting, I'm really over pdf. Some sites have just given up building proper web sites and gone to links to 100 page pdf files that take forever to download and have absolutely 0 rich content that would have required anything more than a pre tag. Most of these sites seem to also always be starving for bandwidth which shows just how truly informed these people were to begin with. And some actually think this is protecting their content somehow. What a sick sad world this has become!
Why are we wasting time on a project like this? Why not just fix and speed up Mozilla Mail? Same thing applies to Phoenix. I don't get why people are so quick to branch when they could actually do more good by fixing the broken code.
I'm 33... I live on AIM, Y!, MSN instant messaging. So do all my coworkers for the past 5 years. It's here buddy, adopt it.
Every law created narrows your rights.
Seems to me, instead of moaning about the incidents (in this case restricting the sale of violent games) we should be thinking about how to restrict the lawmakers so they can't create more laws.
Of course this is revolutionary talk, and with our Homeland Security nonsense in place, I'm sure I'll be getting a visit from my local Citizen Corp (Gestapo) representative.
Thanks for the information, and this clears up the original comment for me.
;)
I'm guessing that an MP3, since it's not either a copy or a 'remake' of the original song, could be considered a derivative work (lower bit rate, compressed etc).
Sam