Computer Forum Chat Thread

[Alindra]

They did no less. I can only hope they can keep this up, but it's just incredibly well-done! They LEARNED from their mistakes in the last three expansions and put out something that I'm having more fun with than I think I ever had in TBC or WotLK. >_> (I started in TBC, didn't start in Vanilla, however earlier this year and summer I played a Vanilla server, completely Blizz-like, too.)

I concur. The real question will be whether it stands the test of time - both in the content available but how future patches add on it. I remember people praising WoD and Garrisons early on - only for them be be pretty universally reviled. (I was one of the people who liked them early on.) Here are a few elements that I really like from Legion so far:

* Scaling Zones - This was a much bigger deal than I thought it would be. When leveling, there was always a tension between finishing a zone and moving on to the next. Once you out leveled it, players are incentivized to move on (better XP, gear rewards, etc) over staying and finishing the zone. Additionally, scaling allows us to play the zones in any order we choose. Even so, they managed to craft the story in such a way that zone order didn't matter, either.

* Class Quests - I really missed the class specific quests, and now we have an entire campaign centered around it. It feels so much better to be (in my case) a Paladin doing Paladin things to progress the story than be a generic adventurer / champion / hero where it doesn't matter if I wear plate or cloth, am a holy warrior or a scoundrel. Also, I can't speak for other specs, but as a Ret well... Ashbringer.

* World Quests - I've only had them unlocked for a couple days, but I like them (so far). They're so much better than daily quests (one reason I didn't renew at the start of MoP is because of all the dailies.)

I do have some concerns (gaining crafting recipes feels very opaque and unclear, but more entertaining when you do them, I worry a bit about the world quest becoming a grind, Class Halls are better than Garrisons - but could be problematic, and Artifact Power / Relics makes it harder to decide what to do with offspecs & alts), but so far, I'm impressed.

My fond memories of classic have almost nothing to do with the content: it universally sucked, but sitting on Ventrillo with the other guys in the warlords group grinding out ranks and making sure everyone adhered to the honour caps was fun. Likewise, AQ40 was pretty dull, but you had (litterally) hours each night running back to twins to just shoot the shit with co-workers and friends between attempts.

Yeah, I have a lot of fond memories of Vanilla, even though the state of WoW (by modern standards) wasn't that great. The social aspect and the sense of wonder were very strong. The world being large and mysterious is pretty much impossible to recapture now. Even without sites like Wowhead data mining everything, we've been around the block often enough to see through the illusion. Sadly, once that happens, you can never see the world quite the same way again.

Naw, but it fun. Playing a pure dps class who can't respec tank or healer for the first time since tbc and first time since they introduced the lfd tool, not so much. 55minute queues on a quick day.

Yeah, the DPS queues are pretty brutal. Though, the handful of times I've had a zone ending quest requiring a dungeon specific queuing has given me a near instant pop. It only works once (quest complete), but still.

[BicycleMafioso]

Shame about the whole 'region locked' realms. I have a bunch of friends from classic who are showing up on chat but have since moved to Germany, Australia, Saudi Arabia, China, etc. We can't play together.

For sure. I will have to simply find a guild. Or reroll one of my two lv100 Paladins (I 'only' had 7 100s, and only two before invasions! But both were old toons)

Yeah, I have a lot of fond memories of Vanilla, even though the state of WoW (by modern standards) wasn't that great. The social aspect and the sense of wonder were very strong. The world being large and mysterious is pretty much impossible to recapture now. Even without sites like Wowhead data mining everything, we've been around the block often enough to see through the illusion. Sadly, once that happens, you can never see the world quite the same way again.



Yeah, the DPS queues are pretty brutal. Though, the handful of times I've had a zone ending quest requiring a dungeon specific queuing has given me a near instant pop. It only works once (quest complete), but still.

With the compromises WoW has done, Vanilla would be an impossible game to have as the only option. I think everyone realises this. (I find it more difficult to see why some would oppose a Vanilla game to co-exist)
I loved most aspects of it, and I too have grown used to many conveniences. But I maintain that the game would have been healthier if not as many would have been made. I would also have preferred Vanilla over Wotlk, Cata, MoP and WoD (but the first two were still playable). Legion? Time will tell.
Thottbot and wow.allakhazam were a thing back then, though. Which is apt, since they're like a vanilla version of wowhead (which came around in 1.11 or 1.12?). :P

I was even lucky enough to, through the random dungeon tool, find the correct instance of Eye of Azshara at one point. I didn't get credit for the whole quest though, because they had already killed Warlord Pajtrash(?).
I might have to try queueing specific instead then.

I'm still only lv108, because the friend I was doing things with grew sick of Priest (especially shadow, he didn't mind healing) and rerolled to his Horde char. And I don't have a Horde Rogue :c
This has caused me to be less enthused about things, and the whole real life raid dungeon going on as well.

[Artorius]

So... Cinnamon is basically Windows 10 now?
Interesting to see that some Linux desktop environment developers simply accepted that making it the same thing as Windows is the easiest way to make it better to use lol.

[Artorius]

You run Ubuntu on servers? Why not just go with Debian? CoreOS and Clear Linux are interesting though, but I think I'd go with Debian or CentOS if I had to choose a distro for a server nowadays. BSDs are nice too depending on the workload, they have an amazing network stack for example.

I think Void Linux, Slackware and CRUX are all Systemd free as well, but they're a pain in the ass to set up compared to, let's say, Ubuntu.

[Remilia]

Ouch... Microsoft, your Scorpio is a year late.
PS4 Pro (Neo) is launching Nov 10 this year @$400.

[DeltrusDisc]

Okay folks... got a little bit of an issue. Might be a big problem, not sure!

I barely woke up this morning at 6AM (so, my memory of this is certainly vague, but I know it happened...) to my phone making a short sound like I got a text message, even though I had it on silent. I look at my phone to find it's in Ultra Power Saving mode with one text written out but with no one it was to be sent to.

Said text said something along these lines: "Help, I am lost and I need you to help me find my location."

O.o

Do you guys think my phone may have been hacked or nah? Maybe it's just being screwy? It's a Samsung Galaxy S6. It's possible I was dreaming and this wasn't real, but I am 90% certain it was real.

Only apps I've recently installed are the WoW Armory app and the Legion Companion App (SO USEFUL, GET IT GET IT GET IT.).

Thanks for any help folks! If you can advise any good virus scanners for smart phones, I'd love to get one.

[Drunkenvalley]

My guess is either you were dreaming or you were doing things in your sleep.

[Artorius]

What's the business case for picking one distribution over another? For practical purposes they're all basically the same unless you're doing something "interesting".

Just asked because you mentioned Debian when you made that Windows 10 video, and people generally regard Debian as more stable (Ubuntu 14.04 is still Ubuntu's most stable release though).

I realize that's largely the "popular = better" argument, but given that I've only got a few hours a week to do "sysadmin" stuff and my real job is writing software, that's a pretty good reason.

Yeah, I can see it being a very appealing reason. I'm not exactly a software guy either, my focus is and most likely will always be hardware, when it comes to Linux for personal usage (I have absolutely no experience with Linux servers) I like Arch due to the extensive wiki and the easiness to find a solution to a problem and fix it yourself.

That kind of workflow makes it really hard to care too much about a particular distribution so long as it's reasonably popular and well supported, but if you've got a good reason for one over the other then I'm willing to listen.

Not really, it doesn't really matter. The main difference between those distributions is the set of packages that they come with by default, which is a minimal set of packages for any "server" version of a distro. If I had to install one of them and could choose between any, I don't think I'd choose Ubuntu but in your case they were already there so whatever.

The problem is that whatever "happiness" slackware might bring me is never going to make up the time that gets wasted on sub-par support from software I need to run (like openstack or calico). It'll work, but it's no where near as well documented and when you're treading in software that's super-new and/or bespoke solutions for 'hard' problems; I want every possible assistant to help keep it going smoothly.

Those more "do it yourself" distros are pure fun when you have the free time to play with them, but I would find it pretty odd to lose time setting them up in a production environment.

In my home I'm more opinionated, but the kinds of issues I'm worrying about at work drown out anything but practical arguments.

This, I have some VMs that I literally use just to play around with those more obscure distros.

tldr I inherited a few hundred Ubuntu machines and have no good reason to change them, plus all popular linuxes are basically identical once you've done your due-dilligence abstracting away the details of maintenance, monitoring, and provisioning.

Yeah.

Okay folks... got a little bit of an issue. Might be a big problem, not sure!

I barely woke up this morning at 6AM (so, my memory of this is certainly vague, but I know it happened...) to my phone making a short sound like I got a text message, even though I had it on silent. I look at my phone to find it's in Ultra Power Saving mode with one text written out but with no one it was to be sent to.

Said text said something along these lines: "Help, I am lost and I need you to help me find my location."

O.o

Do you guys think my phone may have been hacked or nah? Maybe it's just being screwy? It's a Samsung Galaxy S6. It's possible I was dreaming and this wasn't real, but I am 90% certain it was real.

Only apps I've recently installed are the WoW Armory app and the Legion Companion App (SO USEFUL, GET IT GET IT GET IT.).

Thanks for any help folks! If you can advise any good virus scanners for smart phones, I'd love to get one.

[Remilia]

Everytime I see HDR and stuff. I just think of how Crystal LED would be a perfect fit for it, but nooooooooo, stupid overhyped OLED.
[insert oled bashing here].

[DeltrusDisc]

Exactly.

/10char SLOW DOWN LIFE IS TO BE SAVORED

[Alindra]

With the compromises WoW has done, Vanilla would be an impossible game to have as the only option. I think everyone realises this. (I find it more difficult to see why some would oppose a Vanilla game to co-exist)
I loved most aspects of it, and I too have grown used to many conveniences. But I maintain that the game would have been healthier if not as many would have been made. I would also have preferred Vanilla over Wotlk, Cata, MoP and WoD (but the first two were still playable). Legion? Time will tell.
Thottbot and wow.allakhazam were a thing back then, though. Which is apt, since they're like a vanilla version of wowhead (which came around in 1.11 or 1.12?). :P

With respect to the small text, I find it frustrating when people are so closed minded that anything that doesn't fit within their world view is automatically wrong. I'm fine with people disagreeing, so long as they at they at least keep their mind open to the alternatives.

I think you're right, the conveniences are really nice, but because there have been so many of them, the (dare I say) immersion of the world has been greatly diminished, even if we / I praised the conveniences at the time. While Thottbot and Allakhazam provided information, you have to admit that it was far less accurate & thorough than wowhead is now. Data mined information for future patches? Get out of town!

Okay folks... got a little bit of an issue. Might be a big problem, not sure!

I barely woke up this morning at 6AM (so, my memory of this is certainly vague, but I know it happened...) to my phone making a short sound like I got a text message, even though I had it on silent. I look at my phone to find it's in Ultra Power Saving mode with one text written out but with no one it was to be sent to.

Said text said something along these lines: "Help, I am lost and I need you to help me find my location."

O.o

Do you guys think my phone may have been hacked or nah? Maybe it's just being screwy? It's a Samsung Galaxy S6. It's possible I was dreaming and this wasn't real, but I am 90% certain it was real.

Only apps I've recently installed are the WoW Armory app and the Legion Companion App (SO USEFUL, GET IT GET IT GET IT.).

Thanks for any help folks! If you can advise any good virus scanners for smart phones, I'd love to get one.

This sounds like something from The Game.

[Artorius]

Apple doing big.LITTLE is ridiculously funny, I wonder what some of those Apple fanboys will say about it now.

But fuck me. Their SoC design team is amazing as hell. The A10 has higher IPC than Skylake and its performance is so ridiculously high that it's pretty hard to believe this was designed to be used only inside smartphones.

Apple will be able to push 3GHz in the next node change easily, they could even ditch Intel entirely and go full ARM if they wanted to. Hell, they could even be the first to the market with a RISC-V/ARMv8 CPU.

I'm loving this. Enough with the x86 monopoly, let things be more interesting!

[Remilia]

If those benchmarks are true it'd be nuts, but cross platform benchmark aren't really that good in measuring real world performance especially with two different software environment. Both Intel and AMD though are tied with the fact they have to have certain instruction sets for their x86 CPUs thus wasting die space and power, that said if Apple can get a 4c/4t ARM cpu thats very competent in the desktop space that'd be amazing, especially for laptops. However, Apple being Apple isn't really going to matter for non Apple consumer.

That said, like GPU with hardware schedulers and lack of for performance, I really wonder how fast an ARM SoC is when you start adding everything a modern x86 also supports. That's also what makes x86 really good, and really bad, and same position with ARM, which is why ARM for servers aren't really going to take off anytime soon.

[Alindra]

Today Lady Luck decided it was time for me to roll snake eyes. Accidentally dropped my phone in one of the few places without carpeting (literally inches from it) and the screen cracked. Crap. There goes my flawless 7 year smartphone (without a cover!). Of course, it could have been worse - the majority of the cracks are in the upper left inside the bezel with only a few long ones extending to the other end.

Just out of curiosity, have any of you suffered a cracked screen before?

[DeltrusDisc]

I went for 11 years with cell phones without ever cracking a screen until it finally happened in 2014.

- - - Updated - - -

I did it.

After looking over my GM's laptop a couple weeks ago or so, I determined the best course of action, besides buying a new laptop/building a computer, would be going fresh Windows on an SSD for it. So, we're getting him a Crucial MX300 275GB... only $70 just was too damn good of a deal!

I decided I'd also finally splurge, while I was certainly looking at a Crucial MX300 of a larger size myself, I finally decided to go NVMe!

Samsung 950 PRO m.2 PCI-E 3.0 x4 NVMe 256GB coming! >

1 NVMe drive... 2 SSDs... 3 HDDs... Hot diggity.

I don't know if I want to reinstall Windows on it, as Windows runs plenty fast, but WoW is definitely going on it. I've actually been having some issues with choppiness in WoW, especially when opening up maps, specifically ever since Legion launched. Will probably just go ahead and do a fresh WoW install onto this drive.

[Alindra]

I went for 11 years with cell phones without ever cracking a screen until it finally happened in 2014.

Damn.

I have to ask - because this has been bugging me all day - that includes dumb phones, right? Because 11 years before 2014 is 2003, and the first iPhone didn't hit till 2007.

I did it.

After looking over my GM's laptop a couple weeks ago or so, I determined the best course of action, besides buying a new laptop/building a computer, would be going fresh Windows on an SSD for it. So, we're getting him a Crucial MX300 275GB... only $70 just was too damn good of a deal!

I decided I'd also finally splurge, while I was certainly looking at a Crucial MX300 of a larger size myself, I finally decided to go NVMe!

Samsung 950 PRO m.2 PCI-E 3.0 x4 NVMe 256GB coming! >

1 NVMe drive... 2 SSDs... 3 HDDs... Hot diggity.

I don't know if I want to reinstall Windows on it, as Windows runs plenty fast, but WoW is definitely going on it. I've actually been having some issues with choppiness in WoW, especially when opening up maps, specifically ever since Legion launched. Will probably just go ahead and do a fresh WoW install onto this drive.

If you're already running an SSD, what made you single it out for an upgrade over a CPU, GPU, RAM, etc? Running low on space?

That said, I hope you like it! It's always a good feeling getting new hardware for your rig - except, of course, when it's because something broke. Those are much less fun....

[Remilia]

Have yet to crack a screen, hope it stays that way.

Also my god some people for computer stuff act like sports team fans.

- - - Updated - - -

Also @Artorius I think Andrei abandoned the deep dive, somewhere on the AT forum I think is where I read it.
I really don't know why, but some reason I think he wants his confirmation bias to apply but it didn't work out. He's always been an advocate for multi low powered core which is fine, but I still find that the semi-conductor companies really should be going for a good mid ground of single/multi-core performance since not everything can be multi core and not everything is single core. Up until Apple's A10, I think Qualcomm's SD820 did a good job at that. Though one thing that's really good for Apple is that they don't need to deal with software variances like Android devices so it has never been that huge of an issue performance wise.

[Artorius]

Also @Artorius I think Andrei abandoned the deep dive, somewhere on the AT forum I think is where I read it.
I really don't know why, but some reason I think he wants his confirmation bias to apply but it didn't work out. He's always been an advocate for multi low powered core which is fine, but I still find that the semi-conductor companies really should be going for a good mid ground of single/multi-core performance since not everything can be multi core and not everything is single core. Up until Apple's A10, I think Qualcomm's SD820 did a good job at that. Though one thing that's really good for Apple is that they don't need to deal with software variances like Android devices so it has never been that huge of an issue performance wise.

He did some comments about SD820's GB4 scores too:



From a technical PoV iOS has a much better and more straightforward implementation than Android, all the JVM crap smells like poor performance.

[Remilia]

Isn't that the very definition of confirmation bias. I CAN'T take him as objective honestly due to all his comment and pretty much written him off already for many things due to pushing an agenda, just display the information without the snide comments.

And why I mention software is cause looking at LG G5(? I think) and S7's both 820 SoCs, the performance varies widely (both bad / good).

Didn't know he had time off due personal.

[DeltrusDisc]

Damn.

I have to ask - because this has been bugging me all day - that includes dumb phones, right? Because 11 years before 2014 is 2003, and the first iPhone didn't hit till 2007.



If you're already running an SSD, what made you single it out for an upgrade over a CPU, GPU, RAM, etc? Running low on space?

That said, I hope you like it! It's always a good feeling getting new hardware for your rig - except, of course, when it's because something broke. Those are much less fun....

I have an i7-5820K and a GTX 970. :P

I am running out of SSD space after all. I have about ~750GB worth and somehow most of it has disappeared. :P

And yes, dumb phones too. :P Got my first phone in late 2004 actually, I think. So 10 years. Still, long time though.

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Andrei can't leave Anandtech. HE IS ANANDTECH.