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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."
I've been having a hard enough time getting the CD image and now you /. it? ARE YOU MAD?
/., thanks a lot.
Gee
(jerks)
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 .
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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
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.
This isn't on one single site though, if you combined all the records from every site you'd get a rough number. But, not all people are downloading it, some are getting copies burned for them. Others, not even in the beta are downloading it, for some strange reason.
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Insert Witty Sig Here
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.
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Insert Witty Sig Here
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)...
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Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
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
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Computer Science: solving today's problems tomorrow.
Price, Quality, Time. Pick none. What, you thought you had a choice?
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.
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the pun is mightier than the sword
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.
(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
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.
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?
Well, you must have gotten in ahead of the game, because most of the download sites are now down, and even continuously retrying for 24 hours I've only logged on to 2 sites, downloading a whopping 21k.
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
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.
But I insist, if you're testing, wait at least for your first sunset/sunrise combo. About an hour. I was just swept away by the beauty. Plus, no more camping, no more waiting for quest items to respawn. It's all handled by their quest generation routines. Neato.
Also, if you're not going to play with the other children, send your key to someone who will. I've got one, but several people on here offered cash to get one. I'd go for that, but it's too much fun.
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. :-)
...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