What idiot moderator scored this as flamebait? If you're spending your time reading a WoW related article, you should probably already know that there are two competing factions in WoW - the Horde and the Alliance. The Horde have Trolls as one of their races. Thus, someone yelling "TROLL!" would appropriately be called an "Alliance Pig!".
There are musical artists and then there are musicians. Musicians play instruments or sing and write music, etc. Artists produce a piece of work intended to convey emotion and inspire or in some way evoke a response from the listener. A musician custom-builds a film-score, jingle, muzak or top 40 hit.
There's no art in "rock-away" or "drop it like it's hot" or "thong thong thong thong thong". That garbage is just for bouncing around to. There's no more art to that than there is to a room full of old people after a burrito dinner.
So, if they want to use some AI software to find out what the next big hit on Total Request Live will be - great. Artists will never be found on TRL as it is, so what do we care what happens with that genre of music?
I find it unlikely that they'll be applying this to most other fields of music. *shrug*
I have no idea what beta was like, but I doubt they had anything near the current number of accounts playing the game. And as for the cost - Blizzard has been good about compensating players for down time.
I mostly play on Blackrock which just might be the most heavily populated server in the entire game. It was down for the extended 16 hour maintainance. There have been some game-wide login-server problems. And there have been a few outages in the last two months. But really, nothing to get all excited about. I trust that they'll adjust and things will be better over time. As long as they're compensating me for my lost game time, I have no gripes.
The only thing I can think to complain about is that the forums on their website are TIED INTO THE GAME LOGIN SERVERS. So, if the servers are down - you can't post on the forums. As most people from any online game will know, the forums are the busiest when the servers are down. Blizzard has crippled communications during the most critical times for players to communicate with each other and keep up to date on what's going on. It's absurd!
I've been very pleased with WoW. Yes, there have been a couple of downtimes, but nothing extreme. There was a 16 hour extended maintainance one day, but they awarded users 24 hours of compensation time and also alerted players to the scheduled outage in advance (and only the 20 servers were down - the other 68 were still up).
Anyone who thinks this has been a released "plagued with problems" clearly never played Shadowbane or Anarchy Online at release. Those games were down for hours and days at a time and when you were playing, the lag and framerate were absolutely not playable. We're talking 3fps the entire time - if you were lucky. And with Shadowbane, they went from the "let's have one massive universe" idea to "let's have seven or eight of them" to compensate for the troubles and spread the load.
Compared to every other release that I'm aware of, WoW was incredibly flawless and the only people bitching are those who play 24x7 and can't tolerate two seconds away from the game.
Re:OT: EMERGENCY. TAKE THESE SCAMMING FUCKERS DOWN
on
New Yorker on Miyazaki
·
· Score: -1, Offtopic
At least we see what you're really like, now.
You're all stomping around because people don't agree with you. Nice little temper tantrum.
And yes, I'm such an uncaring apathetic American. That's why I donated $4,000 last week. To a legitimate cause, of course.
Really, my caring or not is not relevant here. Your actions _are_. The more you keep talking, the more of an ass you're coming off as. Your manic switch in attitudes from "oh, think of the poor poor people" to "FUCK YOU FOR NOT SUPPORTING ME YOU STUPID AMERICAN SWINE MOTHER FUCKER" illustrates that you're just some moron trying to grab some attention by hijacking a Slashdot thread.
There are so many more effective places to go to promote this.
Re:OT: EMERGENCY. TAKE THESE SCAMMING FUCKERS DOWN
on
New Yorker on Miyazaki
·
· Score: -1, Offtopic
Yep. You sound exactly like your typical spammer.
Or like your typical brochure-pushing jesus-freak in public. "I know I'm annoying, but don't you understand? I just HAVE to save your soul!".
I'm all for doing the right thing, but you're shitting all over someone else's website outside of the context of that site. You're going about it all wrong and have this self-rightous, indignant attitude that you think you are some how allowed a grandious exception for your self-appointed cause.
So, my busy-body dear, why don't you go fuck yourself. After you roll yourself in flour cand find the wet-spot, of course.
Re:OT: EMERGENCY. TAKE THESE SCAMMING FUCKERS DOWN
on
New Yorker on Miyazaki
·
· Score: -1, Offtopic
You sound like those spammers who argue that they should be given an exception, because their product is really important for you to know about, above and beyond everyone else's.
More interesting is, why doesn't Monsanto just genetically engineer these genetically engineered seeds so that they don't produce more seeds? Problem solved.
If I break in your car with the same techniques AAA uses when some mom forgets her keys in the ignition, I'd be arrested.
If you bought a car, figured out some ways to break into YOUR OWN CAR, then published those ways to alert other consumers as to the lack of security the car has, should you still be arrested?
has also shattered all previous concurrency records in North America, achieving over 200,000 simultaneous players during the holiday period. "
200,000 simultaneous players sounds like a lot, until you remember that it's split up over 88 servers. 2,500 players per server is not a record. Wake me up when you have a game that manages to have all 200,000 concurrent players participating in the same exact instance of the same exact universe.
Also, remember that most of those 600,000 people will not stick with the game. For many, it will be frustrating or they'll get bored after leveling one or two characters up. I say 300,000 subscribers by the end of 2005.
Damn, I was paying $155/mo for digital cable and internet through Comcast. Then I realized that I was watching almost no television (nothing on that interested me). There weren't enough good shows to justify that kind of cash, so I canceled cable TV and unplugged my television. Haven't touched it in a year.
I only tolerate them as an ISP, because the only other option is DSL and my distance from the local office limits me to 768k.
The one thing that does tick me off about Comcast is that uploads are capped at 256k - and download (though faster than DSL) is only 3mbps. A few years ago, they offered at least 7mbps.
Then you would think the customer service person (or their manager) would have been able to say "oh, are you perhaps speaking of our digital phone service?".
I mean, even the kid at McDonald's has the sense to ask me if I want Fries or an Apple Pie with my order.
Comcast has been advertising VoIP service in my area for about two years. I called up four months ago and asked them about it, because I wanted to add it to my internet service.
The woman on the phone responded with nothing more than "what are you talking about?". She had to speak with a supervisor, who eventually just said "We don't offer that in your area. Or any area, actually. And I doubt we'll even have such a service for a couple of years".
Didn't explain why they've been advertising it for eons.
Anyway, they've lost money here, because I went with Packet8.net. Great quality, cheap prices. Unlimited long distance to the states and Canada for $20/mo, including all of the features that most companies would charge a hefty extra fee for (call return, caller ID, call blocking, call forwarding, voicemail, conferencing). And rates to other locations are typically between two and four cents per minute. Can't beat that.
Comcast would have to beat that service by at least 20% to make it worth my time *and* provide the adaptor for free (since you have to buy one with most VoIP providers for about $50).
As an avid WoW player, I have to say that I don't understand the point of an EU WoW Beta. The game has been out in the US for a couple of months. It's finished. It's done. It's boxed, installed and played by tens of thousands of people.
So other than changing language libraries and setting up some new servers in Europe, what is there to beta test?! And since they already have experience with the US servers being rolled out, it's not like they don't have a strong idea of what hardware is needed in Europe for the release to go well.
Of course, it's hard to get a house or car loan without a credit history and credit cards are typically the first step in acquiring that. And having a history of bad credit often is more preferable to lenders than having no credit (if you're like me and have the "if I can't afford it with cash, I shouldn't be buying it" philosophy).
Big difference between financial responsibility and financial viability. To banks, and mortgage lenders, at least.:)
I'm 27 and I don't own a cell phone. I never have. I've only used one a few times. I'm a software engineer for a big corporation required to provide 24x7 responses. To that end, I wear a $10/mo company-paid two-way pager.
Carrying a cell-phone around strikes me as needless baggage and excessive availability. I prefer not to have to be reachable by every human being on earth every moment of every day. I'd like to consider my time sipping a coffee and reading the paper in the local cafe on a Saturday morning as _my_ time. Nobody should ever need to reach me so urgently that I need to carry a device that would permit disruption of that.
I understand why UPS drivers need a cell. I understand why cab-drivers need to. I can even understand why a CEO or an IT manager might. But beyond that, it's just a frivolous toy. Children managed to keep in touch with their parents and let them know where they were and what htey were doing for decades prior to this without posessing cell phones.
If I had a child, I can't imagine them providing any viable excuse as to why I should purchase a cell phone for them and pay the bill. And as their parent, I would not let them get one and pay for it themselves for the simple fact that I want to avoid them putting themselves into debt before even seeking out college loans a few years down the road.
Why six year olds and fifteen year olds are carrying them around like a house-key is beyond me.
People who are stupid enough to use a service or accept a product without finding out what the cost is deserve to be gouged. You took the time to find out how much instant messaging on your phone was going to cost before using it. If you hadn't researched that first and wound up paying $800 because you sent 8,000 instant messages without even investigating the charge that would be incurred, you would deserve every bit of that and people with common sense would point and laugh at you.
As an adult, I don't understand why kids need cell phones. There are pay phones everywhere I look. And I've only been in one person's home where they didn't have a telephone. And I've never been in a business that didn't have either a public phone or phones that they would gladly let you use if you asked politely.
If your children are somewhere that they can't reach a landline through any of these venues and they are too far away to physically check in at home between the hours that school is dismissed and curfew sets in, you have much bigger problems.
What shows are there today that in 10 or 15 years people will be reminiscing about? Where are the Knight Riders, the Happy Days, the Sledge Hammers?
What the hell?! Who on earth is reminiscing about Knight Rider, Happy Days or Sledge Hammer - other than to poke fun at them? Most people under 25 don't even know what Knight Rider or Sledge Hammer is and only knows Happy Days from the Weezer video.
There's nothing worth watching on television. Nothong on network television worth my time and nothing on cable worth my time _and_ money. The last show I found worthwhile was Farscape, but they took that off the air before its time. There are occasional other shows but they are not series and they do not comprise enough material to justify spending $100/mo on.
I ditched cable about a year ago. I also stopped watching TV about a year ago. This isn't one of those "you people are stupid, I don't watch TV so I'm better than you" comments. This is just . . . "there's nothing worth my time and money on television, so I don't bother watching it".
Did anyone else initially pronounce "Molestar" the same way I did, before realizing it was "molestar" as in the burrowing rodent and the heavenly object?
It's important to know how to use the french fry timer, so your fries don't burn. Also, you will eventually need to know how to operate the cash register. Fortunately, they usually have pictures of the items on the keypad, so it should be a quick study for nearly anyone.
Well, chances are the original poster doesn't have a "typical office job" filing papers and answering phones. He's probably a programmer or support engineer, in which case he likely makes a salary that comes out to around $40 to $80 per hour. After take-home, that's still half a dozen to a dozen paperbacks.
We geeks cannot simultaneously bitch that people should become more technically literate while at the same time shooing Aunt Edna away from the web because her MT weblog is boring and plastered with comment spam.
Why not?
The rest of us managed to become familiar with technology and computers from a completely non-existant base knowledge. But we still had common sense and a regard for others. We learned what we were doing, found help when needed and typically did not stomp around the place like a retarded ogre.
Why do we suddenly need to exclude everyone who came around to computers and the internet after the mid 1990s from responsibility and due dilligance? You can forgive a four year old for being naive and acting like a helpless child, but not an adult. An adult has the mental faculties and maturity to approach new things with care, learn before doing and seek help when necessary, without having a total disregard for the rest of people.
Imagine if someone jumped into a car, sat behind the wheel, parked it in the middle of traffic and started honking their horn, flashing their lights, screaming out the window and crying about how hard driving is - rather than reading the DMV manual, practicing behind the wheel and becoming a responsible driver? Or imagine someone cooking dinner for their family, but throwing a tantrum on the kitchen floor, because they couldn't figure out how to make meatloaf . . . and didn't want to bother finding and reading a recipe?
Ignorance doesn't excuse one from ecstatically brandishing their stupidity and unwillingness to learn and the internet has been part of popular culture long enough now that the "it's new" excuse is wearing thin.
First, it would seem to legitimize copying copyrighted material - since they are charging you a fee to cover that very thing.
Second, if they still prosecute people copying copyrighted material on a home computer, then how can they justify this? They are already penalizing people without due process and assuming that they are guilty of copyrighting (charging them for it whether they do it or not).
I won Person of the Year from ABC this year! lol How damn trendy. I'm so disapointed. Here are some photos from last month's shoot that a photographer friend did of me. And here's some photosohpped artwork that some fans sent in, of me! I took a dump today and it was a funny brownish color with some yellow in it. I use Colgate toothpaste. Did I mention, I'm Person of the Year according to ABC? What a bunch of conformists.
Mood: Depressed Music: Black Tape For A Blue Girl
[pump up my ego] - [read other people pumping up my ego]
Slashdot Mirror
What idiot moderator scored this as flamebait? If you're spending your time reading a WoW related article, you should probably already know that there are two competing factions in WoW - the Horde and the Alliance. The Horde have Trolls as one of their races. Thus, someone yelling "TROLL!" would appropriately be called an "Alliance Pig!".
I really don't see any of this as a problem.
There are musical artists and then there are musicians. Musicians play instruments or sing and write music, etc. Artists produce a piece of work intended to convey emotion and inspire or in some way evoke a response from the listener. A musician custom-builds a film-score, jingle, muzak or top 40 hit.
There's no art in "rock-away" or "drop it like it's hot" or "thong thong thong thong thong". That garbage is just for bouncing around to. There's no more art to that than there is to a room full of old people after a burrito dinner.
So, if they want to use some AI software to find out what the next big hit on Total Request Live will be - great. Artists will never be found on TRL as it is, so what do we care what happens with that genre of music?
I find it unlikely that they'll be applying this to most other fields of music. *shrug*
Shut, you Alliance pig!
I have no idea what beta was like, but I doubt they had anything near the current number of accounts playing the game. And as for the cost - Blizzard has been good about compensating players for down time.
I mostly play on Blackrock which just might be the most heavily populated server in the entire game. It was down for the extended 16 hour maintainance. There have been some game-wide login-server problems. And there have been a few outages in the last two months. But really, nothing to get all excited about. I trust that they'll adjust and things will be better over time. As long as they're compensating me for my lost game time, I have no gripes.
The only thing I can think to complain about is that the forums on their website are TIED INTO THE GAME LOGIN SERVERS. So, if the servers are down - you can't post on the forums. As most people from any online game will know, the forums are the busiest when the servers are down. Blizzard has crippled communications during the most critical times for players to communicate with each other and keep up to date on what's going on. It's absurd!
I've been very pleased with WoW. Yes, there have been a couple of downtimes, but nothing extreme. There was a 16 hour extended maintainance one day, but they awarded users 24 hours of compensation time and also alerted players to the scheduled outage in advance (and only the 20 servers were down - the other 68 were still up).
Anyone who thinks this has been a released "plagued with problems" clearly never played Shadowbane or Anarchy Online at release. Those games were down for hours and days at a time and when you were playing, the lag and framerate were absolutely not playable. We're talking 3fps the entire time - if you were lucky. And with Shadowbane, they went from the "let's have one massive universe" idea to "let's have seven or eight of them" to compensate for the troubles and spread the load.
Compared to every other release that I'm aware of, WoW was incredibly flawless and the only people bitching are those who play 24x7 and can't tolerate two seconds away from the game.
At least we see what you're really like, now.
You're all stomping around because people don't agree with you. Nice little temper tantrum.
And yes, I'm such an uncaring apathetic American. That's why I donated $4,000 last week. To a legitimate cause, of course.
Really, my caring or not is not relevant here. Your actions _are_. The more you keep talking, the more of an ass you're coming off as. Your manic switch in attitudes from "oh, think of the poor poor people" to "FUCK YOU FOR NOT SUPPORTING ME YOU STUPID AMERICAN SWINE MOTHER FUCKER" illustrates that you're just some moron trying to grab some attention by hijacking a Slashdot thread.
There are so many more effective places to go to promote this.
Yep. You sound exactly like your typical spammer.
Or like your typical brochure-pushing jesus-freak in public. "I know I'm annoying, but don't you understand? I just HAVE to save your soul!".
I'm all for doing the right thing, but you're shitting all over someone else's website outside of the context of that site. You're going about it all wrong and have this self-rightous, indignant attitude that you think you are some how allowed a grandious exception for your self-appointed cause.
So, my busy-body dear, why don't you go fuck yourself. After you roll yourself in flour cand find the wet-spot, of course.
You sound like those spammers who argue that they should be given an exception, because their product is really important for you to know about, above and beyond everyone else's.
More interesting is, why doesn't Monsanto just genetically engineer these genetically engineered seeds so that they don't produce more seeds? Problem solved.
If I break in your car with the same techniques AAA uses when some mom forgets her keys in the ignition, I'd be arrested.
If you bought a car, figured out some ways to break into YOUR OWN CAR, then published those ways to alert other consumers as to the lack of security the car has, should you still be arrested?
has also shattered all previous concurrency records in North America, achieving over 200,000 simultaneous players during the holiday period. "
200,000 simultaneous players sounds like a lot, until you remember that it's split up over 88 servers. 2,500 players per server is not a record. Wake me up when you have a game that manages to have all 200,000 concurrent players participating in the same exact instance of the same exact universe.
Also, remember that most of those 600,000 people will not stick with the game. For many, it will be frustrating or they'll get bored after leveling one or two characters up. I say 300,000 subscribers by the end of 2005.
Only $90/mo?!
Damn, I was paying $155/mo for digital cable and internet through Comcast. Then I realized that I was watching almost no television (nothing on that interested me). There weren't enough good shows to justify that kind of cash, so I canceled cable TV and unplugged my television. Haven't touched it in a year.
I only tolerate them as an ISP, because the only other option is DSL and my distance from the local office limits me to 768k.
The one thing that does tick me off about Comcast is that uploads are capped at 256k - and download (though faster than DSL) is only 3mbps. A few years ago, they offered at least 7mbps.
Oh well.
Then you would think the customer service person (or their manager) would have been able to say "oh, are you perhaps speaking of our digital phone service?".
I mean, even the kid at McDonald's has the sense to ask me if I want Fries or an Apple Pie with my order.
Comcast has been advertising VoIP service in my area for about two years. I called up four months ago and asked them about it, because I wanted to add it to my internet service.
The woman on the phone responded with nothing more than "what are you talking about?". She had to speak with a supervisor, who eventually just said "We don't offer that in your area. Or any area, actually. And I doubt we'll even have such a service for a couple of years".
Didn't explain why they've been advertising it for eons.
Anyway, they've lost money here, because I went with Packet8.net. Great quality, cheap prices. Unlimited long distance to the states and Canada for $20/mo, including all of the features that most companies would charge a hefty extra fee for (call return, caller ID, call blocking, call forwarding, voicemail, conferencing). And rates to other locations are typically between two and four cents per minute. Can't beat that.
Comcast would have to beat that service by at least 20% to make it worth my time *and* provide the adaptor for free (since you have to buy one with most VoIP providers for about $50).
As an avid WoW player, I have to say that I don't understand the point of an EU WoW Beta. The game has been out in the US for a couple of months. It's finished. It's done. It's boxed, installed and played by tens of thousands of people.
So other than changing language libraries and setting up some new servers in Europe, what is there to beta test?! And since they already have experience with the US servers being rolled out, it's not like they don't have a strong idea of what hardware is needed in Europe for the release to go well.
Of course, it's hard to get a house or car loan without a credit history and credit cards are typically the first step in acquiring that. And having a history of bad credit often is more preferable to lenders than having no credit (if you're like me and have the "if I can't afford it with cash, I shouldn't be buying it" philosophy).
:)
Big difference between financial responsibility and financial viability. To banks, and mortgage lenders, at least.
I'm 27 and I don't own a cell phone. I never have. I've only used one a few times. I'm a software engineer for a big corporation required to provide 24x7 responses. To that end, I wear a $10/mo company-paid two-way pager.
Carrying a cell-phone around strikes me as needless baggage and excessive availability. I prefer not to have to be reachable by every human being on earth every moment of every day. I'd like to consider my time sipping a coffee and reading the paper in the local cafe on a Saturday morning as _my_ time. Nobody should ever need to reach me so urgently that I need to carry a device that would permit disruption of that.
I understand why UPS drivers need a cell. I understand why cab-drivers need to. I can even understand why a CEO or an IT manager might. But beyond that, it's just a frivolous toy. Children managed to keep in touch with their parents and let them know where they were and what htey were doing for decades prior to this without posessing cell phones.
If I had a child, I can't imagine them providing any viable excuse as to why I should purchase a cell phone for them and pay the bill. And as their parent, I would not let them get one and pay for it themselves for the simple fact that I want to avoid them putting themselves into debt before even seeking out college loans a few years down the road.
Why six year olds and fifteen year olds are carrying them around like a house-key is beyond me.
People who are stupid enough to use a service or accept a product without finding out what the cost is deserve to be gouged. You took the time to find out how much instant messaging on your phone was going to cost before using it. If you hadn't researched that first and wound up paying $800 because you sent 8,000 instant messages without even investigating the charge that would be incurred, you would deserve every bit of that and people with common sense would point and laugh at you.
As an adult, I don't understand why kids need cell phones. There are pay phones everywhere I look. And I've only been in one person's home where they didn't have a telephone. And I've never been in a business that didn't have either a public phone or phones that they would gladly let you use if you asked politely.
If your children are somewhere that they can't reach a landline through any of these venues and they are too far away to physically check in at home between the hours that school is dismissed and curfew sets in, you have much bigger problems.
What shows are there today that in 10 or 15 years people will be reminiscing about? Where are the Knight Riders, the Happy Days, the Sledge Hammers?
What the hell?! Who on earth is reminiscing about Knight Rider, Happy Days or Sledge Hammer - other than to poke fun at them? Most people under 25 don't even know what Knight Rider or Sledge Hammer is and only knows Happy Days from the Weezer video.
There's nothing worth watching on television. Nothong on network television worth my time and nothing on cable worth my time _and_ money. The last show I found worthwhile was Farscape, but they took that off the air before its time. There are occasional other shows but they are not series and they do not comprise enough material to justify spending $100/mo on.
I ditched cable about a year ago. I also stopped watching TV about a year ago. This isn't one of those "you people are stupid, I don't watch TV so I'm better than you" comments. This is just . . . "there's nothing worth my time and money on television, so I don't bother watching it".
Did anyone else initially pronounce "Molestar" the same way I did, before realizing it was "molestar" as in the burrowing rodent and the heavenly object?
It's important to know how to use the french fry timer, so your fries don't burn. Also, you will eventually need to know how to operate the cash register. Fortunately, they usually have pictures of the items on the keypad, so it should be a quick study for nearly anyone.
Well, chances are the original poster doesn't have a "typical office job" filing papers and answering phones. He's probably a programmer or support engineer, in which case he likely makes a salary that comes out to around $40 to $80 per hour. After take-home, that's still half a dozen to a dozen paperbacks.
We geeks cannot simultaneously bitch that people should become more technically literate while at the same time shooing Aunt Edna away from the web because her MT weblog is boring and plastered with comment spam.
Why not?
The rest of us managed to become familiar with technology and computers from a completely non-existant base knowledge. But we still had common sense and a regard for others. We learned what we were doing, found help when needed and typically did not stomp around the place like a retarded ogre.
Why do we suddenly need to exclude everyone who came around to computers and the internet after the mid 1990s from responsibility and due dilligance? You can forgive a four year old for being naive and acting like a helpless child, but not an adult. An adult has the mental faculties and maturity to approach new things with care, learn before doing and seek help when necessary, without having a total disregard for the rest of people.
Imagine if someone jumped into a car, sat behind the wheel, parked it in the middle of traffic and started honking their horn, flashing their lights, screaming out the window and crying about how hard driving is - rather than reading the DMV manual, practicing behind the wheel and becoming a responsible driver? Or imagine someone cooking dinner for their family, but throwing a tantrum on the kitchen floor, because they couldn't figure out how to make meatloaf . . . and didn't want to bother finding and reading a recipe?
Ignorance doesn't excuse one from ecstatically brandishing their stupidity and unwillingness to learn and the internet has been part of popular culture long enough now that the "it's new" excuse is wearing thin.
This actually suggests two things.
First, it would seem to legitimize copying copyrighted material - since they are charging you a fee to cover that very thing.
Second, if they still prosecute people copying copyrighted material on a home computer, then how can they justify this? They are already penalizing people without due process and assuming that they are guilty of copyrighting (charging them for it whether they do it or not).
I won Person of the Year from ABC this year! lol How damn trendy. I'm so disapointed. Here are some photos from last month's shoot that a photographer friend did of me. And here's some photosohpped artwork that some fans sent in, of me! I took a dump today and it was a funny brownish color with some yellow in it. I use Colgate toothpaste. Did I mention, I'm Person of the Year according to ABC? What a bunch of conformists.
Mood: Depressed
Music: Black Tape For A Blue Girl
[pump up my ego] - [read other people pumping up my ego]