Lets see what do I remember about EQ (got to level 20):
1. The game was full screen. Any attempt to switch to another app would close EQ
2. Having to type /con to determine approximately what level an NPC was relative to your own.
3. Solo play outside of a couple of classes was impossible due to anything granting XP being able to kill you
4. Having to sit down to slowly regain mana, Also move, sit, wait for mana regen tick, move, repeat.
5. Unlike WoW multiple characters couldn't occupy the same place.
6. Massive XP penalization for dying. Clerics could resurrect you to restore some XP, but their 100% XP restore had a 1 day cool down.
7. Players who volunteered to be in game customer support (they got free subscription).
8. A high level quest which involved sitting under water for 3 hours +/- 15 minutes for an NPC to show up.
9. Having to compete with other players on an NPC that spawns once per week for its loot/quest requirement.
10. No private party only dungeons.
11. Daylight savings screwed up the servers
12. If you died you had to get your gear back from your body.
13. I played after they removed the part where you had to stare at a book in the UI to recover mana
14. If you got blind, the UI, including chat with other players was black. Although you could hit just fine.
15. A hack called "Show EQ" pissed off devs and was pretty much undetectable, as you ran it on a proxy server running Linux.
16 If you carry too much you can go to 0 movement speed. If you got a buff to walk, then even the smallest fall was fatal.
17, An invisible NPC called "Pain and suffering" which would attack any player lower than 0 hp, but not yet dead (very unlikey at high levels).

So, No thanks to that. I'm not touching EQ again.

To be clear WoW classic will be a compromise of the old game with probably some more recent features that don't impact the gameplay like cross game chat, security exploits removed etc... However you get into some gray area like multi-loot, or what ui addons they support it gets complex. Add into this how fast new content is released within the original game (there are over 12 content patches), and needing to run it on newer servers, and you can understand why it will take a while to get it out the door.

I've seen non-Blizzard classic servers pull all kinds of shady tricks like being able to donate for grossly overpowered items (e.g. similar to best items in the game, but with an extra 0 on the end of each stat)

Also, don't play WoW classic if you didn't play it back in the day. There is no class balance, and death was penalized by having to spend a good 5 minutes or more walking back as a ghost to your body (in harder content areas). This was however a drastic improvement over Ever Quest which had a massive XP loss penality (like 4 or more hours of grinding XP gone).

You can put Linux on Azure, either choose from one of the prebuilt OS images or bring your own. Also, it is considerably cheaper to do so, as you aren't paying for Windows by the hour if you do. If you bring your own, make sure you use Microsoft's open source cloud drivers on your OS, as your performance will suck without them.

If you want to use Windows on the cloud, you can use AWS, Google, IBM, etc... the price difference between Windows and Linux on those clouds is roughly the same.

The primary reason Microsoft is the one that signs boot images is that no one else wanted to take up that task.

N.B. This friendly message brought to you by an Azure performance engineer

I signed up for the trial subscription of HBO to watch game of thrones. HBO uses the google play subscription model, and as a result when I went to unsubscribe after my watching was done, all I needed to do was hit one button (and a confirmation) and I was unsubscribed.

I've used other subscription models in the past, and many of the "First party" subscription are a massive pain to cancel (as in call their support line to cancel). With Microsoft managing the model, I find it much more likely they will make unsubscribing not too difficult, not to mention I trust Microsoft with my credit card info much more than 5 smaller businesses that could be located anywhere in the world.

If they did use BitPay, then they might have stopped due to higher fees that BitPay would charge due to instability.

Aside from the hyperbole of asking for jail time on something that could be attributed to simple negligence, why does having a stricter punishment make you more likely to trust someone? Microsoft faces a 40 million dollar fine from EU if it is found out that someone's "right to be forgotten" wasn't done property and fully cleaned up,

They do, but javascript can move a fully transparent link that fills the page which sends you to another page. This is why popups only appear when you click on the page, and you can tell it is there as the cursor doesn't change as you hover real links on the page.

Every post I see so far is the generic: see Windows in the title, bash Windows in comments. I mean I'm not sure anyone even read the summary, as all the comments could be made about any article about Windows. And this article doesn't have a lot to do about Windows, its mostly about secure hardware.

Yes, yes I know most of you hate Windows, if not Microsoft as a whole, but is it necessary to remind people of this every article?

Won't help much. Any hacker will just use a proxy, and their ain't no way you are going to block NK, all proxies that allow Russia to use them, all proxies that allow other proxies to use them, and anyone's machine they can hack into.

If someone isn't using a proxy from NK, let them. Don't help enforce the firewalls they already have in place. Any opportunity people from NK (even if it is just the elite) have to learn about the world around them, the more likely they will oppose the NK's administration.

You also need to consider diversity. If your in a fire, it is generally not one lone hero who will come to the rescue, but rather a team. And a diverse team can notice things that a non-diverse team cannot.

Back in 2003 (or sometime before WoW) I was part of a hacking community that wrote RuneScape bots. I remember the day someone found an item dupe hack. This was actually the opposite, if you attempted to trade 0 of an item that wasn't stackable and you didn't actually have, your recipient would receive the item. Combine this with a spell that turned items into currency and you have a serious problem.

Someone decided to be a complete idiot/ass and did their best to ruin the economy. The devs put a bounty of a lifetime premium subscription on anyone who could tell them of how the hack worked. The person who tried to ruin the economy was the first and only instance I know of that got an IP ban.

First, there is not a requirement that people minimize risk while driving on the road, rather they drive with an acceptable level of low risk. If a super safe driver wants to drive in a way that is just as safe as average drivers, then that is their choice.

Second, computers will always have better reaction time than a human. It now becomes a question if someone's judgement can compensate for lack of reaction time. However, my current thought is that most human drivers have worse judgement than the driverless software currently in use (for testing) on the public road.

The question is not whether driverless cars will kill people, but if they do so less frequently than human driven cars.

That's a bad analogy. Try this one:

A person's house caught on fire, and they filed for an insurance claim. An investigation found the person had checked out a book titled "Plausible Deniability - How to get money from insurance". An example in the book matched the house fire. The fact the book was checked out is used as evidence that the house fire was not an accident.

I don't think it is likely. How much crossover is there between Activision and Blizzard? None that I know of. In any case I don't think Blizzard wants King's reputation.