Actually, when I first started playing the beta, my friend made a night elf character and managed to get it to stormwind within an hour or two of starting, at level 3 or so. She did have to run through contested territory and died a couple times, I think, but she made it without too much trouble. Maybe it's harder now, though.
Doesn't matter to me, anyway, as I will never play a night elf. There's too many of them already. Besides, the Alliance is scum.
I'd agree that it's probably some interaction between slashcode and slow net connections and/or buggy firewalls, and not Firefox's rendering engine.
No, it's not. The raw HTML is not being mangled in transit; if it were, you'd be seeing much larger problems. It is a bug in Firefox's rendering engine. The reason it is non-deterministic with Slashdot seems to have something to do with progressive rendering (which is affected by network speed). There are other sites, though, where the bug manifests every single time you load them, regardless of speed.
Yes, it happens on fast connections, too, just much less often. I think it has to do with the progressive rendering code (disclaimer: pure speculation on my part). That is, if part of the page is rendered at the right moment before the whole page has been downloaded, you get the bug. This obviously would happen more often on slower connections because they are less likely to receive the whole page before rendering starts, but it could happen on any connection under the right conditions.
It happens on other sites, too. It would have to: Firefox obviously doesn't treat Slashdot as a special case. It seems that whatever HTML triggers it simply isn't used by many sites.
That's a known bug in Firefox which seems to have greater effect on people with slower internet connections. It will be fixed in the next version (it's currently "fixed in the trunk"). In the meantime, as others have commented, you can fix it by increasing and decreasing the text size (ctrl + mousewheel or ctrl + +/-).
I do agree that it is ridiculous that Firefox 1.0 was let out the door with this bug. For people on slow or even medium-speed connections, this bug happens a lot, and many have no idea how to fix fix it. I have friends who tried Firefox and decided that they hated it because of this bug. I'm guessing the developers are all on fast connections and thus had no idea how often this bug manifests.
Actually, in the 1940's, the US Navy studied the cost of switching to Dvorak and found that it could be made up quite quickly. I use Dvorak myself, and it only took me about two weeks to switch from Qwerty to Dvorak and get mystelf up to decent typing speed. It really does not take long to learn a new layout. You should try it.
Depends. The problems I had with Westfall were well after the players had a chance to spread out. On the other hand, there were areas meant for the same level players which were pretty empty, even then. I did some questing in Thelsamar and saw very few people. I suppose this is because dwarves and gnomes are unpopular as player characters, and the Human and Night Elf masses are mostly too dumb to think of questing in another race's home region.
Still, with 50x the players on the server, it would surely be a problem everywhere.
Well, gee... thanks.:) I'm not religious, personally, but I respect religious people who do not attempt to impose their beliefs on others. Unfortunately the extremists give the rest of Christianity (and religion in general) a bad name...
I don't know if you've played WoW at all, but in the beta I quite often had problems with areas being just too damned crowded. In some areas (e.g. Westfall), the mobs you had to kill for your quests were always dead already, with several players camping their spawn points. And then there's contested territory. Horde player doing Tarren Mill on a crowded PvP server? Good luck staying alive more than two minutes at a time!
That was with about 1200-1500 players logged in to the realm, IIRC. I'd hate to think what it would be like with 10,000 players, much less 100,000.
Now, if Blizzard were somehow capable of creating a game world that was 50 times larger than the one they have, then putting 50 times the players in one realm would be great. But, that would obviously take 50 times the development time, or would require drastic reductions in quality.
Frankly, when I get around to installing the retail version, I'll probably explicitly join the lowest-population server I can find. I like having people around (it's sort of the point of an MMORPG), just not so many.
Does anyone else find it sad that some people can't comprehend the fact that some other people might have different taste in entertainment? I love watching baseball and I love video games, but I don't like baseball video games at all.
Maybe I misunderstood what you were getting at... but my point was to describe why outlawing murder is not an example of legislating morality.
Does "morality" have a place in society? That's a pretty vague question. Even the word "morality" itself is hard to interpret there. When people complain about "legislating morality", they mean legislating a specific belief system, usually religious, which contains arbitrary rules with no direct justification. I don't think that is an acceptable way to derive laws, no.
Hmm... this is more interesting than I thought.
I believe in utilitarianism. So, I believe that an action is "right" if it increases the total happiness in the world and "wrong" otherwise. I in turn believe that a law is "right" if it increases the total happiness in the world and "wrong" otherwise. This might sound like I'm advocating legislating my own moral system, which would make me a hypocrite, but it's actually subtly different.
I judge the law based on whether its enforcement is moral, not whether the law enforces moral behavior. And the fact is, freedom is itself a very important source of happiness. A law which enforces moral behavior will often reduce freedom, which in turn reduces happiness, which could outweigh the benefits of the law, leading the law itself to be immoral.
Say you're a fundamentalist type who believes that homosexuality is morally wrong. Presumably you believe God said that homosexuality is wrong. But did God ever say that enforcing a prohibition on homosexuality is right? Those are two very different proclaimations. Frankly, I think Jesus would say that the "right" thing to do is to let those people be.
OK, I think I am going to retract my original argument that laws designed to prevent emotional damage are wrong. They aren't always wrong. What makes them wrong is if they unreasonably restrict freedom for only a small reduction in damage done. Unfortunately, it seems to be that quite a few laws of this type tend to be unreasonable in this way.
On the other hand, if laws to stop emotional damage weren't allowed, most privacy laws would probably be thrown out, which is probably not a good thing. So, yeah. I completely retract my original argument.
Murder is immoral because it destroys the happiness of the victim and greatly reduces the happiness of the victim's friends and loved ones. Murder is illegal because making it illegal greatly improves our feeling of security, making us happier.
Obscenity can be immoral when the observers feel emotionally scarred by it. Making it illegal, however, will tend to put unreasonable restrictions on our freedom of expression, and will cause people to fear that something they say may be interpreted as obscene. However, if obscenity is not illegal, most people (and even more so, most companies) will regulate themselves in order to be accepted by society. Cable TV, for example, is not government-regulated, and yet it manages to do a fine job of self-regulation. Therefore, obscenity laws probably have very little benefit, while doing significant damage. And, thus, they are "wrong" and should be repealed.
The presence of obscenity does not cause physical or financial harm to anyone. It may cause emotional harm. However, regulating emotional harm is clearly not feasible. Adultry causes emotional harm, and is considered immoral. Should it be illegal? Ad hominem attacks (i.e. name-calling) cause emotional harm, and are often considered immoral. Should they be illegal?
IMO, legislation should be used to prevent physical and financial harm, but not emotional harm. I'd like to see a constitutional ammendment encoding this rule.
Of course, gay marriage is an example of an act which causes no physical or financial harm to anyone. In fact, you'd be hard-pressed to demonstrate how it causes any harm at all to anyone. Why on Earth should an act which causes no harm be illegal?
No no, seriously! You could have a little stack of them. You could even built a little pyramid of them, right on your desk! Am I the only one obsessed with this idea!?
Must... purchase... stack of Mac minis...::zombie::
I'm not sure about Far Cry (haven't played it), but Doom 3's shawdow volumes and Half-Life 2's physics are very CPU-intensive, which would explain why they might benefit from faster CPU's. I was sort of referring to games not quite on the bleeding edge of game engine technology.
Any graphics or game programming book will tell you that performance is usually limited by a single bottleneck, not by the sum of all the system's parts. So, performance could be CPU-limited, RAM-limited, bus-limited, geometry-limited, fillrate-limited, etc. But, it's usually limited by only a single point, until you improve performance of that point enough that some other point becomes saturated.
It depends on the game. As I said, Doom 3 or Half-Life 2 could easily be CPU-limited. A game like World of Warcraft -- with hardly any client-side processing -- probably wouldn't be. The article didn't say what game they used (unless I missed it). So, based only on the fact that they demonstrated two different CPU's getting the same performance in said game, I am inclined to believe that the game is not CPU-limited.
That's not a very well-defined benchmark, but off the top of my head I can think of several possible explanations. Video card drivers tend to use a lot of CPU-specific instructions. AMD and Intel have different instruction sets. So, tests done on an AMD machine could easily have completely different results than an Intel machine.
WoW in particular has very little in the way of CPU requirements. Consider: The physics and AI in the game are very simplistic, and are mostly done server-side anyway. Try running in windowed mode with the task manager open. I did this with the beta, and I'm pretty sure the CPU usage was not even 50%. I'd check with retail but I haven't installed it yet...
Is this a testament to how far the Pentium Mobile architecture has come, or a sad comment on the clockspeed-pushing design of the Pentium 4?
I think it's a testament to the fact that whatever game they were running doesn't bottleneck at the CPU. Most video games are not CPU-limited beyond a GHz or two.
Woops, guess you're right. Oh well. He could play Halo or UT2k4, though. I think it's worth noting that the Mac mini has a far better graphics chipset than just about any $500 PC.
The Mac mini comes with OSX, which is at least equivalent to XP Pro (certainly much better than XP Home). So, you can't blame the price difference on that.
I know it's a joke and all, but the grandparent to your post defined lines as ending with a semicolon. So, where you put your braces wouldn't make a difference.
Well, yes. And if LokiTorrent wants a public defender, they should have one. But I find it outrageous that they think they have a righteous cause worthy of donations.
Why should we want to donate to LokiTorrent's defense fund rather than that of any common criminal? Come on. There are better uses of my money than supporting a site which has no other purpose than massive copyright violations!
I am completely against attacking the technology. BitTorrent itself is a wonderful tool with many legitimate uses. But a site which promenantly features Half-Life 2 for download on its front page? Fuck that. They're common thieves, and they deserve to be treated as such.
Morally speaking: They clearly intend for their site to be used for copyright infringement. You cannot reasonably argue that the maintainers do not condone the use of their service for copyright infringement. In my book, this is what really matters.
Legally speaking: A.torrent file is a derivative work of the data it represents, and thus MAY NOT be distributed without the original author's consent.
It's ridiculous and disgusting to me that Slashdot would actually help these people raise money by posting this!
Troll? Bah. It was supposed to be a joke mocking the fact that the "Impact Probability" link is not directly tied to the asteriod's actual probability, but is instead a trivial script that simply displays whatever number you give in the URL. Look! The asteroid has a 99% impact probability! Oops, now it's 2%. Oh crap! Now it's 200%! How is that possible? -50%? What?
Slashdot Mirror
Here.
Actually, when I first started playing the beta, my friend made a night elf character and managed to get it to stormwind within an hour or two of starting, at level 3 or so. She did have to run through contested territory and died a couple times, I think, but she made it without too much trouble. Maybe it's harder now, though.
Doesn't matter to me, anyway, as I will never play a night elf. There's too many of them already. Besides, the Alliance is scum.
I'd agree that it's probably some interaction between slashcode and slow net connections and/or buggy firewalls, and not Firefox's rendering engine.
No, it's not. The raw HTML is not being mangled in transit; if it were, you'd be seeing much larger problems. It is a bug in Firefox's rendering engine. The reason it is non-deterministic with Slashdot seems to have something to do with progressive rendering (which is affected by network speed). There are other sites, though, where the bug manifests every single time you load them, regardless of speed.
Yes, it happens on fast connections, too, just much less often. I think it has to do with the progressive rendering code (disclaimer: pure speculation on my part). That is, if part of the page is rendered at the right moment before the whole page has been downloaded, you get the bug. This obviously would happen more often on slower connections because they are less likely to receive the whole page before rendering starts, but it could happen on any connection under the right conditions.
It happens on other sites, too. It would have to: Firefox obviously doesn't treat Slashdot as a special case. It seems that whatever HTML triggers it simply isn't used by many sites.
That's a known bug in Firefox which seems to have greater effect on people with slower internet connections. It will be fixed in the next version (it's currently "fixed in the trunk"). In the meantime, as others have commented, you can fix it by increasing and decreasing the text size (ctrl + mousewheel or ctrl + +/-).
I do agree that it is ridiculous that Firefox 1.0 was let out the door with this bug. For people on slow or even medium-speed connections, this bug happens a lot, and many have no idea how to fix fix it. I have friends who tried Firefox and decided that they hated it because of this bug. I'm guessing the developers are all on fast connections and thus had no idea how often this bug manifests.
Actually, in the 1940's, the US Navy studied the cost of switching to Dvorak and found that it could be made up quite quickly. I use Dvorak myself, and it only took me about two weeks to switch from Qwerty to Dvorak and get mystelf up to decent typing speed. It really does not take long to learn a new layout. You should try it.
Depends. The problems I had with Westfall were well after the players had a chance to spread out. On the other hand, there were areas meant for the same level players which were pretty empty, even then. I did some questing in Thelsamar and saw very few people. I suppose this is because dwarves and gnomes are unpopular as player characters, and the Human and Night Elf masses are mostly too dumb to think of questing in another race's home region.
Still, with 50x the players on the server, it would surely be a problem everywhere.
Well, gee... thanks. :) I'm not religious, personally, but I respect religious people who do not attempt to impose their beliefs on others. Unfortunately the extremists give the rest of Christianity (and religion in general) a bad name...
That wouldn't work.
I don't know if you've played WoW at all, but in the beta I quite often had problems with areas being just too damned crowded. In some areas (e.g. Westfall), the mobs you had to kill for your quests were always dead already, with several players camping their spawn points. And then there's contested territory. Horde player doing Tarren Mill on a crowded PvP server? Good luck staying alive more than two minutes at a time!
That was with about 1200-1500 players logged in to the realm, IIRC. I'd hate to think what it would be like with 10,000 players, much less 100,000.
Now, if Blizzard were somehow capable of creating a game world that was 50 times larger than the one they have, then putting 50 times the players in one realm would be great. But, that would obviously take 50 times the development time, or would require drastic reductions in quality.
Frankly, when I get around to installing the retail version, I'll probably explicitly join the lowest-population server I can find. I like having people around (it's sort of the point of an MMORPG), just not so many.
Does anyone else find it sad that some people can't comprehend the fact that some other people might have different taste in entertainment? I love watching baseball and I love video games, but I don't like baseball video games at all.
Maybe I misunderstood what you were getting at... but my point was to describe why outlawing murder is not an example of legislating morality.
Does "morality" have a place in society? That's a pretty vague question. Even the word "morality" itself is hard to interpret there. When people complain about "legislating morality", they mean legislating a specific belief system, usually religious, which contains arbitrary rules with no direct justification. I don't think that is an acceptable way to derive laws, no.
Hmm... this is more interesting than I thought.
I believe in utilitarianism. So, I believe that an action is "right" if it increases the total happiness in the world and "wrong" otherwise. I in turn believe that a law is "right" if it increases the total happiness in the world and "wrong" otherwise. This might sound like I'm advocating legislating my own moral system, which would make me a hypocrite, but it's actually subtly different.
I judge the law based on whether its enforcement is moral, not whether the law enforces moral behavior. And the fact is, freedom is itself a very important source of happiness. A law which enforces moral behavior will often reduce freedom, which in turn reduces happiness, which could outweigh the benefits of the law, leading the law itself to be immoral.
Say you're a fundamentalist type who believes that homosexuality is morally wrong. Presumably you believe God said that homosexuality is wrong. But did God ever say that enforcing a prohibition on homosexuality is right? Those are two very different proclaimations. Frankly, I think Jesus would say that the "right" thing to do is to let those people be.
OK, I think I am going to retract my original argument that laws designed to prevent emotional damage are wrong. They aren't always wrong. What makes them wrong is if they unreasonably restrict freedom for only a small reduction in damage done. Unfortunately, it seems to be that quite a few laws of this type tend to be unreasonable in this way.
On the other hand, if laws to stop emotional damage weren't allowed, most privacy laws would probably be thrown out, which is probably not a good thing. So, yeah. I completely retract my original argument.
Murder is immoral because it destroys the happiness of the victim and greatly reduces the happiness of the victim's friends and loved ones. Murder is illegal because making it illegal greatly improves our feeling of security, making us happier.
Obscenity can be immoral when the observers feel emotionally scarred by it. Making it illegal, however, will tend to put unreasonable restrictions on our freedom of expression, and will cause people to fear that something they say may be interpreted as obscene. However, if obscenity is not illegal, most people (and even more so, most companies) will regulate themselves in order to be accepted by society. Cable TV, for example, is not government-regulated, and yet it manages to do a fine job of self-regulation. Therefore, obscenity laws probably have very little benefit, while doing significant damage. And, thus, they are "wrong" and should be repealed.
By my logic, anyway.
Murder causes direct physical harm to the victim.
The presence of obscenity does not cause physical or financial harm to anyone. It may cause emotional harm. However, regulating emotional harm is clearly not feasible. Adultry causes emotional harm, and is considered immoral. Should it be illegal? Ad hominem attacks (i.e. name-calling) cause emotional harm, and are often considered immoral. Should they be illegal?
IMO, legislation should be used to prevent physical and financial harm, but not emotional harm. I'd like to see a constitutional ammendment encoding this rule.
Of course, gay marriage is an example of an act which causes no physical or financial harm to anyone. In fact, you'd be hard-pressed to demonstrate how it causes any harm at all to anyone. Why on Earth should an act which causes no harm be illegal?
A beowulf cluster of these.
::zombie::
No no, seriously! You could have a little stack of them. You could even built a little pyramid of them, right on your desk! Am I the only one obsessed with this idea!?
Must... purchase... stack of Mac minis...
I'm not sure about Far Cry (haven't played it), but Doom 3's shawdow volumes and Half-Life 2's physics are very CPU-intensive, which would explain why they might benefit from faster CPU's. I was sort of referring to games not quite on the bleeding edge of game engine technology.
Any graphics or game programming book will tell you that performance is usually limited by a single bottleneck, not by the sum of all the system's parts. So, performance could be CPU-limited, RAM-limited, bus-limited, geometry-limited, fillrate-limited, etc. But, it's usually limited by only a single point, until you improve performance of that point enough that some other point becomes saturated.
It depends on the game. As I said, Doom 3 or Half-Life 2 could easily be CPU-limited. A game like World of Warcraft -- with hardly any client-side processing -- probably wouldn't be. The article didn't say what game they used (unless I missed it). So, based only on the fact that they demonstrated two different CPU's getting the same performance in said game, I am inclined to believe that the game is not CPU-limited.
That's not a very well-defined benchmark, but off the top of my head I can think of several possible explanations. Video card drivers tend to use a lot of CPU-specific instructions. AMD and Intel have different instruction sets. So, tests done on an AMD machine could easily have completely different results than an Intel machine.
WoW in particular has very little in the way of CPU requirements. Consider: The physics and AI in the game are very simplistic, and are mostly done server-side anyway. Try running in windowed mode with the task manager open. I did this with the beta, and I'm pretty sure the CPU usage was not even 50%. I'd check with retail but I haven't installed it yet...
Is this a testament to how far the Pentium Mobile architecture has come, or a sad comment on the clockspeed-pushing design of the Pentium 4?
I think it's a testament to the fact that whatever game they were running doesn't bottleneck at the CPU. Most video games are not CPU-limited beyond a GHz or two.
More than just a comment.
Woops, guess you're right. Oh well. He could play Halo or UT2k4, though. I think it's worth noting that the Mac mini has a far better graphics chipset than just about any $500 PC.
The Mac mini comes with OSX, which is at least equivalent to XP Pro (certainly much better than XP Home). So, you can't blame the price difference on that.
Are you planning to play Doom 3 over eggs and bacon?
Incidentally, with the Mac mini, he could.
Congratulations, you totally missed the fact that this story is tagged "humor".
I know it's a joke and all, but the grandparent to your post defined lines as ending with a semicolon. So, where you put your braces wouldn't make a difference.
Well, yes. And if LokiTorrent wants a public defender, they should have one. But I find it outrageous that they think they have a righteous cause worthy of donations.
Why should we want to donate to LokiTorrent's defense fund rather than that of any common criminal? Come on. There are better uses of my money than supporting a site which has no other purpose than massive copyright violations!
.torrent file is a derivative work of the data it represents, and thus MAY NOT be distributed without the original author's consent.
I am completely against attacking the technology. BitTorrent itself is a wonderful tool with many legitimate uses. But a site which promenantly features Half-Life 2 for download on its front page? Fuck that. They're common thieves, and they deserve to be treated as such.
Morally speaking: They clearly intend for their site to be used for copyright infringement. You cannot reasonably argue that the maintainers do not condone the use of their service for copyright infringement. In my book, this is what really matters.
Legally speaking: A
It's ridiculous and disgusting to me that Slashdot would actually help these people raise money by posting this!
Troll? Bah. It was supposed to be a joke mocking the fact that the "Impact Probability" link is not directly tied to the asteriod's actual probability, but is instead a trivial script that simply displays whatever number you give in the URL. Look! The asteroid has a 99% impact probability! Oops, now it's 2%. Oh crap! Now it's 200%! How is that possible? -50%? What?
Oh, never mind.