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Download 600MB From The EU -- For A Demo?
Baddas writes: "Anarchy Online, a MMORPG from Funcom scheduled to come out on the 27th of July, is currently in it's 4th series of beta testing. This beta has about 100,000 people involved by mailed keys. However, the more interesting thing is that each of these people has to download a CD worth of information from servers mostly located in the EU. This may well be one of the largest tests of trans-continental bandwidth ever, as I've never heard of 100,000 people trying to download a single game in the space of 3 days or so (the length of time the emails went out over). This isn't some 150Mb D2 test or something, this is a full 600Mb of data. I think this could be an ideal location to use Swarmcast from OpenCola, since they could enable all of us waiting on this side of the pond to get the files."
And that's currently 4 CDs (650MBx4) worth of data that people all over the world download.
That I think this was a rather intelligent plan, saving the FanCom team TONS of money, and, testing their bandwidth, waaaay before the commercial release of their game. One can only look to the abortion that is the commercial launch of WWII online, and remember the train wreak that was the first week of EQ's launch, to see how important a company stress testing their bandwidth, and their servers, is. WWII online has AT BEST, had 600 out of 20,000 people, able to get online at a time. Also, as a person that got EQ, day of release over 2 years ago, the first 3 days were un-playable, due to the constant crashing of their login server. Also, allow me to point out, the cost of several tens of thousands of dollers FanCom made by not mailing CDs to people. Keep in mind, there are 100,000 people in the new beta, it would be atleast a dollar per person to mail the CDs to each. Oh, and finally, over a week ago, FunCom put up the list of locations of FTP sites where one could download the beta file. If you were intellagent, like myself, you got it late at night, a week ago, burned it to your own CD, and then spent all yesterday, laughing at the fools that did not plan ahead.
Nobody seems to have bothered to look some of this stuff up.
They're ASKING and allowing anyone who wants to to download the file, print up a thousand cds and pass 'em around to friends. AND share their beta cd-key. I think you're able to have 2 people online using the same key at the same time during beta.
Linux "is still planned" but won't be out for a while.
The file is zipped.
For me, a bandwidth challenged netizen (56k) this download will take 35 hours total. (according to reget) I'm now around the 22 hours left mark. It's hard to connect to the ftp sites if you're sitting there waiting, but with a good program that autoretries 9000 times.. you get in eventually.
As for it killing the bandwidth of the 'net... somehow I doubt it. Most people will only bother downloading with cable or something similar. While I don't know what kind of speed they get with those, I'm sure it probably would reduce the time down under 10 hours.
Also, should everyone download at the same time, sure that's a lot but, all the ftp sites are limited to 30 - 50 people. (Which is why it's so hard to dl at the moment)
I've been having a hard enough time getting the CD image and now you /. it? ARE YOU MAD?
/., thanks a lot.
Gee
(jerks)
It is zipped, but those windows installers are already compressed (data1.cab, etc.), it only took about 10 or 20 meg off.
WWJD? JWRTFM!!!
I downloaded the file (aobeta4.zip) yesterday, with 400k/s and it went just fine. And it was from one of the official download places. So I don't see why this should really be a problem? I higly doubt all 100k persons actually will download it.
Cha!
;)
I saw statistics on this a couple of years ago. The traffic balance is around 50:50 but us Europeans pay soemthing like 80:20 of the cost of the link to connect to the "american" internet
Just FYI for those of us having a hard time getting this file. Fileplanet has it here.
:).
Disclaimer - I don't work for AO / File Planet or any other company related to it. I'm just a geek that signed up for the beta and thought I'd share with the rest of the class
Secret windows code
Clinton made me a Republican. Bush made me a Libertarian. Trump is making me question reality.
For the Swarmcast 1.0 we'll either have invested enough time/money or dumped WebStart, but for or 0.9 you just have to trust that the file you're running came from us :(. Remember, all the signature proves is origin -- not that the code won't do mean things to your machine.
As for the 'Full Control' that WebStart says you're giving it, we Linux users know that full control only goes to root. If you run Swarmcast as a non-root user it, of course, won't have any more privilages than you give it.
If anyone has had more luck than we have getting WebStart to recognize a certificate on both Linux and Windows, please drop us a line through http://sf.net/projects/swarmcast .
--
At least for me, the cd key came in email. Not snail mail. Which would be a fairly crucial difference here. I'm sure you wouldn't want a cd image coming through your mail server. ;-)
"No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare."
--James Madison
Unfortunately, I went to their site to download it and there was no real indication of a split between platforms and the file was in zip format. I poked around the FAQ's some and discovered that the linux platform was now tenatively planned, would not be out until at least after the windows release, and would be dependant on the results from the windows release. (I'm not sure in what way, the FAQ doesn't say.)
I dropped a line through their contact form informing them that I was disappointed by this turn of events, and that I was sorry but I would be unable to beta-test their software as none of my boxes run windows. That in fact the whole reason I was interested was their linux support, and indicated my willingness to assist with beta-testing when they needed it for their linux version.
If you are one who is actually interested in playing this game on linux, I would recommend you express your interest. I can only assume they do not believe there is sufficient interest. And they may be right about that. For this reason, please write them only if you are actually interested in the game. Over-inflated market estimates will not help the situation at all. It will only sour them and other gaming companies when it comes to market and they don't come anywhere near their projections.
"No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare."
--James Madison
Just a question: exactly what does your mail server tell you when you receive a 600MB attachment?
War is one of the most horrible things a human can be exposed to. And one of the worlds largest industries.
I can download from european servers without using transcontinental bandwidth. Welcome to the rest of the world.
And the headline is wrong too - it's a beta (according to the rest of the blurb), not a demo.
--
the telephone rings / problem between screen and chair / thoughts of homocide
"don't fall into the fallacy of believing that Perl can solve social problems. Maybe Perl 6 can, but that's a ways off"
ftp://209.98.65.241/pub/mirrors/ao/
-- dieman - Scott Dier
You might be wrong. A few years ago I heard it the other way around: the traffic from porn downloads on European servers to US customers was a lot bigger. This may have changed though.
The Virtual Bookcase: book reviews
According to the latest statistics, the European Union's 320 million people now has more *Internet users* than the USA's 250 million.
Makes me wonder if they will break the old record of ftp.cdrom.com, 996Gb on one day!
If I've understood correctly, the download is available for 3 days, for 100.000 people. That means: 100.000 * 600Mb / 3 = 20.000.000 Mb
That surely beats the old record :)
"The assembler gave birth to the compiler. Now there are ten thousand languages." - Tao of Programming
Bah, first of all its not a demo. Second mirrors are popping up all over the place, including Fileplanet which is no slouch for downloads.
Fileplanet - AOBeta4.zip
Barrysworld (UK) - AOBeta4.zip
Some yahoo said that they'd post to alt.binaries.images when they get it, so if your a trusting person, and are willing to wait until your newserver to get it, that'd probably be the fastest.
---
--
Insert Witty Sig Here
I agree that the /. effect can be extremely hard on a network (it's quite like DoS attack now), but there are things you can do on the server side to compensate (somewhat) for it.
.txt file in the directory advising users of an updated location. That way /.'ers will assume that the site has already been slashdotted and most won't go further into it, but others who are actually meant to get the software will probably go the extra step to grab it. et cetera, et cetera
How about a script that (after the 2nd or 3rd try in under a minute) blocks that IP address? After some length of time (12, 24 hours?) that IP address could be removed from the "blocked" list.
Or disabling the slashdot "link", blocking requests to that direct link, and putting a
This does raise a bit of a question about what will happen when Neocron expands its beta to several thousand people, though. Hmmmm.
--
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
Or you could just wait for it to show up on Usenet warez groups (approximately 12 seconds after release)...
---------------------------------------------
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
That's why it's an Asinchronous line :)
The difference between quality and quantity. (Oops...)
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
You are so right and I was too quick....
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
100,000.00 CD's
;).
x $0.50 each
==========
$50,000.00
+ 10% shipping costs roughly 10%
==========
$55,000.00
Your "no-brainer" just got a tad expensive.
OTOH, shove the image on a bunch of servers and clamp the bandwidth at a max 28.8bps and laugh as us westerners try to download
---
Computer Science: solving today's problems tomorrow.
Price, Quality, Time. Pick none. What, you thought you had a choice?
I eventually managed to download it from a mirror somebody had put up at Linköping University (thanks if you're reading!) which meant a steady 60k/s on my ADSL from SUNET to Telia. This still took hours (and it was several hours until I found this mirror). I eventually finished downloading at around 5:30am after receiving the key at about 9:00pm the previous evening. So I eventually got it installed and ...
It was bloody awful.
I had heard so much about this "EverQuest-killer" that I had go really exciting during the eight and a half hours or so attempting to download it. I don't think I have ever had so much disappointment from a computer game. The MMORPG idea of attacking an NPC just does not work with guns. Pressing "q" and then waiting to shoot at a squirrel just seems wrong. We are so-used to the concept of guns, we have all used them in FPS style games that any way which doesn't involve pointing at an NPC and pressing the mousebutton to shoot just feels totally wrong.
I tried it. Thanks but not thanks, back to EverQuest for me.
you may underestimate the amount of bandwidth available.
I live in Gibraltar, have links directly to the UK, (so I'm only a couple hops away from the eastern seaboard). I get good high speeds from most sites in the US, and have no problems with any online gaming.
Nice :/ First the good news: Java Webstart & Swarmcast runs under Linux emulation in FreeBSD, too.
Bad news: First thing Swarmcast wants to do is take over your machine, erm, I mean, its requesting "unrestricted access" from the runtime. And guess what: Webstart complains that the packages signature is invalid. I think Ill comply with Webstarts advise: Dont start Swarmcast.
It`s a shame how much money gets wasted on those certs.
:/
I just bought a S/MIME cert from German Telekom/T-Online just to find out that half of the Netscapes I tried it out on have botched root certs for this CA.
On the other hand, I don't think anyone will notice this when he receives mail from us
Yeah, it's alot to grab, but surfing through the various mirrors gave me a server in Belgium that was able to saturate my 768K sDSL link with no slowdowns ... took about 2 hours to download.
It is more productive to voice thoughtful opinions (reply) than to judge (moderate) others.
I know slashdot's located in the States and all but still, it's in the worldwide domain, it's certainly reported when european politics have affected IT and the times get displayed in your selected timezone. It's used to recognising that there is a world outside of the US.
So, why is this being remarked on, given that the EU has a higher population than the USA? It might have been a good idea to stick a server or two elsewhere - but it's not exactly unknown to see the reverse.
Greg
(Inside a nuclear plant)
Aaaarrrggh! Run! The canary has mutated!
I don't understand it either. But while I live in the Netherlands, I still prefer US download sites over EU sites most of the time. I don't know why it is, but apparently there's more bandwidth between Amsterdam and the US than there is between Amsterdam and Munich.
----------------------------------------------
the pun is mightier than the sword
Yes, that's right. EU != Europe.
Just thought i would let everyone know, that it isnt 'snail' mailled keys, but 'emailed' keys. I just got mine through.
Duh. I miscalculated. 20,000 Gbyte/day is about 2 Gbit/sec, not 20. So it isn't that much after all. Still, with only 8 download sites over the world each site must be able to deliver 250 Mbit/sec sustained, probably 1 Gbit/sec peak. That still is a lot per site.
Living is a horizontal fall
The download page only lists 8 locations over the world to download from. Even if all of those servers are connected with 1 Gbit/sec ethernet cards to "the backbone" (I know, there's no such thing), and they are able to max out that bandwidth, you cannot ever let 100.000 people download 600 MB worth of data.
100,000 people downloading 600 MB over the coarse of 3 days, that's 20,000 Gbyte/day. That would be 20 Gbit/sec non-stop bandwidth. Assuming that a normal FTP server has trouble enough filling a 100 Mbit link, and that most sites don't have an OC48 link to the internet, they would need at least 200 download sites spread over the globe. Or 20 sites that have at least a 1 Gbit uplink and a small FTP server farm at each site.
So they probably hope that only a few thousand people end up downloading the CD, otherwise they probably need to go talk to a company like Akamai.
Living is a horizontal fall
The 5 cents mailing cost are just a *tad* optimistic.
International mailing of a CD from Europe is probably in the range of $1-$2. The actual shipping container is probably about another 50 cents to $1. This doesn't include handling on their end (anyone care to stick 100,00 customs stickers?). So your probably looking at about $350,000.
You can do better than this by transshipping to the US and then mailing, but overall, the cost of the goods is an insignificant part of the cost of the mailing.
As of this post the layout of FTPs is:
Sure I live in AU with The Worst Cable Ever, but as of this posting, the Australian and American FTPs are down, I can get about 1KB/s out of both servers in Norway. And the Finnish FTP is for Fins only.
Suffice to say I'm practicing my follicle removal, trying to login to non-existant servers.
===
Hacker - "Let me make one thing clear, Humphrey is not God."
* Intelligence is like 4-wheel drive. It only allows you get stuck in more remote places. -- Garr
yes thats probably wiser to do.. although it would cost more if a big number of beta testers is located outside US... like me. :)
(yet another /. effect story)
I'm a sysadmin with one of the download sites - the one in Australia, Pacific Internet. I wasn't the one who put up the mirror site in the first place, but I was the one who cleaned up the mess. When the mirror was originally put up, it was using a sizeable chunk of our bandwidth - big enough that our Networks team noticed it and wondered what was up. So we limited the number of downloads to ~40, and all was good for a number of days. Sure, it would be hard to get on, but if you were in Australia (or the US, most likely) it'd be faster than not getting it.
Then what happened? Slashdot happened.
Suddenly, the server was getting hammered by thousands of people who thought "Ooh, 600M of prerelease game. Better give my Cable/DSL/work T3 a work-out", and completely failed to read the section reading "If you know you did not sign up for beta, you don't need to download the client".
So if you're one of those people, (especially that one guy on @home cable in washington who tried every 5-10 seconds for 3 hours) congratulations, you spoilt it for everyone (well, for the 40 users allowed to connect, anyway).
I'll probably put it back up again in a couple of days, once the greed effect wears off.
Barnes
> I'm a sysadmin with one of the download sites
...
Likewise, of Peliportti.net.
My story is pretty much same as your's except that we didn't get much of additional Slashdot effect. I guess Slashdoters can understand "Finland only", unlike the one guy at stonebrook.edu who sent around 200000 request for the file during Sunday. *sigh*
Traffic is pretty much normal right now
--Flam
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers - Pablo Picasso
Come on now.. do you think this is seriously going to affect the internet in any palpitable way whatsoever? Any ISP worth it's weight in fiber has large (OC3, 12, 48, 192) international interconnects, and LOTS of them. The point of the internet is that things are generally supposed to be location-independant. It doesn't matter if you're sending packets across domestic, terrestrial circuits from SanFran->NY, at 80ms or so, or from EU->NY at 100ms or so. Your downloads are going to look roughly the same, as does the capacity on those links. _Maybe_ you'll flood some smaller ISP's tunnel which is underprovisioned and oversubscribed but come on.. have a little more faith in the infrastructure. An undersea link is sometimes even cheaper to run than domestic bandwidth, since you're just sinking wires to a few hundred (or thousand) ft, and not burying cable across developed land. So don't expect this to be noticed by anyone.
//Phizzy
"Most European technology just isn't worth our stealing," -- Former CIA chief James Woolsey, referring to Echelon
Actually, they are not mailing the keys, they are e-mailing the keys.
I know that, because I received one.
If you're in eurpoe and you want to ship 50,000 CD's to the US, you don't ship them.
You contact a friendly CD duplicator in the US and pay them to manufacture and ship the CD's domestically.
Another reason? Try this... do a traceroute and see if Amsterdam to Munich isn't really Amsterdam to US to Munich as happens frequently ;)
Um, first, that would be "asynchronous", and second, the word you're looking for is probably asymmetric(al)". Mmkay? ;^)
main(O){10<putchar(4^--O?77-(15&5128 >>4*O):10)&&main(2+O);}
It stands for "asymmetrical", because the bandwidth is not symmetrical, i.e. it is not the same in both directions on the wire. To be specific, the bandwidth available downstream (into the home) is typically larger than the one available upstream (out of the home). This is because ADSL is designed in a consumer-centric way, assuming and/or implying that most users do not want to run servers.
Also, if you read my comment again, you'll hopefully come to the conclusion that I was indeed right. The original comment (#17) by Teun was both misspelled and incorrect, and I tried to correct it on both accounts. Just trying to help, you know. ;^)
main(O){10<putchar(4^--O?77-(15&5128 >>4*O):10)&&main(2+O);}
and post the keyname here.
Can your IM do this?
This is slightly tragic. There -was- a US serv listed, but it sure as heck isn't hosting the file anymore. I'm getting it off 4Players, but Germany-To-US over a 56K dialup is going to take several days. This had damn well better be worth my time, considering the only reason I was signed up at all was cuz I got AO mixed up with Planetside...
It's not the voices in my head that annoy me. It's the psychosies they invite over for parties that annoy me.
They are sending the CDKeys by EMAIL not regular mail. I got mine by email and every one that I know of has gotten theirs the same way.
Uh, that's "Pearl Harbor", silly Englishman... ;-)
Let's make a deal -- we'll use your anachronistic English spellings when refering to British place names, if you'll use our creative American spellings when refering to American place names, ok?
The Patriot
Everybody knows this was just a remake of "Braveheart" with "American colonies" substituted for "Scotland" and "sons" substituted for "wife". I assure you that, although it was quite an emotional stirring movie, even the most gullible Americans (and that's pretty darn gullible!) don't accept it as historical fact.
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
I fail to see the difference between Europeans downloading something from America and Americans downloading something from Europe.
We do have the internet over here, you know.
qts
Download from Funcom, East Coast, USA (This may be unavailable from time to time)
Download from Pacific Internet (Australia) Pty. Ltd
D'oh - that's what happens when you turn cookies off
it is zipped
The connection to australia is a lot worse than to Europe
I've been trying to download the bloody thing for about two days now with no success. I live on the east coast in the US and haven't had any luck with the EU servers. Hopefully things'll pick up, I'm looking forward to giving AO a whirl.
plop
More to the point, there were 100,000 keys mailed out. But only seven distribution points(4players doesn't appear to be hosting the DL anymore). Assuming that even half of the recipients want to download the game. Even if we all got in a line and waited our turn politely, is it even possible for such a small number of servers to handle the load over the next 2-3 weeks? Since I've recieved my key(early saturday) my DL manager has been cycleing through them since and only had success once. The connection promptly gave up around the 73 meg mark(512k dsl). Oh, and that particualr server doesn't support resume. :)
Not that they're alone, this kind of short sightedness seems rampant in the MMOG development community.
And it it does not come with MD5 keys... you could easily be downloading a virus or trojan...
I suggest that Slashdot Whitehat hackers take down this company to protect the world.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
Just a question: exactly what does your mail server tell you when you receive a 600MB attachment?
It very politely tells the sending MTA that the message is too large. That MTA had better generate a bounce message back to the sender saying the same thing.
What's in your mail server?
Granted, people download ISOs of RH, Debian, Slack, etc all of the time, and I don't complain... But in this instance, they were mailing something anyways, and it couldn't have cost them THAT much more to mail a lightweight compact disk, and to maybe have the online downloading available as a backup plan.
Yeah, too bad paying per minute is a more capitalist concept than paying by the month, or you'd have a point now, wouldn't you?
Go Kathryn Thurber!
Wow, talk about second rate. How much did Dreamworks pay for that, anyways?
Go Kathryn Thurber!
Nope. You be wrong. Just because you can spell doesn't mean you're smart. What does the A in ADSL stand for again? And WHY does it stand for that? HMM?
Go Kathryn Thurber!
humm, I wonder if the warez scene over the years have helped the buildout of the physical infrastructure.
I signed up for the beta awhile ago, and said I was running linux for my OS since they said they'd eventually have a linux client. Well, I just got accepted, but I see only Windows stuff and I'm not too keen on downloading 600MB over a 56k just to see if it has the linux client. Is there currently a linux client? If so, where can I get it? I want to play the game, but I'd like to see it now before I become a paying customer after the linux client actually comes out.
(Not trying to be pedantis, it's just that some people don't know.)
Blue skies... Barthie burgers... girls.
Umm... they aren't sending the keys out via snail-mail... they're emailing the keys. Oh and just imagine if they tried emailing 100,000 600MB files... ouch
Assuming some of you guys or gals give up on the DL, I'd take a tester key. =) gthomas@(no.spam)grioghar.org (remove the no.spam) if you even consider ditching your key.
Grioghar
Can you ping me now? Gooood! | Manhappenin.Net - Things to do
There's at least another big game, around 600MB.
It's called " Steel Panthers: World at War ", from Matrix Games. It's an übercool tactical, World War 2, combat game. You have different countries, scenarios, long campaigns, 1 tank is 1 tank... a virtual Saving Private Ryan.
It's just wonderful.
Even though it does not run neither with Linux nor WINE nor Win4Lin nor vmWare... believe me, I've tried :( I can install it OK under any of those, but it works in none, sofar. Not yet :)
If you make it work, under Linux, please contact me.
Lineage: The Blood Pledge = 650 MB download
And that's only for the Beta/demo software.. (can be fully registered online though ) The game lists OVER 970,000 registered players, so I figure many of them started out with the downloaded software.
Actually, Steel Panthers: World at War is the third huge release in 12 months. Yes, last year there were 2 versions: v.4.0 and v.4.5. Now, they have released the v.5.01. And all of them have been of around 650MB.
Last year I had a 250Kbps connection. Today, I surf at 2500 Kpbs make it easier :)
BTW, did I mentioned that this a fully-functional FreeWare game? You can buy it, also, on CD with an extra set of scenarios (Called "DesertFox Megacampaign") for a cheap price. Check their web.
Anyway, those guys at Matrix rock. If they only would port it to Linux... or make it work under WINE..... Then, I would not have to bring home my work laptop, loaded with Windows...company requirements, but with a nifty vmware + Linux install :)
never 100,000 from 8 servers tho, and a lot of the warez traffic is mirrors inside the US.
However, the more interesting thing is that each of these people has to download a CD worth of information from servers mostly located in the EU. This may well be one of the largest tests of trans-continental bandwidth ever, as I've never heard of 100,000 people trying to download a single game in the space of 3 days or so
That shouldn't be a big problem, as most of the traffic over the trans-Atlantic links usually goes in the other direction. In general users in Europe download a lot more data from the US than vice versa, which means that there should be a lot of unused capacity. :-)
Slashdot is turning into such a hype machine it's ridiculous.
100,000 users downloading 600 MB is 60 TB. To do that in 3 days you need about an average bandwidth utilization of about 1,862 mbps.
I don't know how much bandwidth is running in between the US and EU, but I'm sure there is a boatload. A single OC-48 can handle this (2,488 mbps max)
These guys deliver much more than that every day. Do some research Slashdot.
first off, its 599 megs second, they released the files well prior before the keys were released third, as a beta tester, I must say that is was well worth the download. and fourth, sending out CDs, that would require addresses which not all beta testers provided and blah blah blah i gotta go :)
- Shadow
They're not mailing keys, they're e-mailing them.
But I wouldn't have complained if they had mailed me a CD.
Mod my comments down. It'll be fun.
> And in my country...internet access is
> time-metered (stupid telcoms monopoly)
Live by the socialist sword, die by the socialist sword...
I am for the complete Trantorization of Earth.
Charging by the minute is very undesirable to the consumer. In a capitalist (i.e. free, specifically, free from government-guaranteed monopolies) country, no one can stop other greedy capitalists from competing for flat-rate access.
Normal modem access is virtually free now, high-speed access is almost free (ca. $50/mo worst case, where available), cell phones are a dime a minute for any calls whatsoever, long distance or otherwise; meanwhile a socialist monopoly telco will whine to the government about costs, impracticality, costs, blah blah blah and politicians bend their ear and pass more idiotic laws to protect this fragile, obese flower of an organization/pseudo corporation that sits like a lardass bon-bon eater on a sofa whining "I should have been born a queen!"
I am for the complete Trantorization of Earth.
Not all that bad? 600MB at 28.8 will take around 2.5 to 3 days. That's assuming you don't get disconnected on a dial-up, or if you're not using dial-up, its assuming that you don't actually want to use that connection for anything else for those 3 days. And in my country (admittedly I'm not a "westerner") internet access is time-metered (stupid telcoms monopoly :( ..), we'd pay roughly the equivalent of 25 US$ for 3 days. Thats just for the time spent online, that doesn't include the monthly ISP fee.
What do you mean '5 cents'? The guy used a figure of 50 cents (+10% to 55c) in his post. Where did you see 5 cents?
Yup, you said it. Luckily we have moved away in general from socialism toward democracy (South Africa in case you were wondering), and the government-granted monopoly to our absolute-shit Telkom is set to run out next year. I'm hoping it brings some real competition into the market along with some niftier bandwidth options. One can never quite predict though, as the US have demonstrated, abusive monopolies sometimes find ways of maintaining their status.
If I can get in game with the key, I'll paypal you 10$, and if I get no interruptions til the end of the beta, I'll send you the other 10$. my email is: James_Sager_PA@yahoo.com
God spoke to me
note this is in AU$
Dude 60 tB is a LOT of information (600mb * 100 000)
Think of the cost to transfer that. Here in Australia the approx cost to the consumer is 1.5c/mB from the local mirror, about 5km away from my ISP. (using a uni account and this is pretty cheap)
(some ISPs charge 30c/mB)
by my calculation that is AU$900 000 = US$450 000
even if it is the tenth the price that's still a LOT!!
Your missing the point.. That is the cost to the ISP, or server, even if they were in the US they still have to pay AFAIK
...aren't they mailing the CDs? It seems logical, and cds only cost what, fifty cents these day? It seems like a no-brainer. Of course, this might be a form of stress test for the servers and client machines...
I'm the stranger...posting to
Why can't they just {zip|gzip|bz2} the images? Any of the compression schemes should shave off at least a hundred megabytes or so.
many .com are not american owned websites
Just like to say I'm just an average joe that can read yahoo and use a calculator.
http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/010412/2256.html
TeleGeography estimates that Trans-Atlantic deployed bandwidth will total 214 gbps in 2001, which comes to approximately 96,300,000 megabytes an hour, and a total capacity of 2,311,200,000 megs per day.
If 100,000 people download a 600meg game, that comes to 60,000,000 megs, which is about 2.6% of total capacity in a day.
It's unlikely that everyone is going to download in an evenly distributed fashion (time and network wise), but all 100,000 won't try to get it in the first day either. It doesn't sound like to me this is going to be a big problem.
Something else that's kind of interesting, the same group says that the "Supply of Lit Bandwidth" will total 1842 Gbps in 2001 (remember they said 214 was deployed), and this group predicts that both of these numbers will roughly double by next year. According to this group, doesn't look like there is no shortage of bandwidth going across the pond.
I downloaded all 600mb of it a day after it was first released (before the 100k people were let in). I live in Texas, and it wasn't bad at all. I would rather have a really high chance to play a beta and have to download it then to get mailed a CD for a 50-person beta. Stop whining.