You know, that is really a myth. We don't just use the first and last letters, but the shape of the word too. If you take a sentence with multiple words having many ascenders and descenders, then place the ascenders and descenders alternating at the beginning of the word, it is much easier to get confused. Many times people use the other words in a sentence to determine what the more difficult words are.
First of all, the 'role' of your pixie poisoner seems very close to that of a controller to me... AoE smoke and amnesia bolts fit that role well.
Second, the first three books have not been released yet. There may be rules in the MM for playing a pixie, and rule in the DMG for poison use. We saw the start of the rogue including some abilities all rogues have, I don't know about you, but of the rogues I've played (one of my favorite classes) only two, that I can recall, have ever bought poison. It may be that poison use has been relegated to a class skill. We've only seen five of those so there's still a chance.
My point is we don't know enough about the game yet, and probably won't until we start playing in June, so please don't say you can't do something yet.
You say you can't remember the last time you had a defined role in a 3.5 game, to that I say you may have to think harder about what a role is. Did your group wander into every fight without any tactical panning? Did the wizards end up in the front line next to the rogue while the fighter stood back with healing potions and the cleric snuck around back to get around the enemy? Somehow I don't think so.
Okay, I see that, but can't it also be thought that they made all the classes into wizards? (I don't take this view point because of the 'fluff' associated with each character and their skills, but mechanically it is similar)
Also, we need to remember that all the conjecture about 4E is from the first 10 levels of the game. Paragon Paths and Epic Destinies really haven't been explored too much. We'll have to wait for Wednesday to see Paragon Paths.
From my limited experience with 4E, the aggro people talk about is not the 'stickyness' from MMOs, but the fighter/paladin making it costly to attack someone else.
For example, the fighter can focus on an enemy so that it (the enemy) will have a -2 to hit any other party member.
Now, if the AC of the fighter is 4 higher than that of the wizard, this will not have an effect on the enemy (it's still easier to hit the wizard).
I've heard this argument a lot about 4E. But no one really gives examples as to what they mean. Here you at least say that everyone is assigned to a role of tank/healer/cannon, but couldn't that be said for 3.x and 2E as well? They just didn't explicitly say it in those versions.
While on the surface this seems like a good request, it seems to me that doing this would be more harmful to Apple's reputation than helpful. Unlike Microsoft, which (not counting peripherals) is in primarily the software market, Apple integrates their OS and hardware, so they have fewer hardware configurations to support. If they opened it up to the beige boxes of the world the percieved quality of their OS would suffer... this wouldn't "just work" like they do now.
You're right, I hadn't thought of that. Though (in my defense) I should say that I was thinking of sinking the data centers a floor, though not being from the S.W. I'm not too sure how cool it is there (I've heard there are large caverns that remain chilly but I don't think we could but a data center in one of those.. preservation, safety, and who want's to work in a carvern (besides me at times)).
It is warmer in the South West, but the additional heat will be the external ambient outside temperature, not the heat generated from the boxes inside. Effecient insulation will help reduce the electrical cost of cooling associated with the increase of ambient temperature so it will not surpass the generated electricity. Think of root cellars -- they stay cool nearly all year round because of their insulation. Plus with the newer generations of processors radiating less heat, the cooling will be that much less.
Additionally moving the data centers around will mitigate the single point of failure associated with all our data being held in the North West. Also the location of the data center to the power source has an effect on the price of the power so if the data center is close to a traditional power source (like the Hoover Dam) the power they would end up needing to buy would also be cheaper. The first year or so of operation probably will show the move as a net loss, but the concurrent years will show the savings of moving the data center.
One thing that needs to be looked at with the congregation of data centers is why are they like that? Here in the North East, any kind of bandwidth will cost an arm and a leg compared to the North West area. I've recently been involved in pricing out Colocations for one of our webservers and a simple T1 costs 4-5 times in the N.E. that it costs in the N.W. I'm sure we'd see more evenly distributed data centers if costs we evenly distributed too.
How about taking some of those new 40% efficiency solar panels and moving some data centers down to the S.W. for a start?
"Cingular will allow people to download music to compatible phones for free, although consumers will pay a monthly charge in the range of $15 for the ability to download songs from those services to a portable music player."
So downloads to your phone are free, but if you want those songs on your MP3 player as well, you'll need to shell out $15 a month.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not every day you see "Microsoft" and "Free" in the same headline.
Search for 'Microsoft' in google. One of the top results will be "Microsoft - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia"
This begs the question... you search for Microsoft every day?
You know, that is really a myth. We don't just use the first and last letters, but the shape of the word too. If you take a sentence with multiple words having many ascenders and descenders, then place the ascenders and descenders alternating at the beginning of the word, it is much easier to get confused. Many times people use the other words in a sentence to determine what the more difficult words are.
First of all, the 'role' of your pixie poisoner seems very close to that of a controller to me... AoE smoke and amnesia bolts fit that role well.
Second, the first three books have not been released yet. There may be rules in the MM for playing a pixie, and rule in the DMG for poison use. We saw the start of the rogue including some abilities all rogues have, I don't know about you, but of the rogues I've played (one of my favorite classes) only two, that I can recall, have ever bought poison. It may be that poison use has been relegated to a class skill. We've only seen five of those so there's still a chance.
My point is we don't know enough about the game yet, and probably won't until we start playing in June, so please don't say you can't do something yet.
You say you can't remember the last time you had a defined role in a 3.5 game, to that I say you may have to think harder about what a role is. Did your group wander into every fight without any tactical panning? Did the wizards end up in the front line next to the rogue while the fighter stood back with healing potions and the cleric snuck around back to get around the enemy? Somehow I don't think so.
Okay, I see that, but can't it also be thought that they made all the classes into wizards? (I don't take this view point because of the 'fluff' associated with each character and their skills, but mechanically it is similar)
Also, we need to remember that all the conjecture about 4E is from the first 10 levels of the game. Paragon Paths and Epic Destinies really haven't been explored too much. We'll have to wait for Wednesday to see Paragon Paths.
From my limited experience with 4E, the aggro people talk about is not the 'stickyness' from MMOs, but the fighter/paladin making it costly to attack someone else. For example, the fighter can focus on an enemy so that it (the enemy) will have a -2 to hit any other party member. Now, if the AC of the fighter is 4 higher than that of the wizard, this will not have an effect on the enemy (it's still easier to hit the wizard).
I've heard this argument a lot about 4E. But no one really gives examples as to what they mean. Here you at least say that everyone is assigned to a role of tank/healer/cannon, but couldn't that be said for 3.x and 2E as well? They just didn't explicitly say it in those versions.
This image represents a file window (item 700) displaying pictures (item 702) with the ad window (item 704) shown.
While on the surface this seems like a good request, it seems to me that doing this would be more harmful to Apple's reputation than helpful. Unlike Microsoft, which (not counting peripherals) is in primarily the software market, Apple integrates their OS and hardware, so they have fewer hardware configurations to support. If they opened it up to the beige boxes of the world the percieved quality of their OS would suffer... this wouldn't "just work" like they do now.
You're right, I hadn't thought of that. Though (in my defense) I should say that I was thinking of sinking the data centers a floor, though not being from the S.W. I'm not too sure how cool it is there (I've heard there are large caverns that remain chilly but I don't think we could but a data center in one of those.. preservation, safety, and who want's to work in a carvern (besides me at times)).
It is warmer in the South West, but the additional heat will be the external ambient outside temperature, not the heat generated from the boxes inside. Effecient insulation will help reduce the electrical cost of cooling associated with the increase of ambient temperature so it will not surpass the generated electricity. Think of root cellars -- they stay cool nearly all year round because of their insulation. Plus with the newer generations of processors radiating less heat, the cooling will be that much less.
Additionally moving the data centers around will mitigate the single point of failure associated with all our data being held in the North West. Also the location of the data center to the power source has an effect on the price of the power so if the data center is close to a traditional power source (like the Hoover Dam) the power they would end up needing to buy would also be cheaper. The first year or so of operation probably will show the move as a net loss, but the concurrent years will show the savings of moving the data center.
One thing that needs to be looked at with the congregation of data centers is why are they like that? Here in the North East, any kind of bandwidth will cost an arm and a leg compared to the North West area. I've recently been involved in pricing out Colocations for one of our webservers and a simple T1 costs 4-5 times in the N.E. that it costs in the N.W. I'm sure we'd see more evenly distributed data centers if costs we evenly distributed too. How about taking some of those new 40% efficiency solar panels and moving some data centers down to the S.W. for a start?
So downloads to your phone are free, but if you want those songs on your MP3 player as well, you'll need to shell out $15 a month.