The word *computer* can be defined in many ways and can also take many different meanings; a somewhat common definition may be this: computer is a machine that automatically performs mathematical computations. We can also see it as a machine for processing [information](information.md), manipulating symbols or, very generally, as any tool that helps computation, in which case one's fingers or even a [mathematical](math.md) formula itself can be considered a computer. Here we are of course mostly concerned with electronic [digital](digital.md) computers.
Electronic digital computer turned out to be one of the greatest [technological](tech.md) inventions in [history](history.md) for many reasons -- firstly computers allowed creation of many other things which previously required too complex calculations, such as highly complex planes, space rockets and undreamed of factories (and, of course, yet more powerful computers which is why we've seen the exponential growth in computer power), secondly they offered extremely advanced work tools like [robots](robotics.md), virtual 3D visualizations, [artificial intelligence](ai.md) and physics simulators, and they also gave us high quality, cheap [multimedia](multimedia.md) and entertainment like [games](game.md) -- with computers anyone can shoot video, record music, carry around hundreds of movies in his pocket or fly a virtual plane. Most important however is probably the fact that computers enabled the [Internet](internet.md) -- by this they forever changed the world.
Electronic digital computer turned out to be one of the greatest [technological](tech.md) inventions in [history](history.md) for many reasons -- firstly computers allowed creation of many other things which previously required too complex calculations, such as highly complex planes, space rockets and undreamed of factories (and, of course, yet more powerful computers which is why we've seen the exponential growth in computer power), they also allow us to crunch extreme volumes of data and accelerate [science](science.md); secondly they offered extremely advanced work tools like [robots](robotics.md), virtual 3D visualizations, [artificial intelligence](ai.md) and physics simulators, and they also gave us high quality, cheap [multimedia](multimedia.md) and entertainment like [games](game.md) -- with computers anyone can shoot video, record music, carry around hundreds of movies in his pocket or fly a virtual plane. Most important however is probably the fact that computers enabled the [Internet](internet.md) -- by this they forever changed the world.
We can divide computers based on many attributes, e.g.:
@ -40,7 +40,9 @@ Computers are theoretically studied by [computer science](compsci.md). The kind
- **[hardware](hw.md)**: physical parts
- **[software](sw.md)**: [programs](program.md) executed by the hardware, made by [programmers](programmer.md)
**The power of computers is limited**, [Alan Turing](turing.md) mathematically proved that there exist problems that can never be completely solved by any [algorithm](algorithm.md), i.e. there are problems a computer (including our [brain](brain.md)) will never be able to solve (even if solution exists). This is related to the fact that the power of mathematics itself is limited in a similar way (see [Godel's theorems](incompleteness_theorems.md)). Turing also invented the theoretical model of a computer called the [Turing machine](turing_machine.md). Besides the mentioned theoretical limitation, many solvable problems may take too long to compute, at least with computers we currently know (see [computational complexity](computational_complexity.md) and [P vs NP](p_vs_np.md)).
**The power of computers is mathematically limited**, [Alan Turing](turing.md) mathematically proved that there exist problems that can never be completely solved by any [algorithm](algorithm.md), i.e. there are problems a computer (including our [brain](brain.md)) will never be able to solve (even if solution exists). This is related to the fact that the power of mathematics itself is limited in a similar way (see [Godel's theorems](incompleteness_theorems.md)). Turing also invented the theoretical model of a computer called the [Turing machine](turing_machine.md). Besides the mentioned theoretical limitation, many solvable problems may take too long to compute, at least with computers we currently know (see [computational complexity](computational_complexity.md) and [P vs NP](p_vs_np.md)).
And let's also mention some [interesting](interesting.md) **statistics** and facts about computers as of 2024. The fist computer in modern sense of the word is frequently considered to have been the Analytical Engine designed in 1837 by an Englishman Charles Babbage, a general purpose [mechanical computer](mechanical_computer.md) which he however never constructed. After this the computers such as the Z1 (1938) and Z3 (1941) of a German inventor Konrad Zuse are considered to be the truly first "modern" computers. Shortly after the year 2000 the number of US households that had a computer surpassed 50%. The fastest [supercomputer](supercomputer.md) of today is Frontier (Tennessee, [USA](usa.md)) which achieved computation speed of 1.102 exaFLOPS (that is over 10^18 [floating point](float.md) operations per second) with power 22.7 MW, using the [Linux](linux.md) kernel (like all top 500 supercomputers). Over time transistors have been getting much smaller -- there is the famous **[Moore's law](moores_law.md)** which states that number of transistors in a chip doubles about every two years. Currently we are able to manufacture [transistors](transistor.md) as small as a few nanometers and chips have billions of them. { There's some blurriness about exact size, apparently the new "X nanometers" labels are just [marketing](marketing.md) lies. ~drummyfish }
## Typical Computer
@ -103,6 +105,7 @@ Here is a list of notable computers.
@ -50,14 +50,16 @@ Here is the Internet over time in numbers:
| 2010 | 700000000 | 300000000|200000000| 30 |
| 2015 | 1000000000 |1000000000|300000000| 43 |
## Alternatives To The Internet
## Alternatives To/Alternative Ways Of Implementing The Internet
See also https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2023/08/thematic-books-series/.
Internet overtook the world thanks to having enabled great number of services to be provided very cheaply, at great scales and/or with extremely elevated attributes such as minimal [delay](delay.md) or great [bandwidth](bandwidth.md). This is crucial to many industries who couldn't do without such a network, however to individuals or even smaller organizations Internet is frequently just a tool of comfort -- they could exist without the Internet, just a little less comfortably. As Internet is becoming more and more monitored, controlled, overcrowded, limited and censored, we may start to consider the less comfortable alternatives as [good enough](good_enough.md) ways that actually gain us advantages in some other ways, e.g. more [freedom of expression](free_speech.md), more robust network (independence of the Internet infrastructure), technological independence etc. We have to keep in mind the services allowed by the Internet, such as long distance communication, information searching or playing games still mostly exist even without Internet, just usually separated or somehow suffering a few disadvantages; nevertheless these disadvantages may be bearable and/or made smaller, e.g. by adjusting ourselves to the limitations (if our communication becomes slower, we'll simply write longer messages to which we put more thought and information etc.) or combining these alternative services in a clever way. Additionally we can make use of the lessons learned from the Internet (e.g. cleverly designed [protocols](protocol.md), steganography, broadcasts, [digital](digital.md) data, ...) and apply them to the alternative networks. Let us now list a few alternatives to the Internet:
- **[books](book.md), [encyclopedias](encyclopedia.md), magazines, libraries, printed media, paper, film, ...**: Paper is an awesome medium, it's cheap and can hold quite a lot of information, both digital and analog, it can be used without a [computer](computer.md) but can still be combined with computers (e.g. [printers](printer.md), scanning and [OCR](ocr.md), [bar codes](bar_code.md), ...) and/or lower tech tools like [typewriters](typewriter.md) that may help manually copy books (see e.g. [samizdat](samizdat.md) that heavily utilized the ability of typewriters to produce several copies at once; in Antiquity books were copied by slaves with one reading the original out loud with others writing down many copies). Quality paper can be used for reliable [backups](backup.md) (source code, books, photos, even sound -- consider a high DPI print with each pixel recording one sample with its brightness). Posters can leave information for others to find. Books that have been written throughout history provide enormous amount of data and information, great part of which isn't even accessible through the Internet. Books are generally of much higher quality than websites, older ones are additionally free of modern propaganda and [censorship](censorship.md). Print encyclopedias can here and there be used instead of [Wikipedia](wikipedia.md), and they are extremely cheap (seek second hand book stores, no one wants them anymore). Books also provide entertainment, from traditional fiction, poetry etc. to entertaining reads such as the Guinness World Records book or even interactive [RPG](rpg.md) games (see [gamebooks](gamebook.md)). Making your own small library of quality books isn't expensive at all and can really greatly reduce your dependence on the Internet in many ways. **[Micrography](micrography.md)** (scaling down documents to fit many of them on a small film) can help maximize store quite large amounts of data on small media without computers.
- **[snail mail](snail_mail.md), avian carriers, arrows, messengers, [USB](usb.md) exchange, messages in bottle, ...**: Physically transforming messages is another historically tested option, travelers will always be around wanting to get from point A to point B and while at it they may also serve as information carriers -- information doesn't weight that much. There even exist volunteer organizations that distribute mail. People used to play correspondence [chess](chess.md) over snail mail, with enough dedication you could probably scale it up to some turn-based [MMORPG](mmorpg.md) game. Owing to the small weight, data can be transferred also by small animals such as pigeons (in some places with very bad Internet this is allegedly still the superior way even nowadays, in wars pigeons helped carry huge numbers of messages on microforms) or even just by "throwing", shooting an arrow with message on it, sending it down the river stream and so on. USB sticks are used by activists to send western propaganda to North Korea (e.g. small helium balloons carrying USB sticks with movies and books over the borders for the inhabitants to find). The disadvantage is high communication delay but even if it's orders of magnitude worse than what Internet offers us, bandwidth can still be excellent, sometimes even beating the Internet! Consider that a truck carrying 1000 1 terabyte harddrives arriving from start to its destination in a week achieves a bandwidth of about 1.6 gigabytes per second. That's pretty solid. Future inhabitants of Mars and other planets will inevitably have to deal with [interplanetary Internet](interplanetary_internet.md) that's doomed by laws of physics to have high delays -- if they can get around the issue, so can we. An interesting concept might be a "slow" network of people who simply meet up once a week and exchange their USB sticks (or SD cards or diskettes or whatever) on which they pass files and messages to others, such as requests for files etc.
- **[sneakernet](sneakernet.md), [data mules](data_mule.md), [snail mail](snail_mail.md), avian carriers, arrows, messengers, [USB](usb.md) exchange, messages in bottle, ...**: Physically transforming messages is another historically tested option, travelers will always be around wanting to get from point A to point B and while at it they may also serve as information carriers -- information doesn't weight that much. When combined with traditional "modern" data storage media such as USB drives we call this the [sneakernet](sneakernet.md). Special case of this are so called *[data mules](data_mule.md)* -- imagine e.g. a bus that carries a computer with [wifi](wifi.md) and drives from village to village, exchanging data with local computers in each village just by getting in close proximity, carrying data not only between the villages but also between the village network and the "big Internet" once it reaches a city that has connection to it (existing example is e.g. [KioskNet](kiosknet.md)) -- with clever software people can do things like send and receive emails and download websites, just a bit slower than with conventional Internet. There exist volunteer organizations that distribute mail. People used to play correspondence [chess](chess.md) over snail mail, with enough dedication you could probably scale it up to some turn-based [MMORPG](mmorpg.md) game. Owing to the small weight, data can be transferred also by small animals such as pigeons (in some places with very bad Internet this is allegedly still the superior way even nowadays, in wars pigeons helped carry huge numbers of messages on microforms) or even just by "throwing", shooting an arrow with message on it, sending it down the river stream and so on. USB sticks are used by activists to send western propaganda to North Korea (e.g. small helium balloons carrying USB sticks with movies and books over the borders for the inhabitants to find). The disadvantage is high communication delay but even if it's orders of magnitude worse than what Internet offers us, bandwidth can still be excellent, sometimes even beating the Internet! Consider that a truck carrying 1000 1 terabyte harddrives arriving from start to its destination in a week achieves a bandwidth of about 1.6 gigabytes per second. That's pretty solid. Future inhabitants of Mars and other planets will inevitably have to deal with [interplanetary Internet](interplanetary_internet.md) that's doomed by laws of physics to have high delays -- if they can get around the issue, so can we. An interesting concept might be a "slow" network of people who simply meet up once a week and exchange their USB sticks (or SD cards or diskettes or whatever) on which they pass files and messages to others, such as requests for files etc.
- **leaving signs ([rocks](rock.md), sticks, leaves, messages in sand, bulletin boards, ...)**: Some forest people communicate by leaving signs for others e.g. by leaving tears on leaves or making shapes from sticks or rocks -- these can carry messages like "beware, dangerous animal around", "today I hunted down a monkey here" or "I have extra food, come take some". When improved, we could communicate whole text messages, numbers and any binary data this way -- imagine e.g. a small ["bulletin board"](bbs.md) on some frequently visited crossroads between villages where people leave latest news, offers, demands, requests for information from others, silly jokes etc. In some cities there exist book exchange booths where people just leave their old books for others to take -- this could be further improved by adding some sort of message board for communication.
- **[intranet](intranet.md), [LAN](lan.md), [WAN](wan.md), ...**: Networks using basically the same technology as the Internet ([TCP](tcp.md)/[IP](ip.md), [ethernet](ethernet.md), [wifi](wifi.md), routers, ...), just on smaller scales -- the technology can actually be simpler: simpler routers can be used, no high performance backbone routers are needed, [Ronja](ronja.md) may be used instead of wifi, [DNS](dns.md) may be omitted and so on. There are many such networks, [military](military.md) has its own isolated networks, North Korea has its famous nation-wide isolated intranet ([Kwangmyong](kwangmyong.md)), Cuba has the famous [SNet](snet.md) -- "street net" that's used for pirating and games -- and so on. The advantage is relative simplicity of implementation -- the technology is all there and quite cheap, you can set up your own network in the neighborhood and have complete control over it, government isn't gonna bully you for sharing movies, it won't spy on your communication (at least not so easily) etc.
- **[intranet](intranet.md), [LAN](lan.md), [WAN](wan.md), ...**: Networks using basically the same technology as the Internet ([TCP](tcp.md)/[IP](ip.md), [ethernet](ethernet.md), [wifi](wifi.md), routers, ...), just on smaller scales -- the technology can actually be simpler: simpler routers can be used, no high performance backbone routers are needed, [Ronja](ronja.md) may be used instead of wifi, [DNS](dns.md) may be omitted and so on. There are many such networks, [military](military.md) has its own isolated networks, North Korea has its famous nation-wide isolated intranet ([Kwangmyong](kwangmyong.md)), Cuba has the famous [SNet](snet.md) -- "street net" that's used for pirating and games -- and so on. In Spain there is the famous [Guifi](guifi.md) network (with as of now nearly 40 thousand nodes) working in decentralized manner just on top of many interconnected wifi devices. The advantage is relative simplicity of implementation -- the technology is all there and quite cheap, you can set up your own network in the neighborhood and have complete control over it, government isn't gonna bully you for sharing movies, it won't spy on your communication (at least not so easily) etc.
- **[radio](radio.md), [telegraph](telegraph.md)**: Plain FM/AM radio communication is a serious competition to Internet in terms of delay, bandwidth and distance of reach, while being very simple in comparison -- a skilled individual can construct or repair a radio with just some basic electronic components, which can't be said about digital computer networks that require extremely complex computer chips. Radio can relatively easily transfer analog information such as voice, but it can also send digital information. With [Morse code](morse_code.md) even the most primitive radio communication system can turn into something extremely powerful.
- **[broadcast](broadcast.md) and alternative network topologies** (see also [world broadcast](world_broadcast.md)): broadcasts (one way communication towards many) can be implemented in many ways: with radio, audio, optically and so on. Broadcast only networks, such as [teletext](teletext.md), [TV](tv.md) or radio station broadcast, can be much simpler than a two way communication -- there don't have to be such complex protocols, there are no handshakes, devices can work on low power (as they're only receivers) and the broadcaster can't be overloaded by client requests. These can cover a great range of services such as news, weather forecast, time synchronization, geolocalization, work organization ("now we need you to produce this and this"), some forms of entertainment or providing generally useful data such as maps and books. If we do go for two way communication anyway, we should at least consider simpler network topologies -- with Internet we tend to think in mesh networks, i.e. "everyone connected to everyone", but that may be too complex to implement with other kinds of networks, it may be better to consider something like a ring network.
- **optical telegraph, smoke signals, lanterns, flag semaphores, kites, flares, mirrors and other optical communication**: Optical communication is another technique widely used throughout history -- the advantage here is speed as obviously [light](light.md) is the fastest medium you can ever use. Lighting bonfires on hill tops could send a message about incoming enemy at great distances, later on even a more complex information could be sent using optical telegraph -- a chain of towers that forwarded symbols one to another by positioning big arms on their rooftops to form some specific shape, with the next tower copying the symbol and so on. You can leave big symbols in your window to send a few bytes to anyone with a telescope in the line of sight of your house. Basically if you can make someone see something, you can send a message; you can increase the amount of data by utilizing [color](color.md), movement, blinking and so on. Also remember that [optical fiber](optical_fiber.md) doesn't need a computer to work, it could probably be operated even manually provided we have some kind of [laser](laser.md).
@ -70,6 +72,7 @@ Internet overtook the world thanks to having enabled great number of services to
- **public fora**: Instead of an Internet discussion forum or chat it's possible to just allocate some public space for people to simply talk. Instead of [YouTube](youtube.md) videos people can go see someone's lecture, with the advantage of being able to actually talk to the guy and ask questions -- again, pretty obvious but the new generation may already be forgetting things can be [done simply](kiss.md).
- **local storage/paper and offline programs instead of [cloud](cloud.md)**: This is again more of a note for the newer generation that's used to storing everything in the cloud and also using "cloud apps" -- you can (and SHOULD) store things locally of course, you can use offline programs and eve boomer solutions like a literal paper notebook for taking notes instead of using some online note taking "app". Similarly you can store your cash [money](money.md) and private photos in a physical safe instead of relying on Internet banking or password protected clouds and voila, suddenly you free of yet another bullshit.
- **doing it yourself, becoming independent**: you can replace many online services by just doing them yourself, for example instead of online weather forecast you can build your own small weather station, instead of online music streaming service you can just buy a harddrive, load it with mp3s and let it play on random, and so on.
- **"online only sometimes"**: An approach contrasted with the "always online" philosophy of the mainstream. This can greatly minimize dependency on connectivity, bandwidth and latency. Though a lot of technology is built with the premise of having constant access to the Internet, practically speaking few tasks require it by nature. You can do most things offline -- reading and replying to emails, reading and searching websites, watching movies, programming and committing to git repositories, playing slow-paced turn based games, all of these require just connecting to the Internet once in quite a long while to refresh the data, send the buffers out and download new queued resources. With just a little effort you can set this up.
- [telepathy](telepathy.md)? :D
- ...
@ -77,6 +80,7 @@ Internet overtook the world thanks to having enabled great number of services to
@ -8,6 +8,8 @@ LGBT is related to the ideas of equality in a similar way in which crusade wars
Note that **not all gay people support LGBT**, even though LGBT wants you to think so and media treat e.g. the terms *gay* and *LGBT* as synonyms (this is part of [propaganda](propaganda.md), either conscious or subconscious). The relationship gay-LGBT is the same as e.g. the relationship White-WhitePride or German-Nazi: Nazis were a German minority that wanted to [fight](fight_culture.md) for more privileges for Germans of their own race (as they felt oppressed by other nations and races such as Jews), LGBT is a gay minority who wants to [fight](fight_culture.md) for more privileges for gay people (because they feel oppressed by straight people). LGBT isn't just about being gay but about approving of a very specific ideology that doesn't automatically come with being gay. LGBT frequently comments on issues that go beyond simply being gay (or whatever), for example LGBT openly stated disapproval of certain other orientation (e.g. [pedophilia](pedophilia.md)) and refuses to admit homosexuality is a disorder, which aren't necessarily stances someone has to take when simply being gay.
**LGBT is a cult** that managed to actually get mainstream and embraced by the ruling powers ([states](state.md) and [corporations](corporation.md)) -- their [pseudoscience](soyence.md), called "[gender studies](gender_studies.md)", is not unlike the hilarious "science" of Ancient Aliens, the LGBT theories are not unlike the Nazi theories about underground Jewish societies secretly ruling the world. Just like some see everything a work of aliens or Jews, LGBT sees a secret gender oppression in everything, in 100 years old child cartoons, in primitive video games like [pacman](pacman.md), in colors of the butterfly wings, everything has a secret straight cis male oppression message embedded within it. If you ever wondered what it would look like if Scientology took over the world or if Nazis won the world war^([Hitler comparison committed but rightfully so]), you don't have to wonder anymore, it's right here (chances are just that you don't see it just as you wouldn't see Scientology as weird if you grew up in a culture completely controlled by it).
Gay fascists furthermore live off of attention so they love to wear bizarre clothes in all existing AND nonexisting [colors](color.md) at once, further combined with ugly hairstyles and [tattoos](tattoo.md) so that they literally look like clowns from mental asylum or that creepy McDonald's mascot. They also love to show their genitalia in the streets -- though they are pedophobes, they think it's a peer reviewed fact that it's natural for a child to see mommy have threesome with her frens.
LGBT works towards establishing [newspeak](newspeak.md) and [though crime](though_crime.md), their "pride" parades are not unlike military parades, they're meant to establish fear of their numbers. LGBT targets children and young whom their propaganda floods every day with messages like *"being gay makes you cool and more interesting"* so that they have a higher probability of developing homosexuality to further increase their ranks in the future. They also push the idea of children having same sex parents for the same reason.
Just compile this and pass a string to the standard input (e.g. `echo "<testing> string | ./program"`), it will write out if it matches or not.
Just compile this and pass a string to the standard input (e.g. `echo "<testing> string" | ./program`), it will write out if it matches or not.
Maybe it seems a bit overcomplicated -- you could say you could program the above even without regular expressions and state machines. That's true, however imagine dealing with a more complex regex, one that matches a quite complex real world file format. Consider that in [HTML](html.md) for example there are pair tags, non-pair tags, attributes inside tags, entities, comments and many more things, so here you'd have great difficulties creating such parser intuitively -- the approach we have shown can be completely automatized and will work as long as you can describe the format with regular expression.
@ -27,7 +27,7 @@ Important thing to realize is that, like most mainstream projects do, Wikipedia
Let's note a few positive and negative points about Wikipedia, as of 2022. Some good things are:
- Despite its flaws Wikipedia is still a **highly free, relatively high quality noncommercial source of knowledge for everyone**, without ads and [bullshit](bs.md). It is quite helpful, Wikipedia may e.g. be printed out or saved in an offline version and used in the third world as a completely free educational resource (see [Kiwix](kiwix.md)).
- Wikipedia **helped prove the point of [free culture](free_culture.md)** and showed that collaboration of volunteers can far surpass the best efforts of corporations.
- Wikipedia **helped prove the point of [free culture](free_culture.md)** and showed that a quite decentralized, "[bazaar](bazaar.md) style" collaboration of volunteers can far surpass the best efforts of corporations.
- Wikipedia's **website is (/used to be) pretty nice** (at least as of 2022), kind of minimalist, lightweight and **works without [Javascript](javascript.md)**. { Indeed as of 2023 they fucked it up :D It is still not as bad as other sites but it's shit now. ~drummyfish }
- Wikipedia is very **friendly to computer analysis**, it provides all its data publicly, in simple and open formats, and doesn't implement any [DRM](drm.md). This allows to make a lot of research, in depth searching, collection of statistics etc.
- Wikipedia **drives the sister projects**, some of which are extremely useful, e.g. Wikimedia Commons, Wikidata or [MediaWiki](mediawiki.md).
@ -4,6 +4,6 @@ World of Warcraft (WoW) is an AAA [proprietary](proprietary.md) [game](game.md)
There is a [FOSS](foss.md) implementation of WoW server called [MaNGOS](mangos.md) (now having some [forks](fork.md)) that's used to make private servers. The client is of course proprietary and if you dare make a popular server Blizzard (or whatever it's called now, it's probably merged with [Micro$oft](microfost.md) or something now) will just rape you.
The classic WoW (mostly the vanilla but we can possibly extend this to the end of WOTLK) lied somewhere in the middle between good old and shitty [modern](modern.md) games, it had many great things like the iconic awesome [low poly](low_poly.md) hand painted stylized graphics, big open world, amazing PvP and PvE, but the modern poison was already creeping in. The WoW of today is of course 100% pure [shit](shit.md), it's [bloated](blot.md) beyond any imagination, the graphics is absolutely ruined (semi realistic style with the retarded shit like character outlines), it's extremely [censored](censorship.md) and [politically correct](political_correctness.md) (you can literally change gender of your character at barbershop lol, they removed the *spit* emote because it was "offensive" -- yes, a game that's all about [war](war.md) and killing and literally has war in its name must restrain you from hurting someone's feelings by spitting on the ground). Basically every race can now be any class, even if it doesn't make any sense, like Tauren rogue (in the past this used to be a [joke](joke.md) but today jokes are made into reality) -- otherwise it would be [racism](racism.md) or something. The game has about 1 billion expansions while the lore writers had already ran out of any ideas after like 5 of them, so they now just started to mess around with time travel and alternative timelines (resorting to time rape is always that desperate last resort move which signifies the work has been dead for a long time by then). The game is so bad Blizzard even started running official vanilla, no expansion servers ("classic WoW"), which is the only thing holding it above the water now. Of course before this they nuked all the popular unofficial private vanilla servers with legal threats so they could force a [monopoly](monopoly.md) -- this destroyed great many communities but Blizzard is a corporation so they could do anything they want.
The classic WoW (mostly the vanilla but we can possibly extend this to the end of WOTLK) lied somewhere in the middle between good old and shitty [modern](modern.md) games, it had many great things like the iconic awesome [low poly](low_poly.md) hand painted stylized graphics, big open world, amazing PvP and PvE, but the modern poison was already creeping in. The WoW of today is of course 100% pure [shit](shit.md), it's [bloated](blot.md) beyond any imagination, the graphics is absolutely ruined (semi realistic style with the retarded shit like character outlines), it's extremely [censored](censorship.md) and [politically correct](political_correctness.md) (you can literally change gender of your character at barbershop lol, they did this out of fear of [LGBT](lgbt.md), they also removed the *spit* emote because it was "offensive" -- yes, a game that's all about [war](war.md) and killing and literally has war in its name must restrain you from hurting someone's feelings by spitting on the ground). You can also make any weapon or armor make look like any other weapon or armor, that just kills the whole point of an RPG. Also basically every race can now be any class, even if it doesn't make any sense, like Tauren rogue (in the past this used to be a [joke](joke.md) but today jokes are made into reality) -- otherwise it would be [racism](racism.md) or something. The game has about 1 billion expansions while the lore writers had already ran out of any ideas after like 5 of them, so they now just started to mess around with time travel and alternative timelines (resorting to time rape is always that desperate last resort move which signifies the work has been dead for a long time by then). The game is so bad Blizzard even started running official vanilla, no expansion servers ("classic WoW"), which is the only thing holding it above the water now. Of course before this they nuked all the popular unofficial private vanilla servers with legal threats so they could force a [monopoly](monopoly.md) -- this destroyed great many communities but Blizzard is a corporation so they could do anything they want.
{ For me the peak of Warcraft was [Warcraft III:TFT](warcraft.md), it was perfect in every way (except for being proprietary and bloated of course). As a great fan of Warcraft III, seeing WoW in screenshots my fantasy made it the best game possible to be created. When I actually got to playing it it was really good -- some of my best memories come from that time -- nevertheless I also remember being disappointed in many ways. Especially with limitation of freedom (soulbound items, forced grinding, effective linearity of leveling, GMs preventing hacking the game in fun ways etc.) and here and there a lack of polish (there were literally visible unfinished parts of the map, also visual transitions between zones too fast and ugly and the overall world design felt kind of bad), laziness and repetitiveness of the design. I knew how the game could be fixed, however I also knew it would never be fixed as it was in hands of a corporation that had other plans with it. That was the time I slowly started to see things not being ideal and the possibility of a great thing going to shit. ~drummyfish }
