Yes, that is exactly what it was like. If you wanted to buy some specific item, you had to go to some "bazaar" area, which was basically one of several larger halls inside town, in which you found the NPC retainers of other players standing around, pretty much like the terracotta army. Each retainer was the private shop of one player, and you had to walk up to each and every single one to check if that shop had the item you wanted, and at which price. So if you wanted to see all the options for a particular item, you had to check all the shops, because there was no overall list of items on offer. The only saving grace was that at least the bazaar areas were labelled as to which areas were for which general type of items (like armor, weapons, ...). But this was, as far as I can remember, not enforced, so you could have private shops in the wrong area. And the server lag made checking out the private shops as slow and annoying as you can imagine. Basically the whole system was as bad as it was possible to make it.

This. Seriously. Any management GUI which requires Java deserves to die in a fire. Because when you need to use it - which for some management GUI like a storage box which is configured once and then left alone until something needs to be changed might happen once every couple months - you can be ABSOLUTELY SURE that the computer you are sitting at either has no Java runtime environment at all or one which is the wrong version. At work, I have special VMs sitting around which I can fire up in case I need to connect to one of those ancient remote management boards which need Java 1.4.1 or stuff like that, and I have to be careful not to accidentally update those machines.

It is super annoying to find out that just to be allowed to click that one button, you first have to get a Java runtime (in the right version!) and install it, because sometimes you do not have an Internet connection available so you have to mess around with a USB stick, you introduce additional security risks by installing Java, most likely you accidentally forget about NOT leaving that Ask toolbar install option selected and have to clean up afterwards, etc.

Exactly. The good thing about the whole time system we have right now is that you can tell exactly what is going on at someone's place when he/she mentions a local time. If it's 3am local time at someone's location, you know he probably won't be at work and that it would be pointless to call them. Yes, you would have to look up the time zone difference to actually know that it is 3am there right now. But if we had the same time everywhere and it's 10am right now, you would STILL have to look up some information to know what the effective difference to that location is, because even though it might be 10am everywhere right now, that person won't be at work if it is still in the middle of the night. So there would STILL be "time zones", they just would not be called that anymore. So you'd have 10am universal time, but they might be at -7 "working time" difference. What would be the whole point of the universal time then?

You just cannot have an effective universal time as long as it is not night/day at the same time everywhere, and I do not think we are close to fixing that problem anytime soon, because it might have to involve transforming our planet into a flat earth.

It's as simple as that - you do not understand WHY people visit Slashdot.

Nobody goes here to read amazing fresh news. It's safe to say what whatever "news" you put up have already been posted elsewhere at least half a day before. Your users come here for the discussions, to read what other Slashdot users think about the stories and to reply to those comments. That's why the comments are absolutely, 100%, the most important thing on the Slashdot website, and your beta site makes them much more annoying to read and reply to. Seriously, how can you NOT see that this will cause an exodus if it will go live? This is not a minor inconvenience people will get used to after a few days, it is a fundamental flaw, like replacing the juicy steak on someone's plate with a huge steaming turd.

Your website redesign is going in a completely wrong direction. Everybody is telling you that, you claim to hear it, but you ignore it. This won't end well.

Oh, and get rid of all that whitespace. I am using a 27" screen, not a portrait-oriented iPad, thank you very much.

Yup, especially if the pictures have nothing to do with the actual story, but instead are stock photography etc. If a story is about some new networking equipment, I do not need a large picture of a bunch of network cables above the story.

No. It's also standard Proliant servers. Read the mails quoted in other posts here. The summary just links to a mail received by somebody owning HP9000 stuff, that's why it only mentions HP9000 products.

No, it's just that the link went to the email received by a customer who is using HP9000 stuff. The change DOES also apply to the usual stuff like HP Proliant DL380 etc. For example, the mail I received today (as a Proliant user) was:

"Update: HP ProLiant Servers: Access to Firmware Updates & Service Pack for ProLiant

You are receiving this communication because you have been identified as a customer using HP ProLiant Servers and HP Services.

HP has made significant investments in its intellectual capital to provide the best value and experience for our customers. We continue to offer a differentiated customer experience with our comprehensive support portfolio. HP, as an industry leader, is well positioned to provide reliable support services across the globe with proprietary tools, HP trained engineers, and genuine certified HP parts. Only HP customers and authorized channel partners may download and use support materials.

In line with this commitment, starting in February 2014, Hewlett-Packard Company will change the way firmware updates and Service Pack for ProLiant (SPP) on HP ProLiant server products are accessed. Select server firmware and SPP on these products will only be accessed through the HP Support Center http://customer.hp.com/r?2.1.3... to customers with an active support agreement, HP CarePack, or warranty linked to their HP Support Center User ID and for the specific products being updated. We encourage you to review your current support coverage to ensure you have the appropriate coverage to maintain uninterrupted access to firmware updates and SPP for these products. "

Problem with water cooling is that, while it is certainly good at cooling the CPU and the graphics card, you lose one of the advantages of having fans on the cpu cooler: air flow over the OTHER components on the mainboard, like the voltage regulators, RAM etc.

If you do not own a car, you simply shop more often. After all, it does not take as much time if the grocery store is only a couple hundred meters away. In other words, you go there, buy one or two large bags of stuff and walk home. And then two or three days later when you ate everything, you walk there again. This works well when you're single or maybe a family with one kid, you just have to plan accordingly "today and tomorrow I want to cook this-and-that, so I need two litres of milk, salad, two steaks, ...". Of course sometimes you still need to do that one large shopping spree to buy bulk stuff like toilet paper, mineral water/beer/..., heavier stuff like packs of flour/sugar/... and for that you usually also do not go to the small shop around the corner, but instead the larger supermarket somewhere else which has a parking lot etc. For example my mom, who lives alone and has no car of her own, either asks me to help her once every two weeks or so or just goes shopping together with a neighbour (who has a car). So yes, it of course is still more convenient to have a car, but you definitely can live without one if you just KNOW someone who has one and who can help you out once in a while when you need to transport the heavy stuff.

The major point against using space suits for arctic exploration imo might be that space suits actually are COOLING suits. They are designed to prevent the astronauts from overheating, because evaporative cooling (sweating) does not work in space. Also, the suits are pressurized and quite hard to move in, plus they are very heavy.

Until you have a support case (which might not even be caused by the "unsupported" cards) while working on a big project, and the software support tells you "well, THOSE cards are not on our certified list, so first replace those, then you can come back to us with your problem". Had it happen a couple times with some departments here which used "unsupported" hardware (not graphics cards) to save money - if you give support an easy way out by letting them point at something which "clearly" could cause problems, they will take it. And the next time your boss will gladly pay the extra money just to avoid the headache.

It's not really a useful comparison if you do not go for, as far as possible, the exact same specs on the PC side. What is the point in saying "well, our PC does not have the same components and it's slower, but IT IS CHEAPER!". They wanted to find out if Apple is putting the usual "luxury tax" on the hardware and it seems that this time, they did not do that - if you choose the same or very similar PC components (e.g. THE SAME graphics cards and not "ah well, just as fast in games and who cares about certified drivers and more RAM for professional software anyway" gamer cards), the PC will be more expensive.

All the reviews so far mention that the new Mac Pro is about as loud as a Mac Mini, i.e. unless you are in a completely silent room, you will not hear it.

Well, it depends on how actual games behave. If they are programmed similarly and do not make use of the additional cores (which I guess might very well be the case, since devs usually do not spend much time on optimizing apps for hardware which is not widely in use yet), then yes - you COULD have just bought the cheapo phone and gotten the same performance in those games. Or the other phone which costs a bit more than the cheapo phone (but still less than the S4), which also has a dual-core CPU but a slightly faster GPU, which gives it a higher score in 3DMark than the S4.

Like I said, it depends. It would not surprise me at all if in actual daily use multi-core monster phones make no sense at all (yet), except for bragging rights.