You have no idea what you're talking about. Many of my points were pointed at how things were LAST YEAR at the Burning Crusade release. At the time, very very few people could kill Gruul, and killing Hydross required your entire raid to be fully buffed with every elixir possible.
I've been through the old world raid content, from the first Onyxia kill on my server in March 05, through MC, BWL, AQ, and Naxx to be a guild that got the 8th worldwide Kel'thuzad kill. When the expansion was released, it destroyed so many guilds. It sent a lot of people adrift out of guilds that had no more place for them. Other guilds were ready to enter 25-mans, and had the people, but found themselves having to fracture the guild into 2-3 groups to do a 10-man. A parallel path through Karazhan wouldn't have hurt casuals or people not ready for 25-mans, on the contrary. I quickly grew disgusted of these problems with the game and quit for some time. I hope they learn for WotLK.
Regarding itemization at release, it was really retarded. Many blues from level 70 items were better than Karazhan epics (I remember a blue chest plate with +healing from SL for example being better than the epic chest from Kara).
Regarding heroics, the problem is that many of them are too hard for people in blues, and are more balanced toward people with some epics. The level 70 instances especially drop the same stuff in heroic mode as in regular, apart from the last boss, and it makes them really annoying (all the TK ones, SL, SH, Sethekk, BM). But many of them you don't run for gear, but for badges. The new badge gear helped rebalance the utility of heroics and make them a lot more interesting and useful from a progression point of view.
Many of the issues I raised have now been fixed, been side-stepped, or have had improvements. It doesn't change the fact it was all broken at release of TBC.
The expansion isn't bad, but there were some serious fuckups in the progression as laid-out.
- The requirement for players (and guilds) to go through a 10-man instance to reach 25-mans - The level of difficulty of the early raid encounters at release was horrible. Gruul, Magtheridon, Hydross were really over-tuned for starter encounters. - The lack of a clear progression path between 5-mans/heroics/10mans. Too many heroics drop crappy gear with very little use for the people who can actually clear them. Some indication of the level of difficulty of heroics would help, with some progression among them. Make some of them harder than others, sure, but make sure to enhance the drops in the hardest heroics. - The itemization issues at release. Many epics and Kara items were worse than some rare items. - The over-reliance on consumables. It was somewhat lessened with the change to elixirs, but buff potions and health/mana potions used to be a way to compensate for deficient gear or on specific, hard encounters. Make one really hard encounter in a raid instance that requires buffing, but when every boss becomes impossible if the entire raid isn't fully buffed the game changes from raiding to farming.
It's quite faster. I recently leveled a paladin (protection) to level 70, and the speed going from 30-50 was _really_ faster, while 50-60 was quite noticeable also. It helps getting you into the Outlands content faster, where most of the people are.
Following computer virus loss estimates, and the *AA estimates, I think we can define a new branch of mathematics, defined as the branch of mathematics devoted to making up numbers.
He also says he can define anyone he wants as a terrorist.
I can understand where in some situations this might be necessary. Enacting martial law in times of war (civil or otherwise), suspending certain civil rights momentarily (with clearly defined renewal requirements) can be justified.
Saying "terrorists don't have rights" and then defining a terrorist as "anyone we name a terrorist" amounts to saying "no one has rights".
Finally, the idea that in the US, only "US citizens" have civil rights is an affront to every humanist and enlightenment thinker. This isn't the Middle Ages, guys, but the 21st century, and human rights applies to every human being on this planet (or others for that matter).
The entire economy of the southern United States is dependent on slavery! We can't abolish slavery or people will lose their jobs and the economy will be destroyed!
All those people working in "safeguarding intellectual property" are engaged in nothing else than the propagation of a myth, namely that ideas can be controlled. My brain is an unlicensed, un-DRM'ed recording device you know. You should do something about it before I manage to memorize an entire movie's dialogue or some piece of copyrighted music and play it back to myself. Ooh, too late!
I certainly do. In another thread in this discussion, I mentioned politicians in a very general way. Both parties in the US are really on the same side in the end: that of the corporations.
The situation isn't quite as bad in Canada or the EU, but it's getting worse here too.
The government is by the people for the people. At least in theory.
But the politicians are those who enact laws, and although they are in theory elected by the people, such elections are only possible thanks to the big money corporations give them. So, yes, those politicians have their priorities very straight: helping those that give them the money they need to keep their jobs.
You DO realize Bush has already suspended Habeas Corpus right? For "terrorists", in theory, but wait till they amend this law to label people who do "illegal copying" (or anyone who does anything that deprives any big corporation of profits) as an "economic terrorist".
Although the US courts have blasted him and congress again and again over that, he keeps going at it.
I went through my calculations rather quickly, but I wasn't so far off.
Most file copies I've done so far have been for files that are owned by the logged-in admin user. Usually, to make a backup of the data, or to put back data on a new machine from an old HD or from backed-up data. Most of Vista's time is spent "preparing" the copy, which I do believe includes checking file permissions. Now, you might say that shouldn't count, but I'll say it does, because it impacts my work significantly.
If file permissions are incorrect, it should just ask me to confirm the operation with an admin password. Who cares what the perms are on read.
Regarding the "new" memory manager, I've read the comments and information about it, and it's all cute and nice on paper. But in real life, 1GB isn't enough for office work...
The RAM usage at startup for a newly-installed system is simply absurd. 600-700MB is not an exaggeration. The graphics card needs for the new environment (without which it's mostly XP right? It's not like there's a new object-oriented file system in there right?) are quite hgh for most business needs.
The slow file copy isn't a joke. We're talking 1hr+ to copy 2.5GB to a FW hard drive from internal SATA. That's about 25MB/min, 120 times slower than the peak speed of FW. I think you can get more out of a parallel port.
There are some nice additions. But it's not worth the trouble, as some of the flaws totally override those.
There's a difference in whether the supply of goods is artificially constrained (I mean, the company in this case could give every piece of furniture to everyone with little to no cost to them), restrained through actual physical constraint (stealing gold for example, a substance which is difficult to find/extract/produce), or restrained through the need of a system to retain a certain balance (like money for example).
If every user of that game/virtual world suddenly got everything free, it might affect that company's pockets, but it wouldn't destroy the world economy, right?
XP is fairly stable on its own. From the point of view of a regular user, it's not too bad.
The problems I have with it are more of a technical point of view, about how it's not very solid, hard to troubleshoot, how to cure it if it gets borked (especially by spyware or trojans), and how stupidly hard it is to reinstall and make the new install workable. The inability to transfer software from one installation to another is very annoying. The way everything is stored in monolithic files which can only be edited through the MS interface (the registry) is a constant issue. If it gets corrupted or deleted, you're fucked. There are ways to recover, but it's not simple, and doesn't always work.
Comparatively, on a Mac OS X machine, I can backup 3 folders and I get everything: apps, data, configurations. If a pref gets hosed, it's a single text file which I can consult, edit, or delete (similar to how it is on Linux which I also like a lot). I can rebuild an OS X machine in little more than an hour, whereas Windows reinstalls take easily 3 hours including the entire patching process (which even starting from SP2 is over 100 updates now), and most software isn't even installed at that point, where with OS X, 99% of the software that I backed up is functional.
It's not quite as good, but almost on a Linux machine. grab $home,/etc, a package list, and off you go reinstalling quite easily.
It is like seeing who has the biggest dick. I play WoW, and understand how PvP works in a MMORPG, but this quote of yours is the epitome of what most PvP feels like to me.
It's a term from DaoC meaning Realm vs Realm, aka faction PvP. Having never played DaoC, and not really liking WoW PvP myself (which is mostly factional), I never understood the fascination with it.
If someone is stupid enough to download something, run it and give it the admin password, it will obviously be able to take control of the machine. No operating system or security software will stop that.
Actually, yes, certain things that are illegal in the US should certainly be legal in my opinion. Heck, many of the things you mentioned are legal in Canada, luckily!
But what you are proposing the NSA ought to be able to do is NOT what they are currently doing at all, is it? They are broadly spying on anyone and everyone, without any warrant, outside of the bonds of the US' constitution. That is unconscionable. The NSA already had the rights and ability to spy on the US' enemies abroad before. This program, OTOH, is about spying on everyone and everything, which isn't quite the same thing. And no, I don't think helping your government do anything to "defeat" their "enemies" is a good thing. There are rights which should not be violated whatever the enemies, and I believe that those rights should apply to every human being, not just citizens of your own country.
Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety. - Benjamin Franklin
As long as you can verify that someone relatively neutral is overseeing the procedure, and that it targets specific individuals, instead of being overbroad. The lack of judicial review in this case is the major issue.
The FBI does wiretaps every day across the US, as do other police forces across the world, to catch criminals. Except that in most countries they need warrants to do so. Are you objecting to such?
Slashdot Mirror
You have no idea what you're talking about. Many of my points were pointed at how things were LAST YEAR at the Burning Crusade release. At the time, very very few people could kill Gruul, and killing Hydross required your entire raid to be fully buffed with every elixir possible.
I've been through the old world raid content, from the first Onyxia kill on my server in March 05, through MC, BWL, AQ, and Naxx to be a guild that got the 8th worldwide Kel'thuzad kill. When the expansion was released, it destroyed so many guilds. It sent a lot of people adrift out of guilds that had no more place for them. Other guilds were ready to enter 25-mans, and had the people, but found themselves having to fracture the guild into 2-3 groups to do a 10-man. A parallel path through Karazhan wouldn't have hurt casuals or people not ready for 25-mans, on the contrary. I quickly grew disgusted of these problems with the game and quit for some time. I hope they learn for WotLK.
Regarding itemization at release, it was really retarded. Many blues from level 70 items were better than Karazhan epics (I remember a blue chest plate with +healing from SL for example being better than the epic chest from Kara).
Regarding heroics, the problem is that many of them are too hard for people in blues, and are more balanced toward people with some epics. The level 70 instances especially drop the same stuff in heroic mode as in regular, apart from the last boss, and it makes them really annoying (all the TK ones, SL, SH, Sethekk, BM). But many of them you don't run for gear, but for badges. The new badge gear helped rebalance the utility of heroics and make them a lot more interesting and useful from a progression point of view.
Many of the issues I raised have now been fixed, been side-stepped, or have had improvements. It doesn't change the fact it was all broken at release of TBC.
The expansion isn't bad, but there were some serious fuckups in the progression as laid-out.
- The requirement for players (and guilds) to go through a 10-man instance to reach 25-mans
- The level of difficulty of the early raid encounters at release was horrible. Gruul, Magtheridon, Hydross were really over-tuned for starter encounters.
- The lack of a clear progression path between 5-mans/heroics/10mans. Too many heroics drop crappy gear with very little use for the people who can actually clear them. Some indication of the level of difficulty of heroics would help, with some progression among them. Make some of them harder than others, sure, but make sure to enhance the drops in the hardest heroics.
- The itemization issues at release. Many epics and Kara items were worse than some rare items.
- The over-reliance on consumables. It was somewhat lessened with the change to elixirs, but buff potions and health/mana potions used to be a way to compensate for deficient gear or on specific, hard encounters. Make one really hard encounter in a raid instance that requires buffing, but when every boss becomes impossible if the entire raid isn't fully buffed the game changes from raiding to farming.
It's quite faster. I recently leveled a paladin (protection) to level 70, and the speed going from 30-50 was _really_ faster, while 50-60 was quite noticeable also. It helps getting you into the Outlands content faster, where most of the people are.
You wish. Copyright infringement has monetary penalties set in the law with no relationship to the actual losses.
I had never heard this neologism before, but I shall adopt it right away!
Following computer virus loss estimates, and the *AA estimates, I think we can define a new branch of mathematics, defined as the branch of mathematics devoted to making up numbers.
Indeed. Of course they're going to delete such posts from their discussion forums, it's not the correct place to disclose security holes and issues!
Dude, this is Slashdot, we don't give a shit about the car, we want pics of the goddamn flux capacitor.
Seriously.
He also says he can define anyone he wants as a terrorist.
I can understand where in some situations this might be necessary. Enacting martial law in times of war (civil or otherwise), suspending certain civil rights momentarily (with clearly defined renewal requirements) can be justified.
Saying "terrorists don't have rights" and then defining a terrorist as "anyone we name a terrorist" amounts to saying "no one has rights".
Finally, the idea that in the US, only "US citizens" have civil rights is an affront to every humanist and enlightenment thinker. This isn't the Middle Ages, guys, but the 21st century, and human rights applies to every human being on this planet (or others for that matter).
The entire economy of the southern United States is dependent on slavery! We can't abolish slavery or people will lose their jobs and the economy will be destroyed!
All those people working in "safeguarding intellectual property" are engaged in nothing else than the propagation of a myth, namely that ideas can be controlled. My brain is an unlicensed, un-DRM'ed recording device you know. You should do something about it before I manage to memorize an entire movie's dialogue or some piece of copyrighted music and play it back to myself. Ooh, too late!
I certainly do. In another thread in this discussion, I mentioned politicians in a very general way. Both parties in the US are really on the same side in the end: that of the corporations.
The situation isn't quite as bad in Canada or the EU, but it's getting worse here too.
The government is by the people for the people. At least in theory.
But the politicians are those who enact laws, and although they are in theory elected by the people, such elections are only possible thanks to the big money corporations give them. So, yes, those politicians have their priorities very straight: helping those that give them the money they need to keep their jobs.
You DO realize Bush has already suspended Habeas Corpus right? For "terrorists", in theory, but wait till they amend this law to label people who do "illegal copying" (or anyone who does anything that deprives any big corporation of profits) as an "economic terrorist".
Although the US courts have blasted him and congress again and again over that, he keeps going at it.
I went through my calculations rather quickly, but I wasn't so far off.
Most file copies I've done so far have been for files that are owned by the logged-in admin user. Usually, to make a backup of the data, or to put back data on a new machine from an old HD or from backed-up data. Most of Vista's time is spent "preparing" the copy, which I do believe includes checking file permissions. Now, you might say that shouldn't count, but I'll say it does, because it impacts my work significantly.
If file permissions are incorrect, it should just ask me to confirm the operation with an admin password. Who cares what the perms are on read.
Regarding the "new" memory manager, I've read the comments and information about it, and it's all cute and nice on paper. But in real life, 1GB isn't enough for office work...
The RAM usage at startup for a newly-installed system is simply absurd. 600-700MB is not an exaggeration. The graphics card needs for the new environment (without which it's mostly XP right? It's not like there's a new object-oriented file system in there right?) are quite hgh for most business needs.
The slow file copy isn't a joke. We're talking 1hr+ to copy 2.5GB to a FW hard drive from internal SATA. That's about 25MB/min, 120 times slower than the peak speed of FW. I think you can get more out of a parallel port.
There are some nice additions. But it's not worth the trouble, as some of the flaws totally override those.
There's a difference in whether the supply of goods is artificially constrained (I mean, the company in this case could give every piece of furniture to everyone with little to no cost to them), restrained through actual physical constraint (stealing gold for example, a substance which is difficult to find/extract/produce), or restrained through the need of a system to retain a certain balance (like money for example).
If every user of that game/virtual world suddenly got everything free, it might affect that company's pockets, but it wouldn't destroy the world economy, right?
And when I was young, we could buy whole BAGS of theme parks for a penny!
Now get off my lawn!
XP is fairly stable on its own. From the point of view of a regular user, it's not too bad.
/etc, a package list, and off you go reinstalling quite easily.
The problems I have with it are more of a technical point of view, about how it's not very solid, hard to troubleshoot, how to cure it if it gets borked (especially by spyware or trojans), and how stupidly hard it is to reinstall and make the new install workable. The inability to transfer software from one installation to another is very annoying. The way everything is stored in monolithic files which can only be edited through the MS interface (the registry) is a constant issue. If it gets corrupted or deleted, you're fucked. There are ways to recover, but it's not simple, and doesn't always work.
Comparatively, on a Mac OS X machine, I can backup 3 folders and I get everything: apps, data, configurations. If a pref gets hosed, it's a single text file which I can consult, edit, or delete (similar to how it is on Linux which I also like a lot). I can rebuild an OS X machine in little more than an hour, whereas Windows reinstalls take easily 3 hours including the entire patching process (which even starting from SP2 is over 100 updates now), and most software isn't even installed at that point, where with OS X, 99% of the software that I backed up is functional.
It's not quite as good, but almost on a Linux machine. grab $home,
How is it more dangerous than the inside threat of Christian Fundamentalists that threaten the very nature of the US?
It's a term from DaoC meaning Realm vs Realm, aka faction PvP. Having never played DaoC, and not really liking WoW PvP myself (which is mostly factional), I never understood the fascination with it.
The only cure to stupidity is intelligence.
If someone is stupid enough to download something, run it and give it the admin password, it will obviously be able to take control of the machine. No operating system or security software will stop that.
I'd rather have a TIMECUBE!
Actually, yes, certain things that are illegal in the US should certainly be legal in my opinion. Heck, many of the things you mentioned are legal in Canada, luckily!
But what you are proposing the NSA ought to be able to do is NOT what they are currently doing at all, is it? They are broadly spying on anyone and everyone, without any warrant, outside of the bonds of the US' constitution. That is unconscionable. The NSA already had the rights and ability to spy on the US' enemies abroad before. This program, OTOH, is about spying on everyone and everything, which isn't quite the same thing. And no, I don't think helping your government do anything to "defeat" their "enemies" is a good thing. There are rights which should not be violated whatever the enemies, and I believe that those rights should apply to every human being, not just citizens of your own country.
Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.
- Benjamin Franklin
As long as you can verify that someone relatively neutral is overseeing the procedure, and that it targets specific individuals, instead of being overbroad. The lack of judicial review in this case is the major issue.
The FBI does wiretaps every day across the US, as do other police forces across the world, to catch criminals. Except that in most countries they need warrants to do so. Are you objecting to such?