This sort of keeps healers and other casters from hiding behind tanks the whole time. They can if they still want to, but if they want more powerful heals, they'll have to actually attack.
My warrior priest, for instance, had to be in the front-lines, dishing out damage while also being able to heal. I was still able to heal without attacking, but my heals became more and more powerful as I attacked more.
I like how each healing class has different dependencies. The warrior priest and disciple of khaine need to go hand to hand in order to cast healing spells (effectively, converting action points into mana). The goblin shaman, by contrast, converts action points directly into healing, but their damage spells affect the power of their healing spells and vice versa. Again, encouraging this "orthogonality". The dwarf rune priest seems to be the only healing class who can sit at the back and cast spells, but I didn't get far enough into playing one yet to realise exactly what the mechanism is.
4.) Tome of Knowledge. Seriously, it's a huge asset. Sometimes doing even the stupidest things may unlock something from your journal. Dying multiple times in Scenarios, for instance, gets you titles such as "The Anguished", "Snuffed", etc.
It's nice how the lore is built right into the tome, and how you can keep track of your kills, your achievements, and your quests all in one book.
Even better, from my view, is that when you're in hardcore questing or scenario mode and just want to ignore the lore and get stuff done, you can. The information will be there in the Tome of Knowledge and easily navigatable during a quieter time.
Actually, since the open beta began there was more of a problem of everyone playing Order, Destruction seemed to have some population issues. I'm sure it will go back and forth.
Though I have no solid facts on it, I believe underpopulated factions get some sort of bonus in order to try to even things up a little. Not sure what format that takes, however.
I was in the WAR closed beta for a couple of months, and now in the open beta. Much about the game has already been covered so I'll skip it, but I have a few things to say.
First of all, I do love the game.
WoW did well with a (relatively) unknown lore and translated it into something sophisticated that touched the whole game. WAR does the same with its great lore set. Architecture, monsters, speech text, the ways the classes play, it all fits very well.
The graphics in the closed beta were bad, texture wise at least. In the open beta, they're significantly better. Hardly any graphic settings are changeable in game currently, so I figure they had a crappy default on the closed beta, a slightly better one now, and when you can tweak it to use your full system, it will be able to rival AoC.
The main point about WAR is, it is two games. It is a PvE game - you can do quests, public quests, instances, raids and never even go RvR enabled, if you so choose. It also has a full RvR game - scenarios, RvR enabled areas, RvR quests (from doing PvE activities within RvR areas, so actually killing players as an objective), a beautifully designed tiered RvR hierarchy, the lot. You can sign up for a scenario at Rank 1 and go right into PvP if you so choose, never looking back. Of course, the strength is when you do a little of both and have a lot of fun.
So far my impression is the RvR stuff is stronger, but the PvE is pretty damn good too.
Crafting, I've had a play with. I'll need more of a look. It feels a bit limited compared to WoW's "become the best blacksmith and make a fortune" ideal, but both innovative and with a fair element of chance that things won't come out as planned.
The interface was great in the closed beta, but not much handholding. They've added that in now and it's easy to get around and the early quests seem as graceful a learning curve as WoWs, but perhaps even more fun - more dark humour and some cool ones (shooting ballistas at NPCs etc)
It's worth mentioning again the classes and the beautiful way some of them work. Bright Wizards and Disciples of Khaine are my favourites. The first is a caster who the more spells they unleash, the more damage and crit they get, but the more chance to blow themselves up (and their teammates) too. The Disciple of Khaine is a healer, but their mana is generated through doing melee damage combos. No more standing at the back spamming Renew. It encourages, nay, requires, strategy rather than tactics.
Speaking of strategy, tanks intercepting attacks make formation hunting *very* powerful. The healer is hiding behind the tank? You can't hit him, target him, lob a fireball, chances are the tank intercepts it. And you can't just run through him. Finally!:)
In my second ever scenario, while a large skirmish was going on, a few of us outflanked the enemy and *ripped them apart*. The way it should be.
Overall the beta launch has been smooth. Even in Europe, where I play. I was in the WoW open beta as well, and it was nowhere near as smooth as this. People do forget that, a couple of years on. It's been playable almost all the time, which hey, is pretty good for a beta.
Speaking of beta, one thing I was impressed with was during closed beta, the level of interaction required from players. Lots of surveys on performing actions (how was that last quest, last scenario, etc) and looks like the developers have been very good at picking things up.
Overall, I think it's great. May not be for everyone, but I'm having a lot of fun.
I agree with you, but bear in mind WASD is not used for that these days - it's simply forward/back and strafe. But more importantly than that, it gives access to 15-20 other keys surrounding it giving more functionality than even the most finger-spraining console pad.
nope, it's the 9600. it won't run anything that has a LOT of shaders all at once. Crysis is one thing, and I didn't even mention that, I'm talking *today's* mid-end gaming.
CPU: E7200- $125. Intel introduced this model to compete with the AMD triple core offerings. Its a dual core, but with single core performance greater than AMDs triple core offering. Stock at 2.5 GHz, easily overclockable to 3.0 with reports of 3.5. I can confirm no problems at 3.0 with stock cooling and some room to grow.
Case: 25 bucks will get you a decent case. They overpaid.
If you're going to be overclocking, you'd best get a decent case where you can at least attach a few fans.
GPU: BFG Nvidia 9600GT. SLI is not worth it, its broken on many games and it makes a minor performance increase when it does. Going for a 9800 isn't worth it, the extra price is far more than the extra performance. $130
Got to disagree strongly here. The 9600 has gimped stream processors, just 64 compared to 112 on the 9800. On "easy" benchmarks they will be comparable, but once it starts ramping up, the 9600 will fall very quickly. For instance, a friend of mine on his 8600 plays WoW fine, same as me (8800). In AoC, I get about 40 fps, he gets 15 if that. 9600 simply doesn't cut it for high-end present-day gaming, let alone future. The 512M 9800GT is about the same price as the 9600 (£85 vs £80 on my usual site) and performs better. Hell the good 9800 GTXs start at only £110.
It's quite simply just the nature of the game. In a game without a set storyline, where the players make the story
The players don't set the story in any MMO. No action the player takes will affect the storyline or lore. The players are immersed observers, if you like.
the only real reason to play is to reach higher levels than everyone else or to get strong enough to kill that NPC.
No, the reason to play is to see more of the game, face more difficult challenges (tectically/strategically), and a sense of shared accomplishment from having done these things with your friends.
If you can reach the highest level in 10 hours of play the game ends at 10 hours of play. As the developer is interested in your monthly fee the game is structured to make reaching the next level take twice as much time as the last once your past the first 10 levels or so (you have to make roughly the first 10 easy or you lose the first time players). The only method to accomplish this difficulty is by making the game take longer. So to reach level 20 you have to spend 1024 (2^10) times as much time playing as level 10, to reach level 30 you have to play 1048576 (2^20) times more time than it took to reach level 10, etc.
What planet are you on? Seriously. You've obviously never played an MMO, nor can you even envisage what it's like to play one.
The biggest problem long term for the developers is to keep adding NPC's and Levels so that players that reach the top keep playing.
Wow, you prove the million monkey theory right. You actually did nail something.
This need to spend time playing to advance creates demand to avoid/reduce this time, either through character sales or sales of items that equate to time, such as gold in the game. Those players with money and little time will trade small sums of money to avoid large time commitments. That's human nature because as everyone knows, Time = Money.
You've skillfully avoided the point again. Having a vast amount of gold in an MMO does not give you a significant advantage. There is little money can actually buy, except vanity/prestige items (including faster mounts), and a few craftable equipment pieces. Most decent equipment has some sort of prerequisite on it (PVP rank, bind on pickup, etc), which money can't affect. The best craftable items are only equivalent to the best PvE/PvP obtainable items. A gold buyer will only have items that cost the most, not the ones that perform the best, nor the ones that are most sought after. A typical gold buyer is one who wants to play for 2 hours for the best equipment, rather than 20.
Not to say gold sellers don't wreck an MMO's economy, but that's due to inflation of prices of standard trade materials, not because someone is hogging all the gold.
I think the belief that C is the de-facto fastest language is the misconception that it can be simply translated directly into assembler. On many operations, this is correct - there are assembler equivalents on many architectures for many language constructs (looping, arithmetic and so forth) and its low-level approach to arrays, memory usage and such mimic how assembler programs are written. However, it is not always the case, particularly when you start to use more complex language constructs. Filesystem calls, templates, structs, anybody?
C has the same problems as other languages. In some cases, it has MORE problems - as has been pointed out already, strict typing for instance can help a LOT in optimisation at compile time, something C cannot always benefit from. The one thing C lacks is a JIT compiler - runtime compilation can have some serious benefits, as we've seen with other languages.
NB: My experience in this comes from 68k assembler, writing relatively simple C on the Amiga and noticing how little work the compiler often had to do;)
I've been around enterprise-grade stuff long enough to know what tech the big solution players specialise in. If you want to talk corporate you're in the league of Logica, Accenture and the like. Java, Oracle and SAP. I've also worked a lot in the medium-large business sector, and sure, they do use Perl, PHP, Python and the like extensively. I've used it there myself. But that is not corporate. They don't have Enterprise-level solutions.
When I see one of those solution providers recommending a military or government-grade system in perl, I'll laugh. Actually, I won't, that would be kind of scary.
With the shaman, you cast damage spells to increase your healing power and vice versa, but other classes have different configurations.
For instance the chaos healer, Disciple of Khaine, has something akin to a mana store for casting healing spells. The way they replenish that is by doing (primarily) melee attacks. So the more they attack in frontline combat, the more healing they can do.
I've played both these classes, and while it starts being difficult due to being an old WoW player and not being used to this, it really is a challenge and rewards using more than one button continuously.
I agree with you 100%. I was in the open beta for WoW, and played it a lot at release too (still do play, casually. Got 4 70s). At launch it was a bit of a mess, lots of downtime and lots of placeholders as you mentioned.
However, an MMORPG that comes out these days has to compete with WoW, even though it has a 4 year headstart. And that's a very difficult thing to do. I love WAR so far, I hope it does very well. I just don't envy them the task.
I'm in the closed beta too, and while I've not played as extensively as I could have (got in the day before going on holiday, how cruel...) I've had a hell of a lot of fun.
It does lack some polish in some areas, but given it's competing with a title that's been out what, nearly 4 years, it seems very complete. The various ways RvR takes place are all good. My particular favourite aspect is the lack of one-shotting in PVP, you'll never get close to that, so battles are more strategic, and a good positioning/formation makes a huge difference.
Incorrect. You don't HAVE to preorder to get into the open beta, it's just one of the ways to get in. You can get into the open beta without preordering. You can get into the closed beta without preordering, for that matter.
If you missed it, this thred is about corporates. All the big players - governments, big iron (ibm, etc), large enterprise developers (logica, capita, etc), military and most cutting-edge science development projects, use Java for Enterprise-grade applications.
Sure, the front-end desktop/browser embedded side is dominated by flash and ajax, with flex on the rise. But only small to medium development houses use much PHP and Python. Ruby is too new/too niche for now, and Perl *is* legacy, due to too few developers around, and no major new projects being written in it (Thank God).
To be honest, I thought I would miss cut and paste more than I have, because I used to use it a lot on the Treo. E.g. someone texts you someone else's number, you copy and paste it into a new contact etc. Or, you have a note you wrote to yourself and want to add it as a text to someone. But the iPhone's interface is compensates for this very well, generally allowing you to move this sort of data around without needing to copy and paste - that's genius. I'm sure it only works 95% of the time, but I'm surprised I've not missed the feature.
As for the other ones you mention, I'm sure they will come in time. Tethering is certainly in the birthing process right now;)
For your email blackout, why not just turn off Push for that time? Sure it's not automated, but easy to get to.
Finally, Apple understands tech support - my phone died yesterday. Went to teh Apple store, no appointments available. teh guy in orange signed me up for a walkup - 10 minutes later Jill was helping me. Two hours later, my phone was working - turned out ATT screwed up the SIM activation. Did Jill say - go to ATT? No, she got me a new SIM and solved the problem.
Jill at the Grove in LA - you are a godess.
Have to agree with the quality of that - I had a strange MobileMe/iPhone bug on launch, aside from all the service unavailability:) Push would just turn itself off until the email account was removed and restarted. As it was so new, the tech support guy didn't know the solution either, but worked with me for 20 minutes or so to diagnose it. I really appreciated that instead of being fobbed of or being told "dunno" by a vacant sales monkey.
There is a difference from refusing to adapt and believing taht just because something is new that it is automatically better. New technology has it's own limts - ever dial a touch tone phone using the hook? Navigated a ship when LORAN-C was not able to lock or you can't get a GPS signal? Keeping old capabilities while using new ones is a good thing, IMHO.
Finally, if you like cars, driving performance car with a stick on a windy country road is a joy not to be missed.
Oh, absolutely. Interestingly enough, the list includes some things I much prefer the old version of (eg, wet shaving), but some I prefer the new of too. The point is I *tried* them all enough to decide I preferred one over another, which I think everyone needs to do before they discount something. Sometimes it surprised me too (I wish I preferred electric shavers, so much more convenient) There are a lot of very entrenched bigots out there, and closed-mindedness is the most unfortunate thing.
Whatever your opinion on how good the Treo is overall, I was referring specifically to the keyboard, which has been universally praised for its utility in the restricted space, especially with its bevelled keys, slightly curved design, and so forth.
Certainly I could type a lot faster on it than most other people I knew could on similarly sized devices, and I managed to adapt to the iPhone keyboard well, which is the issue.
Slashdot Mirror
This sort of keeps healers and other casters from hiding behind tanks the whole time. They can if they still want to, but if they want more powerful heals, they'll have to actually attack.
My warrior priest, for instance, had to be in the front-lines, dishing out damage while also being able to heal. I was still able to heal without attacking, but my heals became more and more powerful as I attacked more.
I like how each healing class has different dependencies. The warrior priest and disciple of khaine need to go hand to hand in order to cast healing spells (effectively, converting action points into mana). The goblin shaman, by contrast, converts action points directly into healing, but their damage spells affect the power of their healing spells and vice versa. Again, encouraging this "orthogonality". The dwarf rune priest seems to be the only healing class who can sit at the back and cast spells, but I didn't get far enough into playing one yet to realise exactly what the mechanism is.
4.) Tome of Knowledge. Seriously, it's a huge asset. Sometimes doing even the stupidest things may unlock something from your journal. Dying multiple times in Scenarios, for instance, gets you titles such as "The Anguished", "Snuffed", etc.
It's nice how the lore is built right into the tome, and how you can keep track of your kills, your achievements, and your quests all in one book.
Even better, from my view, is that when you're in hardcore questing or scenario mode and just want to ignore the lore and get stuff done, you can. The information will be there in the Tome of Knowledge and easily navigatable during a quieter time.
Actually, since the open beta began there was more of a problem of everyone playing Order, Destruction seemed to have some population issues. I'm sure it will go back and forth.
Though I have no solid facts on it, I believe underpopulated factions get some sort of bonus in order to try to even things up a little. Not sure what format that takes, however.
I was in the WAR closed beta for a couple of months, and now in the open beta. Much about the game has already been covered so I'll skip it, but I have a few things to say.
First of all, I do love the game.
WoW did well with a (relatively) unknown lore and translated it into something sophisticated that touched the whole game. WAR does the same with its great lore set. Architecture, monsters, speech text, the ways the classes play, it all fits very well.
The graphics in the closed beta were bad, texture wise at least. In the open beta, they're significantly better. Hardly any graphic settings are changeable in game currently, so I figure they had a crappy default on the closed beta, a slightly better one now, and when you can tweak it to use your full system, it will be able to rival AoC.
The main point about WAR is, it is two games. It is a PvE game - you can do quests, public quests, instances, raids and never even go RvR enabled, if you so choose. It also has a full RvR game - scenarios, RvR enabled areas, RvR quests (from doing PvE activities within RvR areas, so actually killing players as an objective), a beautifully designed tiered RvR hierarchy, the lot. You can sign up for a scenario at Rank 1 and go right into PvP if you so choose, never looking back. Of course, the strength is when you do a little of both and have a lot of fun.
So far my impression is the RvR stuff is stronger, but the PvE is pretty damn good too.
Crafting, I've had a play with. I'll need more of a look. It feels a bit limited compared to WoW's "become the best blacksmith and make a fortune" ideal, but both innovative and with a fair element of chance that things won't come out as planned.
The interface was great in the closed beta, but not much handholding. They've added that in now and it's easy to get around and the early quests seem as graceful a learning curve as WoWs, but perhaps even more fun - more dark humour and some cool ones (shooting ballistas at NPCs etc)
It's worth mentioning again the classes and the beautiful way some of them work. Bright Wizards and Disciples of Khaine are my favourites. The first is a caster who the more spells they unleash, the more damage and crit they get, but the more chance to blow themselves up (and their teammates) too. The Disciple of Khaine is a healer, but their mana is generated through doing melee damage combos. No more standing at the back spamming Renew. It encourages, nay, requires, strategy rather than tactics.
Speaking of strategy, tanks intercepting attacks make formation hunting *very* powerful. The healer is hiding behind the tank? You can't hit him, target him, lob a fireball, chances are the tank intercepts it. And you can't just run through him. Finally! :)
In my second ever scenario, while a large skirmish was going on, a few of us outflanked the enemy and *ripped them apart*. The way it should be.
Overall the beta launch has been smooth. Even in Europe, where I play. I was in the WoW open beta as well, and it was nowhere near as smooth as this. People do forget that, a couple of years on. It's been playable almost all the time, which hey, is pretty good for a beta.
Speaking of beta, one thing I was impressed with was during closed beta, the level of interaction required from players. Lots of surveys on performing actions (how was that last quest, last scenario, etc) and looks like the developers have been very good at picking things up.
Overall, I think it's great. May not be for everyone, but I'm having a lot of fun.
Then why doesn't someone use the information in those papers to do just that and win this challenge?
It's not her who has the character, it's the boyfriend.
I would never go out with someone just cause they had a level 70 though, pah.
I agree with you, but bear in mind WASD is not used for that these days - it's simply forward/back and strafe. But more importantly than that, it gives access to 15-20 other keys surrounding it giving more functionality than even the most finger-spraining console pad.
nope, it's the 9600. it won't run anything that has a LOT of shaders all at once. Crysis is one thing, and I didn't even mention that, I'm talking *today's* mid-end gaming.
nothing beats sitting comfortably on the couch, feet up, with a wireless controler, on a large TV screen.
I think you'll find mouse and keyboard beats it easily. not in comfort perhaps, but definitely in performance :)
CPU: E7200- $125. Intel introduced this model to compete with the AMD triple core offerings. Its a dual core, but with single core performance greater than AMDs triple core offering. Stock at 2.5 GHz, easily overclockable to 3.0 with reports of 3.5. I can confirm no problems at 3.0 with stock cooling and some room to grow.
Case: 25 bucks will get you a decent case. They overpaid.
If you're going to be overclocking, you'd best get a decent case where you can at least attach a few fans.
GPU: BFG Nvidia 9600GT. SLI is not worth it, its broken on many games and it makes a minor performance increase when it does. Going for a 9800 isn't worth it, the extra price is far more than the extra performance. $130
Got to disagree strongly here. The 9600 has gimped stream processors, just 64 compared to 112 on the 9800. On "easy" benchmarks they will be comparable, but once it starts ramping up, the 9600 will fall very quickly. For instance, a friend of mine on his 8600 plays WoW fine, same as me (8800). In AoC, I get about 40 fps, he gets 15 if that. 9600 simply doesn't cut it for high-end present-day gaming, let alone future. The 512M 9800GT is about the same price as the 9600 (£85 vs £80 on my usual site) and performs better. Hell the good 9800 GTXs start at only £110.
Right, time for the cluebat.
It's quite simply just the nature of the game. In a game without a set storyline, where the players make the story
The players don't set the story in any MMO. No action the player takes will affect the storyline or lore. The players are immersed observers, if you like.
the only real reason to play is to reach higher levels than everyone else or to get strong enough to kill that NPC.
No, the reason to play is to see more of the game, face more difficult challenges (tectically/strategically), and a sense of shared accomplishment from having done these things with your friends.
If you can reach the highest level in 10 hours of play the game ends at 10 hours of play. As the developer is interested in your monthly fee the game is structured to make reaching the next level take twice as much time as the last once your past the first 10 levels or so (you have to make roughly the first 10 easy or you lose the first time players). The only method to accomplish this difficulty is by making the game take longer. So to reach level 20 you have to spend 1024 (2^10) times as much time playing as level 10, to reach level 30 you have to play 1048576 (2^20) times more time than it took to reach level 10, etc.
What planet are you on? Seriously. You've obviously never played an MMO, nor can you even envisage what it's like to play one.
The biggest problem long term for the developers is to keep adding NPC's and Levels so that players that reach the top keep playing.
Wow, you prove the million monkey theory right. You actually did nail something.
This need to spend time playing to advance creates demand to avoid/reduce this time, either through character sales or sales of items that equate to time, such as gold in the game. Those players with money and little time will trade small sums of money to avoid large time commitments. That's human nature because as everyone knows, Time = Money.
You've skillfully avoided the point again. Having a vast amount of gold in an MMO does not give you a significant advantage. There is little money can actually buy, except vanity/prestige items (including faster mounts), and a few craftable equipment pieces. Most decent equipment has some sort of prerequisite on it (PVP rank, bind on pickup, etc), which money can't affect. The best craftable items are only equivalent to the best PvE/PvP obtainable items. A gold buyer will only have items that cost the most, not the ones that perform the best, nor the ones that are most sought after. A typical gold buyer is one who wants to play for 2 hours for the best equipment, rather than 20.
Not to say gold sellers don't wreck an MMO's economy, but that's due to inflation of prices of standard trade materials, not because someone is hogging all the gold.
to provide the entire interface to the application; the button simply works as an "exit application" button.
Great post, I'd mod you up if you had points.
I think the belief that C is the de-facto fastest language is the misconception that it can be simply translated directly into assembler. On many operations, this is correct - there are assembler equivalents on many architectures for many language constructs (looping, arithmetic and so forth) and its low-level approach to arrays, memory usage and such mimic how assembler programs are written. However, it is not always the case, particularly when you start to use more complex language constructs. Filesystem calls, templates, structs, anybody?
C has the same problems as other languages. In some cases, it has MORE problems - as has been pointed out already, strict typing for instance can help a LOT in optimisation at compile time, something C cannot always benefit from. The one thing C lacks is a JIT compiler - runtime compilation can have some serious benefits, as we've seen with other languages.
NB: My experience in this comes from 68k assembler, writing relatively simple C on the Amiga and noticing how little work the compiler often had to do ;)
I've been around enterprise-grade stuff long enough to know what tech the big solution players specialise in. If you want to talk corporate you're in the league of Logica, Accenture and the like. Java, Oracle and SAP. I've also worked a lot in the medium-large business sector, and sure, they do use Perl, PHP, Python and the like extensively. I've used it there myself. But that is not corporate. They don't have Enterprise-level solutions.
When I see one of those solution providers recommending a military or government-grade system in perl, I'll laugh. Actually, I won't, that would be kind of scary.
Oh yeah, aside from the 3 race cities on each side. And the 4 tiers before them. And the different scenarios within each.
You seem to not understand the RvR hierarchy either..
Just because it says "capital city" doesn't mean it's stormwind. It's the endgame pvp scenario. Which is only open when everyone pushes that far.
Orthogonality is a good way to describe it.
With the shaman, you cast damage spells to increase your healing power and vice versa, but other classes have different configurations.
For instance the chaos healer, Disciple of Khaine, has something akin to a mana store for casting healing spells. The way they replenish that is by doing (primarily) melee attacks. So the more they attack in frontline combat, the more healing they can do.
I've played both these classes, and while it starts being difficult due to being an old WoW player and not being used to this, it really is a challenge and rewards using more than one button continuously.
I'm sure they will have free trial/guest passes available in time, just as every MMO has. Age of Conan just released theirs a few weeks back.
Heaven forbid you don't get free access to something before it's even launched. Life is hard.
I agree with you 100%. I was in the open beta for WoW, and played it a lot at release too (still do play, casually. Got 4 70s). At launch it was a bit of a mess, lots of downtime and lots of placeholders as you mentioned.
However, an MMORPG that comes out these days has to compete with WoW, even though it has a 4 year headstart. And that's a very difficult thing to do. I love WAR so far, I hope it does very well. I just don't envy them the task.
You don't understand how RvR works, how the city hierarchy works, and you haven't played the game.
Have fun raiding karazhan, again.
What he said.
I'm in the closed beta too, and while I've not played as extensively as I could have (got in the day before going on holiday, how cruel...) I've had a hell of a lot of fun.
It does lack some polish in some areas, but given it's competing with a title that's been out what, nearly 4 years, it seems very complete. The various ways RvR takes place are all good. My particular favourite aspect is the lack of one-shotting in PVP, you'll never get close to that, so battles are more strategic, and a good positioning/formation makes a huge difference.
It does have a global cooldown of sorts. not sure if it's totally exclusionary of other abilities, but it does stop people just spamming keypresses.
The gameplay is a lot of fun, each class has tons of abilities at its disposal, and how they interact with each other is inspiring.
Incorrect. You don't HAVE to preorder to get into the open beta, it's just one of the ways to get in. You can get into the open beta without preordering. You can get into the closed beta without preordering, for that matter.
Applets? This isn't 1998.
If you missed it, this thred is about corporates. All the big players - governments, big iron (ibm, etc), large enterprise developers (logica, capita, etc), military and most cutting-edge science development projects, use Java for Enterprise-grade applications.
Sure, the front-end desktop/browser embedded side is dominated by flash and ajax, with flex on the rise. But only small to medium development houses use much PHP and Python. Ruby is too new/too niche for now, and Perl *is* legacy, due to too few developers around, and no major new projects being written in it (Thank God).
Thanks for playing, try again sometime.
To be honest, I thought I would miss cut and paste more than I have, because I used to use it a lot on the Treo. E.g. someone texts you someone else's number, you copy and paste it into a new contact etc. Or, you have a note you wrote to yourself and want to add it as a text to someone. But the iPhone's interface is compensates for this very well, generally allowing you to move this sort of data around without needing to copy and paste - that's genius. I'm sure it only works 95% of the time, but I'm surprised I've not missed the feature.
As for the other ones you mention, I'm sure they will come in time. Tethering is certainly in the birthing process right now ;)
For your email blackout, why not just turn off Push for that time? Sure it's not automated, but easy to get to.
Finally, Apple understands tech support - my phone died yesterday. Went to teh Apple store, no appointments available. teh guy in orange signed me up for a walkup - 10 minutes later Jill was helping me. Two hours later, my phone was working - turned out ATT screwed up the SIM activation. Did Jill say - go to ATT? No, she got me a new SIM and solved the problem.
Jill at the Grove in LA - you are a godess.
Have to agree with the quality of that - I had a strange MobileMe/iPhone bug on launch, aside from all the service unavailability :) Push would just turn itself off until the email account was removed and restarted. As it was so new, the tech support guy didn't know the solution either, but worked with me for 20 minutes or so to diagnose it. I really appreciated that instead of being fobbed of or being told "dunno" by a vacant sales monkey.
There is a difference from refusing to adapt and believing taht just because something is new that it is automatically better. New technology has it's own limts - ever dial a touch tone phone using the hook? Navigated a ship when LORAN-C was not able to lock or you can't get a GPS signal? Keeping old capabilities while using new ones is a good thing, IMHO.
Finally, if you like cars, driving performance car with a stick on a windy country road is a joy not to be missed.
Oh, absolutely. Interestingly enough, the list includes some things I much prefer the old version of (eg, wet shaving), but some I prefer the new of too. The point is I *tried* them all enough to decide I preferred one over another, which I think everyone needs to do before they discount something. Sometimes it surprised me too (I wish I preferred electric shavers, so much more convenient) There are a lot of very entrenched bigots out there, and closed-mindedness is the most unfortunate thing.
Whatever your opinion on how good the Treo is overall, I was referring specifically to the keyboard, which has been universally praised for its utility in the restricted space, especially with its bevelled keys, slightly curved design, and so forth.
Certainly I could type a lot faster on it than most other people I knew could on similarly sized devices, and I managed to adapt to the iPhone keyboard well, which is the issue.
The iPhone keyboard has tactile feedback.
That is, assuming your fingertips are not devoid of sensation.
You feel the screen against your fingertip - that's it, you've touched it. It is practically impossible to touch it too lightly.