But your method has one glaring flaw. Cost and complexity. And planning.
One of the really odd things about p2p technology is that it also distributes the cost of distribution. Whereas you could say the ISP could add more, add more this, add more that--in some and many cases this becomes cost prohibitve to have to keep up that infrastructure, especially if the cost is burdened by one entity.
By using peer to peer technology, that cost is distributed across all of the users simiarly--not equally, but similarly. And in torrent's case, it's also pretty good at making sure users that can use higher bandwidth also need to incur a higher cost. If you can distribute more, the protocol allocates more to give you more to distribute.
It's kind of automatic in nature, self healing, distributive, with no single points of failure and no glaring flaws.
The only reason this is even "argued" is because ISPs didn't build the infrastructure to handle this. And the only other reason this is argued is because a lot of people are selfish and feel the cost shouldn't be burdened by them.
But I'd rather have say, 10 cents here, 20 cents there, than the ISP assuming I'm always going to use 20 cents and charge me accordingly for access to their distribution servers.
You fail to address the situation that newsgroup access is "A to B" distribution. In the event that A dies, then B has nowhere to get the file from. Sure, you could cluster A1, A2, A3 and if A1 dies you still have A2 and A3 to deliver to B. But in the event the route between A and B dies, A1-A3 now cannot deliver to B.
Then you still have the situation of A to B being limited on bandwidth. A to B might be fast, but A to B & C immediately cuts the bandwidth in half. You have to hope that B and C use their bandwidth differently or at different times. Perhaps B uses A's bandwidth during the daytime hours, perhaps C uses the bandwidth during nighttime hours.
P2P distribution provides a network that is vastly scalable and redundant. It solves all of these problems dynamically. Mesh networking provides the greatest redundancy for distribution, which is far better than a simple logical star setup (which is what you propose).
If bits and pieces of a file reside on A, B, and C, and D comes in to get that file--He can get it from A, B, or C. A could drop off the map, B and C can still dstribute the same file to D. It's far less likely that A, B, and C are going to disappear all at the same time.
And not only is it fantastic for redundancy, there is *0* drop. In the event your news server dropped, you would have to make a new connection to a new news server that is online and restart the transfer. In a p2p mesh distribution model, the only thing you would see if A went offline? A drop in performance as A is no longer there. But if B and C weren't at full capacity, you could increase the load on B & C to give to D by halves.
There's really no way you can argue AGAINST this method of distribution. Really. The reason ISPs are complaining is that they over sold their infrastructure.
The very fact that you stated "Bittorrent is slower than other methods" of file distribution shows that you have very little grasp on file distribution and limits to bandwidth.
I've had to deal with it directly, as a content producer.
There is not very much more efficient distribution out there than a peer to peer model.
And how many people use their ISPs news servers to get the content they want? There are various news sites that are extremely popular due to retention time and access to content for a reason.
I take it you're new to the internet. USENET is still a point-to-point protocol from A to B, and this is where the problem comes in. You have a significant amount of traffic going over that single point.
With torrent and peer-to-peer distribution, you have smaller amounts of traffic coming from many different points.
Load Balancing, Clustering, P2P--are all technologies favored by the IT industry. If your distribution node goes down, nobody cares because you have others. There's no single point of failure in a peer-to-peer distribution system.
P2P should be used in pretty much every scenario requiring high bandwidth of highly popular media. (Which is actually fairly common on the internet). This drastically will reduce bandwidth costs for the people paying and improve end-user experience.
If we had Torrent before FilePlanet went pay, they probably would have never gone in that direction.
Unfortunately this headline is very sensationalist, and provides a very limited scope of the entirety IT industry as a whole.
Basically, the person who blogged this has been reading too many internet blogs surrounding these products.
Intel's ATOM CPU was not aimed at the "UMPC" market, though most certainly can be used in this fashion. Intel's Atom is aimed at the ARM market. They targetted it for the mobile phone/handheld device market.
Sure, your random IT geek bloggers are going to talk about the latest "smallest mobile gadget" and everything like that because that's what they do. That's their job. They're not going to talk up how Dell rolls out a new line of high end laptops because guess what? It doesn't sell their blog. These people are "gadget geeks" and not IT nerds.
Microsoft's spurred change on XP has a lot to do with the fact that companies rolling out desktops want to continue rolling out desktops that they know will work with their existing infrastructure. Why move to Vista, for example, when all of your servers are running Server 2003?
Having the option there is certainly not a bad thing, and it's by no means an admittance by Microsoft that "Vista sucks". Software-wise, Vista and Server 2008 are light years beyond the Server 2003/XP combination and continue to grow.
Where Microsoft is going to grow their market, however, is through a more "peer to peer" "social" computing concept, which they are experimenting with the Live Mesh project.
The biggest problem facing very large IT environments today is how to find data that you've got stored? You can have Z:\shares\commonshares\departments\finance\finance documents\marys finance documents\2008\march\monthly sheet for April.xls (multiply this by 1000000x and this is what most IT environments have) and be completely unable to find it.
So they're working on improved searching features, and again, things like Live Mesh are going to help this even more. They're also working on Sharepoint to provide even easier management of such items.
Microsoft isn't going anywhere, Linux and Apple aren't going to squeeze them out, and the EEE PC is just a fad. As soon as the "average joe" gets his hands on one and realize it won't play his video games, he's going to take it back and that's that.
The client and what the server does and has to do are entirely separate things and pretty much have no relation with regards to each other in any way except that they communicate data back and forth for one or the other to process.
Not necessarily. It's not easier to argue that it's your bandwidth, because it's not. It's still their bandwidth, and they will still want to QoS it however they please.
Metering the bandwidth has little to do with them wanting to finance new infrastructure and a whole lot more to do with new ways to extract more revenue from their existing customer base. I mean, once you lock someone into a $150/month package deal of internet service, you can only do so much more to get money from them.
So this is how they're going to do it. Beyond this, they will still look at providing "premium" service rates for quality of service assurances.
Not to mention they will still QoS competitive products down. This will stifle innovation, as companies such as Netflix, who want to start online delivery, will now not be able to be as successful. Your freedom of choice to choose who you get content from is now limited to precisely your cable company because guess what? They aren't going to be metering your cable TV as part of the internet service.
Well, thankfully (for now) FIOS is unmetered and most certainly will be hyped by Verizon. The cable companies may rake in money for a year or two, but their greed will get the best of them and they won't know when to stop. By that time, Verizon's FIOS infrastructure will be pretty much complete in most markets and everyone will be switching.
The only reason that TW is even testing this in a limited market is probably because there is 0 competition there. I'm pretty positive in a market where there is actual competition they will lose out.
I know damn well that if Comcast starts capping my usage with a "meter" like this, particularly this low, I'll move to a lower end DSL line without a problem. Sure I'd take a speed hit, but I can live. So it takes me 45-60 minutes to DL a TV episode instead of 15 minutes.
Even so, I would like to add that users in those environments don't have to interact with each other. If your processing load (say, server-side scripts and workloads) gets too high for a particular individual box, you can load balance with another machine and generally be okay with that.
You can't simply add "another box" to the game environment for a single instance of the game server since you run into issues where users interact with each other and movement data is processed and sent between server/client. You would need software that gracefully handles transmitting this data over a high bandwidth link to another server.
It's not something I've personally seen, but again, this is why I noted it would be great to really get into the nitty gritty to see how these environments actually pull off some of the things they do and where they're headed.
True. As I said in my post, gaming ranks up there as one of the most high demand environments. An environment that a large amount of users don't necessarily ever deal with because they don't deal with data on that scale of availability.
It was just a post to put it into perspective for perhaps some readers who take video game server environments for granted because it's a video game:)
As I stated, I implied that the environment is very high demand. It's not quite like every other datacenter environment in terms of a systems architecture point of view because of the nature of the data.
Just from a systems architecture point of view, and pardon if I'm not too well versed in database architecture as some others--but in the community version of MySQL there are multiples of ways to do backups and database tracking for recovery if needed. One of which is is how to track the database data in the event of a database failure. You can backup the SQL database files, but what if the data hadn't been paged out to disk yet? Stuck in cache somewhere that got erased when the machine powered off?
This sort of issue might not be too big of a deal if Joe Schmoe's forum user account needs to be restored from a backup, but it's a big problem when his game character loses a very important item that he just obtained or an achievement he received.
And while of course that might not be a "big problem" to you because it's a video game and "nobody should care that much", it's still a big data problem nonetheless that puts it on par with say, medical information on a patient that didn't get stored properly.
I think a lot of people underestimate the requirements of running 24/7 online game servers for persistent worlds. There are definitely some serious architectural hurdles to overcome that don't necessarily exist in other areas of IT. In fact, one could say it's like "regular" IT work but on steroids.
For one, the server hardware has to be pretty powerful. Because it's doing a lot of high demand database work, everything from the lower layers of the hard disks to the file system to the software itself has to be fast and reliable.
For two, there is an increased demand for data reliability. If you manage an e-mail server and for some reason a flaw in the e-mail server doesn't pass e-mail on properly, you may be able to fix it and tell users to simply resend whatever e-mail they were sending and that's that. If a flaw comes up in the online game world that requires users to possibly "redo" something they did in the game, you will immediately lose a vast majority of your playerbase as they will see the game as unreliable.
That said also, the servers are very high demand 24/7. Even when the maintenance times are scheduled outages, people still complain. Generally in a normal business IT scenario, you can reboot a few servers here or there and nobody will notice anything during off time. So you've got change control windows that can occur 2 hours before anyone else gets to work and have to use the system, and they won't care one way or the other as long as everything's fine when they get into the office.
The databases are vast, doing constant read/write operations. Again, constantly changing database as players move about the world and interact. Exchanging items, gold, leveling up, learning new abilities.
Clustering and load balancing become very real problems for game servers. This is extremely apparent when you look at Blizzard where they number over 200 seperate, completely independent realms worldwide.
We won't even get into issues where the game world can't be dynamic and involving due to the technical limitations that we have, resulting in very limited forms of gameplay.
And again, you cannot forget the customer base. You know, if Joe cannot access e-mail for an hour because something is up with his e-mail account on the server, in most situations that's perfectly fine, he has something else he can do and you won't necessarily lose money on productivity. If Joe cannot access his online gaming character, you have the potential to lose a sale and a customer.
Not sure about anyone else here, but traffic shaping only works to an extent. One of the things regarding my Juniper Netscreen is that it has impressive traffic shaping abilities--except, it only shapes per connection direction.
Meaning, since most of the problem comes from torrent *upload* (which is an inbound connection), you won't be able to QoS that to a lower priority than your web traffic (outbound connection).
Essentially, you get about the same effectiveness as simply capping using the program's rate limiting options.
Oh yeah, likewise you won't be able to modify a program's configuration with a non-administrative notepad session if that file is located in Program Files. You aren't prompted by UAC for this, you are just denied write privileges to Program Files from notepad unless you fire it up as Administrative mode (which then prompts UAC as you fire up notepad).
Vista's UAC prompt only occurs when you need to perform administrative functions. This includes installing applications (C:\Program Files), modifying system variables (Device Manager, etc.)
Most Control Panel applets come up with a UAC prompt. Most software installation comes up with a UAC prompt initially.
You need to actively run an Administrative Command Prompt in Vista in order to do things like ipconfig release/renew, chkdsk, defrag, and other tools.
MMC pops up a UAC prompt. (If you don't know why this is the case then you haven't used Windows extensively).
Regedit pops up a UAC prompt. Same goes for Regedt32.
Applications that write configuration data to Program Files may fail unless you run them in Administrative mode. Same goes for applications that write in HKLM. For example, World of Warcraft writes its location registry key to HKLM, which is not allowed to happen (silently) unless you run the executable as an Administrator. There's no UAC prompt for it, just UAC blocks it from occuring.
This separation from running as "global administrator" is new to a lot of Windows users, but I've used Vista for years and this is what I've found.
I rarely get UAC prompts except in the case of installing applications.
Generally as far as I can tell applications trigger UAC when they write to the registry (and even then I believe they can write to HKCU but not HKLM) or write to Program Files or the Windows DIR. Beyond that, there is no issue.
Or if you try to make system changes.
You cannot run "ipconfig/release" from a non-administrative command prompt either. Nor can you run chkdsk and other system level tools.
The problem actually comes in when applications try to become "portable" and install in Program Files. Since the application does not own its own directory as they do in Linux, Windows won't allow an app to write to configuration files stored within there.
The proper method is that application configuration should be stored in the User's home directory.
Some stuff behaves this way in Linux (irssi stores some config in each user's home DIR), while others do not (apache config is stored in apache's home dir since apache owns it).
Generally it's not too bad though, just a pain for people who don't understand this simple concept and aren't used to it.
Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, Inc., 464 U.S. 417 (1984)[1], also known as the "Betamax case", was a decision by the Supreme Court of the United States which ruled that the making of individual copies of complete television shows for purposes of time-shifting does not constitute copyright infringement, but is fair use.
Doesn't mean they have to allow you to do it, it just means that they can't use the courts to prevent you from doing so. This case also protects device manufacturers.
Again, it doesn't mean that the content producers and device manufacturers can't work together to come up with something if they choose. This is clearly what Microsoft has done.
So if you don't like it, use a Tivo and that's that. I don't see what the whining is for.
Why is everyone blaming Microsoft? While the broadcast flag is certainly not a required thing to honor, it is something the content providers wanted and something that doesn't really negatively affect consumers unless the content provider wishes so.
The fact of the matter is: It's not up to Microsoft to decide for you NOR the content provider. Microsoft can't tell the content provider "screw you" because you want to skip by some commercials on TV.
Microsoft isn't a champion of consumers, nor is any other company. They are out to get your money. That's their primary goal, that's why they exist.
Without support for DRM in Windows, we wouldn't have the ability to watch things such as blu-ray. This will become more important as the drives become cheaper and people start loading them up in their HTPC setups.
What do you want? To just not watch blu-ray movies?
You could go and download the HD movies you want (like I'm sure most people here do), but if you want to make a good faith effort to stay on the "legal" side of things, these technologies need to be in place by Microsoft.
It wasn't their decision, after all. They need to attract content providers to have a good reason to support the PC platform, AND they need to attract consumers.
Even if massive DRM was removed from say, Blu-Ray, tomorrow, it would not increase the sales of players nor movies. Why? Because DRM isn't as big of a "problem" as some people on these comments seem to think it is.
That said, let's look at the law here. You have no "constitutional" rights in the US to do whatever you want with whatever you want. You have no "rights" to download, store, digitally alter media produced by someone else if they don't want you to.
If you want the ability to do that, stand up to your government and push them for laws that favor your ability to do this more.
But hey, then that puts more "control in the hands of that evil, terrible thing we call government!"
Here's an idea.
Build your own PC!
Yes, that's right, build your own. The fact of the matter is these vendors are offering what a vast majority of their customers want. Just because you want to be the "rebel" and "bitch" about Microsoft.
You'd probably end up installing a pirated copy of Windows on there as a dual boot or a VM anyway.
You may as well just take the $30-$40 Windows license and be done with it.
April 30th, 2007 - Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC) were informed of
this issue.
March 18th, 2008 - Microsoft releases a service pack for Windows Vista (Vista
SP1), which includes a fix for this issue.
April 8th, 2008 - Microsoft issues a fix ([19]) for Windows Vista, Windows XP SP2,
Windows 2003 and Windows 2000 SP4. The fix is downloadable at Microsoftâ(TM)s website. Simultaneously, Trusteer discloses the vulnerability to the public (in the
form of this document).
Also, as stated above, the scenarios required to pull this off are pointless. If someone is sniffing your traffic in your switched network, they already have access to your network that could invoke far more problems than simple DNS poisoning.
Slashdot Mirror
But your method has one glaring flaw. Cost and complexity. And planning.
One of the really odd things about p2p technology is that it also distributes the cost of distribution. Whereas you could say the ISP could add more, add more this, add more that--in some and many cases this becomes cost prohibitve to have to keep up that infrastructure, especially if the cost is burdened by one entity.
By using peer to peer technology, that cost is distributed across all of the users simiarly--not equally, but similarly. And in torrent's case, it's also pretty good at making sure users that can use higher bandwidth also need to incur a higher cost. If you can distribute more, the protocol allocates more to give you more to distribute.
It's kind of automatic in nature, self healing, distributive, with no single points of failure and no glaring flaws.
The only reason this is even "argued" is because ISPs didn't build the infrastructure to handle this. And the only other reason this is argued is because a lot of people are selfish and feel the cost shouldn't be burdened by them.
But I'd rather have say, 10 cents here, 20 cents there, than the ISP assuming I'm always going to use 20 cents and charge me accordingly for access to their distribution servers.
aj50:
You fail to address the situation that newsgroup access is "A to B" distribution. In the event that A dies, then B has nowhere to get the file from. Sure, you could cluster A1, A2, A3 and if A1 dies you still have A2 and A3 to deliver to B. But in the event the route between A and B dies, A1-A3 now cannot deliver to B.
Then you still have the situation of A to B being limited on bandwidth. A to B might be fast, but A to B & C immediately cuts the bandwidth in half. You have to hope that B and C use their bandwidth differently or at different times. Perhaps B uses A's bandwidth during the daytime hours, perhaps C uses the bandwidth during nighttime hours.
P2P distribution provides a network that is vastly scalable and redundant. It solves all of these problems dynamically. Mesh networking provides the greatest redundancy for distribution, which is far better than a simple logical star setup (which is what you propose).
If bits and pieces of a file reside on A, B, and C, and D comes in to get that file--He can get it from A, B, or C. A could drop off the map, B and C can still dstribute the same file to D. It's far less likely that A, B, and C are going to disappear all at the same time.
And not only is it fantastic for redundancy, there is *0* drop. In the event your news server dropped, you would have to make a new connection to a new news server that is online and restart the transfer. In a p2p mesh distribution model, the only thing you would see if A went offline? A drop in performance as A is no longer there. But if B and C weren't at full capacity, you could increase the load on B & C to give to D by halves.
There's really no way you can argue AGAINST this method of distribution. Really. The reason ISPs are complaining is that they over sold their infrastructure.
Tony:
The very fact that you stated "Bittorrent is slower than other methods" of file distribution shows that you have very little grasp on file distribution and limits to bandwidth.
I've had to deal with it directly, as a content producer.
There is not very much more efficient distribution out there than a peer to peer model.
And how many people use their ISPs news servers to get the content they want? There are various news sites that are extremely popular due to retention time and access to content for a reason.
Zil:
I take it you're new to the internet. USENET is still a point-to-point protocol from A to B, and this is where the problem comes in. You have a significant amount of traffic going over that single point.
With torrent and peer-to-peer distribution, you have smaller amounts of traffic coming from many different points.
Load Balancing, Clustering, P2P--are all technologies favored by the IT industry. If your distribution node goes down, nobody cares because you have others. There's no single point of failure in a peer-to-peer distribution system.
P2P should be used in pretty much every scenario requiring high bandwidth of highly popular media. (Which is actually fairly common on the internet). This drastically will reduce bandwidth costs for the people paying and improve end-user experience.
If we had Torrent before FilePlanet went pay, they probably would have never gone in that direction.
Unfortunately this headline is very sensationalist, and provides a very limited scope of the entirety IT industry as a whole.
Basically, the person who blogged this has been reading too many internet blogs surrounding these products.
Intel's ATOM CPU was not aimed at the "UMPC" market, though most certainly can be used in this fashion. Intel's Atom is aimed at the ARM market. They targetted it for the mobile phone/handheld device market.
Sure, your random IT geek bloggers are going to talk about the latest "smallest mobile gadget" and everything like that because that's what they do. That's their job. They're not going to talk up how Dell rolls out a new line of high end laptops because guess what? It doesn't sell their blog. These people are "gadget geeks" and not IT nerds.
Microsoft's spurred change on XP has a lot to do with the fact that companies rolling out desktops want to continue rolling out desktops that they know will work with their existing infrastructure. Why move to Vista, for example, when all of your servers are running Server 2003?
Having the option there is certainly not a bad thing, and it's by no means an admittance by Microsoft that "Vista sucks". Software-wise, Vista and Server 2008 are light years beyond the Server 2003/XP combination and continue to grow.
Where Microsoft is going to grow their market, however, is through a more "peer to peer" "social" computing concept, which they are experimenting with the Live Mesh project.
The biggest problem facing very large IT environments today is how to find data that you've got stored? You can have Z:\shares\commonshares\departments\finance\finance documents\marys finance documents\2008\march\monthly sheet for April.xls (multiply this by 1000000x and this is what most IT environments have) and be completely unable to find it.
So they're working on improved searching features, and again, things like Live Mesh are going to help this even more. They're also working on Sharepoint to provide even easier management of such items.
Microsoft isn't going anywhere, Linux and Apple aren't going to squeeze them out, and the EEE PC is just a fad. As soon as the "average joe" gets his hands on one and realize it won't play his video games, he's going to take it back and that's that.
The client and what the server does and has to do are entirely separate things and pretty much have no relation with regards to each other in any way except that they communicate data back and forth for one or the other to process.
Not necessarily. It's not easier to argue that it's your bandwidth, because it's not. It's still their bandwidth, and they will still want to QoS it however they please.
Metering the bandwidth has little to do with them wanting to finance new infrastructure and a whole lot more to do with new ways to extract more revenue from their existing customer base. I mean, once you lock someone into a $150/month package deal of internet service, you can only do so much more to get money from them.
So this is how they're going to do it. Beyond this, they will still look at providing "premium" service rates for quality of service assurances.
Not to mention they will still QoS competitive products down. This will stifle innovation, as companies such as Netflix, who want to start online delivery, will now not be able to be as successful. Your freedom of choice to choose who you get content from is now limited to precisely your cable company because guess what? They aren't going to be metering your cable TV as part of the internet service.
Well, thankfully (for now) FIOS is unmetered and most certainly will be hyped by Verizon. The cable companies may rake in money for a year or two, but their greed will get the best of them and they won't know when to stop. By that time, Verizon's FIOS infrastructure will be pretty much complete in most markets and everyone will be switching.
The only reason that TW is even testing this in a limited market is probably because there is 0 competition there. I'm pretty positive in a market where there is actual competition they will lose out.
I know damn well that if Comcast starts capping my usage with a "meter" like this, particularly this low, I'll move to a lower end DSL line without a problem. Sure I'd take a speed hit, but I can live. So it takes me 45-60 minutes to DL a TV episode instead of 15 minutes.
Even so, I would like to add that users in those environments don't have to interact with each other. If your processing load (say, server-side scripts and workloads) gets too high for a particular individual box, you can load balance with another machine and generally be okay with that.
You can't simply add "another box" to the game environment for a single instance of the game server since you run into issues where users interact with each other and movement data is processed and sent between server/client. You would need software that gracefully handles transmitting this data over a high bandwidth link to another server.
It's not something I've personally seen, but again, this is why I noted it would be great to really get into the nitty gritty to see how these environments actually pull off some of the things they do and where they're headed.
True. As I said in my post, gaming ranks up there as one of the most high demand environments. An environment that a large amount of users don't necessarily ever deal with because they don't deal with data on that scale of availability.
:)
It was just a post to put it into perspective for perhaps some readers who take video game server environments for granted because it's a video game
Jellybob:
As I stated, I implied that the environment is very high demand. It's not quite like every other datacenter environment in terms of a systems architecture point of view because of the nature of the data.
Just from a systems architecture point of view, and pardon if I'm not too well versed in database architecture as some others--but in the community version of MySQL there are multiples of ways to do backups and database tracking for recovery if needed. One of which is is how to track the database data in the event of a database failure. You can backup the SQL database files, but what if the data hadn't been paged out to disk yet? Stuck in cache somewhere that got erased when the machine powered off?
This sort of issue might not be too big of a deal if Joe Schmoe's forum user account needs to be restored from a backup, but it's a big problem when his game character loses a very important item that he just obtained or an achievement he received.
And while of course that might not be a "big problem" to you because it's a video game and "nobody should care that much", it's still a big data problem nonetheless that puts it on par with say, medical information on a patient that didn't get stored properly.
I think a lot of people underestimate the requirements of running 24/7 online game servers for persistent worlds. There are definitely some serious architectural hurdles to overcome that don't necessarily exist in other areas of IT. In fact, one could say it's like "regular" IT work but on steroids.
For one, the server hardware has to be pretty powerful. Because it's doing a lot of high demand database work, everything from the lower layers of the hard disks to the file system to the software itself has to be fast and reliable.
For two, there is an increased demand for data reliability. If you manage an e-mail server and for some reason a flaw in the e-mail server doesn't pass e-mail on properly, you may be able to fix it and tell users to simply resend whatever e-mail they were sending and that's that. If a flaw comes up in the online game world that requires users to possibly "redo" something they did in the game, you will immediately lose a vast majority of your playerbase as they will see the game as unreliable.
That said also, the servers are very high demand 24/7. Even when the maintenance times are scheduled outages, people still complain. Generally in a normal business IT scenario, you can reboot a few servers here or there and nobody will notice anything during off time. So you've got change control windows that can occur 2 hours before anyone else gets to work and have to use the system, and they won't care one way or the other as long as everything's fine when they get into the office.
The databases are vast, doing constant read/write operations. Again, constantly changing database as players move about the world and interact. Exchanging items, gold, leveling up, learning new abilities.
Clustering and load balancing become very real problems for game servers. This is extremely apparent when you look at Blizzard where they number over 200 seperate, completely independent realms worldwide.
We won't even get into issues where the game world can't be dynamic and involving due to the technical limitations that we have, resulting in very limited forms of gameplay.
And again, you cannot forget the customer base. You know, if Joe cannot access e-mail for an hour because something is up with his e-mail account on the server, in most situations that's perfectly fine, he has something else he can do and you won't necessarily lose money on productivity. If Joe cannot access his online gaming character, you have the potential to lose a sale and a customer.
Very high demand indeed.
Not sure about anyone else here, but traffic shaping only works to an extent. One of the things regarding my Juniper Netscreen is that it has impressive traffic shaping abilities--except, it only shapes per connection direction.
Meaning, since most of the problem comes from torrent *upload* (which is an inbound connection), you won't be able to QoS that to a lower priority than your web traffic (outbound connection).
Essentially, you get about the same effectiveness as simply capping using the program's rate limiting options.
Oh yeah, likewise you won't be able to modify a program's configuration with a non-administrative notepad session if that file is located in Program Files. You aren't prompted by UAC for this, you are just denied write privileges to Program Files from notepad unless you fire it up as Administrative mode (which then prompts UAC as you fire up notepad).
Vista's UAC prompt only occurs when you need to perform administrative functions. This includes installing applications (C:\Program Files), modifying system variables (Device Manager, etc.)
Most Control Panel applets come up with a UAC prompt. Most software installation comes up with a UAC prompt initially.
You need to actively run an Administrative Command Prompt in Vista in order to do things like ipconfig release/renew, chkdsk, defrag, and other tools.
MMC pops up a UAC prompt. (If you don't know why this is the case then you haven't used Windows extensively).
Regedit pops up a UAC prompt. Same goes for Regedt32.
Applications that write configuration data to Program Files may fail unless you run them in Administrative mode. Same goes for applications that write in HKLM. For example, World of Warcraft writes its location registry key to HKLM, which is not allowed to happen (silently) unless you run the executable as an Administrator. There's no UAC prompt for it, just UAC blocks it from occuring.
This separation from running as "global administrator" is new to a lot of Windows users, but I've used Vista for years and this is what I've found.
Perhaps a little video demonstrating the new UAC feature would have been in Microsoft's best interest.
I rarely get UAC prompts except in the case of installing applications.
/release" from a non-administrative command prompt either. Nor can you run chkdsk and other system level tools.
Generally as far as I can tell applications trigger UAC when they write to the registry (and even then I believe they can write to HKCU but not HKLM) or write to Program Files or the Windows DIR. Beyond that, there is no issue.
Or if you try to make system changes.
You cannot run "ipconfig
The problem actually comes in when applications try to become "portable" and install in Program Files. Since the application does not own its own directory as they do in Linux, Windows won't allow an app to write to configuration files stored within there.
The proper method is that application configuration should be stored in the User's home directory.
Some stuff behaves this way in Linux (irssi stores some config in each user's home DIR), while others do not (apache config is stored in apache's home dir since apache owns it).
Generally it's not too bad though, just a pain for people who don't understand this simple concept and aren't used to it.
Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, Inc., 464 U.S. 417 (1984)[1], also known as the "Betamax case", was a decision by the Supreme Court of the United States which ruled that the making of individual copies of complete television shows for purposes of time-shifting does not constitute copyright infringement, but is fair use.
Doesn't mean they have to allow you to do it, it just means that they can't use the courts to prevent you from doing so. This case also protects device manufacturers.
Again, it doesn't mean that the content producers and device manufacturers can't work together to come up with something if they choose. This is clearly what Microsoft has done.
So if you don't like it, use a Tivo and that's that. I don't see what the whining is for.
Why is everyone blaming Microsoft? While the broadcast flag is certainly not a required thing to honor, it is something the content providers wanted and something that doesn't really negatively affect consumers unless the content provider wishes so.
The fact of the matter is: It's not up to Microsoft to decide for you NOR the content provider. Microsoft can't tell the content provider "screw you" because you want to skip by some commercials on TV.
Microsoft isn't a champion of consumers, nor is any other company. They are out to get your money. That's their primary goal, that's why they exist.
Without support for DRM in Windows, we wouldn't have the ability to watch things such as blu-ray. This will become more important as the drives become cheaper and people start loading them up in their HTPC setups.
What do you want? To just not watch blu-ray movies?
You could go and download the HD movies you want (like I'm sure most people here do), but if you want to make a good faith effort to stay on the "legal" side of things, these technologies need to be in place by Microsoft.
It wasn't their decision, after all. They need to attract content providers to have a good reason to support the PC platform, AND they need to attract consumers.
Even if massive DRM was removed from say, Blu-Ray, tomorrow, it would not increase the sales of players nor movies. Why? Because DRM isn't as big of a "problem" as some people on these comments seem to think it is.
That said, let's look at the law here. You have no "constitutional" rights in the US to do whatever you want with whatever you want. You have no "rights" to download, store, digitally alter media produced by someone else if they don't want you to.
If you want the ability to do that, stand up to your government and push them for laws that favor your ability to do this more.
But hey, then that puts more "control in the hands of that evil, terrible thing we call government!"
Can't have it both ways.
Here's an idea. Build your own PC! Yes, that's right, build your own. The fact of the matter is these vendors are offering what a vast majority of their customers want. Just because you want to be the "rebel" and "bitch" about Microsoft. You'd probably end up installing a pirated copy of Windows on there as a dual boot or a VM anyway. You may as well just take the $30-$40 Windows license and be done with it.
April 30th, 2007 - Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC) were informed of this issue.
March 18th, 2008 - Microsoft releases a service pack for Windows Vista (Vista SP1), which includes a fix for this issue.
April 8th, 2008 - Microsoft issues a fix ([19]) for Windows Vista, Windows XP SP2, Windows 2003 and Windows 2000 SP4. The fix is downloadable at Microsoftâ(TM)s website. Simultaneously, Trusteer discloses the vulnerability to the public (in the form of this document).
Also, as stated above, the scenarios required to pull this off are pointless. If someone is sniffing your traffic in your switched network, they already have access to your network that could invoke far more problems than simple DNS poisoning.
Exactly.
That's not necessarily true, especially if the Gates' could get the OS for cheaper, heavily discounted, or just subsidize it themselves.
The device does not need to be "open" nor does the software.