I don't care about the difference in the cultists or wildlife in stv. You have to kill them by millions to get anything (gear or xp). A grind is a grind is a grind. And yes, *I hate both* of them.
And at that level of granularity, you can describe the entire game that way. And that general description of the game, you dislike. Getting back to what I said in my first reply: Then this is probably not your game.
I leveled all my characters doing the *same* bloody quests, doing the same damned zones. Why? Because you have to. If you don't, you have to grind even more mobs to get comparative xp. Don't pretend there is a variety or even a choice (aside from class quests, which really are a few) in doing quests/zones when leveling.
Well you simply haven't tried then. I leveled three characters to 60 only by questing and running instances and I saw many different areas on all three. If you care more about raw efficiency and thus only choose the fastest path then no you won't see anything different and that's because since you're viewing leveling as nothing but a grind as opposed to a chance to do something different you've actually made it more repetitive than it needs to be.
And logical fallacies are generally considered valid arguments... You are playing WoW too much.
You're reading/. too much, you forgot that saying "logical fallacy" doesn't make something so. That wasn't a propositional logic statement, it was advice that in this case is not only sound, it is apparently the advice you took. You did leave the game, no? So can you explain what your actual problem with the statement was?
Reread my post. But now you are just trolling. Go back to your cage.
*reads again* Yup, that's exactly what you're saying, and you repeated again. "A grind is a grind is a grind."
Why did you get out from under your bridge in the first place, again? Did you even have a point other than "I find the majority of WoW boring"?
Lack of density is a valid argument for explaining why rural areas have bad broadband. But it isn't a good explanation of why urban areas don't, the size of the U.S. not being relevant. Why isn't it relevant? Because the only part of the Internet where the large size of the U.S. makes a difference is in the backbones that connect the population centers. Maybe I'm mistaken, but I thought that as of now our backbones are operating at way under capacity. In other words, the distances between cities has not proven a problem for creating large internet connections between them.
So the connections between the cities are fine, what about the cities themselves? Take NY City. It's the biggest and densest city in the U.S. There's no distance argument to be made here. And there are 10 million potential customers -- that's more than the entire country of Sweden, all in one compact area! Yet if you only compare NY and ignore the rest of the country, we're still way behind in broadband.
No, sorry, the density argument holds no water at all. At least, it is clearly not the limiting factor on broadband, because where it isn't a factor at all broadband is still limited.
You are however absolutely correct about the monopolies being the cause. Why don't we have better broadband? Because the telcos neither want nor need to provide it. Hell, it wasn't until the mid to late nineties that we started to see sub-$0.10/min long-distance POTS because of the lack of competition before that. Why would they go run off and invest in more technology when there's nobody for you to go to if you think they're too slow? Right now the only "competition" we have is DSL vs cable, and they have apparently decided that it's perfectly adequate to just compete on price and the slightly different features of DSL vs cable.
So you can tell me where one can find some other "versions" of King Bangalash? You missed my point. With all your characters you killed King Bangalash exactly the same number of times (or even more). How that can be fun? Or killing 3x30 of his "lesser" clones? I get bored to the tears.
Okay, so let's say it takes you three months to get a character to 70, and another three months to get a second character to 70, you've killed King Bangalash twice in six months.
And this is supposedly worse than killing the Twilight Cultists at a rate of one per 30 seconds, non stop, for weeks upon weeks.
Maybe it's just me (and judging from the number of alts people level, it isn't) but months later with a completely different class, yeah, King Bangalash feels somewhat fresh. As opposed to seconds later killing the exact same monster with the same class.
If you're saying leveling in WoW doesn't have a lot of replay value, okay I can see that. Though I disagree to some extent since I leveled multiple characters with almost completely orthogonal quests, outside a few rather obnoxious examples like Stranglethorn. But there's a lot of areas in the game, and you're unlikely to see all of them in a single character. Even when I leveled my third character I was going to zones and doing quests that I'd never done before. And that's without ever rolling an alliance character even!
Wow, what variety? There is no variety after you reroll another character. You do the *same* quests all over again. It is the same, killing cultists in Silithus or killing wildlife in Stranglethorn Vale. You have to grind them to obscene numbers. In defense of Silithus, at least those mobs respawn fast and the zone is much smaller so it is less painful to grind them.
You're kidding, right? You're really comparing the total of 30 tigers you have to kill in STV to the literally thousands of cultists you have to grind for rep?
But, in my own defense, I only did the quests (for XP) in Silithus, never went for CC rep. And yes, I hate *all* forms of (mindless) grind*.
In other words, even you yourself are referring to what was nothing but another part of your leveling "grind" as though it were a completely different segment of the game. Because at least in the details it is. As opposed to if you were going for CC rep, when you would have been in Silithus for as long as you had taken getting from 40 to 60 without ever going anywhere but those same few cultist camps.
I have to repeat myself. What changes in scenery? When you reroll, you see all the same zones, houses, trees, npcs, mobs, quests etc.
From Durotar to Barrens to Ashenvale to Desolace to Stranglethorn and so on and so on. That's changing scenery, unlike your post-70 rep grinds, where in the time that you're sitting in one place grinding the same 10 mobs over and over as fast as they respawn, you would have gone through three separate zones while leveling. They're not even in the same ballpark of repetition. Not to mention next time you level it can be Tirisfall to Silverpine to Tauren Mill to Arathi... but you're right, that's much worse than standing in Silithus for a month killing cultists.
Again, the whole context here is leveling vs max-level rep grinds. Max level rep grinds not only don't change if you re-roll, they also don't change if you don't re-roll. They aren't a loop that repeats every three months, they're a loop that repeats every three minutes. Again, orders of magnitude of difference.
If you can't see any difference, well, then that's just you.
Heh, nice straw man. Classic: if you don't like it, leave.
Whatever, man. You're the one who said you left the game. And we're not talking about the place you live, we're talking about a game you pay a monthly fee for. "If you don't like it, leave" is the right thing to do, because as long as you give them your money you're saying "I like what you are doing please continue".
But what can I expect from someone arguing that playing through an entire game multiple times is more boring and repetitive than playing exactly one part of that game for the same amount of time.
That's funny, I found leveling to be lots of fun. Mostly because while yes you are killing lots of monsters (duh i wouldn't be playing a combat-based rpg if that wasn't what I wanted to do) it comes in the form of quests where you go after -different- monsters, or you have to infiltrate some hideout to find a specific named monster, or if you can find a group you can go level in instances.
If you can't see any difference between grinding and any form of gameplay that involves killing monsters, then it doesn't matter if we are playing the same game, you just aren't playing the right one, and i don't know why you ever thought this was the game for you.
I mean you're really comparing the wide variety of environments and tasks you're asked to do to level from 1-70, to the non-stop months-after-months killing of the exact same Cultist Camps in Silithus? And you're even saying leveling is worse? I really can't fathom.
They kinda complain about that but not as much 1-70 grind.
BS to that. What do most casuals do when they hit 70? Roll another character. Because at least when you're leveling you're seeing the scenery change and actually gaining things at an appreciable rate.
Yes it is a grind, and yes it the worst part of WoW.
* I did quit, before I ruined my life.
Good for you. The question is, what made you think you'd ever like the game in the first place? It's clearly not your playstyle in any way shape or form.
But end content being very intensive is almost necessary for their business model. Otherwise they'd have to be constantly releasing new expansions to keep everyone involved... and I suppose that's where my argument breaks down. I'm just whiney.:)
Well yeah, they have to "balance" everything around people who can play the game like it was their full-time job, and they need these people to have to spend more than one month getting through all the content so they keep paying monthly fees. Which means what's designed for hard-core raiders to spend 3 months doing is going to take us casuals years -- I'll be damn lucky if I've done a fraction of level 70 content by the time the expansion comes out, the level cap goes up to 80, and everything I did at 70 becomes irrelevent, just like what happened when TBC was released.
But while one can recognize Blizzard's need to design the game this way, I don't think it's being whiney to ask that they make it more fun to do.:)
I mean come on guys, you expect me to take you seriously but you use Outlook? Down with America, but we love the products their mega-corporations produce!
No man, they hate MS! It's just that thanks to vendor lock-in and the proprietary Exchange protocols, they have to use Outlook. Why do you think they're so pissed at us?
I don't want to start any conspiracy theories... But it was on Sept. 6th 2001 that the DoJ announced that they would no longer be pursuing the breakup of Microsoft. Sept 11th, al Qaeda attacks. Coincidence? You decide (but the answer is no).
Seriously, though. I hear people on WoW complaining about "the grind" which to me is the best part. I like questing from 1 to 70.
Uh, yeah, I guess some people complain about the leveling "grind", but really WoW has one of the nicest leveling phases, replete with quests and things to do to fit a variety of playstyles.
"The grind" that everyone complains about is the one you do after reaching the level cap. The endless, endless rep grinding for faction rewards, heroic instance keys, etc etc. And actually despite there being more reps to grind, they aren't as bad as pre-expansion when the lvl 60 rep grinds were horrible time sinks of repetitive killing. Grinding Cenarian Hold or Argent Dawn rep was as arduous as the 1-60 leveling process, but much, much more boring. Or remember when you got to go farm for cloth so that other people could get to run a raid instance? That's what people complain about.
The leveling "grind" is great for casuals. It's the top-level content that at best tolerates casuals by giving them mindless repetitive tasks to perform.
Well first the plane probably wouldn't explode, it'd probably just depressurize which could certainly kill the passengers, but probably not all of them.
Second, 911 wasn't about killing the passengers, it was about killing a lot more people by using the plane as a weapon. 9/11 would have been considered a failure had they only managed to blow up the airplanes. Look at how we see Flight 93 -- heroes who stuck it to the bad guys by foiling their plans, simply because of what could have happened instead.
Which is why I think it would be foolish to allow guns on a plane. Realistically, how many people on a plane would be carrying a gun? I wouldn't. Everyone without a gun is now an easy target for the armed terrorists. The passengers with guns would end up in a firefight with the terrorists, and that could end up either way. But terrorists armed at best with pocket knives or box cutters wouldn't be able to fend off a hundred angry passengers. So I say keep the guns off the planes.
I mean, in the same way that Earth is endangered by rogue meteorites and asteroids, the whole solar system is vulnerable to a rogue star or brown dwarf.
Here's a short story H.G. Wells wrote about the subject, called The Star.
That out of the way, I'll admit I was out on a limb because I didn't RTFA. And according to the article, they're leasing network access, as in paying a monthly fee for it, and allowing public and private entities to access it, as in giving it away for free. As in, the State of Ohio is spending taxpayer money to purchase broadband access for everyone, and they're spending that taxpayer money by giving it to the companies who provide network access. Again, according to the article, they already maintain a number of such public networks, and this is simply a consolidation. They simply aren't selling it. They aren't competing with the broadband companies, they are purchasing massive amounts of bandwidth from the broadband companies. This is exactly what government is for, pooling resources of the people to give them what they need. From satellite-guided missiles to broadband access to the formerly privately owned ranch up for sale that was one of the best rock climbing locations in central Texas.
The thing that does bother me is that this is an "executive order", meaning unlike the land purchase in Travis County, it wasn't a proposition that voters went out and decided on. The actual text of the order makes it sound more like an organizational change than it is expanding the scope of the program then that may be legitimate, under the assumption that an actual budget expansion would require at least the approval of Congress (making it more like the gift of arms aid to Israel described in the article, and unlike say the Iran/Contra scandal).
When they start complaining about the government "competing" with private enterprise, just remember that Ohio will be competing with private network service providers in the same way that the U.S. DoD competes with Boeing in jet fighters -- as in, they won't, they'll be customers. The DoD doesn't want to get into the business of building planes, and I doubt Ohio wants to create their own network company, and instead will be paying someone else to do the work.
The reason they don't like this is because the state will be a customer with the collective bargaining power of potentially every resident in the state, and therefore it will be the network providers who have to either give the state a good deal or go home without a lucrative contract. As opposed to normally when each individual has little choice in providers, and can either take the crappy DSL or cable "deal" or simply go without. It's collective bargaining that they fear.
Of course this is mostly recycled from previous discussions on municipal broadband, the "they" I speak of not referring to any specific complainers in this case.
I don't know why you'd have to have played Rogue to legitimately use the word Rogue-like. Angband, Nethack, Moria, etc are all "Rogue-like", and it's a very useful way of referring to the genre of similar games with a very recognizable style even if you haven't played the original. What's a non-vain way of saying it? Should I stop saying "sci-fi" because I haven't read whatever the first science fiction book supposedly was?
And I have played Rogue, at least enough to know that I would rather play any other Rogue-like game, because surprise it's the most primitive. I only played it because it was the only Rogue-like that I found for my Palm at the time; once I found kMoria I played that instead. I think it would be stupid to require people to play it before they can otherwise claim to appreciate the genre, since ultimately it's not a very good game compared to the other options.
Well that's what I mean. You can have whatever complexity of IPC protocol implemented in a user-space daemon. However for Process A (an application) to tell Process B (your IPC daemon) that it wants to do IPC, requires some form of IPC in itself. The kernel by necessity must be involved. Getting that data to Process C (the target of Process A's message) requires kernel-supported IPC between B and C.
That's always been the performance problem with microkernals. Since the services are all in user-space but in separate processes, in order for an app to use a service there's first the context switch into the kernel, then the context switch to the service, then back to the kernel, then back to the app. As opposed to macrokernels where you switch to kernel space then back, half as many context switches. Shared data through text files is a good example -- in a microkernel, your file system is a user-space service, and the kernel is responsible for connecting your application to that service via IPC, and more hoops must be jumped through than in a kernel-based file system driver.
Microkernels are still great due to the compartmentalization and its many advantages, which is why Mach is still a very popular research OS. It still isn't practical or even possible to take the philosophy to the extreme and get rid of all kernel-based services.
I don't know about that. I like Futurama a lot (very stoked that more episodes are coming) and appreciate the really nerdy physics, math, and computer jokes, and the old sci-fi references. But ultimately, I still like the Simpsons more. My girlfriend loves Futurama, and she isn't a geek nor avid watcher of Star Trek nor reader of Heinlein, and she's Canadian to boot so her knowledge of U.S. political history is slightly worse than mine. I assure you, she gets more than a few laughs out of the show.
Everything else, including IPC, could be in userspace.
And the user-level application process communicates with the IPC process to do IPC with some other process... how? Some things, even in microkernels, stay in the kernel out of necessity. I'm not saying you can't have user space IPC libraries, but fundamentally the act of two processes with separate memory spaces communicating requires OS involvement.
I guess it's not a bad analogy. I can see how one could describe the internet as a series of tubes. I mean, we call them "pipes" and like a pipe they have fixed flow capacity, and at the joints of these pipes you have valves that control where the water goes. That's a fine layman explanation.
What I can't figure out is, if one can say the internet is a series of tubes, how is it also not like a truck? The point about finite capacity applies to trucks as well, and frankly I think a bunch of trucks carrying cargo down the highway is a better metaphor because it is more like how the internet works -- discreet packets of data being sent from one location to another.
Yeah, so? That was back when we were trained to cooperate with hijackers. They hijacked an airplane with shivs they carved with boxcutters, and people just sat there because they thought that was the thing to do. Hell, back then they probably could have hijacked the plane by threatening to change the in-flight movie to Gigli. That doesn't mean boxcutters or shivs are threatening weapons, it means we were gullible and fell for their trick. Now? I laugh at whatever poor fool tries to hijack a plane today with boxcutters, a plastic shiv, or a Swiss Army pocket knife. Just like those poor terrorist fuckers on the flight 93 discovered when the passengers figured out what was up, that shit doesn't cut it against over a hundred angry passengers fighting for their lives.
The old standards were fine for keeping shotguns and m16s off of planes, and as long as we continue to do that I'm not particularly worried about people hijacking airplanes. Somebody pulls out a 2" knife and says they're taking over the airplane, either that guy gets stomped like a narc at a biker rally, or we deserve to die.
Hehe. Well, I have a thought along similar lines. Here's my prediction: Much like the Shoe Bomber prompted this new ridiculous screening procedure, the "Bung-hole Bomber" is going to be put-up or shut-up time for TSA and the airlines. Either they stick to policy and watch the airline industry go under, or they admit that security theater is useless and encourage us to shrug and go on with our lives.
It's this second level of idiocy that's the real problem: the notion that, in a bureaucracy, anyone who does think through the reasoning behind a policy, must be a threat.
Actually, it is usually the case that anyone who thinks through the policies of a bureaucracy is in fact a threat. A bureaucracy is basically piling layers and layers of superfluous management on top of whatever useful task the organization is supposed to be performing. Any thoughtful evaluation of the bureaucracy policies -- policies almost universally created so as to justify the bureaucracy -- is most likely going to result in the conclusion that the bureaucracy is useless. Thus trying to reason about why a policy exists is threatening to the existence of the bureaucracy.
And now I've typed that word as much as I can stand in one post.
By throwing _any_ bottle of sufficient size in the trash, dangerous explosions are prevented without a costly determination whether someone was a threat or not. On one hand, the danger is avoided. On the other hand, terrorists will go undetected and they can try again. That's what he said, and it sounds very reasonable to me.
Er, yeah, that's bad and useless for the same reason profiling is bad and useless. Here's what happens: The terrorists go through security on a "dry run", where they are carrying nothing that is actually dangerous and have no intention of causing any trouble. The whole purpose is information gathering. So they carry various containers and objects through security. Anything that is thrown out is ruled out for live runs, and any operative who is picked to be searched (possibly random, possibly profiling) is ruled out for live runs. Eventually, having been able to test the system with no risk of being caught with incriminating evidence, they have figured out who and what can get through the screening process unmolested. When the real run happens, they do exactly what the 9/11 hijackers did -- waltz right through security with no problems.
That's why it's useless. The reason it's bad? Because we think it isn't useless. What's the only thing worse than no security at all? Security Theater that doesn't make you safe but makes you think you are. A false sense of security is worse than knowing you are insecure.
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I don't care about the difference in the cultists or wildlife in stv. You have to kill them by millions to get anything (gear or xp). A grind is a grind is a grind. And yes, *I hate both* of them.
/. too much, you forgot that saying "logical fallacy" doesn't make something so. That wasn't a propositional logic statement, it was advice that in this case is not only sound, it is apparently the advice you took. You did leave the game, no? So can you explain what your actual problem with the statement was?
And at that level of granularity, you can describe the entire game that way. And that general description of the game, you dislike. Getting back to what I said in my first reply: Then this is probably not your game.
I leveled all my characters doing the *same* bloody quests, doing the same damned zones. Why? Because you have to. If you don't, you have to grind even more mobs to get comparative xp. Don't pretend there is a variety or even a choice (aside from class quests, which really are a few) in doing quests/zones when leveling.
Well you simply haven't tried then. I leveled three characters to 60 only by questing and running instances and I saw many different areas on all three. If you care more about raw efficiency and thus only choose the fastest path then no you won't see anything different and that's because since you're viewing leveling as nothing but a grind as opposed to a chance to do something different you've actually made it more repetitive than it needs to be.
And logical fallacies are generally considered valid arguments... You are playing WoW too much.
You're reading
Reread my post. But now you are just trolling. Go back to your cage.
*reads again* Yup, that's exactly what you're saying, and you repeated again. "A grind is a grind is a grind."
Why did you get out from under your bridge in the first place, again? Did you even have a point other than "I find the majority of WoW boring"?
Lack of density is a valid argument for explaining why rural areas have bad broadband. But it isn't a good explanation of why urban areas don't, the size of the U.S. not being relevant. Why isn't it relevant? Because the only part of the Internet where the large size of the U.S. makes a difference is in the backbones that connect the population centers. Maybe I'm mistaken, but I thought that as of now our backbones are operating at way under capacity. In other words, the distances between cities has not proven a problem for creating large internet connections between them.
So the connections between the cities are fine, what about the cities themselves? Take NY City. It's the biggest and densest city in the U.S. There's no distance argument to be made here. And there are 10 million potential customers -- that's more than the entire country of Sweden, all in one compact area! Yet if you only compare NY and ignore the rest of the country, we're still way behind in broadband.
No, sorry, the density argument holds no water at all. At least, it is clearly not the limiting factor on broadband, because where it isn't a factor at all broadband is still limited.
You are however absolutely correct about the monopolies being the cause. Why don't we have better broadband? Because the telcos neither want nor need to provide it. Hell, it wasn't until the mid to late nineties that we started to see sub-$0.10/min long-distance POTS because of the lack of competition before that. Why would they go run off and invest in more technology when there's nobody for you to go to if you think they're too slow? Right now the only "competition" we have is DSL vs cable, and they have apparently decided that it's perfectly adequate to just compete on price and the slightly different features of DSL vs cable.
So you can tell me where one can find some other "versions" of King Bangalash? You missed my point. With all your characters you killed King Bangalash exactly the same number of times (or even more). How that can be fun? Or killing 3x30 of his "lesser" clones? I get bored to the tears.
Okay, so let's say it takes you three months to get a character to 70, and another three months to get a second character to 70, you've killed King Bangalash twice in six months.
And this is supposedly worse than killing the Twilight Cultists at a rate of one per 30 seconds, non stop, for weeks upon weeks.
Maybe it's just me (and judging from the number of alts people level, it isn't) but months later with a completely different class, yeah, King Bangalash feels somewhat fresh. As opposed to seconds later killing the exact same monster with the same class.
If you're saying leveling in WoW doesn't have a lot of replay value, okay I can see that. Though I disagree to some extent since I leveled multiple characters with almost completely orthogonal quests, outside a few rather obnoxious examples like Stranglethorn. But there's a lot of areas in the game, and you're unlikely to see all of them in a single character. Even when I leveled my third character I was going to zones and doing quests that I'd never done before. And that's without ever rolling an alliance character even!
Wow, what variety? There is no variety after you reroll another character. You do the *same* quests all over again. It is the same, killing cultists in Silithus or killing wildlife in Stranglethorn Vale. You have to grind them to obscene numbers. In defense of Silithus, at least those mobs respawn fast and the zone is much smaller so it is less painful to grind them.
You're kidding, right? You're really comparing the total of 30 tigers you have to kill in STV to the literally thousands of cultists you have to grind for rep?
But, in my own defense, I only did the quests (for XP) in Silithus, never went for CC rep. And yes, I hate *all* forms of (mindless) grind*.
In other words, even you yourself are referring to what was nothing but another part of your leveling "grind" as though it were a completely different segment of the game. Because at least in the details it is. As opposed to if you were going for CC rep, when you would have been in Silithus for as long as you had taken getting from 40 to 60 without ever going anywhere but those same few cultist camps.
I have to repeat myself. What changes in scenery? When you reroll, you see all the same zones, houses, trees, npcs, mobs, quests etc.
From Durotar to Barrens to Ashenvale to Desolace to Stranglethorn and so on and so on. That's changing scenery, unlike your post-70 rep grinds, where in the time that you're sitting in one place grinding the same 10 mobs over and over as fast as they respawn, you would have gone through three separate zones while leveling. They're not even in the same ballpark of repetition. Not to mention next time you level it can be Tirisfall to Silverpine to Tauren Mill to Arathi... but you're right, that's much worse than standing in Silithus for a month killing cultists.
Again, the whole context here is leveling vs max-level rep grinds. Max level rep grinds not only don't change if you re-roll, they also don't change if you don't re-roll. They aren't a loop that repeats every three months, they're a loop that repeats every three minutes. Again, orders of magnitude of difference.
If you can't see any difference, well, then that's just you.
Heh, nice straw man. Classic: if you don't like it, leave.
Whatever, man. You're the one who said you left the game. And we're not talking about the place you live, we're talking about a game you pay a monthly fee for. "If you don't like it, leave" is the right thing to do, because as long as you give them your money you're saying "I like what you are doing please continue".
But what can I expect from someone arguing that playing through an entire game multiple times is more boring and repetitive than playing exactly one part of that game for the same amount of time.
Would any of them be these?
That's funny, I found leveling to be lots of fun. Mostly because while yes you are killing lots of monsters (duh i wouldn't be playing a combat-based rpg if that wasn't what I wanted to do) it comes in the form of quests where you go after -different- monsters, or you have to infiltrate some hideout to find a specific named monster, or if you can find a group you can go level in instances.
If you can't see any difference between grinding and any form of gameplay that involves killing monsters, then it doesn't matter if we are playing the same game, you just aren't playing the right one, and i don't know why you ever thought this was the game for you.
I mean you're really comparing the wide variety of environments and tasks you're asked to do to level from 1-70, to the non-stop months-after-months killing of the exact same Cultist Camps in Silithus? And you're even saying leveling is worse? I really can't fathom.
They kinda complain about that but not as much 1-70 grind.
BS to that. What do most casuals do when they hit 70? Roll another character. Because at least when you're leveling you're seeing the scenery change and actually gaining things at an appreciable rate.
Yes it is a grind, and yes it the worst part of WoW.
* I did quit, before I ruined my life.
Good for you. The question is, what made you think you'd ever like the game in the first place? It's clearly not your playstyle in any way shape or form.
Yea, usually crack ho's only need 3-5 hours of grinding before earning enough for a hit.
:P
Sounds great, but I'm not sure I want to do the quest line that unlocks that hero class.
But end content being very intensive is almost necessary for their business model. Otherwise they'd have to be constantly releasing new expansions to keep everyone involved... and I suppose that's where my argument breaks down. I'm just whiney. :)
:)
Well yeah, they have to "balance" everything around people who can play the game like it was their full-time job, and they need these people to have to spend more than one month getting through all the content so they keep paying monthly fees. Which means what's designed for hard-core raiders to spend 3 months doing is going to take us casuals years -- I'll be damn lucky if I've done a fraction of level 70 content by the time the expansion comes out, the level cap goes up to 80, and everything I did at 70 becomes irrelevent, just like what happened when TBC was released.
But while one can recognize Blizzard's need to design the game this way, I don't think it's being whiney to ask that they make it more fun to do.
I mean come on guys, you expect me to take you seriously but you use Outlook? Down with America, but we love the products their mega-corporations produce!
No man, they hate MS! It's just that thanks to vendor lock-in and the proprietary Exchange protocols, they have to use Outlook. Why do you think they're so pissed at us?
I don't want to start any conspiracy theories... But it was on Sept. 6th 2001 that the DoJ announced that they would no longer be pursuing the breakup of Microsoft. Sept 11th, al Qaeda attacks. Coincidence? You decide (but the answer is no).
Seriously, though. I hear people on WoW complaining about "the grind" which to me is the best part. I like questing from 1 to 70.
Uh, yeah, I guess some people complain about the leveling "grind", but really WoW has one of the nicest leveling phases, replete with quests and things to do to fit a variety of playstyles.
"The grind" that everyone complains about is the one you do after reaching the level cap. The endless, endless rep grinding for faction rewards, heroic instance keys, etc etc. And actually despite there being more reps to grind, they aren't as bad as pre-expansion when the lvl 60 rep grinds were horrible time sinks of repetitive killing. Grinding Cenarian Hold or Argent Dawn rep was as arduous as the 1-60 leveling process, but much, much more boring. Or remember when you got to go farm for cloth so that other people could get to run a raid instance? That's what people complain about.
The leveling "grind" is great for casuals. It's the top-level content that at best tolerates casuals by giving them mindless repetitive tasks to perform.
Well first the plane probably wouldn't explode, it'd probably just depressurize which could certainly kill the passengers, but probably not all of them.
Second, 911 wasn't about killing the passengers, it was about killing a lot more people by using the plane as a weapon. 9/11 would have been considered a failure had they only managed to blow up the airplanes. Look at how we see Flight 93 -- heroes who stuck it to the bad guys by foiling their plans, simply because of what could have happened instead.
Which is why I think it would be foolish to allow guns on a plane. Realistically, how many people on a plane would be carrying a gun? I wouldn't. Everyone without a gun is now an easy target for the armed terrorists. The passengers with guns would end up in a firefight with the terrorists, and that could end up either way. But terrorists armed at best with pocket knives or box cutters wouldn't be able to fend off a hundred angry passengers. So I say keep the guns off the planes.
I mean, in the same way that Earth is endangered by rogue meteorites and asteroids, the whole solar system is vulnerable to a rogue star or brown dwarf.
Here's a short story H.G. Wells wrote about the subject, called The Star.
There's a huge difference: The DoD doesn't sell jet fighters. Ohio is selling broadband.
Bold emphasis mine, because first, ha ha ha ha!.
That out of the way, I'll admit I was out on a limb because I didn't RTFA. And according to the article, they're leasing network access, as in paying a monthly fee for it, and allowing public and private entities to access it, as in giving it away for free. As in, the State of Ohio is spending taxpayer money to purchase broadband access for everyone, and they're spending that taxpayer money by giving it to the companies who provide network access. Again, according to the article, they already maintain a number of such public networks, and this is simply a consolidation. They simply aren't selling it. They aren't competing with the broadband companies, they are purchasing massive amounts of bandwidth from the broadband companies. This is exactly what government is for, pooling resources of the people to give them what they need. From satellite-guided missiles to broadband access to the formerly privately owned ranch up for sale that was one of the best rock climbing locations in central Texas.
The thing that does bother me is that this is an "executive order", meaning unlike the land purchase in Travis County, it wasn't a proposition that voters went out and decided on. The actual text of the order makes it sound more like an organizational change than it is expanding the scope of the program then that may be legitimate, under the assumption that an actual budget expansion would require at least the approval of Congress (making it more like the gift of arms aid to Israel described in the article, and unlike say the Iran/Contra scandal).
When they start complaining about the government "competing" with private enterprise, just remember that Ohio will be competing with private network service providers in the same way that the U.S. DoD competes with Boeing in jet fighters -- as in, they won't, they'll be customers. The DoD doesn't want to get into the business of building planes, and I doubt Ohio wants to create their own network company, and instead will be paying someone else to do the work.
The reason they don't like this is because the state will be a customer with the collective bargaining power of potentially every resident in the state, and therefore it will be the network providers who have to either give the state a good deal or go home without a lucrative contract. As opposed to normally when each individual has little choice in providers, and can either take the crappy DSL or cable "deal" or simply go without. It's collective bargaining that they fear.
Of course this is mostly recycled from previous discussions on municipal broadband, the "they" I speak of not referring to any specific complainers in this case.
Only the best thieves get access to the best fences. There's even a mythology around it: the mysterious Gray Fox!
You mean he's a fence in addition to being a crazy cyborg ninja?!
No, a foeboy is the opposite of fanboy. A fauxboy is the opposite of a realboy. Foxboy is closely related, it's the opposite of truthboy. Zing!
What's the opposite of a fanboy?
A foeboy.
You may now create a wikipedia page in my honor for coining this word.
I don't know why you'd have to have played Rogue to legitimately use the word Rogue-like. Angband, Nethack, Moria, etc are all "Rogue-like", and it's a very useful way of referring to the genre of similar games with a very recognizable style even if you haven't played the original. What's a non-vain way of saying it? Should I stop saying "sci-fi" because I haven't read whatever the first science fiction book supposedly was?
And I have played Rogue, at least enough to know that I would rather play any other Rogue-like game, because surprise it's the most primitive. I only played it because it was the only Rogue-like that I found for my Palm at the time; once I found kMoria I played that instead. I think it would be stupid to require people to play it before they can otherwise claim to appreciate the genre, since ultimately it's not a very good game compared to the other options.
Well that's what I mean. You can have whatever complexity of IPC protocol implemented in a user-space daemon. However for Process A (an application) to tell Process B (your IPC daemon) that it wants to do IPC, requires some form of IPC in itself. The kernel by necessity must be involved. Getting that data to Process C (the target of Process A's message) requires kernel-supported IPC between B and C.
That's always been the performance problem with microkernals. Since the services are all in user-space but in separate processes, in order for an app to use a service there's first the context switch into the kernel, then the context switch to the service, then back to the kernel, then back to the app. As opposed to macrokernels where you switch to kernel space then back, half as many context switches. Shared data through text files is a good example -- in a microkernel, your file system is a user-space service, and the kernel is responsible for connecting your application to that service via IPC, and more hoops must be jumped through than in a kernel-based file system driver.
Microkernels are still great due to the compartmentalization and its many advantages, which is why Mach is still a very popular research OS. It still isn't practical or even possible to take the philosophy to the extreme and get rid of all kernel-based services.
I don't know about that. I like Futurama a lot (very stoked that more episodes are coming) and appreciate the really nerdy physics, math, and computer jokes, and the old sci-fi references. But ultimately, I still like the Simpsons more. My girlfriend loves Futurama, and she isn't a geek nor avid watcher of Star Trek nor reader of Heinlein, and she's Canadian to boot so her knowledge of U.S. political history is slightly worse than mine. I assure you, she gets more than a few laughs out of the show.
Everything else, including IPC, could be in userspace.
And the user-level application process communicates with the IPC process to do IPC with some other process... how?
Some things, even in microkernels, stay in the kernel out of necessity. I'm not saying you can't have user space IPC libraries, but fundamentally the act of two processes with separate memory spaces communicating requires OS involvement.
I guess it's not a bad analogy. I can see how one could describe the internet as a series of tubes. I mean, we call them "pipes" and like a pipe they have fixed flow capacity, and at the joints of these pipes you have valves that control where the water goes. That's a fine layman explanation.
What I can't figure out is, if one can say the internet is a series of tubes, how is it also not like a truck? The point about finite capacity applies to trucks as well, and frankly I think a bunch of trucks carrying cargo down the highway is a better metaphor because it is more like how the internet works -- discreet packets of data being sent from one location to another.
box cutters are under 3"
Yeah, so? That was back when we were trained to cooperate with hijackers. They hijacked an airplane with shivs they carved with boxcutters, and people just sat there because they thought that was the thing to do. Hell, back then they probably could have hijacked the plane by threatening to change the in-flight movie to Gigli. That doesn't mean boxcutters or shivs are threatening weapons, it means we were gullible and fell for their trick. Now? I laugh at whatever poor fool tries to hijack a plane today with boxcutters, a plastic shiv, or a Swiss Army pocket knife. Just like those poor terrorist fuckers on the flight 93 discovered when the passengers figured out what was up, that shit doesn't cut it against over a hundred angry passengers fighting for their lives.
The old standards were fine for keeping shotguns and m16s off of planes, and as long as we continue to do that I'm not particularly worried about people hijacking airplanes. Somebody pulls out a 2" knife and says they're taking over the airplane, either that guy gets stomped like a narc at a biker rally, or we deserve to die.
Hehe. Well, I have a thought along similar lines. Here's my prediction: Much like the Shoe Bomber prompted this new ridiculous screening procedure, the "Bung-hole Bomber" is going to be put-up or shut-up time for TSA and the airlines. Either they stick to policy and watch the airline industry go under, or they admit that security theater is useless and encourage us to shrug and go on with our lives.
It's this second level of idiocy that's the real problem: the notion that, in a bureaucracy, anyone who does think through the reasoning behind a policy, must be a threat.
:)
Actually, it is usually the case that anyone who thinks through the policies of a bureaucracy is in fact a threat. A bureaucracy is basically piling layers and layers of superfluous management on top of whatever useful task the organization is supposed to be performing. Any thoughtful evaluation of the bureaucracy policies -- policies almost universally created so as to justify the bureaucracy -- is most likely going to result in the conclusion that the bureaucracy is useless. Thus trying to reason about why a policy exists is threatening to the existence of the bureaucracy.
And now I've typed that word as much as I can stand in one post.
Bureaucracy is a force multiplier for idiocy.
Awesome.
By throwing _any_ bottle of sufficient size in the trash, dangerous explosions are prevented without a costly determination whether someone was a threat or not. On one hand, the danger is avoided. On the other hand, terrorists will go undetected and they can try again. That's what he said, and it sounds very reasonable to me.
Er, yeah, that's bad and useless for the same reason profiling is bad and useless. Here's what happens: The terrorists go through security on a "dry run", where they are carrying nothing that is actually dangerous and have no intention of causing any trouble. The whole purpose is information gathering. So they carry various containers and objects through security. Anything that is thrown out is ruled out for live runs, and any operative who is picked to be searched (possibly random, possibly profiling) is ruled out for live runs. Eventually, having been able to test the system with no risk of being caught with incriminating evidence, they have figured out who and what can get through the screening process unmolested. When the real run happens, they do exactly what the 9/11 hijackers did -- waltz right through security with no problems.
That's why it's useless. The reason it's bad? Because we think it isn't useless. What's the only thing worse than no security at all? Security Theater that doesn't make you safe but makes you think you are. A false sense of security is worse than knowing you are insecure.