Likely no. The WoW client does not allow any form of real time communication in or out of the client, except to and from the server. This is by design. The only way to get data out is to (1) reload your UI, saving addon data, (2) wait for the chat log to be flushed to disk (no set period of time, it varies), or (3) any number of possibilities that all involve breaking their ToU.
Adding support for IM protocols means external data access, means I can write an addon that generates a live map of what herbs are spawned and where, plus a heat map of when they were last picked, in addition to breaking the cross-faction communication restrictions, all at once.
Long story short, valid question sure, but if selected you'll likely be met with a firm "no" simply because it opens up a world of possibility that they don't want to have to bother with.
1) Install and DNS server that supports what is technically called 'dynamic updates' and make sure that the updates can be authorized by keys. This server will be internal.
3) Set the public facing DNS servers to transfer the zones from your internal DNS server.
4) Tada.
Using ISC BIND, I've setup my zones in a similar fashion. I configured the zone update authorization to be key based instead of IP based.
nsupdate uses no special magic, just RFC based standards to allow zone updates. If nsupdate doesn't fit your bill (and it should, it allows you to batch updates and send them), you can roll your own.
Keep in mind that 'dynamic update' doesn't mean 'low TTL value.' You can set it to whatever you please, it just means that you can updates records without any special zone magic.
"The after 20 experience was no different for me than the pre-20 experience."
You are the first person I've ever met or talked to who has said that, and that's out of no small number of people.
I'd also disagree concerning WoW at launch being dullsville. I was absolutely hooked, and that was at 29 on a trial account. But as you said earlier, that's entirely subjective. (My account is also canceled; active right now but canceled - it takes money that I need to be saving right now.)
You're right; the MMO genre is tough to get into, and I'd go further to say "right next to impossible to get into." WoW as it stands now is much more than two generations established, and it's had at least two real generations of polish, bugfixes, features, and content added. AoC currently has absolutely none of that, and from what I can tell they're looking to rectify that... with an expansion. Will that make or break their bank? I don't know.
But to be really honest? I really can't wrap my head around "stats only half working didn't really do anything after they were fixed."
If stats really don't do much of anything, then why even bother? What's the point?
Take off the rose colored glasses yourself; 20 levels of awesome gameplay doesn't make up for core stats simply doing *nothing* when the game launched.
Everyone who played the game that I've talked to stated that the first 20 levels were some of the most amazing 20 levels they've had in an MMO. Then they hit 21, and the game literally died. You had armor with stats that did nothing, you had broken abilities, absolutely no semblance of class balance, and the game was considered by many to be "an unfinished beta at best." Many still think of it the same way.
Strength did nothing. They said "screw it, we'll launch."
What? Really?
You may say that "AoC's character-centric quest line [was] done better" but quite frankly anything after level 20 was and is crap, and sorry, if I wanted to play a game that was 1/4th awesome (1-20) and 3/4ths crap (21-80) then I'd probably be playing AoC.
Nothing even remotely close to "class balance" (it makes WoW at launch look like it had flawless class balance... come on, a priest archtype in AoC being a better AoEer than... everyone? Without needing to heal? Uhhh k), base character stats not doing anything (really?), and every bit of what drew you in from 1-20 absolutely disappearing the second you hit 21.
Then you have their "lolpvp" stance - summarized in some awesome screenshots here (first post, #0, ignore the rest of the thread):
This is supposed to be FFA PvP. And uh... apparently anything more than "a few minutes" of participating in "FFA PvP" is good enough to get you the banhammer.
"So take off the rose colored glasses. WoW wasn't better when it launched."
I'm pretty sure WoW had both functional base stats and an entertaining leveling experience past 20.
Some people may disagree that leveling is entertaining, but even given that, it had a functional and complete experience.
From the Alliance side you had foreshadowing of what would amount to be the uncovering of Onyxia, a rather large dragon, who had ensnared the minds of the leaders of the human capital city of Stormwind. Over a rather... "long" quest chain covering quite a bit of the in-game world, the player was then able to become attuned with the area surrounding Onyxia's Lair, and eventually defeat her in combat.
AoC had (has?) neither functional base stats nor any really functional/remotely entertaining leveling experience past... 20.
Suddenly you can see why I based my post off of that. Nothing even compares, even a little bit.
Every other MMO that has been released or will be released in the near future has been hailed by one person or another as the "great WoW killer" and in that regard, they have all failed.
It's just my opinion that they will all continue to keep failing until we get a company willing to push the release dates back enough to get a decent game out.
Got me there. If not releasing for another year means they go bankrupt, then sure, it'd be better to release now.
On the flip side, by releasing earlier they drastically reduce all chances they have of being successful in the long run.
The obvious proof of this statement is seen by comparing Blizzard to any other MMO company. One rolled a game that has 1-60 and 40+ zones, all of their classes and zones in-game. The other is cutting a HUGE amount just to make a date on a calendar (unless, yes, the real factor here is money).
Take your pick: a game where you know that you're missing 4/6 cities and 4 classes (HUUUUUGE balance implications), or a game which is actually considered mostly complete and sees regular content additions.
The exact release details are beyond me, yes. If it was never set in stone then I'll take your word for it.:)
And you're right, WoW launched without some *features* such as the honor system. They did, however, launch with all six capital cities, every single one of their classes, tens of hundreds of spells, and over 60 (or so? Exact numbers are beyond me) individual zones. WoW was largely content complete from the day it launched, just not feature complete.
When you compare this to Warhammer cutting 4/6 cities and 4 classes, things look quite a bit more bleak for Warhammer than they ever did with WoW.
Cutting a very large chunk of content just to make a release date is nothing good for the future of Warhammer.
It has absolutely nothing to do with people who will wait for a Blizzard game. Those waiting on Warhammer will continue to wait indefinitely, just like how those who were waiting on World of Warcraft waited indefinitely for it too.
The same applied for the Burning Crusade expansion. They announced a release date, and then pushed it back ~2 months, if I remember. The forums lit up with complaints, whining, and many large capital letters. People had scheduled their jobs around this release date, and now suddenly they had all this free time and no game to play. And what happened? They bought the game anyway.
People will wait on games because they're looking forward to them. Blizzard's reputation of pushing quality games out the door was built on people getting pissed off that they were taking so long.
You say that "that is a luxury that most other studios don't have." And I disagree entirely. There is nothing stopping a studio from pushing their dates back. The only reason they don't is that they feel if they don't make their release date, then they will miss out of customers.
Which is entirely wrong. The entire MMO market is saturated right now, with WoW. Those who want to play other MMOs, such as Age of Conan or Warhammer Online will wait indefinitely for one simple reason: they are dissatisfied with Blizzard for one reason or another, and these are the people who are not only just dissatisfied, but will also remain dissatisfied indefinitely.
The thing that the Warhammer Online people are missing, and to some degree this applies to Age of Conan too ("hey guys! Let's launch a game where a core stat, strength, does entirely nothing!"), is that their playerbase consists almost entirely of people who are pissed off at WoW. Those people are not pleased with how Blizzard has taken WoW, and no degree of talking with them will change that.
The name of the game is "the grass is always greener on the other side." The vast majority of people who want to play Warhammer don't want to play it because it will be awesome, they want to play it because they are sick of WoW, and likewise, Warhammer suddenly becomes awesome.
The Warhammer devs saying "let's cut a huge amount of content" is ultimately what is going to kill them, at least in the short term. The people who are pissed at WoW will remain pissed, and they will always have that one shiny, better game out on the horizon. Why anyone would cut content and quality for release dates when almost their entire fanbase will be ex-WoW players who will join them the moment that games comes out - be it tomorrow or in two years - boggles my mind.
I've got mod points, and I was going to moderate in this thread, and then I saw this and needed to reply.
I've got Comcast at home, and lately anything over:80/tcp has been horrendous. Most pages take a good 10-30 seconds to connect to the server, and never mind the number of pictures that can be on some sites.
I grabbed my laptop, hit the OpenVPN button to my server in a datacenter in Atlanta, and surprise! The pages loaded instantly.
Between P2P throttling and general crappy service, I sincerely hope that this suit changes things for the better.
Primary Domain Controllers died with NT4. As of server 2000, the concept of "primary" was removed and everything was made multi-master.
To that end, no, samba has not been able to *fully* function as a "domain controller" - as that is a separate technology from that of a "primary domain controller." They share some characteristics, but they are not the same thing.
Actually I've been here a few years. Half the reason I posted that comment is just so that someone could reply with "you must be new here!" and get the +5 funny karma (however little that may be).
Standards mode is invoked when you specify a strict doctype in the page.
This IS out of the box support. Let's have less false assumptions and cheap shots at Microsoft, okay?
Re:vimdiff
on
Hacking VIM
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Actually I was being 100% honest in my question(s). My extent of emacs usage is at my school during the "Intro to UNIX" class - which I completed in four hours (the entire class).
Four hours of emacs is just enough to hate it, and not nearly enough to understand it.
Again, honest questions.
Re:vimdiff
on
Hacking VIM
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I was simply going to mod you offtopic (two points left) - but instead I decided to reply. Mostly because I'm curious.
Your comment is the typical argument: "emacs is better."
However, you do not go into why it's better. You don't even mention a slight reason as to why it's better. You state that "the rest of us" "use more decent tools" and "snicker [at those who don't]."
Would you mind qualifying your statements? 1) What is a "more decent tool"? 2) Why is this other tool better to use? 3) Who is "the rest of us"? 4) Why make this statement with nothing to back it up? If your statement is 100% qualified and "correct" - why not just give a few reasons as to why?
I really want to know why your "more decent tools" are so plainly superior that you don't even bother to qualify your statements as to why.
X-Powered-By: Slash 2.005000184 X-Fry: Hardy Boys: too easy. Nancy Drew: too hard! X-Bender: Listen up, cause I got a climactic speech. X-Fry: I'm going to continue never washing this cheek again.
Really good thing that my linux software firewall is stored on a read-only filesystem then, and only allows login via SSH hostkeys.
I made my initial post pretty quickly, and likewise screwed up some things.
What is the difference between a software and a hardware firewall anyways? Heck, what is a firewall? There are so many countless ways of defining a 'firewall' that the average home router you can pick up at your local grocery store is advertised as a "router/firewall." Just because it's embedded suddenly makes it less of a software firewall, and more of a hardware one?
As mentioned, my router has a read-only root file system. It's also running a complete linux distro. Is this a hardware or software firewall?
Further, it does stateful packet inspection (four-ish lines of iptables commands? Worth $40+ on 'firewall' devices?), QoS (both host and service based), and it does this all through a transparent ethernet bridge. Then I have an admin ethernet jack, which requires IPSEC connectivity before you can touch the internal ports (22, 80).
It's a complete linux distro, so it's software. It's 100% embedded, so it's hardware.
As mentioned, other routers are embedding linux. Cool. Hardware or software? More secure, or less? More capable? Or less capable?
Classifying 'software firewalls' as 'insecure' and classifying 'a cheap Linksys Firewall/Router' as 'secure' is kinda scary in all truth. Well, mostly just wrong. Firewalls are too generic now - just because it says 'firewall' on the front, you're supposed to think that you're safe from 'hackers.'
That's not the problem. The problem is primarily people who gain physical access to the hashes, and load them onto much beefier machines to do the processing for them. 100% CPU for days on end will eventually warrant a call to the help desk stating that their computer is "too slow."
While I agree that for this to be a problem, a previous security hole has to exist somewhere, it's more the "what if that happens" that is the problem. If a hash, and just a hash is stolen, it's not exactly going to set off alarms.
Likewise, once unknown person X has your hash, it's over.
I used to think the same. "Eight characters is enough for now, but it's only a matter of time..."
Then I realized that this doesn't mean IT departments will require longer passwords. Rather, this is the death of the password, in place of other authentication methods (smartcard, biometrics, others, and combinations of everything).
It won't be immediate, or close to it... but a 25x increase in the speed of bruteforcing passwords will certaintly speed up the process by which passwords are obseleted.
Slashdot Mirror
Likely no. The WoW client does not allow any form of real time communication in or out of the client, except to and from the server. This is by design. The only way to get data out is to (1) reload your UI, saving addon data, (2) wait for the chat log to be flushed to disk (no set period of time, it varies), or (3) any number of possibilities that all involve breaking their ToU.
Adding support for IM protocols means external data access, means I can write an addon that generates a live map of what herbs are spawned and where, plus a heat map of when they were last picked, in addition to breaking the cross-faction communication restrictions, all at once.
Long story short, valid question sure, but if selected you'll likely be met with a firm "no" simply because it opens up a world of possibility that they don't want to have to bother with.
When it's done.
(Seriously. Google is your friend. You won't see them give a date other than "when it's done.")
1) Install and DNS server that supports what is technically called 'dynamic updates' and make sure that the updates can be authorized by keys. This server will be internal.
2) man nsupdate
Here, I'll even do this step for you: http://linux.die.net/man/8/nsupdate
3) Set the public facing DNS servers to transfer the zones from your internal DNS server.
4) Tada.
Using ISC BIND, I've setup my zones in a similar fashion. I configured the zone update authorization to be key based instead of IP based.
nsupdate uses no special magic, just RFC based standards to allow zone updates. If nsupdate doesn't fit your bill (and it should, it allows you to batch updates and send them), you can roll your own.
Keep in mind that 'dynamic update' doesn't mean 'low TTL value.' You can set it to whatever you please, it just means that you can updates records without any special zone magic.
So this isn't my favorite language. Heck, I barely even know the language. But!
http://www.google.com/search?q=java+6+api&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.debian:en-US:unofficial&client=iceweasel-a
http://java.sun.com/javase/6/docs/api/
Can I has karma now?
"The after 20 experience was no different for me than the pre-20 experience."
You are the first person I've ever met or talked to who has said that, and that's out of no small number of people.
I'd also disagree concerning WoW at launch being dullsville. I was absolutely hooked, and that was at 29 on a trial account. But as you said earlier, that's entirely subjective. (My account is also canceled; active right now but canceled - it takes money that I need to be saving right now.)
You're right; the MMO genre is tough to get into, and I'd go further to say "right next to impossible to get into." WoW as it stands now is much more than two generations established, and it's had at least two real generations of polish, bugfixes, features, and content added. AoC currently has absolutely none of that, and from what I can tell they're looking to rectify that... with an expansion. Will that make or break their bank? I don't know.
But to be really honest? I really can't wrap my head around "stats only half working didn't really do anything after they were fixed."
If stats really don't do much of anything, then why even bother? What's the point?
Take off the rose colored glasses yourself; 20 levels of awesome gameplay doesn't make up for core stats simply doing *nothing* when the game launched.
Everyone who played the game that I've talked to stated that the first 20 levels were some of the most amazing 20 levels they've had in an MMO. Then they hit 21, and the game literally died. You had armor with stats that did nothing, you had broken abilities, absolutely no semblance of class balance, and the game was considered by many to be "an unfinished beta at best." Many still think of it the same way.
Strength did nothing. They said "screw it, we'll launch."
What? Really?
You may say that "AoC's character-centric quest line [was] done better" but quite frankly anything after level 20 was and is crap, and sorry, if I wanted to play a game that was 1/4th awesome (1-20) and 3/4ths crap (21-80) then I'd probably be playing AoC.
Nothing even remotely close to "class balance" (it makes WoW at launch look like it had flawless class balance... come on, a priest archtype in AoC being a better AoEer than... everyone? Without needing to heal? Uhhh k), base character stats not doing anything (really?), and every bit of what drew you in from 1-20 absolutely disappearing the second you hit 21.
Then you have their "lolpvp" stance - summarized in some awesome screenshots here (first post, #0, ignore the rest of the thread):
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=6762171037&sid=1&pageNo=1
And this screenshot here:
http://img140.imageshack.us/img140/2425/gms1xv7.jpg
This is supposed to be FFA PvP. And uh... apparently anything more than "a few minutes" of participating in "FFA PvP" is good enough to get you the banhammer.
"So take off the rose colored glasses. WoW wasn't better when it launched."
I don't even... no words. Really?
I'm pretty sure WoW had both functional base stats and an entertaining leveling experience past 20.
Some people may disagree that leveling is entertaining, but even given that, it had a functional and complete experience.
From the Alliance side you had foreshadowing of what would amount to be the uncovering of Onyxia, a rather large dragon, who had ensnared the minds of the leaders of the human capital city of Stormwind. Over a rather... "long" quest chain covering quite a bit of the in-game world, the player was then able to become attuned with the area surrounding Onyxia's Lair, and eventually defeat her in combat.
AoC had (has?) neither functional base stats nor any really functional/remotely entertaining leveling experience past... 20.
Soooo..... you were saying?
You're exactly right, I'm basing that entire post from a WoW player's perspective.
And sure, not everyone plays or has played WoW that will play AoC/Warhammer.
But if these are of any remotely correct value:
http://www.mmogchart.com/Chart1.html
http://www.mmogchart.com/Chart2.html
http://www.mmogchart.com/Chart3.html
http://www.mmogchart.com/Chart5.html
Suddenly you can see why I based my post off of that. Nothing even compares, even a little bit.
Every other MMO that has been released or will be released in the near future has been hailed by one person or another as the "great WoW killer" and in that regard, they have all failed.
It's just my opinion that they will all continue to keep failing until we get a company willing to push the release dates back enough to get a decent game out.
Those investors will be even more angry a year from the release date when there are an entire nine people playing it.
I'm not saying it changes such a situation, I'm simply saying that it'll kill them in the long run.
Got me there. If not releasing for another year means they go bankrupt, then sure, it'd be better to release now.
On the flip side, by releasing earlier they drastically reduce all chances they have of being successful in the long run.
The obvious proof of this statement is seen by comparing Blizzard to any other MMO company. One rolled a game that has 1-60 and 40+ zones, all of their classes and zones in-game. The other is cutting a HUGE amount just to make a date on a calendar (unless, yes, the real factor here is money).
Take your pick: a game where you know that you're missing 4/6 cities and 4 classes (HUUUUUGE balance implications), or a game which is actually considered mostly complete and sees regular content additions.
The exact release details are beyond me, yes. If it was never set in stone then I'll take your word for it. :)
And you're right, WoW launched without some *features* such as the honor system. They did, however, launch with all six capital cities, every single one of their classes, tens of hundreds of spells, and over 60 (or so? Exact numbers are beyond me) individual zones. WoW was largely content complete from the day it launched, just not feature complete.
When you compare this to Warhammer cutting 4/6 cities and 4 classes, things look quite a bit more bleak for Warhammer than they ever did with WoW.
Cutting a very large chunk of content just to make a release date is nothing good for the future of Warhammer.
Hmm, moderate or educate.
It has absolutely nothing to do with people who will wait for a Blizzard game. Those waiting on Warhammer will continue to wait indefinitely, just like how those who were waiting on World of Warcraft waited indefinitely for it too.
The same applied for the Burning Crusade expansion. They announced a release date, and then pushed it back ~2 months, if I remember. The forums lit up with complaints, whining, and many large capital letters. People had scheduled their jobs around this release date, and now suddenly they had all this free time and no game to play. And what happened? They bought the game anyway.
People will wait on games because they're looking forward to them. Blizzard's reputation of pushing quality games out the door was built on people getting pissed off that they were taking so long.
You say that "that is a luxury that most other studios don't have." And I disagree entirely. There is nothing stopping a studio from pushing their dates back. The only reason they don't is that they feel if they don't make their release date, then they will miss out of customers.
Which is entirely wrong. The entire MMO market is saturated right now, with WoW. Those who want to play other MMOs, such as Age of Conan or Warhammer Online will wait indefinitely for one simple reason: they are dissatisfied with Blizzard for one reason or another, and these are the people who are not only just dissatisfied, but will also remain dissatisfied indefinitely.
The thing that the Warhammer Online people are missing, and to some degree this applies to Age of Conan too ("hey guys! Let's launch a game where a core stat, strength, does entirely nothing!"), is that their playerbase consists almost entirely of people who are pissed off at WoW. Those people are not pleased with how Blizzard has taken WoW, and no degree of talking with them will change that.
The name of the game is "the grass is always greener on the other side." The vast majority of people who want to play Warhammer don't want to play it because it will be awesome, they want to play it because they are sick of WoW, and likewise, Warhammer suddenly becomes awesome.
The Warhammer devs saying "let's cut a huge amount of content" is ultimately what is going to kill them, at least in the short term. The people who are pissed at WoW will remain pissed, and they will always have that one shiny, better game out on the horizon. Why anyone would cut content and quality for release dates when almost their entire fanbase will be ex-WoW players who will join them the moment that games comes out - be it tomorrow or in two years - boggles my mind.
Whoops.
(See post topic)
Just because it isn't maintained doesn't mean that it's broken.
Just because there is no obvious documentation doesn't mean that it's unusable and impenetrable.
No one is contesting that everything speaks ICMP.
pchar is not 'the current method.' It is 'a situationally better method.'
ICMP echo replies ARE discriminated against on MANY networks. ICMP echo replies are very commonly outright dropped.
Timing TCP or UDP replies are commonly more useful, as they are used to transport the bulk of the data over the internet and ICMP isn't.
You may have been out of network engineering for a few years, but I have to question your logic behind your statements.
I've got mod points, and I was going to moderate in this thread, and then I saw this and needed to reply.
:80/tcp has been horrendous. Most pages take a good 10-30 seconds to connect to the server, and never mind the number of pictures that can be on some sites.
I've got Comcast at home, and lately anything over
I grabbed my laptop, hit the OpenVPN button to my server in a datacenter in Atlanta, and surprise! The pages loaded instantly.
Between P2P throttling and general crappy service, I sincerely hope that this suit changes things for the better.
Primary Domain Controllers died with NT4. As of server 2000, the concept of "primary" was removed and everything was made multi-master.
To that end, no, samba has not been able to *fully* function as a "domain controller" - as that is a separate technology from that of a "primary domain controller." They share some characteristics, but they are not the same thing.
Actually I've been here a few years. Half the reason I posted that comment is just so that someone could reply with "you must be new here!" and get the +5 funny karma (however little that may be).
:/
Oh, you posted AC. I'm sorry.
Standards mode is invoked when you specify a strict doctype in the page.
This IS out of the box support. Let's have less false assumptions and cheap shots at Microsoft, okay?
Actually I was being 100% honest in my question(s). My extent of emacs usage is at my school during the "Intro to UNIX" class - which I completed in four hours (the entire class).
Four hours of emacs is just enough to hate it, and not nearly enough to understand it.
Again, honest questions.
I was simply going to mod you offtopic (two points left) - but instead I decided to reply. Mostly because I'm curious.
Your comment is the typical argument: "emacs is better."
However, you do not go into why it's better. You don't even mention a slight reason as to why it's better. You state that "the rest of us" "use more decent tools" and "snicker [at those who don't]."
Would you mind qualifying your statements?
1) What is a "more decent tool"?
2) Why is this other tool better to use?
3) Who is "the rest of us"?
4) Why make this statement with nothing to back it up? If your statement is 100% qualified and "correct" - why not just give a few reasons as to why?
I really want to know why your "more decent tools" are so plainly superior that you don't even bother to qualify your statements as to why.
X-Powered-By: Slash 2.005000184
X-Fry: Hardy Boys: too easy. Nancy Drew: too hard!
X-Bender: Listen up, cause I got a climactic speech.
X-Fry: I'm going to continue never washing this cheek again.
Nothing quite like slashdot HTTP headers.
(wget -S http://slashdot.org/ )
Really good thing that my linux software firewall is stored on a read-only filesystem then, and only allows login via SSH hostkeys.
I made my initial post pretty quickly, and likewise screwed up some things.
What is the difference between a software and a hardware firewall anyways? Heck, what is a firewall? There are so many countless ways of defining a 'firewall' that the average home router you can pick up at your local grocery store is advertised as a "router/firewall." Just because it's embedded suddenly makes it less of a software firewall, and more of a hardware one?
As mentioned, my router has a read-only root file system. It's also running a complete linux distro. Is this a hardware or software firewall?
Further, it does stateful packet inspection (four-ish lines of iptables commands? Worth $40+ on 'firewall' devices?), QoS (both host and service based), and it does this all through a transparent ethernet bridge. Then I have an admin ethernet jack, which requires IPSEC connectivity before you can touch the internal ports (22, 80).
It's a complete linux distro, so it's software. It's 100% embedded, so it's hardware.
As mentioned, other routers are embedding linux. Cool. Hardware or software? More secure, or less? More capable? Or less capable?
Classifying 'software firewalls' as 'insecure' and classifying 'a cheap Linksys Firewall/Router' as 'secure' is kinda scary in all truth. Well, mostly just wrong. Firewalls are too generic now - just because it says 'firewall' on the front, you're supposed to think that you're safe from 'hackers.'
I trust my linux based software firewall a lot more than I trust a Linksys router doing NAT.
That's not the problem. The problem is primarily people who gain physical access to the hashes, and load them onto much beefier machines to do the processing for them. 100% CPU for days on end will eventually warrant a call to the help desk stating that their computer is "too slow."
While I agree that for this to be a problem, a previous security hole has to exist somewhere, it's more the "what if that happens" that is the problem. If a hash, and just a hash is stolen, it's not exactly going to set off alarms.
Likewise, once unknown person X has your hash, it's over.
I used to think the same. "Eight characters is enough for now, but it's only a matter of time..."
Then I realized that this doesn't mean IT departments will require longer passwords. Rather, this is the death of the password, in place of other authentication methods (smartcard, biometrics, others, and combinations of everything).
It won't be immediate, or close to it... but a 25x increase in the speed of bruteforcing passwords will certaintly speed up the process by which passwords are obseleted.