kirylyn wrote a tweet, but I want to use more than 150 characters to respond. So, here:

A server is a complete, separate copy of the entire WoW world. You can only communicate and interact with people who are playing on the same server you are. You want to have your characters on the server where your friends are playing (if you have friends who play). If that's not a consideration, there are four kinds of servers: PvE, PvP, RP and RP-PvP. "PvE" stands for "Player versus Environment", and is the opposite of "PvP, which stands for "Player versus Player". On a PvE server you have to actively chose to fight other players. On a PvP server the possibility is (almost) always there. "RP" stands for "Role-Playing", and it's a PvE server where you're supposed to actually roleplay your character. People don't do that anywhere near as much as they ought to, which is a pity. Still, what roleplaying there is in WoW goes on on the RP servers. "RP-PvP" is a PvP server where you're supposed to roleplay.

You can have up to ten characters per server. On PvE and RP servers you can have characters from both factions, on PvP servers all your characters must be of the same faction.

Alliance and Horde are known as factions. They are enemies. In PvP, you fight players of the opposing faction (with some exceptions). You can't talk to the opposing faction, you use different cities, you can't trade, nothing. Again, you want to be the same faction as your friends. If that's not a consideration, you want Horde :-)

Alliance consists of humans, dwarves, gnomes, night elves and draenei (weirdo space goats that were added in the Burning Crusade expansion). Apart from the draenei, they match their traditional fantasy clichés quite well. Draenei are, as far as I know, actually original.

Horde consists of orcs, trolls, free undead (known as Forsaken), tauren (minotaurs with a culture strongly inspired by North American natives) and blood elves (relatives of the night elves, and also added in BC). These vary much more from the clichés than the Alliance races do, and some of them are actually somewhat interesting. My personal favourites are the tauren.

There is a common opinion (that matches my own impressions quite well) that the players on the Alliance side are on average younger and less mature than on the Horde side, presumably since Alliance has the races that are traditionally the heroes in fantasy fiction. To check for yourself, create a human and an orc on a PvE server and see what the chat is like in the starting areas (particularly the ones for level 10-20). In my experience, it's pretty bad on the Horde side (The Barrens) and mindbendingly horrible on the Alliance side (Goldshire)

Bah. My nice jacket is getting a bit tight around the waist.

Although I got it eleven years ago, so maybe it's not that surprising.

I was just going to have a quick look at what the Death Knights are like, and suddenly four hours were gone!

I thought I'd sign up for the Yuletide thing, but the signup page was just too enormous for me. It'd take hours to go through the list of given fandoms, particularly since you have to scroll through it a handful lines at a time in a tiny little box.

I'm assuming that everyone who cares has heard by now that David Tennant has announced that he'll be handing the Doctor over to someone else come 2010 (if you hadn't, you have now). So the question of course becomes, who next?

Poll #1287814 Doctor XI
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All

Who should play the next regeneration of Doctor Who?

The headset that Apple Store had such problems getting to me is an Etymotic hf2. Which I've now used for a couple of grocery shopping expeditions, so I thought I'd post an initial comparison between them and the Sennheiser CX-300 earbuds I used before.

On the minus side, the Etymotic headset is much more sensitive to proper insertion into the ear, and not quite as comfortable to wear.

On the other hand, once they are properly seated in the ear, they are clearly better. Not quite as much bass, but sound clarity and separation is noticeably better. The Etymotics are quite a lot less sensitive to noise from physical handling of the cord (which is good, since that was the main problem I had with the Sennheisers), and the external sound isolation is amazing. If I have any sound being generated by the headset I can't hear external sounds. At all. If I'm not playing anything, I can hear some exernal sounds, but not much. It wouldn't be possible to hold a conversation while wearing the headset.

And of course, the headset is a headset. The microphone part seems to be pretty good, but I haven't tried it under any noisy circumstances yet.

First Apple Store delivered my headset to the wrong address, and it took several day to actually get it. When I got it, it was broken. And now they have, in spite of what they explicitly said over the phone, delivered the replacement to the wrong address too.

This is the last time ever I buy something from Apple Store. Fucking incompetents.

Since Blizzard has announced that at least for the US servers, this week's maintenance downtime is going to be an extra-extended 12-hour affair, it's pretty much certain that the preparatory patch for Wrath of the Lich King is about to go live. The game itself has  been downloading stuff for the past few days, which also hints strongly that a hefty patch is coming soon.

To be more precise, it's been downloading roughly 1.5GB of patch data.

To almost 11 million players, worldwide.

That's over 16 petabytes of data. That's a lot of data. 16000000 gigabytes. If you're on an 8 Mbit/s ADSL line, it'd take you roughly 700 years to download it all. If you upgraded to gigabit Ethernet, it'd still take five and half years. If you burned it to disc, you'd need about 58 tons of blank DVD-Rs.

And since they're using the BitTorrent protocol to do the distribution, they quite handily do it in less than a day.

Today my contract with .SE (that is, the organisation that runs the Swedish top-level DNS domain) got extended to the end of the year. So I'll be doing Open Source Perl coding for a couple of months more. This is pretty nifty.