For the exact reasons spelled out by other posters:
Putting in traps for the sake of making a single skill useful means adding in content that negatively affects n-1 classes, where n is the total number of classes in the game.
On the contrary, my definition of hardware is spot on. Hardware is a physical device or card that you connect or put into your computer.
A Driver, on the other hand, is a piece of software that tells the OS how to interface with hardware. Usually they are shipped with either the OS or the product itself. They are also OS dependant.
Part of the problem with Windows is that the drivers that actually ship with Windows are considerably out of date. A number of them have not been upgraded since the initial launch in 2001. This is why each product from motherboards on down comes with a drivers disc. These discs are not there just there to file in a case and ignore.
Linux distrubutions are a different ballgame. They tend to have a hardware auto-discovery program that runs on boot. From there, it tells the kernel which drivers (kernel modules) to load. Since almost all drivers in Linux are written by the kernel team, actually hitting a conflict between drivers written by the kernel team is rare.
ATI and NVidia cards are the exception to the kernel team written driver rule. These two companies don't want anyone to know how their drivers work, so they ship them as pre-compiled binaries. However, it's not guaranteed to be shipped in a particular distribution.
Even though OSX only has a limited subset of hardware (as pointed out by toddestan) that it has to deal with, not everything Just Works.
Talk about trolling flamebait. Apple makes money on hardware, not operating systems, so it behooves them to make their operating system work on their hardware. The nice thing about this is that they make some damn nice harware (I'm typing this on a PowerBook), and that they have very little incentive to 'feature-pack' their OS like Microsoft does -- so you get less in the way of quirky 'features', and a hell of a lot of functionality.
I'm willing to bet that if you took a survey of 100 random mac users, the majority would say that the OS is the reason they got it, not the hardware.
Apple seems to agree with me: They're changing over to the same hardware that Windows PCs run on.
There are unused zones around the world. The Blood Elf zones, for instance, will be appearing in the pair of unused zones north of Eastern Plaguelands.
Other unused zones exist, too:
Eastern Kingdoms
The zone east of Loch Modan and Wetlands.
The zone south of Badlands, north of Redridge, and east of Burning Steppes.
The zone south of Dun Morough, north of Elwynn Forest, and west of Burning Steppes.
Gilneas, the zone south of Silverpine Forest.
Kalimdor
Mount Hyjal, east of Felwood, south and west of Wintersping, and north of Ashenvale.
Other
The island continent of Undermine, as pictured in the WoW Collector's Edition Art book.
One of the other islands pictured on the WoW World Map. As far as I can tell, Undermine is one of the two southern ones, but there's also an island cluster to the far north.
There's one problem that sticks out with the theory of Draenei as the new Alliance race:
Where will the Draanei's starting area be? Beyond the Dark Portal? I don't think so! Blizzard said some time ago that opening the Dark Portal will be a World Event. This means that no one on a specific server can go through it until the World Event is completed on that server.
Unfortunately, those of us who do realize it often can't actually do anything about it.
That is, unless everyone else does. I admit, voting in a member of the Liberitarian or Green parties as President would probably throw the Democrat and Republican parties for a loop...
The sad part is, I can't tell if this is sarcasm or serious. I'm replying to it as if it were serious.
IE supports more standards.
Please enlighten us as to which standards you're referring to. By standards, I mean standards that have actually passed through some sort of standards board, whether it be the W3C, ISO, ECMA, IETF, or some other standards body that I missed.
For example, Firefox 1.5 supports SVG, MathML, and fully supports PNG (IE doesn't do transparency), and has better support for CSS than IE6 does (Microsoft's IE Team lists a number of bugs that they're fixing for IE7).
, and doesn't have confusing and useless features like "tabbed" browsing (you have to have ADD to like this "feature").
Tell that to the IE7 developers. The IE Developer Blog says IE7 Has Tabs.
Not only that, but the only conclusions at all are on a page labeled "Editor's Choice" (emphasis mine), which starts out with the following paragraph.
Oracle 10G and DB2 are acknowledged as industry leaders in the database field and both are strong in terms of features and are surprisingly easy to use with clean GUIs.
If you're not going to have a lot of named users, the named users licensing is definately a lot cheaper, at $149, $300, and $800 per-user respectively.
I agree. Year first allows for filenames to be correctly sorted when sorting a file list, and they don't have to be converted like a unix timestamp does.
Although, I might add, in SQL, I never use date columns, and instead rely on storing a timestamp into an INTEGER column. Unlike SQL date columns, a timestamp always comes out in the same format, and can be passed to a time formatter (strftime() in most programming languages).
The web forums part is a moot point. As the grandparent said, HTML ignores whitespace. Web Browsers handle this by converting tabs to spaces, then ignoring all multiple whitespace characters following the first. This also means that any spaces or tabs following a new line get ignored, because HTML considers it a whitespace character. So, unless your forums has something that allows the pre tag, it will not appear as you entered it:
sub doSomething() { # This line and the next are indented with 4 spaces print "NO!"; }
I used Slashdot's ecode tag in the above, which indents the entire block. The sub and } lines are not indented, but the comment and print lines are.
Besides, there are better ways to distribute code:
A versioning system like CVS/SVN
Text Files - This solution works particularly well on web sites and web forums as attachments. It works on email, too!
Because he's probably a clicky-widget M$ admin who doesn't understand the power of a straightforward, low-level *programmatic* interface to everything on the system. Nothing to see, move along.
The scariest part is, Windows Vista is supposed to expose a bunch of new interfaces in its new command shell (MSH). What will all those MS admins do, then?
But for me it's actually more important that I can play with just the keyboard and no mouse. It's hard to accurately move the mouse pointer when you've got the phone tucked up on your shoulder, a cigarette in one hand and dinner in the other while you're trying to keep your group from wiping deep in RunnyEye.
This is something (again) that WoW does fine, and SWG doesn't. SWG's click-to-shoot mechanism makes it quite impossible to play using just the mouse.
Although... in WoW, I don't know if the optional button bars have hotkeys or not.
The optional button bars were an interface option that was added in one of the patches earlier this year. They default to off, but can be enabled individually in the Interface Options dialog.
There are four optional button bars total, one above the normal button bar in the lower left, one above the bag area in the lower right, and two more along the right edge of the screen, the second of which can't be enabled unless the first is. Each adds 12 more buttons for abilities and usable items.
Of these, I think only the one directly above the original button bar has keyboard shortcuts, and thus the rest are not useful to keyboard-only settings.
Slashdot Mirror
Haha, that's great. I definately agree on the first item being there though, and the second... well, I didn't know there was Pong on CD!
Try leaving it open. You'll see the memory leak's effects over time... it still exists in 1.5, too.
MOD PARENT UP. :P
Putting in traps for the sake of making a single skill useful means adding in content that negatively affects n-1 classes, where n is the total number of classes in the game.
How is that any different than Wikipedia?
Ah. I wasn't actually thinking of it as singular or plural, but rather that the name Microsoft is a proper noun.
I find that this reads better as
"Microsoft has not yet released a patch."
A Driver, on the other hand, is a piece of software that tells the OS how to interface with hardware. Usually they are shipped with either the OS or the product itself. They are also OS dependant.
Part of the problem with Windows is that the drivers that actually ship with Windows are considerably out of date. A number of them have not been upgraded since the initial launch in 2001. This is why each product from motherboards on down comes with a drivers disc. These discs are not there just there to file in a case and ignore.
Linux distrubutions are a different ballgame. They tend to have a hardware auto-discovery program that runs on boot. From there, it tells the kernel which drivers (kernel modules) to load. Since almost all drivers in Linux are written by the kernel team, actually hitting a conflict between drivers written by the kernel team is rare.
ATI and NVidia cards are the exception to the kernel team written driver rule. These two companies don't want anyone to know how their drivers work, so they ship them as pre-compiled binaries. However, it's not guaranteed to be shipped in a particular distribution.
Even though OSX only has a limited subset of hardware (as pointed out by toddestan) that it has to deal with, not everything Just Works.
I'm willing to bet that if you took a survey of 100 random mac users, the majority would say that the OS is the reason they got it, not the hardware.
Apple seems to agree with me: They're changing over to the same hardware that Windows PCs run on.
Most people's favorite MMORPG already runs under OSX. ;)
Unfortunately, that's one of the exceptions, not the rule.
Other unused zones exist, too:
Another World Event that will be appearing in WoW soon is The Gates of Ahn'Qiraj.
I'm sure there are other reasons that the Draenai wouldn't make sense as the new race, too.
I never thought I'd do this, but... mod parent up!
That is, unless everyone else does. I admit, voting in a member of the Liberitarian or Green parties as President would probably throw the Democrat and Republican parties for a loop...
No.
IE supports more standards.
Please enlighten us as to which standards you're referring to. By standards, I mean standards that have actually passed through some sort of standards board, whether it be the W3C, ISO, ECMA, IETF, or some other standards body that I missed.
For example, Firefox 1.5 supports SVG, MathML, and fully supports PNG (IE doesn't do transparency), and has better support for CSS than IE6 does (Microsoft's IE Team lists a number of bugs that they're fixing for IE7).
, and doesn't have confusing and useless features like "tabbed" browsing (you have to have ADD to like this "feature").
Tell that to the IE7 developers. The IE Developer Blog says IE7 Has Tabs.
If you're not going to have a lot of named users, the named users licensing is definately a lot cheaper, at $149, $300, and $800 per-user respectively.
SWT works by interfacing with the current windowing system, rather than having its own widgets like Swing does.
Although, I might add, in SQL, I never use date columns, and instead rely on storing a timestamp into an INTEGER column. Unlike SQL date columns, a timestamp always comes out in the same format, and can be passed to a time formatter (strftime() in most programming languages).
I used Slashdot's ecode tag in the above, which indents the entire block. The sub and } lines are not indented, but the comment and print lines are.
Besides, there are better ways to distribute code:
The scariest part is, Windows Vista is supposed to expose a bunch of new interfaces in its new command shell (MSH). What will all those MS admins do, then?
er... that should read "using just the keyboard." Now that the college semester is over, I think that my brain went on vacation.
This is something (again) that WoW does fine, and SWG doesn't. SWG's click-to-shoot mechanism makes it quite impossible to play using just the mouse.
Although... in WoW, I don't know if the optional button bars have hotkeys or not.
The optional button bars were an interface option that was added in one of the patches earlier this year. They default to off, but can be enabled individually in the Interface Options dialog.
There are four optional button bars total, one above the normal button bar in the lower left, one above the bag area in the lower right, and two more along the right edge of the screen, the second of which can't be enabled unless the first is. Each adds 12 more buttons for abilities and usable items.
Of these, I think only the one directly above the original button bar has keyboard shortcuts, and thus the rest are not useful to keyboard-only settings.