It will be released in two different versions, the Alliance version has all the horde dialogue subtitled and the Horde version has all the alliance dialogue subtitled. This way they can make sure to keep the fans happy regardless of their faction.

A company refusing to do business with a person who they think stole a product from one of their customers is, in fact, being incredibly loyal to their customer.

The guy they are treating like crap is not a customer because with no receipt and no warrenty he is quite likely a thief. If the sale was legitimate why would he have any trouble getting the warrenty number from the seller?

Alienware have no obligation to deal with this guy. They do not sell PC parts individually and they don't have to. If the sale was legitimate then the guy who bought the PC should have absolutely no trouble getting the warrenty number from the seller.

The previous rant about the hassles of DRM just to install a dual boot also suggests that he does not have the CDs to reinstall his operating system etc if needed furthering the idea that the laptop he bought was, in fact, stolen.

You are missing the point. Poor people paying proportionally more tax is morally wrong. It doesn't matter if the rich person can choose to pay more, what matters is that only the rich person gets that choice.

What puzzles me though is that the article tries to argue that on one hand the cloud concept is no different from client-server as it stands but on the other that the problem is the lack of interoperability.

A random Microsoft server can no more interoperate with a random Oracle or Apple server than a cloud service can so exactly how is it worse?

I also think the term cloud computing is just a bit jumbled. I think of it as the Amazon model, you basically design your server as a VM and then multiple copies of that get instanced as needed. The strange thing is that model is far more vendor neutral than anything currently on the market. In theory there is no reason why any company with the hardware resources can't fire up 1000 copies of that VM if you choose to change vendor. In effect cloud computing by that definition (which I believe is the most common) is no different than leasing servers from a hosting service at present, it just scales a lot easier if you need to.

The economic comparison is equally false. If for example Amazon were to oversell their hardware by 10% then all that happens is the sites they host end up running a bit slowly and people move off the service. The whole company doesn't end up in negative equity and going broke because of that. That metaphor just seems so wrong in this situation that it pretty much makes no sense.

If we were seeing a situation where web hosting and data center companies were merging wholesale while pursuing shaky business models then you could argue that there was a comparison but we are not. Cloud computing is a technical development, and until we see huge companies hosting the entire internet there is no real risk.

They keep 3 days of logs and a 30 day log of malicious activity. That the article describes their policy while claiming they don't have one pretty much proves the "storm in a teacup" point.

The policy they are using is both practical and reasonable from a privacy standpoint. It may not be an "official" policy but it is a policy and it is a good one. It is just a case of arguing over definitions.

Seriously, they keep the records for 3 days for most traffic and 30 days for anomolous traffic which might indicate a threat to the network. Most networks I have seen keep data for far longer just because nobody ever bothers to clean out the logs.

The fact that they have a policy for cleaning the logs puts them streets ahead of the most network admins and yet they are being portrayed as the bad guys here.

Storm in a teacup if I have ever seen one.

These are multimillion dollar operations. You can't make that kind of decision, you're just a grunt.

No offense.

I think they did the right thing, they started with a lot of surplus capacity and now are scaling back to what they are actually using. Unless (by some miracle) they could guess exactly what capacity would be needed then they have two options, provide too much or provide too little. From a customer service standpoint it is certainly much better to err on the side of providing too much.

I feel a bit bad for Mythic in that this will probably be spun as some sort of death knell for the game when in fact it is simply the logical outcome of the company doing the right thing at launch.

So let me get this straight.

1. You tax the people.
2. You give the tax to the record companies.
3. The record companies use this tax to sue the very people who were taxed.

Isn't that just a roundabout way of forcing the defendant to pay all the legal bills regardless of the outcome?

After years of dicking around and holding back the broadband rollout in Ireland so they could squeeze every extra penny out of people stuck with dial up they immediately roll over for the content companies and decide to screw over their customers again.

I am very glad I switched away from eircom years ago. The main problem though is that they control all the actual physical lines and others have to lease bandwidth so I can see them quite happily using this shit as a stick to beat their competitors.

One of the problems is that having low energy requirements could potentially limit the chance for new technologies to develop. If for example plasma TVs cannot meet the new requirement they may well be scrapped, but potentially if they can remain on the market it is possible that in 5 years time that technology will have developed to the point that plasma TVs use much less energy than the LCD TVs.

A system which prevents any technology from co-existing also prevents that technology from developing which is a bad thing.