Of course many people have noted that an enterprise level internet connection with SLAs is going to be pricier than a household connection.
But the submitter is also asking, more or less, why do we still use DSL, 2 or 4 pair copper to the home?
Money is the answer. Anything that involves rolling out new infrastructure will be a huge investment, especially if you have one of those picky governments that expects industry to treat customers equally. Who's going to pay for that? I can only imagine what the cost would be like. Now, since internet is treated like a commodity instead of a utility, no government under those conditions can mandate the provision of high speed internet, so it has to be profitable. So it would cost a lot, lot more. And 99% of users wouldn't pay.
Take a look under the hood of Vista before you start flaming it. The OS is fundamentally, and in many cases wildly different from previous revs of Windows. I suggest you review some of the Paul Thurrot and Mark Russinovic articles about changes in Vista.
Yes, the user interface shares many similarities with previous versions of Windows.
But people seem to be missing the point here - it's an operating system. You use it to launch applications and provide a framework for those applications to work in. That's all it does. What did you expect? Oral sex?
Just to provide some facts (I hate to do this, especially on/. where I will be modded to hell)
Vista will allow you to perform a fully functioning install without using *any* serial or license key. You can run Windows Vista, fully functional, for 30 days without entering a key or verifying that key via the activation product. Sure, during that 30 day period you need to fix up your license details and activate the product. This is an anti-piracy process. If you respect copyrights and have legitimately paid for your software, this shouldn't be a problem.
If you don't respect copyrights, or just feel like pirating the product, or don't want to phone home to Microsoft, it's a simple matter of using any of the fire-and-forget third party product activators.
Now, most importantly, all of those facts above indicate clearly that Vista can be installed and running and useable immediately after the initial install process. It's not as free as open source/free software is, because you're dealing with proprietary code.
But if you ask me, it is a million times better than OS X. At least with Vista I get to choose who I buy the computer from. Microsoft doesn't lock me in or tie me down to a specific hardware platform like some DRM laden MP3 player sellers do.
So, game developers are not constantly re-inventing the wheel... this is great. How many times in an FPS have you burst into an office, seen a desk, a chair, etc, then wondered how long it took developers to model it, texture it etc? Probably not many. But I have! Really, a few good chair models is all we need. This will hopefully free up development time for more important things like design, AI, plot and innovation.
Even better, these kinds of resources need to be made available to small time and independant developers. Writing a 3D game would be a lot easier if a huge number of the objects were already done.
What are people talking about here? Blaming Hollywood for not making stodgy, boring, exquisite boutique SciFi (not scifi or whatever because apparently there's a difference) movies designed for an audience consisting of real world contemporaries of the Comic-Store guy from the Simpsons?
It's a lot like blaming McDonalds for not making cuisine suitable for the food-stacking jus guzzling professional restauranteurs so they can write pretentious articles about how high the food stacks are at their $200/plate 20 course meals.
Yeah, it's art. Hollywood is a business. Art either sells or it doesn't. If you need to make a profit, what movie will you make?
I like science. I like science fiction. I hate being bored out of my skull. I'll pick the science fiction in an entertaining wrapper.
She's not being sued for downloading a track. She's being sued for making that track available for downloading from her on a P2P network, ie, distribution of copyrighted material that she has no right to distribute.
Of course the financial harm aspect is still quite correct, the RIAA usually wants huge sums of money (something like $10,000US TEN THOUSAND US DOLLARS) per track shared, whereas the specific instance they capture, she may have served requests to upload the track 10, 20 times, maybe 100 at the most extreme, at $1/track, that's $100 of lost revenue for the RIAA (assuming each downloader would have purchased the track had it not been available from this child).
The mean just tells us what you have if you get a sample and divide the sum of values in the sample by the sample size. It's one of the three more meaningful "averages" you can get in statistics. I'd be at least as interested in this case in seeing the mode and median.
You can "screw up" a mean by adding one or two samples that are extreme. These disks, say they have a 5 million MTBF as the figure you want, but they all really fail after 5 minutes of use. Problem, right? Wrong! You just get a a few units that are good for 1 or 2 billion years and throw them into the mix. Then your mean value skyrockets into millions! The median or mode averages won't suffer from the same distortion.
Of course if we are dealing with a reasonable, wishfully thinking a normally distributed sample, then of course I would like to know the variance and standard deviation for the sample. This will tell us if all the drives plug away for exactly 5 million years, or if they are just as likely to last 1 million years or 9 million years, or anywhere inbetween or even outside of that.
But all that extra information isn't provided to us. We just get the mean. On its own, mean doesn't mean much at all.
Ahh, but if I use thott or the allakhazam or any other data tracker, it's an opt in experience.
And yes it is a slippery slope argument, but slippery slopes do exist. Do you trust a major corporation to always do the right thing? When you see a corporation starting to act out of line, it shouldn't be ignored. It's not like Sony just started behaving themselves right away when people realised they were installing rootkits on every PC you dropped their DRM CD's in.
Maybe I just don't want people to see all my stuff? I don't care if it's harmless information. What stings me is that I don't get a choice. I recognise the terms of use agreeement allows Blizzard to do whatever the heck they want with any data stored in their systems. That doesn't mean I have to like it, and it doesn't mean this kind of behaviour is good customer service.
It wouldn't be that hard to add an opt-in or opt-out button, now, would it? Nowhere in my post did I suggest that it was a bad idea. But when it comes to my privacy, even for unassuming details like the kind of shirt my in-game character wears, I like to have a choice in it.
This is a privacy issue stemming from a poor design methodology. Even if it seems like a small thing, you can't ignore privacy or just shrug privacy violations off like they mean nothing.
That's very easy to say, and I'm sure there isn't any kind of special and amazing IWIN combination. But there might be something good that's unconventional. I know if I worked something like that out, I'd like to keep it on the hush for as long as I can.
A lot of people seem to have missed the main point of my post, the problem with the whole Armory implementation is that Blizzard doesn't give you the choice to hide the information.
Saying that it's not important to have an option for privacy, even in something as trite as your in-game details in a computer game, is probably a bad idea. If Blizzard doesn't care about keeping this data private, what else don't they care about keeping private? Your name? Your phone number? Sure would be nice if you gank some guy and he looks up your name and address and comes around for a visit because it turns out he was criminally insane.
Nice kneejerk reaction! Free cookie. Now please read my post and put your knee back where it's supposed to be.
Nowhere did I say locks were overpowered. Or underpowered. I just said they're simple to play. You can write a macro that does your casting sequence (dot fear dot etc). Then you just keep clicking one button and either stuff dies or it doesn't depending on how good your gear is. Many classes are quite similar in terms of very low skill requirement, hunters, mages, locks, priests in particular. Melee classes and short range classes require much more careful attention to positioning, but even then it's simplistic in terms of the buttons you're mashing when you're in combat.
I'd like to quote Guild Wars as an example of not-so-simple, because the skills you take into combat can be used to create a customised combo set, which depends on both your pre-game design and your in game sequence. I'm not saying GW is better than WoW, either, just illustrating an example.
All else remaining equal, skill and co-ordination are decisive.
But WoW is quite simplistic in terms of gameplay (really, it is very simple, warlock for example, dot-fear-dot, it's not complicated). As a result of the straightforward nature of gameplay, skill is a backseat compared to equipment.
I know this because I play warrior a lot, and playing warrior is painful. It's painful because the blizzard developers balance the entire class around the 1% of warriors completely equipped with orange gear.
It's true there's not much room to be unpredictable in your class, but you can keep an edge by keeping your capabilities hidden until the very last moment, just ask Sun Tzu. Blizzard have removed the ability for players to be secretive.
And what about world PvP? You can now stalk your favourite enemy, work out how tough he really is, and exploit that information. Or, just as likely, he'll do that to you. Think about that next time you stroll out of Tarren Mill. Talk about emergent play.
But like most corps, Blizzard forgot that people like options and they like to feel like they have rights.
This should have been opt-in. Instead, I don't think you can even opt out.
Sure, 90% of players won't care, but what about the high end gamers who develop a secret 2v2 PvP secret sauce? Since they don't actually have real lives, their performance and uniqueness in WoW PvP means a lot to them!
Blizzard jeapardises this quite a lot without thinking too hard about the consequences.
I'd also bet good money that the people paying for those systems probably won't unpack them and start using them productively, either. Some people collect their own navel lint, and while it may have value to that absolute minority, it's perhaps not so useful to the majority, which is why navel lint, Apple Lisa's and PCjr's aren't commodities today.
And, more to my original point, even though the Lisa, the PCjr, and the lint aren't big sellers, the people who produced them have other products that are quite useful and viable products, which you shouldn't discount just because you didn't like the lint, the PCjr, or the Lisa.
That was 7 years ago... I suppose you wouldn't buy an IBM/Lenovo Thinkpad laptop purely because the PCjr "peanut" was a worthless system, and you wouldn't buy an iPod because the Apple Lisa never caught on?
As a matter of fact, just about every corporation has had some serious screwups - does this mean you don't buy products anymore?
What do you advocate as a replacement? The Registry?;) The Registry uses text in places...the DWORD is actually an assembler variable...but it also uses a lot of non-text and is completely non-transparent in places. There are good reasons why UNIX (and hence Linux) uses text config files...you can read about those here if you want.
Ideally, as an end user in this particular case, I should have no idea whatsoever where the configuration is kept. It should just be "done for me" through GUI dialogs. At least the registry gives an elegant answer to the question "Where's my configuration data?" "In the registry.". As a side note, you don't need to open regedit.exe and directly edit the registry if you want to connect to a network resource in Windows. In Linux, you do have to open a text editor to edit fstab or whatever. Advantage: Windows.
FTP is good for transferring files yes, but I have a TB of storage on my server and about 120GB on the Ubuntu box - it doesn't make sense to move the video files from where they're stored onto the Ubuntu box when I should be able to just connect to the shared network resource and go with it.
I do appreciate that Microsoft are famous for making interoperability a pain, but from a usability perspective it should at least be possible. I daresay that until interoperability is seamless, Linux has a long way to go. I wonder if OS X has the same interoperability problems, and if that doesn't, why is it that Linux does?
I know I'll get smacked for this, but I've installed Edgy Eft to build a modest home theatre PC with MythTV. I did this because I wasn't 100% happy with the Vista Media Center.
It's still not working correctly because of some pretty glaring issues with useability and interoperability in Linux.
Installation - whilst installation was in fact a breeze and as simple as a Windows install (although, Vista offers better hard disk controller management, so if things go screwy with your install, Vista would be the safer bet). Applications - I needed to connect to my windows server at home where my movies are stored. Linux won't "just work" with Windows - I had to install Samba. Then I discovered that even if you install Samba, you can't connect to a Windows Server 2003 share with it anyway. The complete stabbing agony of it - I had to use a terminal session, enter command lines, and edit text files to make it work enough to find out it's not possible anyway. Linux isn't ready. Interoperability - Microsoft saves the day. I updated my server to Windows Server 2003 R2, which includes file services for Unix, allowing me to create linux-mountable shares. At least now I can access network resources from my new linux box, but it took Microsoft to do it.
Until Linux frees itself from the horrible terminal/command line dependencies, eliminates text files for configuration (how the heck is the average joe supposed to know which one of hundreds of config files he needs to edit just to connect a network drive??) and gets some decent interoperability happening, it's irresponsible to suggest using it in anywhere but a 24/7 technically supported environment.
"DNI" could still be surpassed, I'm pretty sure alliance players would like nothing more than to grind the opposing faction completely into the ground. If you want to understand something of the mentality of an alliance PvP player, I suggest rolling a L20 horde anything and hanging around Tarren Mill to do the quests there. Just quest. You'll be dead and corpse camped within 30 minutes. Your only hope? Horde counter-PvP. Good luck with the odds heavily tilted against you in terms of numbers.
Let's constructively assume that "DNI" is really "I", aka, Impossible. Now, Horde holds, say, 30% of the towns in the game, has only got access to 30% of the quests (so presumably can't quest from 1-70 anymore). Alliance holds 70% of towns and happily runs around ganking every horde they can find to make sure ally n00bs can keep on powerlevelling without losing any more towns... this is "fun", right? Why is this scenario fun for a Horde player?
And yes it's true, according to realm stats, there are 3 times more Horde pallies than Ally shammies now. Which says a lot about Blizzard's pro-Alliance bias we've endured for the past three years, having such great battlegrounds as A/V, where (I looked up the stats), it's about 90 alliance wins for every 30 horde ones. But will having pallies really balance the factions? On PvP realms, where it counts (unless you're a furry or otherwise love carebears and PvE servers), you can't roll both factions, so any alts you make will be same-faction. So only new players will tilt the balance, and at best there is a 50/50 chance they'll roll horde- but then we reduce that chance because they'll roll the same faction as their friends play, so we're back to 70/30 for new players as well. The balance won't change because of 2.0.x.
All we can hope for is that the rumours will work out, and once L70 horde pallies are established they'll review AV for a third time and balance the game out. Otherwise I'd suggest you continue to enjoy the wait in the AV queues while blizzard finds enough hordies for the allies to punish over and over again.
Yeah, and with an average 70%-30% population in favour of alliance on WoW, that would be a nightmare (if you're over 15, aka, horde) or pointless (if you're under 15, aka alliance).
What happens when the horde don't have any towns at all? (this will occur roughly 3-4 hours after the realm opens).
Exactly - like the Nintendo Wii, which while a nice evolution of existing motion sensitive controllers, is going to be completely dependant on Mario and friends in the future. What was one of the first big games? Zelda? Of course the franchise is borrowed but the game is a rather new one.
Anyway don't forget the Horadric cube. I sure hope they implement one of those in WoW, the possibilities could be remarkable, and it would be great to watch highbie raiders trashing piles of epic items and getting minor healing potions. I'd never seen anything like that in a game before.
You make some good points - but I suggest to you that innovation, while necessary and fraught with high risks (many, many innovations are duds), it cannot happen and is not as important as evolution is.
Are you so convinced there is some kind of magic new gameplay out there we've never thought about before? Here's an example - the Wii isn't new, Virtual Reality arcade games 10 years ago had the same motion control, the Wii is evolutionary, they were the first to do it *right*. The only revolutions I can remember that are worth mentioning: FPS, RTS, MUDs, 2D Shooters, TBS, flight simulators. Everything else is an *evolution* of those things. Not innovative, they just took existing ideas and made them better. Even FPS is tenuous in there - while it's a wildly successful format and ID software were the first to jump in, it's just an evolution of the 2D shooter (look at wolfenstein and the magic-spellcaster game before that, they're radial 2D shooters ala "commando" represented with mapped textures in 3D).
But we have FPS because the 2D shooter was evolved by ID software into wolfenstein then Doom, then Quake (first fully 3D FPS I believe?). Was that innovation or evolution? Was descent an innovative revolution or an evolution? It was a flight sim inside a 3D maze. Turn based games are just a computerised version of boardgames. MMORPGs are just MUDs crossed with FPS games, pretty much. Sure you zoom out to third person most of the time, but there's effectively no difference apart from POV between FPS and TPS anyway, it's a no brainer.
This is obviously a semantics problem. You seem to believe that if a product is evolutionary, even if it is successful, that it is not innovative. I beg to differ. I believe the only successful innovation is totally dependant on a good evolution from an existing model. WoW is innovative and evolutionary. The innovation is in the overall game design mix. It's the first casual gamer friendly MMORPG. It's the first mass-market appealing MMORPG. These were all deliberate design decisions. Even though the list of similarities for WoW and other MMORPGs is much larger than the list of differences, it is innovatively evolved.
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It's disappointing. The early betas worked more like *nix, requiring proper authentication for any activity that could be harmful to the OS.
The problem is, Windows has always catered to the lowest common denominator of end user, so the worst security practices are also the most common.
Caving in to market pressure from early reviewers, Microsoft diluted UAC to those nag dialogs which are so easily clicked through.
As usual, most users just disable UAC as one of the first activities under Vista.
Of course many people have noted that an enterprise level internet connection with SLAs is going to be pricier than a household connection.
But the submitter is also asking, more or less, why do we still use DSL, 2 or 4 pair copper to the home?
Money is the answer. Anything that involves rolling out new infrastructure will be a huge investment, especially if you have one of those picky governments that expects industry to treat customers equally. Who's going to pay for that? I can only imagine what the cost would be like. Now, since internet is treated like a commodity instead of a utility, no government under those conditions can mandate the provision of high speed internet, so it has to be profitable. So it would cost a lot, lot more. And 99% of users wouldn't pay.
Take a look under the hood of Vista before you start flaming it. The OS is fundamentally, and in many cases wildly different from previous revs of Windows. I suggest you review some of the Paul Thurrot and Mark Russinovic articles about changes in Vista.
Yes, the user interface shares many similarities with previous versions of Windows.
But people seem to be missing the point here - it's an operating system. You use it to launch applications and provide a framework for those applications to work in. That's all it does. What did you expect? Oral sex?
Just to provide some facts (I hate to do this, especially on /. where I will be modded to hell)
Vista will allow you to perform a fully functioning install without using *any* serial or license key. You can run Windows Vista, fully functional, for 30 days without entering a key or verifying that key via the activation product. Sure, during that 30 day period you need to fix up your license details and activate the product. This is an anti-piracy process. If you respect copyrights and have legitimately paid for your software, this shouldn't be a problem.
If you don't respect copyrights, or just feel like pirating the product, or don't want to phone home to Microsoft, it's a simple matter of using any of the fire-and-forget third party product activators.
Now, most importantly, all of those facts above indicate clearly that Vista can be installed and running and useable immediately after the initial install process. It's not as free as open source/free software is, because you're dealing with proprietary code.
But if you ask me, it is a million times better than OS X. At least with Vista I get to choose who I buy the computer from. Microsoft doesn't lock me in or tie me down to a specific hardware platform like some DRM laden MP3 player sellers do.
So, game developers are not constantly re-inventing the wheel... this is great. How many times in an FPS have you burst into an office, seen a desk, a chair, etc, then wondered how long it took developers to model it, texture it etc? Probably not many. But I have! Really, a few good chair models is all we need. This will hopefully free up development time for more important things like design, AI, plot and innovation.
Even better, these kinds of resources need to be made available to small time and independant developers. Writing a 3D game would be a lot easier if a huge number of the objects were already done.
I think intel pulled a gutsy move (maybe a little premature) by hacking off the IDE parts of the mainboard.
You can get around this with the F8 key on your keyboard and a floppy disk drive and the right drivers for the JMicron controller.
Or, if you're using Vista, you can use a USB thumb drive for the drivers.
What are people talking about here? Blaming Hollywood for not making stodgy, boring, exquisite boutique SciFi (not scifi or whatever because apparently there's a difference) movies designed for an audience consisting of real world contemporaries of the Comic-Store guy from the Simpsons?
It's a lot like blaming McDonalds for not making cuisine suitable for the food-stacking jus guzzling professional restauranteurs so they can write pretentious articles about how high the food stacks are at their $200/plate 20 course meals.
Yeah, it's art. Hollywood is a business. Art either sells or it doesn't. If you need to make a profit, what movie will you make?
I like science. I like science fiction. I hate being bored out of my skull. I'll pick the science fiction in an entertaining wrapper.
She's not being sued for downloading a track. She's being sued for making that track available for downloading from her on a P2P network, ie, distribution of copyrighted material that she has no right to distribute.
Of course the financial harm aspect is still quite correct, the RIAA usually wants huge sums of money (something like $10,000US TEN THOUSAND US DOLLARS) per track shared, whereas the specific instance they capture, she may have served requests to upload the track 10, 20 times, maybe 100 at the most extreme, at $1/track, that's $100 of lost revenue for the RIAA (assuming each downloader would have purchased the track had it not been available from this child).
Rudimentary statistics (IANAS)
The mean just tells us what you have if you get a sample and divide the sum of values in the sample by the sample size. It's one of the three more meaningful "averages" you can get in statistics. I'd be at least as interested in this case in seeing the mode and median.
You can "screw up" a mean by adding one or two samples that are extreme. These disks, say they have a 5 million MTBF as the figure you want, but they all really fail after 5 minutes of use. Problem, right? Wrong! You just get a a few units that are good for 1 or 2 billion years and throw them into the mix. Then your mean value skyrockets into millions! The median or mode averages won't suffer from the same distortion.
Of course if we are dealing with a reasonable, wishfully thinking a normally distributed sample, then of course I would like to know the variance and standard deviation for the sample. This will tell us if all the drives plug away for exactly 5 million years, or if they are just as likely to last 1 million years or 9 million years, or anywhere inbetween or even outside of that.
But all that extra information isn't provided to us. We just get the mean. On its own, mean doesn't mean much at all.
Ahh, but if I use thott or the allakhazam or any other data tracker, it's an opt in experience.
And yes it is a slippery slope argument, but slippery slopes do exist. Do you trust a major corporation to always do the right thing? When you see a corporation starting to act out of line, it shouldn't be ignored. It's not like Sony just started behaving themselves right away when people realised they were installing rootkits on every PC you dropped their DRM CD's in.
Maybe I just don't want people to see all my stuff? I don't care if it's harmless information. What stings me is that I don't get a choice. I recognise the terms of use agreeement allows Blizzard to do whatever the heck they want with any data stored in their systems. That doesn't mean I have to like it, and it doesn't mean this kind of behaviour is good customer service.
It wouldn't be that hard to add an opt-in or opt-out button, now, would it? Nowhere in my post did I suggest that it was a bad idea. But when it comes to my privacy, even for unassuming details like the kind of shirt my in-game character wears, I like to have a choice in it.
This is a privacy issue stemming from a poor design methodology. Even if it seems like a small thing, you can't ignore privacy or just shrug privacy violations off like they mean nothing.
That's very easy to say, and I'm sure there isn't any kind of special and amazing IWIN combination. But there might be something good that's unconventional. I know if I worked something like that out, I'd like to keep it on the hush for as long as I can.
A lot of people seem to have missed the main point of my post, the problem with the whole Armory implementation is that Blizzard doesn't give you the choice to hide the information.
Saying that it's not important to have an option for privacy, even in something as trite as your in-game details in a computer game, is probably a bad idea. If Blizzard doesn't care about keeping this data private, what else don't they care about keeping private? Your name? Your phone number? Sure would be nice if you gank some guy and he looks up your name and address and comes around for a visit because it turns out he was criminally insane.
Nice kneejerk reaction! Free cookie. Now please read my post and put your knee back where it's supposed to be.
Nowhere did I say locks were overpowered. Or underpowered. I just said they're simple to play. You can write a macro that does your casting sequence (dot fear dot etc). Then you just keep clicking one button and either stuff dies or it doesn't depending on how good your gear is. Many classes are quite similar in terms of very low skill requirement, hunters, mages, locks, priests in particular. Melee classes and short range classes require much more careful attention to positioning, but even then it's simplistic in terms of the buttons you're mashing when you're in combat.
I'd like to quote Guild Wars as an example of not-so-simple, because the skills you take into combat can be used to create a customised combo set, which depends on both your pre-game design and your in game sequence. I'm not saying GW is better than WoW, either, just illustrating an example.
All else remaining equal, skill and co-ordination are decisive.
But WoW is quite simplistic in terms of gameplay (really, it is very simple, warlock for example, dot-fear-dot, it's not complicated). As a result of the straightforward nature of gameplay, skill is a backseat compared to equipment.
I know this because I play warrior a lot, and playing warrior is painful. It's painful because the blizzard developers balance the entire class around the 1% of warriors completely equipped with orange gear.
It's true there's not much room to be unpredictable in your class, but you can keep an edge by keeping your capabilities hidden until the very last moment, just ask Sun Tzu. Blizzard have removed the ability for players to be secretive.
And what about world PvP? You can now stalk your favourite enemy, work out how tough he really is, and exploit that information. Or, just as likely, he'll do that to you. Think about that next time you stroll out of Tarren Mill. Talk about emergent play.
But like most corps, Blizzard forgot that people like options and they like to feel like they have rights.
This should have been opt-in. Instead, I don't think you can even opt out.
Sure, 90% of players won't care, but what about the high end gamers who develop a secret 2v2 PvP secret sauce?
Since they don't actually have real lives, their performance and uniqueness in WoW PvP means a lot to them!
Blizzard jeapardises this quite a lot without thinking too hard about the consequences.
I did say "was".
I'd also bet good money that the people paying for those systems probably won't unpack them and start using them productively, either. Some people collect their own navel lint, and while it may have value to that absolute minority, it's perhaps not so useful to the majority, which is why navel lint, Apple Lisa's and PCjr's aren't commodities today.
And, more to my original point, even though the Lisa, the PCjr, and the lint aren't big sellers, the people who produced them have other products that are quite useful and viable products, which you shouldn't discount just because you didn't like the lint, the PCjr, or the Lisa.
That was 7 years ago... I suppose you wouldn't buy an IBM/Lenovo Thinkpad laptop purely because the PCjr "peanut" was a worthless system, and you wouldn't buy an iPod because the Apple Lisa never caught on?
As a matter of fact, just about every corporation has had some serious screwups - does this mean you don't buy products anymore?
With the marketshare Microsoft has they can require people to sacrifice their first born (which I'll do before Vista gets on MY systems)
Man, you must want Vista *real* bad. Or you just hate your firstborn?
What do you advocate as a replacement? The Registry? ;) The Registry uses text in places...the DWORD is actually an assembler variable...but it also uses a lot of non-text and is completely non-transparent in places. There are good reasons why UNIX (and hence Linux) uses text config files...you can read about those here if you want.
Ideally, as an end user in this particular case, I should have no idea whatsoever where the configuration is kept. It should just be "done for me" through GUI dialogs. At least the registry gives an elegant answer to the question "Where's my configuration data?" "In the registry.". As a side note, you don't need to open regedit.exe and directly edit the registry if you want to connect to a network resource in Windows. In Linux, you do have to open a text editor to edit fstab or whatever. Advantage: Windows.
FTP is good for transferring files yes, but I have a TB of storage on my server and about 120GB on the Ubuntu box - it doesn't make sense to move the video files from where they're stored onto the Ubuntu box when I should be able to just connect to the shared network resource and go with it.
I do appreciate that Microsoft are famous for making interoperability a pain, but from a usability perspective it should at least be possible. I daresay that until interoperability is seamless, Linux has a long way to go. I wonder if OS X has the same interoperability problems, and if that doesn't, why is it that Linux does?
I know I'll get smacked for this, but I've installed Edgy Eft to build a modest home theatre PC with MythTV. I did this because I wasn't 100% happy with the Vista Media Center.
It's still not working correctly because of some pretty glaring issues with useability and interoperability in Linux.
Installation - whilst installation was in fact a breeze and as simple as a Windows install (although, Vista offers better hard disk controller management, so if things go screwy with your install, Vista would be the safer bet).
Applications - I needed to connect to my windows server at home where my movies are stored. Linux won't "just work" with Windows - I had to install Samba. Then I discovered that even if you install Samba, you can't connect to a Windows Server 2003 share with it anyway. The complete stabbing agony of it - I had to use a terminal session, enter command lines, and edit text files to make it work enough to find out it's not possible anyway. Linux isn't ready.
Interoperability - Microsoft saves the day. I updated my server to Windows Server 2003 R2, which includes file services for Unix, allowing me to create linux-mountable shares. At least now I can access network resources from my new linux box, but it took Microsoft to do it.
Until Linux frees itself from the horrible terminal/command line dependencies, eliminates text files for configuration (how the heck is the average joe supposed to know which one of hundreds of config files he needs to edit just to connect a network drive??) and gets some decent interoperability happening, it's irresponsible to suggest using it in anywhere but a 24/7 technically supported environment.
"DNI" could still be surpassed, I'm pretty sure alliance players would like nothing more than to grind the opposing faction completely into the ground. If you want to understand something of the mentality of an alliance PvP player, I suggest rolling a L20 horde anything and hanging around Tarren Mill to do the quests there. Just quest. You'll be dead and corpse camped within 30 minutes. Your only hope? Horde counter-PvP. Good luck with the odds heavily tilted against you in terms of numbers.
Let's constructively assume that "DNI" is really "I", aka, Impossible. Now, Horde holds, say, 30% of the towns in the game, has only got access to 30% of the quests (so presumably can't quest from 1-70 anymore). Alliance holds 70% of towns and happily runs around ganking every horde they can find to make sure ally n00bs can keep on powerlevelling without losing any more towns... this is "fun", right? Why is this scenario fun for a Horde player?
And yes it's true, according to realm stats, there are 3 times more Horde pallies than Ally shammies now. Which says a lot about Blizzard's pro-Alliance bias we've endured for the past three years, having such great battlegrounds as A/V, where (I looked up the stats), it's about 90 alliance wins for every 30 horde ones. But will having pallies really balance the factions? On PvP realms, where it counts (unless you're a furry or otherwise love carebears and PvE servers), you can't roll both factions, so any alts you make will be same-faction. So only new players will tilt the balance, and at best there is a 50/50 chance they'll roll horde- but then we reduce that chance because they'll roll the same faction as their friends play, so we're back to 70/30 for new players as well. The balance won't change because of 2.0.x.
All we can hope for is that the rumours will work out, and once L70 horde pallies are established they'll review AV for a third time and balance the game out. Otherwise I'd suggest you continue to enjoy the wait in the AV queues while blizzard finds enough hordies for the allies to punish over and over again.
Yeah, and with an average 70%-30% population in favour of alliance on WoW, that would be a nightmare (if you're over 15, aka, horde) or pointless (if you're under 15, aka alliance).
What happens when the horde don't have any towns at all? (this will occur roughly 3-4 hours after the realm opens).
Of course, we know Blizzard is not afraid to stick the knife into any projects that don't work out - so we can be assured of two things
1) We won't get a bad product
2) We may not get a product at all (Ghost, anyone?)
Exactly - like the Nintendo Wii, which while a nice evolution of existing motion sensitive controllers, is going to be completely dependant on Mario and friends in the future. What was one of the first big games? Zelda? Of course the franchise is borrowed but the game is a rather new one.
Anyway don't forget the Horadric cube. I sure hope they implement one of those in WoW, the possibilities could be remarkable, and it would be great to watch highbie raiders trashing piles of epic items and getting minor healing potions. I'd never seen anything like that in a game before.
You make some good points - but I suggest to you that innovation, while necessary and fraught with high risks (many, many innovations are duds), it cannot happen and is not as important as evolution is.
Are you so convinced there is some kind of magic new gameplay out there we've never thought about before? Here's an example - the Wii isn't new, Virtual Reality arcade games 10 years ago had the same motion control, the Wii is evolutionary, they were the first to do it *right*. The only revolutions I can remember that are worth mentioning: FPS, RTS, MUDs, 2D Shooters, TBS, flight simulators. Everything else is an *evolution* of those things. Not innovative, they just took existing ideas and made them better. Even FPS is tenuous in there - while it's a wildly successful format and ID software were the first to jump in, it's just an evolution of the 2D shooter (look at wolfenstein and the magic-spellcaster game before that, they're radial 2D shooters ala "commando" represented with mapped textures in 3D).
But we have FPS because the 2D shooter was evolved by ID software into wolfenstein then Doom, then Quake (first fully 3D FPS I believe?). Was that innovation or evolution? Was descent an innovative revolution or an evolution? It was a flight sim inside a 3D maze. Turn based games are just a computerised version of boardgames. MMORPGs are just MUDs crossed with FPS games, pretty much. Sure you zoom out to third person most of the time, but there's effectively no difference apart from POV between FPS and TPS anyway, it's a no brainer.
This is obviously a semantics problem. You seem to believe that if a product is evolutionary, even if it is successful, that it is not innovative. I beg to differ. I believe the only successful innovation is totally dependant on a good evolution from an existing model. WoW is innovative and evolutionary. The innovation is in the overall game design mix. It's the first casual gamer friendly MMORPG. It's the first mass-market appealing MMORPG. These were all deliberate design decisions. Even though the list of similarities for WoW and other MMORPGs is much larger than the list of differences, it is innovatively evolved.