I wonder how USians feel about agnostics. After all, we don't reject God outright, we merely say that blind faith in him is not justified and that there is no non-faith-based proof of his existence.
However, I think that in the end agnostics probably end up being seen as palette-swapped atheists by most bible (t)humpers.
I haven't kept up with the mobile phone market since I got my 6210, which has exactly the features I want out of a mobile phone (plus WAP, but I think I can handle that amount of bloat;). However, UMTS is going to become the new standard Real Soon and there might be a time when I have to get a new mobile.
My question is: Is there a 3210/6210 equivalent that dows UMTS? My requirements are:
- Candybar form factor. Everything with moving parts is too damn fragile. See next line.
- Somewhat rugged. I want the thing to be able to survive a one meter drop.
- No camera, no media player, no nothing. As little functionality besides phone calls and SMS/mail as possible.
- Bonus points if the phone doesn't have a big fancy color screen because it doesn't need one.
- Also bonus points for low price. I can live off a 15 EUR prepaid card for a year, thus I have no use for phones that are so expensive you can only afford them together with some kind of plan.
Essentially I want a UMTS-based mobile telephone with SMS functionality and nothing else. Even though I like multifunctionality in some devices, I perceive telephones as tools rather than computers - they have to work, be simple and do what they do exceptionally well. A phone that does not match these criteria is just a bad crossbreed between a PDA and an UMTS modem.
Ulimately, though, I think Ozzie and Novell will be unable to stop Ballmer to sue some poor linux distro into legal catacombs -- recall that Microsoft successfully defended itself against the Government of the United States and the European Union; I would not think many entities stand a chance against them.
They have to be careful about what they do. While they could weaken IBN, the converse is true as well - IBM is one of the heavyweights in the software patent arena and they can MAD the crap out of Microsoft, should it come to a patent war. Novell has a smaller overkill factor but is dangerous nonetheless. Also, Europe has a strong anti-software patent lobby (of which I'm a supporter) and a full-blown patent war would give us the best ammunition we could ever ask for.
By the way, Microsoft hasn't successfully defended itself against the EU (yet). If they don't deliver the demanded documentation soon they face another triple-digit Megaeuro fine - and they're getting pretty close to the Gigaeuro mark. Sure, it'll take ages until they pay, since they're challenging the fines, but I seriously doubt that they'll avert the fines. And even if they do, their resistance is generating bad PR.
Microsoft is quickly losing friends over here. If they don't watch their step they could lose crucial parts of this market without abandoning it.
Re:Parent is wrong, not insightful
on
Leopard Vs. Vista
·
· Score: 1
Oh, the greatness etc.
Due to problems with a hardware upgrade I have ended up with a system with 512 megs of RAM and an NVidia Gf 6150 TC, which supports up to 512 MiB of RAM. It comes with awe-inspiring 32 megs onboard and uses up 1/3 of my system RAM without the option of turning off TC. Either way, it's not very fast (indeed a Geforce 4 Ti would've beat it). The only merit the 6150 had was being the cheapest non-ATI PCIe graphics card in the store.
If you think about getting a TC card consider buying anything else, including cards from the previous generation, as they give you the disadvantage of reduced system RAM while performing worse than GPUs that only support half of their memory but bring their own.
Maybe Apple should just implement symlinks as aliases (at least on HFS+ volumes). That way you can ln -s a file without the link looking ugly in the Finder and you get some more simplicity. I don't know enough about the differences between both to actually tell whether it works like that, though.
Maybe it's not right to continually bash Vista for a few problems, but Vista doesn't have a few problems - it has heaps of them. It's late, most of the features we were promised are missing and others are badly implemented - in this case they promised us full-blown symbolic links and in reality delivered a functional equivalent to Windows 95's link files.
I'm sorry, but much of the continual bashing of Vista comes from the fact that we're continually discovering new flaws. It's hard to stop bitching when you're subjected to a continuous stream of news saying that "Vista feature X was dropped/doesn't work as advertised/is implemented in a bad fashion".
When NT was created Microsoft knew it'd break compatibility but be superior to the existing stuff. Maybe Microsoft should treat the current NT line as a legacy OS (effectively making Visty the new Windows 98) and create a new OS completely from scratch.
I mean, how often did they have to scrap major parts (or even everything) of Vista and start over? At least twice, I think. Windows is getting unmanageable and I somewhat doubt that the NT kernel is in a better state. If Microsoft first developed a structured approach to OS building (unlike the 1000-developers-and-minimal-communication hodgepodge they have today) and then created a completely new kernel and userland parallel to Vista they might impress their users like they did when they introduced the NT kernel to home users with Windows 2000. They might even surprise people and write an OS that actually gets some respect from IT professionals.
I think Blackcomb could very well become the next Me - with or without a superior alternative being developed.
I would argue that it's a bit more than a graphics upgrade, especially on the part of the PS3. The Cell architecture will allow much more advanced AI and physics, among other things.
So it's an upgrade to graphics and the scripted pseudo-AI used in the games. Seriously, I don't see the Physx and related technologies as much more than prettification devices. As long as stuff like this is used for particle effects and the like it's, well, eye candy. In other words, worse than completely irrelevant - it siphons off developer time that could have been used for better gameplay.
Once they show me a game that really relies on real-time physics calculation for more than mere effects I might be intersted. Fluid dynamics would be especially interesting. But until then, well, why the fsck should I waste my money on something that merely enables more effects?
I've stopped being impressed by video game techology a while ago. We have raytracing hardware but no OpenRT games (and yes, OpenRT looks more interesting to me than NVidia's latest GPU with 4096 parallel rendering pipelines. And even then, technological innovation === the development of more graphics efects. Heck, the same applies to pretty much anything that happens in the video game world. I've been sick of it whan Doom 3 came out and I'm still sick of it.
I think that's the reason I became a retrogamer in the first place: I don't see a reason to play wer games because they're mostly clones of old games with prettier graphics. And the interesting ones are not even as fun as the originals because they skimped on the QA (Gothic 3 being a prime exmple - not that Gothic 2 was cleaner when it came out).
It's also great when you want random documents to be easily reverse-engineerable. XML markup can't replace good documentation, but it can give pointers.
This occurrred to me when I had to reverse-engineer a format of concatenated ASCII lines mostly containing sets of small integers with strings intersparsed (ie. "1\n0\n22 12\nbrown\ngreen\n12 11 12 10 9 13 14\n5 5 6 3 3 2 3 3") and had to come up with an own format to store the data in. Just in case in the future someone has to write a replacement for my software each file (even though other kinds of storage would be more efficient) tells the user where a variable begins, where it ends and what name it has. That's one advantage of XML, at least when the tag names are informative.
I find it cute how you manage to apply "arguably", a word denoting objectivity to "best", a purely subjective qualifier. WoW is the most popular MMORPG out there, but that doesn't mean that it's better in all cases - for example, Saga of Ryzom has the more intriguing world and feels less clichéd than WoW (come on, everyone has humans, dwarves, elves and or[ck]s. They weren't even new when Warcraft 1 came out), plus it has Ryzom Ring, which allows for user-created content. EVE Online isn't a fantasy game, which alone makes it better if you don't like fantasy. Ragnarok Online has lots of freeshards (besides, where's WoW's anime series?) with a variety of conditions. Those are all qualities which might or might not be important to a player.
WoW is the best game for you, but if you try to convince me that that Technicolor grindfest is enjoyable to play you'd be hard pressed. (Yes, I did try it.) The point is, fun is subjective and success doesn't equal quality - cf. McDonald's, VHS, MS-DOS, Star Wars I-III, the Cuban government...
How about you don't assume that I'm an idiot because my taste in games doesn't equal yours and I don't assume that you play WoW because you don't get more sophisticated games? We'd most probably both be wrong anyway.
Of course nobody falls into just one category. When I create a character I plan with a meticulosity (is that a word?) of a munchkin, but once creation is over I transmute into a roleplayer who occasionally does things that are clearly wrong - because the character thinks they're right. I guess I'm just really serious about having detailed characters.
OTOH I'm also a dice-lover, frequently using a d20 to let my character make up his mind about something he's not entirely sure about. Whenever uncertainty is involed I bring out the dice, because, well, they are uncertainty.
I don't assume the role of the problem solver often - except for Shadowrun, where the planning is equally as fun as putting the plan into action.
Heh. When I go into a dungeon I just hope that my character will come out at least somewhat sane. And no, we aren't playing Call of Cthulhu - my group's default GM manages to make almost-vanilla The Dark Eye v3 just as dangerous to the characters' sanity.
[The following part will only make sense to TDE players. The terminology might be off since we play the game in German]
The only real artifact we've ever found is a titanium casket - unfortunately nobody in the party knows what it's made of and it's so incredibly expensive that we won't be able to sell it anyway. Also, it's kinda used to contain a carbuncle infused by part of Amazeroth's essence and I expect to lose it when we get the nearest Praios temple to get the stone destroyed.
Incidentally, my scoundrel(? the thief-type class) is now determined to join the Praiots and become a demon hunter, even though he is connected to (probably) either Hesinde or Amazeroth since a strange gypsy woman made him a medium without him knowing or wanting it. Since a nervous breakdown he also suffers from occasional bouts of derealization.
Except for him becoming a Praiot that was all pretty much part of the GM's plan to wear down his sanity. And compared to our recently-vampirized druid (without a vampire even being present!) and our numbed Film Noir-style Rondra priest with necromantic tendencies my character actually got off somewhat lucky. I won't even go into how one character entered a portal into the nether hells lured by the prospect of sex.
[End of TDE-specifica]
Really, it depends on the group how things play out. We tend to be more down-to-earth with slow progression in power - all new characters start out at level 7 (to make the classes more distinctive), but so far only one has progressed past level 9 and that was due to gross miscommunication. The most powerful weapon I've found so far is a dagger with a damage of 1D6+2 (as compared to 1D6 for a regular dagger). Usually charcters leave adventures with less equipment than they started with. Magical artifacts are extremely rare and usually bring much more trouble than benefit (like a two-handed sword that can be wielded by anyone but has the unfortunate tendency to possess the wielder).
We like it that way. When we want to play with big guns we play Shadowrun (v3; all RPG systems get bad once they reach v4). Shadowrun is for putting modified grenade launchers into your van to use them as mine layers. TDE is for roleplay unrestricted by powerful equipment. When you know you won't get it you start worrying about it.
Gathering powerful items to pimp out your character are a part of roleplaying, yes, but I won't say that they are necessarily a big part. If character building is your main concern you can have that with WoW or Diablo. None of the P&P gamers I've met so far are as fixated on building up their characters as the D&D player stereotype suggests.
Then again I don't play D&D and won't touch it as long as TDE exists.
Not Neccessarily. Roleplayers just suffer a -10 malus on Charisma when dealing with a non-roleplayer (-50 when the person is of the other sex) and have a maximal value of 1 on Perform:Sex*. Theoretically they could produce offspring, but there aren't enough dice in the world to roll that many twenties.
* Munchkins are an exception, but they aren't aware that they bought their +20 To Everything with the malus Completely And Utterly Repulsive Beyond Any Hope.
So, essentially the author wants WoW to be more like Saga of Ryzom?
I think that WoW's server concept might make this less feasible than Ryozm's three-plus-one servers (one for each of the English, German and French communities and one test server) - after all, if players change the world that means that every server will develop differently, leading to (w|m)ildly divergent realms. This is maintainable when you have few servers, especially when each server is used by speakers of one language (thus avoiding confusion between the individual servers), but with the dozens of servers WoW uses all hell would break loose, not to mention the confusion in the boards.
A: "Damn, I want Zoggo's Gauntlets!"
B: "Why, they suck?"
A: "Well, on my server Zoggo survived the assault on Deadopolis and thus had time to perfect the gauntlets. They give a sweet attack bonus."
B: "The assault on what? We don't even have that town!"
A: "Well, it used to be Darnassus but then the Forsaken took it over and renamed it."
I think they don't care because what they have is fast enough.
True. I'm on 2 Mbps ADSL and the only thing I'm utterly dissatisfied with is the upstream (~150 kbps). I'd love 2M/2M SDSL or even 2M/1M ADSL, but the only way to get faster upstream would be to buy a bigger ADSL line (6M/? being the fastest in my area), which I don't really need.
I don't beieve this. In the last year when the Leoonids came it was either somewhere in the middle of the week (and I had to go to school/university early the next days) or northern Germany was overcast with low clouds. But it's weekend and a quick glance at the Dashboard forecast widget reveals sunny (if cold) weather from saturday onward.
There's got to be something wrong. I don't believe that it's actually possible to see the Leonids from the Bremen area... Maybe Earth approaches the trail from such an angle that the Leonids only come down over the other side of the Earth. Or Earth's rotation becomes irregular for a few days so that the Leonids come down everywhere except here. Something like that.
Ladies and gentlemen, we present to you this season's lame Slashdot joke! (Don't worry if you find it funny. It'll lose its charm in about ten or twenty repetitions.)
True, plus it makes no sense for yoda to go from being 880 years and fit as a fiddle to 900 and dying, though I've always told myself this was just because Yoda felt bad for fucking up so bad and decided he was done after helping Luke to fix Yoda's mess. Mostly though he was a pretty ludicrous character to have serving as a general -- it didn't fit his V/VI persona at all.
There's a good explanation for that - no maintenance for twenty years. You see, Yodas behavior in the prequels (going from "oh, I need this stick to walk" to "I'm bouncing around like Flubber on caffeine") is explainable only by one theory: He's a droid. Yes, Yoda is a Jedi droid, probably from the same manufacturer as General Grievous. After battles his aging energy core is depleted (probably has seen too many charge cycles - maybe Yoda runs on LiIon?) and he has to recharge, thus the need for a walking stick. After Episode 3 he falls in disrepair and succumbs to entropy.
And even if George Lucas himself showed up and told me I'm wrong, I won't care. I think that Bioware has a much better grasp of the Star Wars universe than he does and with a glitch the X-Box version of KOTOR allowed the creation of Jedi driods. Yes, I also trust that glitch more on Star Wars lore than Lucas.
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I wonder how USians feel about agnostics. After all, we don't reject God outright, we merely say that blind faith in him is not justified and that there is no non-faith-based proof of his existence.
However, I think that in the end agnostics probably end up being seen as palette-swapped atheists by most bible (t)humpers.
Yes, but not many people expect Singularity to reach any market ever.
I haven't kept up with the mobile phone market since I got my 6210, which has exactly the features I want out of a mobile phone (plus WAP, but I think I can handle that amount of bloat ;). However, UMTS is going to become the new standard Real Soon and there might be a time when I have to get a new mobile.
My question is: Is there a 3210/6210 equivalent that dows UMTS? My requirements are:
- Candybar form factor. Everything with moving parts is too damn fragile. See next line.
- Somewhat rugged. I want the thing to be able to survive a one meter drop.
- No camera, no media player, no nothing. As little functionality besides phone calls and SMS/mail as possible.
- Bonus points if the phone doesn't have a big fancy color screen because it doesn't need one.
- Also bonus points for low price. I can live off a 15 EUR prepaid card for a year, thus I have no use for phones that are so expensive you can only afford them together with some kind of plan.
Essentially I want a UMTS-based mobile telephone with SMS functionality and nothing else. Even though I like multifunctionality in some devices, I perceive telephones as tools rather than computers - they have to work, be simple and do what they do exceptionally well. A phone that does not match these criteria is just a bad crossbreed between a PDA and an UMTS modem.
Ulimately, though, I think Ozzie and Novell will be unable to stop Ballmer to sue some poor linux distro into legal catacombs -- recall that Microsoft successfully defended itself against the Government of the United States and the European Union; I would not think many entities stand a chance against them.
They have to be careful about what they do. While they could weaken IBN, the converse is true as well - IBM is one of the heavyweights in the software patent arena and they can MAD the crap out of Microsoft, should it come to a patent war. Novell has a smaller overkill factor but is dangerous nonetheless. Also, Europe has a strong anti-software patent lobby (of which I'm a supporter) and a full-blown patent war would give us the best ammunition we could ever ask for.
By the way, Microsoft hasn't successfully defended itself against the EU (yet). If they don't deliver the demanded documentation soon they face another triple-digit Megaeuro fine - and they're getting pretty close to the Gigaeuro mark. Sure, it'll take ages until they pay, since they're challenging the fines, but I seriously doubt that they'll avert the fines. And even if they do, their resistance is generating bad PR.
Microsoft is quickly losing friends over here. If they don't watch their step they could lose crucial parts of this market without abandoning it.
Oh, the greatness etc.
Due to problems with a hardware upgrade I have ended up with a system with 512 megs of RAM and an NVidia Gf 6150 TC, which supports up to 512 MiB of RAM. It comes with awe-inspiring 32 megs onboard and uses up 1/3 of my system RAM without the option of turning off TC. Either way, it's not very fast (indeed a Geforce 4 Ti would've beat it). The only merit the 6150 had was being the cheapest non-ATI PCIe graphics card in the store.
If you think about getting a TC card consider buying anything else, including cards from the previous generation, as they give you the disadvantage of reduced system RAM while performing worse than GPUs that only support half of their memory but bring their own.
Maybe Apple should just implement symlinks as aliases (at least on HFS+ volumes). That way you can ln -s a file without the link looking ugly in the Finder and you get some more simplicity. I don't know enough about the differences between both to actually tell whether it works like that, though.
Maybe it's not right to continually bash Vista for a few problems, but Vista doesn't have a few problems - it has heaps of them. It's late, most of the features we were promised are missing and others are badly implemented - in this case they promised us full-blown symbolic links and in reality delivered a functional equivalent to Windows 95's link files.
I'm sorry, but much of the continual bashing of Vista comes from the fact that we're continually discovering new flaws. It's hard to stop bitching when you're subjected to a continuous stream of news saying that "Vista feature X was dropped/doesn't work as advertised/is implemented in a bad fashion".
When NT was created Microsoft knew it'd break compatibility but be superior to the existing stuff. Maybe Microsoft should treat the current NT line as a legacy OS (effectively making Visty the new Windows 98) and create a new OS completely from scratch.
I mean, how often did they have to scrap major parts (or even everything) of Vista and start over? At least twice, I think. Windows is getting unmanageable and I somewhat doubt that the NT kernel is in a better state. If Microsoft first developed a structured approach to OS building (unlike the 1000-developers-and-minimal-communication hodgepodge they have today) and then created a completely new kernel and userland parallel to Vista they might impress their users like they did when they introduced the NT kernel to home users with Windows 2000. They might even surprise people and write an OS that actually gets some respect from IT professionals.
I think Blackcomb could very well become the next Me - with or without a superior alternative being developed.
I would argue that it's a bit more than a graphics upgrade, especially on the part of the PS3. The Cell architecture will allow much more advanced AI and physics, among other things.
So it's an upgrade to graphics and the scripted pseudo-AI used in the games. Seriously, I don't see the Physx and related technologies as much more than prettification devices. As long as stuff like this is used for particle effects and the like it's, well, eye candy. In other words, worse than completely irrelevant - it siphons off developer time that could have been used for better gameplay.
Once they show me a game that really relies on real-time physics calculation for more than mere effects I might be intersted. Fluid dynamics would be especially interesting. But until then, well, why the fsck should I waste my money on something that merely enables more effects?
I've stopped being impressed by video game techology a while ago. We have raytracing hardware but no OpenRT games (and yes, OpenRT looks more interesting to me than NVidia's latest GPU with 4096 parallel rendering pipelines. And even then, technological innovation === the development of more graphics efects. Heck, the same applies to pretty much anything that happens in the video game world. I've been sick of it whan Doom 3 came out and I'm still sick of it.
I think that's the reason I became a retrogamer in the first place: I don't see a reason to play wer games because they're mostly clones of old games with prettier graphics. And the interesting ones are not even as fun as the originals because they skimped on the QA (Gothic 3 being a prime exmple - not that Gothic 2 was cleaner when it came out).
Oh, great. Now carbon nanotubes turn into the XML of molecular chemistry.
"Hey, we need a material with $PROPERTY."
"Just use carbon nanotubes."
"Genius!"
It's also great when you want random documents to be easily reverse-engineerable. XML markup can't replace good documentation, but it can give pointers.
This occurrred to me when I had to reverse-engineer a format of concatenated ASCII lines mostly containing sets of small integers with strings intersparsed (ie. "1\n0\n22 12\nbrown\ngreen\n12 11 12 10 9 13 14\n5 5 6 3 3 2 3 3") and had to come up with an own format to store the data in. Just in case in the future someone has to write a replacement for my software each file (even though other kinds of storage would be more efficient) tells the user where a variable begins, where it ends and what name it has. That's one advantage of XML, at least when the tag names are informative.
It's also *arguably* the best ever.
I find it cute how you manage to apply "arguably", a word denoting objectivity to "best", a purely subjective qualifier. WoW is the most popular MMORPG out there, but that doesn't mean that it's better in all cases - for example, Saga of Ryzom has the more intriguing world and feels less clichéd than WoW (come on, everyone has humans, dwarves, elves and or[ck]s. They weren't even new when Warcraft 1 came out), plus it has Ryzom Ring, which allows for user-created content. EVE Online isn't a fantasy game, which alone makes it better if you don't like fantasy. Ragnarok Online has lots of freeshards (besides, where's WoW's anime series?) with a variety of conditions. Those are all qualities which might or might not be important to a player.
WoW is the best game for you, but if you try to convince me that that Technicolor grindfest is enjoyable to play you'd be hard pressed. (Yes, I did try it.) The point is, fun is subjective and success doesn't equal quality - cf. McDonald's, VHS, MS-DOS, Star Wars I-III, the Cuban government...
How about you don't assume that I'm an idiot because my taste in games doesn't equal yours and I don't assume that you play WoW because you don't get more sophisticated games? We'd most probably both be wrong anyway.
World of Warcraft is the new Counterstrike.
Of course nobody falls into just one category. When I create a character I plan with a meticulosity (is that a word?) of a munchkin, but once creation is over I transmute into a roleplayer who occasionally does things that are clearly wrong - because the character thinks they're right. I guess I'm just really serious about having detailed characters.
OTOH I'm also a dice-lover, frequently using a d20 to let my character make up his mind about something he's not entirely sure about. Whenever uncertainty is involed I bring out the dice, because, well, they are uncertainty.
I don't assume the role of the problem solver often - except for Shadowrun, where the planning is equally as fun as putting the plan into action.
Heh. When I go into a dungeon I just hope that my character will come out at least somewhat sane. And no, we aren't playing Call of Cthulhu - my group's default GM manages to make almost-vanilla The Dark Eye v3 just as dangerous to the characters' sanity.
[The following part will only make sense to TDE players. The terminology might be off since we play the game in German]
The only real artifact we've ever found is a titanium casket - unfortunately nobody in the party knows what it's made of and it's so incredibly expensive that we won't be able to sell it anyway. Also, it's kinda used to contain a carbuncle infused by part of Amazeroth's essence and I expect to lose it when we get the nearest Praios temple to get the stone destroyed.
Incidentally, my scoundrel(? the thief-type class) is now determined to join the Praiots and become a demon hunter, even though he is connected to (probably) either Hesinde or Amazeroth since a strange gypsy woman made him a medium without him knowing or wanting it. Since a nervous breakdown he also suffers from occasional bouts of derealization.
Except for him becoming a Praiot that was all pretty much part of the GM's plan to wear down his sanity. And compared to our recently-vampirized druid (without a vampire even being present!) and our numbed Film Noir-style Rondra priest with necromantic tendencies my character actually got off somewhat lucky. I won't even go into how one character entered a portal into the nether hells lured by the prospect of sex.
[End of TDE-specifica]
Really, it depends on the group how things play out. We tend to be more down-to-earth with slow progression in power - all new characters start out at level 7 (to make the classes more distinctive), but so far only one has progressed past level 9 and that was due to gross miscommunication. The most powerful weapon I've found so far is a dagger with a damage of 1D6+2 (as compared to 1D6 for a regular dagger). Usually charcters leave adventures with less equipment than they started with. Magical artifacts are extremely rare and usually bring much more trouble than benefit (like a two-handed sword that can be wielded by anyone but has the unfortunate tendency to possess the wielder).
We like it that way. When we want to play with big guns we play Shadowrun (v3; all RPG systems get bad once they reach v4). Shadowrun is for putting modified grenade launchers into your van to use them as mine layers. TDE is for roleplay unrestricted by powerful equipment. When you know you won't get it you start worrying about it.
Gathering powerful items to pimp out your character are a part of roleplaying, yes, but I won't say that they are necessarily a big part. If character building is your main concern you can have that with WoW or Diablo. None of the P&P gamers I've met so far are as fixated on building up their characters as the D&D player stereotype suggests.
Then again I don't play D&D and won't touch it as long as TDE exists.
Not Neccessarily. Roleplayers just suffer a -10 malus on Charisma when dealing with a non-roleplayer (-50 when the person is of the other sex) and have a maximal value of 1 on Perform:Sex*. Theoretically they could produce offspring, but there aren't enough dice in the world to roll that many twenties.
* Munchkins are an exception, but they aren't aware that they bought their +20 To Everything with the malus Completely And Utterly Repulsive Beyond Any Hope.
So, essentially the author wants WoW to be more like Saga of Ryzom?
I think that WoW's server concept might make this less feasible than Ryozm's three-plus-one servers (one for each of the English, German and French communities and one test server) - after all, if players change the world that means that every server will develop differently, leading to (w|m)ildly divergent realms. This is maintainable when you have few servers, especially when each server is used by speakers of one language (thus avoiding confusion between the individual servers), but with the dozens of servers WoW uses all hell would break loose, not to mention the confusion in the boards.
A: "Damn, I want Zoggo's Gauntlets!"
B: "Why, they suck?"
A: "Well, on my server Zoggo survived the assault on Deadopolis and thus had time to perfect the gauntlets. They give a sweet attack bonus."
B: "The assault on what? We don't even have that town!"
A: "Well, it used to be Darnassus but then the Forsaken took it over and renamed it."
I think they don't care because what they have is fast enough.
True. I'm on 2 Mbps ADSL and the only thing I'm utterly dissatisfied with is the upstream (~150 kbps). I'd love 2M/2M SDSL or even 2M/1M ADSL, but the only way to get faster upstream would be to buy a bigger ADSL line (6M/? being the fastest in my area), which I don't really need.
Ugh. Sp msny zypos. I shouldn't post to Slashdot immediately after waking up.
I don't beieve this. In the last year when the Leoonids came it was either somewhere in the middle of the week (and I had to go to school/university early the next days) or northern Germany was overcast with low clouds. But it's weekend and a quick glance at the Dashboard forecast widget reveals sunny (if cold) weather from saturday onward.
There's got to be something wrong. I don't believe that it's actually possible to see the Leonids from the Bremen area... Maybe Earth approaches the trail from such an angle that the Leonids only come down over the other side of the Earth. Or Earth's rotation becomes irregular for a few days so that the Leonids come down everywhere except here. Something like that.
A guy with a sig like yours has no right to talk ;)
You see, I'm an expert.
Ahh, the good old days of the Thunderbird...
Ladies and gentlemen, we present to you this season's lame Slashdot joke! (Don't worry if you find it funny. It'll lose its charm in about ten or twenty repetitions.)
"...IT'S WINDOWS FROM MICROSOFT FOR JUST 199 US DOLLARS! CRIKEY, WHAT A BEAUTY!"
Yeah... no. Also, Ballmer would never get killed by a stingray - the shouting would scare away all sealife within a ten mile radius.
True, plus it makes no sense for yoda to go from being 880 years and fit as a fiddle to 900 and dying, though I've always told myself this was just because Yoda felt bad for fucking up so bad and decided he was done after helping Luke to fix Yoda's mess. Mostly though he was a pretty ludicrous character to have serving as a general -- it didn't fit his V/VI persona at all.
There's a good explanation for that - no maintenance for twenty years. You see, Yodas behavior in the prequels (going from "oh, I need this stick to walk" to "I'm bouncing around like Flubber on caffeine") is explainable only by one theory: He's a droid. Yes, Yoda is a Jedi droid, probably from the same manufacturer as General Grievous. After battles his aging energy core is depleted (probably has seen too many charge cycles - maybe Yoda runs on LiIon?) and he has to recharge, thus the need for a walking stick. After Episode 3 he falls in disrepair and succumbs to entropy.
And even if George Lucas himself showed up and told me I'm wrong, I won't care. I think that Bioware has a much better grasp of the Star Wars universe than he does and with a glitch the X-Box version of KOTOR allowed the creation of Jedi driods. Yes, I also trust that glitch more on Star Wars lore than Lucas.