I suspect you're right, and the main problems have to do with the two servers and/or synchronizing the AH contents given several access points.
However, there is the/who, as you said... mail can be accessed from both continents (even though sending items takes an hour, normal mail or sending money is instantaneous)... and the AH notifications (you just sold X, or your auction of Y just expired, etc.) also work on both continents.
It still seems to me that having a server for each continent shouldn't be a huge hurdle that cannot be overcome... that's why I would love getting more info from the developers.
On a more serious note, it has been suggested numerous times to have an auction house interface - pointing to a common AH database - in each of the three major cities for each side. The CMs have stated repeatedly that this is something the development team wants to do, but has been unable to so far because of technical difficulties. Can you expand on what these difficulties have been?
I think I speak for at least half the WoW players out there when I ask:
Who in the world decided to put that big pit in front of the Ironforge auction house? (affectionately know as the lag trap, the lag pit of death, and many other unprintable names:p)
There are only two possible paths for Apple: continue to keep their OS working only on their hardware, or making it also work on x86.
I'm sure everyone who knows what a Mac is has speculated at one point or another what would happen if Apple made their OS work on x86 hardware, and whether they would, and why they would take that decision. Calling it the Dvorak prophecy seems way too pretentious.
There are a few other important, not immediately apparent facts I would like to bring to the attention of fellow slashdotters:
- Space is big, because of the high distances between everything - Digital audio is usually recorded, stored and played back using digital equipment - The human ear is generally used by humans to listen to audio signals
Can I have my mod points now?
(can't say I can really blame the parent, though... this article is such a non-story that there isn't much to say beyond "it's not a podcast!")
> Let parents return Grand Theft Auto for a full refund until they do a national awareness campaign to educate parents of content and possible effects
*boggle*
Do they also want Rockstar to pay for a national education campaign to teach reading to all the illiterate parents who apparently can't read "violent content", "sexual content" and such on the box? And possibly hire some security guards in all the stores selling their products to tackle any parent who tries to buy a copy without reading the box, and twist their arm, slap them around, or torture them in any way, shape or form until they do read the box?
> Create a fund for victims of unauthorized use of a motor vehicle and car-jackings, etc,
Because, clearly, there has been such a huge spike in those crimes after GTA was released... my god, the people at Rockstar must be gods, with the power to affect our minds and control our actions!
> Make a national apology for misleading and lying to children, parents, and legislators about their intentions
"We're sorry we lied to you and said our game is very violent and contains sexual content. Oh wait, we said the truth! Nevermind."
>and causing insurance premiums to sky rocket
Okay, when I got to this one I just lost it. Causing WHAT insurance premiums to sky rocket?? Medical insurance for carpal tunnel? Eye insurance for staring at a computer/TV screen for too long?
> Give a written response within five business days of receipt of these demands...or we will BLOW UP THE EARTH!!! Mwuahahaha!
I wonder if it's possible to sue Slashdot for posting an article summary so mind-numbingly dull that it caused some readers to fall asleep and hit their head on their desk...
Actually, one possible source of its popularity is that it's a favourite saying of Inuyasha, the main character in the anime of the same name, used generally along the same lines as "bah". It's a 3-letter exclamation, I suspect trying to track its many origins would be entirely futile... last time I checked Japanese != Yiddish.
*geek mode off*
(sadly, the above is the most interesting I can post given such an obvious troll of a story...)
Call it whatever you will, the idea is the same... and obviously seeing the game logo in-game (which you see on the loading screen anyway) isn't nearly as bad as seeing real-life ads...
Blizzard puts tons of other small things in their games that would also break the fourth wall, if you will (Broken I.W.I.N. button... Eric the Swift, which is a character from The Lost Vikings, one of their first games... etc.) but they're generally just minor, amusing things...
Whatever happened to suspension of disbelief? Games are generally supposed to happen in their own world - especiall online games... how can viewing a movie trailer for a real-life movie possibly fit in with the game world?
After a hard day at work, nothing beats the warm welcome of a puppy running to the door when you get home. Well, almost nothing. Drinky and I had some fun last night, and I'm starting to learn what he likes. I expect I'll be able to teach him some new tricks soon. He also caught the frisbee for the first time last night... I was so happy.
But last night there was pain as well as pleasure. For some reason, I decided to enter Drinky into a Dog competition. It was quite a crazy move, considering we're still getting acquainted and all. The first stage of the contest, I had to make Drinky sit, and he could manage that without any problem. But the second part, I was asked to make him lie down. Poor Drinky hasn't learnt that properly yet. And things just went downhill from there. "Shake hands" was met with a blank stare, the judges thought Drinky was sick, and the crowd almost booed us off the stage. We walked away with 0.03 points and 3rd place in a 3 dog contest. Drinky was not pleased.
To patch things up between us, I gave him a shower with some soothing shampoo. After rinsing him down, his coat was lovely and shiny. Then I gave him some of his favourite dog biscuits and some fresh water. I let him play with the tennis ball and then we both called it a night.
...I'm speechless. Really, I am. Trying to think of something witty or insightful to say, but the above really does speak for itself...
I started writing a rebuttal, but realized the whole discussion's pretty silly to start with.
I didn't disagree with your point to start with, just with the way it was presented. It seems to be a template reply that often tries to mask a comparison that isn't quite valid, and mostly just elicits a knee-jerk reaction from others. Again, whether I think that your specific comparison is valid wasn't really the point.
Will you please, PLEASE stop quoting other people's posts and changing one word to prove a point? It's overused, annoying to read, and it proves very little. This might shock some people, but Google and Microsoft are different entities. If you replace "Google" with "Microsoft" in a paragraph, OF COURSE it's not going to make much sense, but you didn't prove anything. At best, you manage to annoy or bore the reader (although it always seems to work on people with mod points). At worst, you forget to substitute one of the words, and end up sounding no better than a buggy Perl script.
"Dog is man's best friend. For thousands of years, humans have befriended dogs, and have used dogs for hunting, protection, and company."
"Lack of oxygen is man's best friend. For thousands of years, humans have befriended lack of oxygen, and have used lack of oxygen for hunting, protection, and company."
Did I just disprove the first statement? Or did I just waste the reader's time with something that isn't especially relevant (like this entire post, for that matter)?
Is it THAT hard to just type "Replace Google with Microsoft in your post and see if it still makes sense"?
Sorry for the disproportionately long rant (and note that you =/. posters in general, not ergo98 specifically), but it's something that's always bugged me... and a way for me to avoid work for a bit longer:p
The first interesting post in this story, that might actually lead to some intelligent discussion... thank you.
Why SHOULDN'T schools train kids to work in factories/IT? (really, I wouldn't differentiate too much between the two).
No matter how much we might dislike it, someone has to work in factories and in all the "low" jobs. The only feasible social hierarchy IS a pyramid; anything else just wouldn't work.
IMO, what makes the difference between a good system and a bad system is how flexible that pyramid is. Something like Brave New World, where your place in the pyramid is determined at birth, is bad. Something where anyone can move up (or down) to the best of their ability is good. The tricky part is defining "the best of their ability"... is it how smart they were born? (and no, all people are NOT born equal). Is it how well their parents planned for their future? Is it how wealthy their parents are?
If you look at software today, through the lens of the history of engineering, it's certainly engineering of a sort--but it's the kind of engineering that people without the concept of the arch did. Most software today is very much like an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves.
SF The analogy is even better because there are the hidden chambers that nobody can understand.
For those too lazy to read even the article summary, here' the abstract...
Honestly, it's threads like these that make me want to stop bothering with the comments on/. Even the abstract is fairly specific. Relax, people, they're not patenting maps.
Methods are disclosed for encoding latitude/longitude coordinates within a URL in a relatively compact form. The method includes converting latitude and longitude coordinates from floating-point numbers to non-negative integers. A set of base-N string representations are generated for the integers (N represents the number of characters in an implementation-defined character set being utilized). The latitude string and longitude string are then concatenated to yield a single output string. The output string is utilized as a geographic indicator with a URL.
Would it have killed the story submitter to say "encode latitude/longitude coordinates within an URL"? Then again, the story wouldn't have been trollish enough to be accepted then.
Slashdot Mirror
Thank you.
:(
Especially since that error showed up in two consecutive sentences.
I'm starting to lose hope that people will ever use it correctly...
...no one wants to preach two different religions :)
*ducks*
I suspect you're right, and the main problems have to do with the two servers and/or synchronizing the AH contents given several access points.
/who, as you said... mail can be accessed from both continents (even though sending items takes an hour, normal mail or sending money is instantaneous)... and the AH notifications (you just sold X, or your auction of Y just expired, etc.) also work on both continents.
However, there is the
It still seems to me that having a server for each continent shouldn't be a huge hurdle that cannot be overcome... that's why I would love getting more info from the developers.
On a more serious note, it has been suggested numerous times to have an auction house interface - pointing to a common AH database - in each of the three major cities for each side. The CMs have stated repeatedly that this is something the development team wants to do, but has been unable to so far because of technical difficulties. Can you expand on what these difficulties have been?
I think I speak for at least half the WoW players out there when I ask:
:p)
Who in the world decided to put that big pit in front of the Ironforge auction house? (affectionately know as the lag trap, the lag pit of death, and many other unprintable names
The fact that this is currently +4 Insightful is one of the funniest things I've seen on Slashdot in a while.
:)
Cheers, mods
Oh c'mon.
There are only two possible paths for Apple: continue to keep their OS working only on their hardware, or making it also work on x86.
I'm sure everyone who knows what a Mac is has speculated at one point or another what would happen if Apple made their OS work on x86 hardware, and whether they would, and why they would take that decision. Calling it the Dvorak prophecy seems way too pretentious.
Any idea what game it was?
Vaguely surprised to see it wasn't WoW or some other MMORPG...
FTA:
"online battle simulation games "
So does that mean BF1942 or something along those lines?
There are a few other important, not immediately apparent facts I would like to bring to the attention of fellow slashdotters:
- Space is big, because of the high distances between everything
- Digital audio is usually recorded, stored and played back using digital equipment
- The human ear is generally used by humans to listen to audio signals
Can I have my mod points now?
(can't say I can really blame the parent, though... this article is such a non-story that there isn't much to say beyond "it's not a podcast!")
No, really... this HAS to be a joke.
...or we will BLOW UP THE EARTH!!! Mwuahahaha!
> Let parents return Grand Theft Auto for a full refund until they do a national awareness campaign to educate parents of content and possible effects
*boggle*
Do they also want Rockstar to pay for a national education campaign to teach reading to all the illiterate parents who apparently can't read "violent content", "sexual content" and such on the box? And possibly hire some security guards in all the stores selling their products to tackle any parent who tries to buy a copy without reading the box, and twist their arm, slap them around, or torture them in any way, shape or form until they do read the box?
> Create a fund for victims of unauthorized use of a motor vehicle and car-jackings, etc,
Because, clearly, there has been such a huge spike in those crimes after GTA was released... my god, the people at Rockstar must be gods, with the power to affect our minds and control our actions!
> Make a national apology for misleading and lying to children, parents, and legislators about their intentions
"We're sorry we lied to you and said our game is very violent and contains sexual content. Oh wait, we said the truth! Nevermind."
>and causing insurance premiums to sky rocket
Okay, when I got to this one I just lost it. Causing WHAT insurance premiums to sky rocket?? Medical insurance for carpal tunnel? Eye insurance for staring at a computer/TV screen for too long?
> Give a written response within five business days of receipt of these demands
Seriously... who the hell ARE these people??
....zzzzzz*klunk* OW!
I wonder if it's possible to sue Slashdot for posting an article summary so mind-numbingly dull that it caused some readers to fall asleep and hit their head on their desk...
*geek mode on*
Actually, one possible source of its popularity is that it's a favourite saying of Inuyasha, the main character in the anime of the same name, used generally along the same lines as "bah". It's a 3-letter exclamation, I suspect trying to track its many origins would be entirely futile... last time I checked Japanese != Yiddish.
*geek mode off*
(sadly, the above is the most interesting I can post given such an obvious troll of a story...)
Heh, I did read that post actually...
Call it whatever you will, the idea is the same... and obviously seeing the game logo in-game (which you see on the loading screen anyway) isn't nearly as bad as seeing real-life ads...
Blizzard puts tons of other small things in their games that would also break the fourth wall, if you will (Broken I.W.I.N. button... Eric the Swift, which is a character from The Lost Vikings, one of their first games... etc.) but they're generally just minor, amusing things...
Whatever happened to suspension of disbelief? Games are generally supposed to happen in their own world - especiall online games... how can viewing a movie trailer for a real-life movie possibly fit in with the game world?
"All these worlds are yours, except Europa"
:p
Better be careful what they swim into...
From TsameFA (actually, just the line above):
# Line-of-sight to a 300,000 square mile area
# Wireless capability (currently) to an area with a radius of 200 miles
Radius 200 miles ~= 125,000 square miles, anyway... not sure if that counts as "a lot" less.
And it seems to imply that the wireless capability will eventually be extended to approach the entire line of sight area...
It's bunnies all the way down?
Hi there :)
I started writing a rebuttal, but realized the whole discussion's pretty silly to start with.
I didn't disagree with your point to start with, just with the way it was presented. It seems to be a template reply that often tries to mask a comparison that isn't quite valid, and mostly just elicits a knee-jerk reaction from others. Again, whether I think that your specific comparison is valid wasn't really the point.
Will you please, PLEASE stop quoting other people's posts and changing one word to prove a point? It's overused, annoying to read, and it proves very little. This might shock some people, but Google and Microsoft are different entities. If you replace "Google" with "Microsoft" in a paragraph, OF COURSE it's not going to make much sense, but you didn't prove anything. At best, you manage to annoy or bore the reader (although it always seems to work on people with mod points). At worst, you forget to substitute one of the words, and end up sounding no better than a buggy Perl script.
/. posters in general, not ergo98 specifically), but it's something that's always bugged me... and a way for me to avoid work for a bit longer :p
"Dog is man's best friend. For thousands of years, humans have befriended dogs, and have used dogs for hunting, protection, and company."
"Lack of oxygen is man's best friend. For thousands of years, humans have befriended lack of oxygen, and have used lack of oxygen for hunting, protection, and company."
Did I just disprove the first statement? Or did I just waste the reader's time with something that isn't especially relevant (like this entire post, for that matter)?
Is it THAT hard to just type "Replace Google with Microsoft in your post and see if it still makes sense"?
Sorry for the disproportionately long rant (and note that you =
Flamebait? Heh... I thought it was kinda funny... and not entirely inaccurate :p
The first interesting post in this story, that might actually lead to some intelligent discussion... thank you.
Why SHOULDN'T schools train kids to work in factories/IT? (really, I wouldn't differentiate too much between the two).
No matter how much we might dislike it, someone has to work in factories and in all the "low" jobs. The only feasible social hierarchy IS a pyramid; anything else just wouldn't work.
IMO, what makes the difference between a good system and a bad system is how flexible that pyramid is. Something like Brave New World, where your place in the pyramid is determined at birth, is bad. Something where anyone can move up (or down) to the best of their ability is good. The tricky part is defining "the best of their ability"... is it how smart they were born? (and no, all people are NOT born equal). Is it how well their parents planned for their future? Is it how wealthy their parents are?
Well done!
:p
For an encore, prove that black is white. Just watch out for the next zebra crossing.
For those too lazy to read even the article summary, here' the abstract...
/. Even the abstract is fairly specific. Relax, people, they're not patenting maps.
Honestly, it's threads like these that make me want to stop bothering with the comments on
Methods are disclosed for encoding latitude/longitude coordinates within a URL in a relatively compact form. The method includes converting latitude and longitude coordinates from floating-point numbers to non-negative integers. A set of base-N string representations are generated for the integers (N represents the number of characters in an implementation-defined character set being utilized). The latitude string and longitude string are then concatenated to yield a single output string. The output string is utilized as a geographic indicator with a URL.
Would it have killed the story submitter to say "encode latitude/longitude coordinates within an URL"? Then again, the story wouldn't have been trollish enough to be accepted then.