Not to mention a cold and dark house. If you had a chest freezer, you might start to approach that cost. Not to mention the cost for the utility to throw the power off and on (well, I guess you could use the master breaker too).
Planetside had plenty of people playing it back in the day and is still alive. But bugs and faction imbalance and other games eventually drove a lot of players away.
I played PS way back near release. It was a good time. The friendly-kill-points was a good way to handle TK issues if a bit more forgiving than it should have been, but hey. I'm not sure I really liked the system though -- the exponential leveling scale meant it was more effecitve to have a number of characters to have one who does vehicles, one who's the sniper/engineer type, one who's your heavy (max units or just heavy weaponry/grenades), etc.
The problem with trying to get students to think about things and analyse the content of the class is that often the exams are "easy to grade" aka "route memorization."
Problem is, if you do that then you get students who haven't ever had to use their brain complaining that your class is "too hard." Because you didn't ask route memorization problems and asked them to think. Most US schools (grade, jr, high) don't encourage thinking. They encourage memorization.
What date(s) did Rome get sacked? What is the name for C6H3O7? (made up the molecule on the fly, I have no idea what it is offhand) What is the scientific name for the domestic cat (far too common an animal for that question, but...)?
Memorization is easy for a computer to grade, so I can't entierly blame the schools.
Some companies value face to face more than a labor cost savings. Indian techs can't provide the personal interaction and problem solving skills that me walking over to your desk to help fix your problem can. I know that's not solving it remotely with a remote desktop tool or whatever the rage is, but some fields value personal interaction over impersonal so-called "effiency."
Or, work somewhere that's concerned with security. The supercomputer I run cannot legally be run by someone who isn't a US citizen. We've got data on it that, while not classified, is "sensative" and is not to be released to non-US-citizens.
Because I can get that far while the game is installing and patching.
But really for most games these days do you need a manual? If you've played civ 1-3, civ 4 isn't that different, and what is different is helpfully covered in a short little section of manual titled something handy like, "differences for veteren civ players."
The world of warcraft manual was shockingly useful considering most MMO manuals are a waste of paper. But even still, if you've played one MMO you've played them all. You probably don't need a manual to start playing.
You can buy your linux machine with linux preinstalled from various major linux vendors depending on where you get the box from too.
You have to compare apples to apples. You're saying, "well I don't have to do anything to make windows run since I paid dell to install it" versus "I have to do something (whatever that thing is) to get linux on it."
That or reinstall a copy of windows (a real new, store-bought copy; not the "I destroy everything on your hard drive" so-called recovery CDs manufacturers ship).
You might not know the disaster turbine will make of this. They've had good people -- and good streches -- in their games, but it has been rare.
If you think some of their DDO decisions are laughable, you should have seen some of the AC ones. Spells researched by dumping components into a bar and hitting a button. Eventually it turned out that your spell components were just the result of a formula applied to a hash of your account name (not character name even). Programs popped up to bot it for you (thank god it was awfully boring). Thus was the start of the great Macro-on's Call. A problem they never really banned anyone for but that caused serious problems in the game, especially for PvP as the "level cap" without macroing was effectivly unreachable (and almost unreachable with macroing).
Then there was the "spell economy." You see, magic is "depleted" by being cast. Both in a school (critter, life, item, and war) and per-spell/per-spell-level. So a spell that should have given you +35 to a stat (for example, focus self 6) would actually only give you +30 to a stat, because so many people were casing it (namely everyone in existance who had critter magic and could eek out a 6th level spell -- highest there was in AC at the time). Meanwhile, other spells like crossbow mastery self 6 were providing a +40 bonus since next to nobody used xbow. Kinda cute, but when you combine it with the Flavor Of The Month problems MMOs face it started sucking. Especially with reguard to mages -- you spent a lot of points buying all those magic schools, and someone else without them but with arcane lore could use jewlery that would always provide that +35 bonus (item cast buffs were not part of the spell economy). There was in theory some indicator bar for the spell economy but it never actually indicated anything as far as I could tell. Needless to say the system was nixed after (too long) a time.
And let's not forget the most brilliant decision ever: allow monsters to gain XP off killing players. Also, provide monsters with a flat 10xp/pt curve to improve their stats, as opposed to the exponential curve players faced. Have the Virindi Executor resist your first 2 war spells? May as well run away, he just gained ~500-1000 xp, and dumped all 50-100 points that provides into his magic resistance skill. Needless to say your war magic skill of 250 to 300 won't be landing anymore.
Last but not least, no discussion of turbine is complete without mentioning the "Wi Flag". See, the way they calculated monster aggro (initial (and often final target) not based on damage or healing or anything -- purely random amoung targets in range! Fight till one of you dead or target out of range. Run back to spawn. Acquire new target.) was... flawed. Depending on how your character name hashed, you would either be mostly-as-intended (in the middle), or Wi (you get 10x of the aggro you should), or myself (you get 1/10th of the aggro you should).
Now, this Wi or anti-Wi flag was kinda interesting tactically. You could send my toons with it into situations nobody could normally go, because most mobs would ignore me. It could be annoying though; my friend (who had a Wi) zones in to the dungon I'm fighting in and suddenly the 15 bugs surrounding me (Olthoi -- the one cool thing about the game) are off in another corner. Even the one I was fighting turns around and tries (and fails due to the "I run at your location" pathing AC has) to run at him, dragging me behind it across the dungon.
But overall it was just irratating. People who were wi-flagged often couldn't do quests; they'd just die due to concentrated fire at the start of a spawn. It lasted, what, 2 years before one of their good (last good? I think she moved on) programmers found it. Despite them telling us "we've tested it there is no wi flag" the whole time.
So yeah, go Turbine. Not a company I plan to play a game from again.
Probably get karma-dinged by a D&D fanboi for bashing the developer of The Best Game Ever or something, but that's okay I've done my time (in AC and playing D&D -- gestalt at the moment thanks for asking) and said my peace.
The thinly veiled "you must buy gold" implication is really sad. But as with accusations of "u hax" thrown by every alliance team I trounce, no way to prove what I say. So if it helps you sleep at night, you go right on believing that.
Anyway, the reason the publisher doesn't is because they believe that doing so would be bad for business. Duh. That's all there is to it. It is also why they don't just sell premade level 60 characters. People would play less.
In fact, gold farming is in the publisher's interest IF it generates more accounts than they'd have without gold farming. If you don't think they study that very carefully you'd be a fool. They're maintaining a balancing act: keep the anti-gold-farmers happy, but otherwise don't disturb the practice because it is more revenue in pocket for them.
There are publishers experimenting with RL $$ to virutal $$ conversions. Second Life comes right to mind, and I believe UO or EQ also had something along those lines. Someone else was doing it as well, but I can't recall who now, they may well have died before startup.
Your hour is worth $50 (a nice round number I pulled from thin air). Call it what you get consulting. Or working overtime. Or working at all. Whatever makes it worth that, your time is worth that.
Now, say you don't like... cleaning your house. You can hire a maid service to do it for $75. It takes you 2 hours to clean your house, and you don't enjoy cleaning it for the sake of cleaning it.
Do you pay the maids or not? If so, then you understand gold farming. If not, rerun the thought experiment with $25 to pay the maids. Or $5.
Of course, some people would say, "It is my house I'm going to clean it I don't care about maids no matter how cheap that'd be. This is Mine and I want to do it!" Maybe you're one of them. That's the same as those who don't buy gold. Because for them, for whatever reason (even if they claim to not enjoy cleaning house), they get something out of cleaning their house (farming their own gold).
That doesn't mean everyone does.
"But it is virtual! It doesn't exist." That's where you're wrong. It does exist. The person paying $$ for gold would be happier (overall) if they didn't have the $$ and did have the gold. The transaction created happiness for them. The person getting $$ for the gold (their time) is happier with the $$. It means they get to eat, which makes most people fairly happy.
It doesn't matter if it can be done "more efficently" by code. I could pray to the heavens (presuming the existance of some higher power, or that we're in the matrix) to rain manna down too. Doesn't mean we shouldn't have farmers growing crops. It is one of the "rules of that world": the game doesn't have gold+=500000, and you can't really expect it to rain manna from heaven. It doesn't matter that the rule is arbitrary in the game, only that the rule exists.
They're putting items up that have a hefty listing fee to be paid.
I'll resell items. It is easy to make yourself a fair bit of cash doing it. There is a difference between people doing casual reselling and the folks farming instances/rocks/plants for gold. If you watch spam in the cities and the AH they aren't hard to pick out.
Sure, as a good player you get stuff quicker. And? A 'good player' in his mom's basement (the typical stereotype) who spends twice the amount of time online you do is going to be twice as successful. 'Good play' doesn't get you to 60 that much faster. Spending twice the time, on the other hand, will.
Plus, how much "good play" is required for the resource gathering in wow. Wait till the fishing bobber goes "sploosh". Shift-click it. Recast, repeat.
Run around to all mineral (or plant) nodes on your map. Check mini-map for spawned item. Loot. Optionally kill mob guarding it (if you don't have another way to loot it without bothering).
Warcraft's economy was ruined the moment the servers opened. It is broken by design. Not that it isn't quite probably the best MMO economy I've seen so far, but that doesn't mean it isn't broken.
Disclaimer: I haven't bought gold. I don't ever expect to. Why? Because frankly gold is trivial to make in most games. Skinning level 10 boars? A waste. I'll skim off the auction house. Buy low, sell high. Especially if you can reprocess in the middle so people don't realize you're doing it.
Now, having gotten that out of the way. Consider: how long would it take you to farm the mats for... let's pick a couple things I'm looking at recently: the devilsaur set and/or volcanic and/or stormshroud. Fairly expensive: one person is selling stormshoud for about 130/150 a pop per peice on my server.
Now, I can make good money on the AH, but making that much... that'd take a lot of time. Most people don't even know making money like that on the AH is possible, but reguardless. How much time would it take farming ore, or "farming" the AH to make that much?
Right. Now from the article, 500 gold is what, $60? (I think it is less on my server from in-game spam I get from time to time but who knows.) If I wanted to do some work consulting, or even some overtime, how long would it take me to earn $60?
Heck of a lot less time than it'd take in game that's for sure! In fact, for them it may be a net gain. Spend a couple hours working on cleaning viruses off computers, spend some of that cash on virtual gold, powerlevel up whatever skill you want. Now you have some leftover real cash, leftover virtual cash, met the goal you were pursuing in the game and took less time to do it than you would have just grinding in game.
That's why people do it. It makes economic sense to them. It doesn't matter if they could buy another game: this is the game they want to play.
Ours drive prices/up/. I consistnatly see the few same people selling all the high end items well above what auctioneer (or even searching and watching prices myself) would suggest market value is.
In fact, driving prices up is better for them. You have more incentive to buy gold as you'll never make enough to get the items you want otherwise.
If you walk to talk about screwing the economy, talk to Blizzard. Increasing red dragonscales drop rate and quest XP at 60 -> gold is going to be a nice shock when 1.10 hits. I'm happy I got to resell the red scales I'd been picking up on the cheap (min bid or underpriced for the win) hopeing to put together a red DS suit before the price drop hits.
Asheron's Call 1 had this since release. I don't know how mainstream it is, but at the time it was released the competition consisted of EQ and UO and that was pretty much it, so...
Warcraft now also has this with food, bandages, and potions. Timered, but still. Much better than the DAOC "sit for 2 minutes" deal.
* net-misc/vpnc
Latest version available: 0.3.3-r1
Latest version installed: [ Not Installed ]
Size of files: 58 kB
Homepage: http://www.unix-ag.uni-kl.de/~massar/vpnc/
Description: Free client for Cisco VPN routing software
License: GPL-2 BSD
Cisco makes a client themselves too but it sucks. I have used vpnc successfully in the past on my laptop with the ipw2100 drivers to get on the wireless network here at UIUC.
I ran cedega for a while, but even doing hardware swaps (my windows and linux machines are identical except for the video card) CoH ran about 10-20% slower on average in framerate.
This would probably have been okay but as I sad that was average. Standard deviation was way up there, which was the problem. Smooth smooth smooth smooth frame-per-second-crawl-for-3-seconds smooth smooth smooth. Didn't look like it was a lack of memory issue or what-not.
I don't believe he said "I long to pay companies more money to use content I already own again." Which seems to be what you meant, unless Nintendo & co have come out and said the old content will be free if you buy a Revolution. (possible, I don't pay much attention to next-gen news)
Of course, then there's the question of "a free lunch" but we'll leave that to philosphers.
Intel has a 64-bit, low power, high floating-point performance chip where, exactly? The chips the article is talking about are server chips, not your average desktop trash.
This may be a good sign, the scientific community has not been exactly impressed with a lot of intel's offerings.
# Cook for everyone at once and pick up some heat trapping storage bags (the sort used for camping and picnics) to keep food warm for latecomers. Try not to cook too much or else you're going to need to store that extra food for later...
I can't see this being more efficient. Do you really think that the stove outputs less than 1500 watts (over 5 minutes of zapping food to reheat) over the time needed to cook a meal? I'm pretty sure the stove would put off well more than that. Especially if you were cooking something like a croc-pot dish or a stew that simmers for a long time.
Actually I had no problem getting flat cable internet, no TV attached with insightbb in central IL. And their uptime/service has been better than SBC's DSL which I was on (course I was on campus at the time so cable was right out for any performance).
I raid every now and then, but I get terrible migraines if I have to stare at the screen for too long.
Try an LCD. Or if you're using an LCD, go back to a CRT. Seriously, LCDs are way easier on the eyes. I never had issues staring at a CRT long-term anyway, but an LCD is definatly easier on the eyes.
I was meaning to test out what you said but I hadn't found my 10baseT hub -- think I loaned it to a friend.
Blizzard wouldn't be stupid to encrypt the whole traffic stream. Their servers are already seriously overloaded, and that's just more load. They might be able to use SSL-accelerators on the front of their server farms, but that's still extra client load = poorer performance. Not much to be done about it there.
Your login info, I can see being sent via PKI. Barrens chat, monster movement (remember, encryption = latency) and such? Not a good plan.
But as I said, I didn't dig out tcpdump and check so I could be wrong.
Besides, as long as you have administrator and can read blizzard's memory in your computer, you can always nab the key out of there and send it on to the linux box.
Slashdot Mirror
Not to mention a cold and dark house. If you had a chest freezer, you might start to approach that cost. Not to mention the cost for the utility to throw the power off and on (well, I guess you could use the master breaker too).
Keep 1280 cores at a 90-100% load, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. They show no sign of stopping.
It is called supercomputing.
Planetside had plenty of people playing it back in the day and is still alive. But bugs and faction imbalance and other games eventually drove a lot of players away.
I played PS way back near release. It was a good time. The friendly-kill-points was a good way to handle TK issues if a bit more forgiving than it should have been, but hey. I'm not sure I really liked the system though -- the exponential leveling scale meant it was more effecitve to have a number of characters to have one who does vehicles, one who's the sniper/engineer type, one who's your heavy (max units or just heavy weaponry/grenades), etc.
The problem with trying to get students to think about things and analyse the content of the class is that often the exams are "easy to grade" aka "route memorization."
Problem is, if you do that then you get students who haven't ever had to use their brain complaining that your class is "too hard." Because you didn't ask route memorization problems and asked them to think. Most US schools (grade, jr, high) don't encourage thinking. They encourage memorization.
What date(s) did Rome get sacked? What is the name for C6H3O7? (made up the molecule on the fly, I have no idea what it is offhand) What is the scientific name for the domestic cat (far too common an animal for that question, but...)?
Memorization is easy for a computer to grade, so I can't entierly blame the schools.
Some companies value face to face more than a labor cost savings. Indian techs can't provide the personal interaction and problem solving skills that me walking over to your desk to help fix your problem can. I know that's not solving it remotely with a remote desktop tool or whatever the rage is, but some fields value personal interaction over impersonal so-called "effiency."
Or, work somewhere that's concerned with security. The supercomputer I run cannot legally be run by someone who isn't a US citizen. We've got data on it that, while not classified, is "sensative" and is not to be released to non-US-citizens.
Pretty much solves the H1B thing right there.
Because I can get that far while the game is installing and patching.
But really for most games these days do you need a manual? If you've played civ 1-3, civ 4 isn't that different, and what is different is helpfully covered in a short little section of manual titled something handy like, "differences for veteren civ players."
The world of warcraft manual was shockingly useful considering most MMO manuals are a waste of paper. But even still, if you've played one MMO you've played them all. You probably don't need a manual to start playing.
You can buy your linux machine with linux preinstalled from various major linux vendors depending on where you get the box from too.
You have to compare apples to apples. You're saying, "well I don't have to do anything to make windows run since I paid dell to install it" versus "I have to do something (whatever that thing is) to get linux on it."
That or reinstall a copy of windows (a real new, store-bought copy; not the "I destroy everything on your hard drive" so-called recovery CDs manufacturers ship).
You might not know the disaster turbine will make of this. They've had good people -- and good streches -- in their games, but it has been rare.
... flawed. Depending on how your character name hashed, you would either be mostly-as-intended (in the middle), or Wi (you get 10x of the aggro you should), or myself (you get 1/10th of the aggro you should).
If you think some of their DDO decisions are laughable, you should have seen some of the AC ones. Spells researched by dumping components into a bar and hitting a button. Eventually it turned out that your spell components were just the result of a formula applied to a hash of your account name (not character name even). Programs popped up to bot it for you (thank god it was awfully boring). Thus was the start of the great Macro-on's Call. A problem they never really banned anyone for but that caused serious problems in the game, especially for PvP as the "level cap" without macroing was effectivly unreachable (and almost unreachable with macroing).
Then there was the "spell economy." You see, magic is "depleted" by being cast. Both in a school (critter, life, item, and war) and per-spell/per-spell-level. So a spell that should have given you +35 to a stat (for example, focus self 6) would actually only give you +30 to a stat, because so many people were casing it (namely everyone in existance who had critter magic and could eek out a 6th level spell -- highest there was in AC at the time). Meanwhile, other spells like crossbow mastery self 6 were providing a +40 bonus since next to nobody used xbow. Kinda cute, but when you combine it with the Flavor Of The Month problems MMOs face it started sucking. Especially with reguard to mages -- you spent a lot of points buying all those magic schools, and someone else without them but with arcane lore could use jewlery that would always provide that +35 bonus (item cast buffs were not part of the spell economy). There was in theory some indicator bar for the spell economy but it never actually indicated anything as far as I could tell. Needless to say the system was nixed after (too long) a time.
And let's not forget the most brilliant decision ever: allow monsters to gain XP off killing players. Also, provide monsters with a flat 10xp/pt curve to improve their stats, as opposed to the exponential curve players faced. Have the Virindi Executor resist your first 2 war spells? May as well run away, he just gained ~500-1000 xp, and dumped all 50-100 points that provides into his magic resistance skill. Needless to say your war magic skill of 250 to 300 won't be landing anymore.
Last but not least, no discussion of turbine is complete without mentioning the "Wi Flag". See, the way they calculated monster aggro (initial (and often final target) not based on damage or healing or anything -- purely random amoung targets in range! Fight till one of you dead or target out of range. Run back to spawn. Acquire new target.) was
Now, this Wi or anti-Wi flag was kinda interesting tactically. You could send my toons with it into situations nobody could normally go, because most mobs would ignore me. It could be annoying though; my friend (who had a Wi) zones in to the dungon I'm fighting in and suddenly the 15 bugs surrounding me (Olthoi -- the one cool thing about the game) are off in another corner. Even the one I was fighting turns around and tries (and fails due to the "I run at your location" pathing AC has) to run at him, dragging me behind it across the dungon.
But overall it was just irratating. People who were wi-flagged often couldn't do quests; they'd just die due to concentrated fire at the start of a spawn. It lasted, what, 2 years before one of their good (last good? I think she moved on) programmers found it. Despite them telling us "we've tested it there is no wi flag" the whole time.
So yeah, go Turbine. Not a company I plan to play a game from again.
Probably get karma-dinged by a D&D fanboi for bashing the developer of The Best Game Ever or something, but that's okay I've done my time (in AC and playing D&D -- gestalt at the moment thanks for asking) and said my peace.
The thinly veiled "you must buy gold" implication is really sad. But as with accusations of "u hax" thrown by every alliance team I trounce, no way to prove what I say. So if it helps you sleep at night, you go right on believing that.
Anyway, the reason the publisher doesn't is because they believe that doing so would be bad for business. Duh. That's all there is to it. It is also why they don't just sell premade level 60 characters. People would play less.
In fact, gold farming is in the publisher's interest IF it generates more accounts than they'd have without gold farming. If you don't think they study that very carefully you'd be a fool. They're maintaining a balancing act: keep the anti-gold-farmers happy, but otherwise don't disturb the practice because it is more revenue in pocket for them.
There are publishers experimenting with RL $$ to virutal $$ conversions. Second Life comes right to mind, and I believe UO or EQ also had something along those lines. Someone else was doing it as well, but I can't recall who now, they may well have died before startup.
Your hour is worth $50 (a nice round number I pulled from thin air). Call it what you get consulting. Or working overtime. Or working at all. Whatever makes it worth that, your time is worth that.
Now, say you don't like... cleaning your house. You can hire a maid service to do it for $75. It takes you 2 hours to clean your house, and you don't enjoy cleaning it for the sake of cleaning it.
Do you pay the maids or not? If so, then you understand gold farming. If not, rerun the thought experiment with $25 to pay the maids. Or $5.
Of course, some people would say, "It is my house I'm going to clean it I don't care about maids no matter how cheap that'd be. This is Mine and I want to do it!" Maybe you're one of them. That's the same as those who don't buy gold. Because for them, for whatever reason (even if they claim to not enjoy cleaning house), they get something out of cleaning their house (farming their own gold).
That doesn't mean everyone does.
"But it is virtual! It doesn't exist." That's where you're wrong. It does exist. The person paying $$ for gold would be happier (overall) if they didn't have the $$ and did have the gold. The transaction created happiness for them. The person getting $$ for the gold (their time) is happier with the $$. It means they get to eat, which makes most people fairly happy.
It doesn't matter if it can be done "more efficently" by code. I could pray to the heavens (presuming the existance of some higher power, or that we're in the matrix) to rain manna down too. Doesn't mean we shouldn't have farmers growing crops. It is one of the "rules of that world": the game doesn't have gold+=500000, and you can't really expect it to rain manna from heaven. It doesn't matter that the rule is arbitrary in the game, only that the rule exists.
They're putting items up that have a hefty listing fee to be paid.
I'll resell items. It is easy to make yourself a fair bit of cash doing it. There is a difference between people doing casual reselling and the folks farming instances/rocks/plants for gold. If you watch spam in the cities and the AH they aren't hard to pick out.
It rewards time playing.
Sure, as a good player you get stuff quicker. And? A 'good player' in his mom's basement (the typical stereotype) who spends twice the amount of time online you do is going to be twice as successful. 'Good play' doesn't get you to 60 that much faster. Spending twice the time, on the other hand, will.
Plus, how much "good play" is required for the resource gathering in wow. Wait till the fishing bobber goes "sploosh". Shift-click it. Recast, repeat.
Run around to all mineral (or plant) nodes on your map. Check mini-map for spawned item. Loot. Optionally kill mob guarding it (if you don't have another way to loot it without bothering).
Warcraft's economy was ruined the moment the servers opened. It is broken by design. Not that it isn't quite probably the best MMO economy I've seen so far, but that doesn't mean it isn't broken.
Disclaimer: I haven't bought gold. I don't ever expect to. Why? Because frankly gold is trivial to make in most games. Skinning level 10 boars? A waste. I'll skim off the auction house. Buy low, sell high. Especially if you can reprocess in the middle so people don't realize you're doing it.
Now, having gotten that out of the way. Consider: how long would it take you to farm the mats for... let's pick a couple things I'm looking at recently: the devilsaur set and/or volcanic and/or stormshroud. Fairly expensive: one person is selling stormshoud for about 130/150 a pop per peice on my server.
Now, I can make good money on the AH, but making that much... that'd take a lot of time. Most people don't even know making money like that on the AH is possible, but reguardless. How much time would it take farming ore, or "farming" the AH to make that much?
Right. Now from the article, 500 gold is what, $60? (I think it is less on my server from in-game spam I get from time to time but who knows.) If I wanted to do some work consulting, or even some overtime, how long would it take me to earn $60?
Heck of a lot less time than it'd take in game that's for sure! In fact, for them it may be a net gain. Spend a couple hours working on cleaning viruses off computers, spend some of that cash on virtual gold, powerlevel up whatever skill you want. Now you have some leftover real cash, leftover virtual cash, met the goal you were pursuing in the game and took less time to do it than you would have just grinding in game.
That's why people do it. It makes economic sense to them. It doesn't matter if they could buy another game: this is the game they want to play.
I want your server's gold farmers.
/up/. I consistnatly see the few same people selling all the high end items well above what auctioneer (or even searching and watching prices myself) would suggest market value is.
Ours drive prices
In fact, driving prices up is better for them. You have more incentive to buy gold as you'll never make enough to get the items you want otherwise.
If you walk to talk about screwing the economy, talk to Blizzard. Increasing red dragonscales drop rate and quest XP at 60 -> gold is going to be a nice shock when 1.10 hits. I'm happy I got to resell the red scales I'd been picking up on the cheap (min bid or underpriced for the win) hopeing to put together a red DS suit before the price drop hits.
Asheron's Call 1 had this since release. I don't know how mainstream it is, but at the time it was released the competition consisted of EQ and UO and that was pretty much it, so...
Warcraft now also has this with food, bandages, and potions. Timered, but still. Much better than the DAOC "sit for 2 minutes" deal.
You could stop whatever is animating them, however.
* net-misc/vpnc
Latest version available: 0.3.3-r1
Latest version installed: [ Not Installed ]
Size of files: 58 kB
Homepage: http://www.unix-ag.uni-kl.de/~massar/vpnc/
Description: Free client for Cisco VPN routing software
License: GPL-2 BSD
Cisco makes a client themselves too but it sucks. I have used vpnc successfully in the past on my laptop with the ipw2100 drivers to get on the wireless network here at UIUC.
I ran cedega for a while, but even doing hardware swaps (my windows and linux machines are identical except for the video card) CoH ran about 10-20% slower on average in framerate.
This would probably have been okay but as I sad that was average. Standard deviation was way up there, which was the problem. Smooth smooth smooth smooth frame-per-second-crawl-for-3-seconds smooth smooth smooth. Didn't look like it was a lack of memory issue or what-not.
I don't believe he said "I long to pay companies more money to use content I already own again." Which seems to be what you meant, unless Nintendo & co have come out and said the old content will be free if you buy a Revolution. (possible, I don't pay much attention to next-gen news)
Of course, then there's the question of "a free lunch" but we'll leave that to philosphers.
Whew. That was close.
Intel has a 64-bit, low power, high floating-point performance chip where, exactly? The chips the article is talking about are server chips, not your average desktop trash.
This may be a good sign, the scientific community has not been exactly impressed with a lot of intel's offerings.
I can't see this being more efficient. Do you really think that the stove outputs less than 1500 watts (over 5 minutes of zapping food to reheat) over the time needed to cook a meal? I'm pretty sure the stove would put off well more than that. Especially if you were cooking something like a croc-pot dish or a stew that simmers for a long time.
Actually I had no problem getting flat cable internet, no TV attached with insightbb in central IL. And their uptime/service has been better than SBC's DSL which I was on (course I was on campus at the time so cable was right out for any performance).
It already exists. It is called free dialup (or paid) versus cable or dsl.
This is just a money grab.
Try an LCD. Or if you're using an LCD, go back to a CRT. Seriously, LCDs are way easier on the eyes. I never had issues staring at a CRT long-term anyway, but an LCD is definatly easier on the eyes.
I was meaning to test out what you said but I hadn't found my 10baseT hub -- think I loaned it to a friend.
Blizzard wouldn't be stupid to encrypt the whole traffic stream. Their servers are already seriously overloaded, and that's just more load. They might be able to use SSL-accelerators on the front of their server farms, but that's still extra client load = poorer performance. Not much to be done about it there.
Your login info, I can see being sent via PKI. Barrens chat, monster movement (remember, encryption = latency) and such? Not a good plan.
But as I said, I didn't dig out tcpdump and check so I could be wrong.
Besides, as long as you have administrator and can read blizzard's memory in your computer, you can always nab the key out of there and send it on to the linux box.