It's no secret that most states are hurting when it comes to their most recent budgets. Taxing the internet sounds good on paper for most of these politicians, and in a lot of ways it's just another form of locaization.
When most people purchase, they do so with the expectation of delivery charges. Catalogs are similiar. Whatever you don't pay in state tax, you will normally pay for in shipping fees.
The "Use Tax" is absurd. If the states which wish to impose sales tax on internet purchases, it should only to ONLY the stae in which the company resides. This would make states compete for the business of such companies. States would soon learn it's far better to not charge end users, but directly tax these companies earnings their the income of their employees.
Yet another form of short term legislation, which can't see beyond the next hill.
https://www.donotcall.gov/FAQ/FAQBusiness.aspx#W ho
One caveat: if a consumer asks a company not to call, the company may not call, even if there is an established business relationship. Indeed, a company may not call a consumer - regardless of whether the consumer's number is on the registry - if the consumer has asked to be put on the company's own do not call list.
Basically if you ask them not to call when you sign up for their services, they are legally obligated to NOT call you.
I've had telemarketers attempt to bullshit me by saying, "we're the phone company, we're allowed to call you", at which point I throw them the riot act. It's BS, and they obviously have only read as far as they wanted to read, and no further.
>> Its good to have diversity in your language choices, because different languages have different strengths and weaknesses, and having a good command of more than one can often make you much better, individually.
One issue is that rexx when compared to perl, pales in comparison. There are reasons for diversity with regard to differnt language styles, as each serves a niche, but you're kidding yourself if you think rexx serves any purpose for future scripting development.
There are reasons for python, perl, tk/tcl, C, C++, C#, java, lisp, and even smalltalk... but rexx? Lacking in the strengths of perl, and yet having more glaring weaknesses, with little in the way of development and integration that perl already has in a stronger and more up to date fashion.
Only reason to learn rexx is to help support previously written applications that would require too much time and effort to rewrite in a better support scripting language.
How many people are outraged by spam and telemarketers, but wouldn't bat an eyelash to getting junk mail? There's an obvious difference, the cost of sending is placed upon the advertiser, rather than the recipient when it comes to US postal, it's also far less intrusive.
Let's face it though, if it's not bills, what else comes in your snail mail inbox? More and more people are using email to replace snail mail, even during the Iraq conflict, email and phone were used to convey messages to friends and families. It is because society has relegated these forms of communication that we find spam and telemarketers so abhorrent. They intrude upon our private lives, take away significant portions of our time.
Parsing mail logs on an MTA I run for several domains, the amount of incoming spam has been increasing steadily. For people who abhor RBL's (and what they stand for), let me tell you it's getting to the point where the bandwidth constraints for spam are growing to the point where RBL lists must be considered, if only to prevent the levels of bandwidth usage for delivering the data portion of the email into the MTA, only to be rejected by another filter at the user's inbox level.
I get sick and tired of people saying, "they're fine with spam", or "they're getting used to it". This selfish myopia is exactly what's wrong with this country and how it legislates laws. There are technical reasons as to why spam has become problematic, and imposing some 'tariff or charge' upon the general populace won't deter people from going offshore to peddle their message, and furthermore having advertisers flood my inbox.
Bandwidth isn't cheap. There's a lot of websites that usually charge for their content, or provide a captive audience that allows for ads to be directed. Email is not a captive audience, and it's assanine to assume as such.
Who's the brainchild that comes up with these emails that attempt to bypass filters explicitly put into place to stop them? Do these obvious failures at sentient thought processes understand that people don't want to see their message, and attempting to go around filters only pisses people off more. It's these same brain surgeons who came up with popup advertising, and you have to wonder what levels of cloning testing was done to create these marketing wizards.
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Now, he may be serious with his accusations against open source. His message borders on the evangelical against open source software? A proprietary, Microsoft zealot, which is no better or worse than a rabid Linux Zealot?
There's already a rebuttal editoral on Devx.com's main webpage by another Engineer there.
http://www.devx.com/opensource/Article/20135
Now as to whether this was some kind of publicity stunt to garner more traffic to their website, since before today I'd never heard of them... they've been quite successful. They've probably seen more traffic today than in quite a while, but it seems likes an infantile cry for attention.
Why not? It's obviously that absurd and completely ridiculous claims can be made for public perusal (aka SCO) and gather quite a bit of the media spotlight. It's a precedent already set in our culture that favors glitz and glamor over substance.
>> However, in the United States of America, Microsoft has never been able to trademark the term 'Windows' in any fashion.
Actually, both Microsoft and Windows are (R) registered trademarks of Microsoft within the United States. If you pull out your CD's you'll notice that both have an (R) by them...
How many people really get involved with politics unless it affects them? It's the most common remark, that people don't care unless they benefit. From the top/down, politics is about personal gain, whether it be Senators and/or Reps who must juggle the good of the nation versus that of their own constituency. You'll often see the same in MMO's, where the loudest voices are quite often those who have something to eitehr gain or lose.
The largest outcry of customer response in MMO's have typically been the extreme gamers with an agenda, or those who currently reside in an operational game that feel either disenfranchised or threatened by the development cycle.
During game development, you have the RP'ers who want elements that allow them the freedom to practice role playing, although each person may have a completely separate intrepretation of this. You'll have the hardcore players who'll want rather strict rules of PvP, as cutthroat as possible. You'll have other players, the perennial drifters from game to game, who want the perfect utopia.
Once the game has been launched, you'll have factions built within the gaming community. The vocal components will voice their concerns over whether certain aspects are unbalancing. In a class style system (which most are), you'll have classes, which fearing nerfs will be quite adamant in professing their perceived flaws so that they will pose less of a target to the masses. You'll have others, who might feel their class is disenfranchised and not seeing the same benefits from the company, wanting dev attention.
This is fine for MMO's where not only is "all characters are created equal" the creed, it's also, "all characters must remain equal, regardless of time, effort or ambition". MMO's cater far more towards the Lowest Common Denominator than you'll find in modern society. You can't take these same concepts of lowering the bar of achievement and transferring them to the real world, otherwise you end up with schools that don't teach children how to compete.
Basically people are only willing to speak up when it benefits them, since our "Commercialistic Democracy" as a whole centers around being selfish. People will cater to that which benefits themselves the most, and given a choice, they don't care unless it affects them.
Those who typically have an agenda are those you normally fear the most. People with a single item or issues they wish to push through. Yes, the US is founded upon fervent idealism, but far too often you have passion coupled with politics. Political issues that are far more emotional than objective, and yet you're creating laws for the populace. One thing you want to avoid is kneejerk "nerfs" in the real world, that purely emotional, otherwise you end up with such far reaching laws like the Patriot Act.
I believe one of the major reasons for moving towards R5 for Lotus Notes was the "web"-alization of the client. IBM and Lotus both toted the new R5 client as being just a beefed up web browser.
There was also a strong push towards Domino, a web frontend to the actual data, and if you're just using Notes as an email/calender/organizer, Domino could fill that need. One of the problems I've seen though is that Domino tends to require more horsepower on the backend server.
There was a R4 client that ran on AIX, so there was code out there. I believe most of the original code for the client as originally written on AIX, then they moved all development over to Wintel side of the house. A lot of IBM's projects were coming out on Windows, and it takes times for companies to shift their development strategies.
There's been a lot of discussion on how Raph 'failed' both UO and SWG. His concept of what he thinks players want is similiar to how you treat an ant farm. The issue that most players take with this... noone wants to be treated like a worker drone ant, and to be told point blank, well that's a slap in the face.
Raph should take a close look at FFXI, and remind himself that people want to play a game. The word MMORPG ends in G, and that should be the most important aspect, not creating some sort of microcosm of human society. People often play their games as a form of escapism, to get away from the everyday world. They don't want every aspect of reality within this world. Players "pay to play", this isn't a MUD, where devs can play as gods. Customers are just that, and a clash of egos between players and devs does more to hurt the genre.
Another thing people want is content. Not make your own world type content, but real content, that they've paid for. The idea is that MMO's should be worlds built for players, not built BY players. Vocal minorities among players will say one thing, but it's often "pie in the sky" ideals. The vast majority of players will determine what they want, aka "Skinner Box" mentalities via money they've spent.
One of the primary concerns for a multi-node cluster is insured latency among all components within the cluster. It doesn't have to be the fastest, it just needs to insured exacting timing for latency across all nodes. IBM can do this with their "wormhole" switch routing on SP and has done this with Myranet on their Intel X-series clusters.
From most of my reading with Infiniband, it was designed from the ground up as a NAS style solution, than for large multi-node cluster computing. I'm curious as to if they have any issues with cluster latency.
http://www.nwfusion.com/news/2002/1211sandia.htm l
The primary timings and white papers I've seen published for Infiniband have been for small clustered filesystem access. Although it's burst rate is much higher than Myranet, it's hard to find any raw retails for their multiple node latency normalization.
I hope it scales, since Intel's solution appears to be less cost prohibitive than some of the other solutions offered on the market, and would really open up the market even for smaller clusters (16-36 node) for business use.
Regardless of how omniscient you would like game developers to be, they are often underestimating the ability of several thousand rabid gamers, and to what extents a player will go to in order to gain an advantage of edge. No amount of testing can simulate the hundreds of man hours of play that goes into each game week of an online game.
This article discusses Blizzard, and yet the biggest names they cite to leave Blizzard were part of Blizzard North (Diablo fame). There's several games and companies under the VU standard, including 2 or 3 MMO's. There doesn't seem to be an issue with someone buying Blizzard, there seems to be an issue with VU using them as a carrot to sell off the rest of their gaming unit.
Dr. Bartle was a trend setter for a genre that is still in it's growth stage. Much like how Gordon Moore was able to set words to a trend that was formulating before him, Bartle attempted to attach theories to a microcosm of online societies.
Without intending to, I may have damaged the reputation of Dr. Bartle and of his book, and I feel an obligation to set the record straight with an actual review of his book.
Nice to know that Dave attempts to offset his first treatise with an almost narcissistic comment. A thorough review of Dave's background, as well as following his comments on various boards when he worked for Mythic Entertainment will show a clear disdain for his predecessors within the industry. An egocentrism that seems to permeate most "Devs" for online games that goes all the way down to MUD's.
Bartle is not a Fred Brooks or Don Knuth, but his background, his past accomplishments and achievements does tend to merit more weighing to his analysis and prose.
Rackshack offers a lot of bandwidth, and if you know what you're doing, you can do whatever you want with that server. I co-opt'ed for a server with a friend, and we parcel out webspace to various friends, in return they chip in for a portion of the cost which lowers the monthly cost of the server to $20 for us.
They have some other options if you don't want to administrate the server yourselves. I like it since it's basically a rented server that they provided to us.
For anyone who uses Ogg Vorbis, Netrek is the reason why the files end in.ogg.
In "modern" terms, to "ogg" is similiar to "zerg". Before there was zerg, there was ogg. And nothing grants satisifaction like "dooshing" a starbase.
Netrek was team versus team "capture the flag" over the internet before first person shooters became all the rage. It was great back in 1992, I still remember playing on Paradise servers back in 1993.
It was a relatively simple concept that mostly college kids played. Simple, and yet elegant.
Recently I did some googling to find out what happened to it, and it appears for the most part that netrek has died off with the advent of most of the online games available. The low tech sprite based graphics just doesn't appeal to kids nowadays.
I can "feel good" right up until the point where I'm patching my MTA yet again.
Say what you want about Dan, his product (qmail) hasn't changed for several years.
For something as "simple" as a MTA, there's no reason to recompile a fix every few months due to "yet another" buffer overflow. In the corporate world, this becomes doubly important.
Postfix is relatively secure, compared to sendmail.
I have used TightVNC with max compression, 8-bit display and 800x600 resolution over a 26.4baud modem with reasonably useful results. It was far better than using plain X11-protocol (Exceed) for graphical applications.
After a comparison of several commerical products at work, including both Exceed and VNC, VNC won out. Considering you can run VNC through a tunnel SSH connection, that could also setup your compression, what is so "out" about it?
Quite often the argument is "who has the bigger number"? The PC processor is often attractive due to it's higher number versus... a Mac. Obviously it isn't an "apples to apple" comparison, different architectures rarely are.
The number of cycles for your pipeline, versus the number of concurrent threads of execution through the same pipelines?
I've always considered the intel family to be a very racy and fast sports cars. Versus other processors which tend to be a little slower trucks. They don't go as fast, but they carry more payload. In today's market of "multi-tasking", well written programs can take advantage of a processor that doesn't get bogged down with "stalled" pipes. Also the frequency can only be "cranked up" so high...
There is also a focus on where is Adobe commiting their development work. There is a lot to be said for programs written and developed natively, versus those which must be ported over to other platforms. Carmack originally developed on the Mac first for Q3, due to the inherent limitations for that platform. That made porting it to Linux and Windows much easier.
Too often the HZ on the processor is used as a crutch to explain away the lack of development know-how (or lack of funding) for multiple Operating Systems. There are so many products on the market today that are only support on 2k/NT. Sadly any port to another OS is dismally lacking... and the platform is blamed for this.
Is Adobe still focusing the majority of their development on Apple? Was the conversion from OS9 to OSX too difficult for them to handle? Are they writing native code? I think it was reckless for Adobe to make the blanket statement that PC is faster, and sounds more like some internal pissing match between the companies.
I originally chose this shell back in '92 for the right hand prompt. A 'spiff' feature for a shell chocked full of features. It was also the first shell to have a truly programmable completion. It has all the interactive add-on's for tcsh, with the base template built off of Korn Shell (so you don't have issues with scripting in something separate from a Bourne derivative).
The z-shell is so filled with features at this point, it's nearly become the "emacs" of shells, and yet, it's memory footprint for the same tasks is smaller than either bash or tcsh.
How much can you reliably run through an SSH connection to w2k, and still do what you need to be done?
To a certain limited extent, it's possible depending upon your application (aka a w2k DNS server). But as far as convenience of use for most major vendor apps on w2k, ssh isn't viable, unless either MS or someone else is able to encapsulate a PC anywhere through a tunneled ssh connection (similiar to what you can do with VNC).
The high end niche is marketed more by the hardware than the software. The technology of LPAR's on the Regatta (high end rs6k) is nearly on par with mainframe technology. It's also at a price point of over a quarter of a million (after discounts).
Linux is not an Enterprise level Unix. That isn't its niche. It's an OS for low-mid range hardware.
The argument for Unix versus Windows has been... Unix is expensive hardware with cheap (nearly free software). Windows is the exact opposite, cheap and redundant hardware with expensive software licensing. Trying to license Microsoft SQL can be as onerous as trying to negotiate an Oracle contract.
Are there other things available in Enterprise Linux? Sure, it's called licensed software. Enterprise level companies are extremely leary of deploying software unless it's licensed. They don't want to hear the word "free". "Free" in their minds often means there is noone to sue.
Also with corporate enterprise, there is a sincere fear of employee empowerment. No company wants to be held hostage by their employees. With Linux, the power is within the administrator to have full control over the operating system. Most companies have no way of watching the watchers to this level, especially with knowledgable, disgruntled employees. It's not a sound argument, but it's one that is often tossed out there.
Other more obvious things include mature LVM (logical volume management). Being able to add and grow filesystems on the fly. Active and mature SAN access. The VMM has come a long way from the 2.x kernel, but still needs to play catch-up.
You realize the ideal setup for an AIX 5.x server? You optimize the server (performance wise) for ZERO percent paging space. There are certain tools that come with the operating system at the kernel level you just won't find with Linux unless you're a kernel hacker... Companies don't have the luxury of hiring kernel hackers to administrate their systems.
For a person who's beta tested and played AC2, Daoc, EQ and AO, this decision rackles most people.
It's seen as an obvious money grap decision to appease the masses of casual players. AC2 still has 3 base professions, with 6 specializations. It STILL gives you the option to play more then one character per server.
DAOC came out and decided to restrict your play to only 4 characters per regular server (the hardcore PvP and test servers were allowed more), they have since changed this rule since the competition offers more.
If this game honestly wants the staying power, and appease the masses who actually play, not just the Star Wars fanbois, they'll allow more then the SCS.
"New Concept" indead. Star Wars: Galaxies, Episode 4, A New Hype.
Of course, anyone who pays $$$ for modern Sun kit is an idiot if they want to run anything other than Solaris on it, because Solaris, as well as being a solid and powerful Unix implementation in its own right, is designed from the ground up for SPARC hardware, it doesn't have to make any compromises for compatibility's sake.
You realize that OpenBSD's focus is primarily security. Having spent 3 years running Solaris, and seeing some of the blatantly brain dead buffer overflows demonstrated, it's not that hard to understand why some people would rather run OpenBSD.
Anyone remember back in 1995, Solaris 2.6, when the stack crushing bug arose, and how long it took Sun to fix this issue? This was AFTER a publically available patch was created outside of Sun as a workaround, while we waiting for the "official" patch to arise.
Theo said he would prefer to run openbsd.org on Ultrasparc architecture, since it provides certain levels of hardware security, from following the thread on the BSD forums.
He's not exactly the easiest person to get along with, but to be honest, this is on par for Sun's dealings with the Open Source commnuity. Sun at times deals with the community like Digital did back in the day. And like Digital, I can honestly see Sun fading into the sunset, from an operating system perspective.
AIX / HP provide the enterprise level OS's, with several features that are not found in the core of Solaris. AIX with 5.2 has attempted to bridge the gap with Linux, in providing a common environment shared with Open Source applications, including having RPM's integrated with their own package management (as a side note, AIX's LPP package management is more sound then RPM's, IMHO).
Linux has been edging into the low-to-mid end market, even stealing Sun's thunder with Oracle buy-in. Sun is being squeezed in the middle, and must decide whether they want to focus on the high-end enterprise, or the middle tier web/app/database servers.
AIX has it's association with Websphere and DB2. Sun has to decide whether it's operating system is worth the cost, or whether they are a hardware company. Unfortunately as long as companies feel they must only run specific OS'es on their Hardware (Apple), they will continue to relegate themselves to a niche market that is ultimately self-limiting.
IBM still has the monopoly on Z-series Mainframes (Amdahl pulled out of that market). Their philosophy has always been expensive hardware, cheap to free software, and hefty support and services contracts. They make their continued money through licenses and services.
Unfortunately I've found job scheduling commercial software to often be less reliable then cron/at jobs. There are a few nice features available to them that is not available in cron/at.
1. the ability to list ancestors/descendant jobs, the first job(s) must complete before the next job is kicked off. Of course you must break up your job into smaller components.
2. cross platform scheduling, the ability to schedule jobs on more then one platform. I'm sure there are plenty of ways to schedule for jobs to be kicked off on NT or what not, but what about the mainframe?
3. central log maintence, if done correctly can keep the jobs in sync, which can be vitally important when you've got jobs that span your entire environment.
I really wish there was a unix based solution that encompassed all of these. There's a probably a good reason as to why there isn't an open source/"free" alternative for this process. The people who need it are less likely to use a free product. You're dealing with people so entrenched in archaic business practices, that it is difficult sometimes to authorize the use perl in your environment without going through weeks of business jutification.
It's easy to setup an existing framework to work correctly on Unix. Computer Associates has one. At times it seems to be the most bass-ackwards implementation I have seen, but then I have to remember it was originally designed for the mainframe.
With qmail, it's rather easy to setup a "generic" address prefix.
You can setup email to
d-*@insertyourdomainhere.com
Then, when you give out your email address, you can selectively choose a descriptive name.
Let's say I need to give the New York Times an address, and I want to see if they ever expose my email address.
I send them d-nytimes@insertyourdomainhere.com.
With beauty of this solution is with qmail, by default anything to d-* will be accepted. If this address is exposed, I can make an explicit rule to deny this address, basically decomissioning it.
I've had to do that with Onsale, when they either sold or exposed my email address. Real has also exposed my email address.
If you REALLY need to give out your email, it should be a disposible address. With qmail it's also possible to come up with email addresses that expire after a set time.
The main problem with this solution is that it doesn't SOLVE the issue. It only hides it. The email is still wasting processor time and bandwidth. Unfortunately the only way to fix the problem is to prevent spammers from spamming. As long as network providers feel they can make a buck off this scum, there will continue to be spammers.
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It's no secret that most states are hurting when it comes to their most recent budgets. Taxing the internet sounds good on paper for most of these politicians, and in a lot of ways it's just another form of locaization.
When most people purchase, they do so with the expectation of delivery charges. Catalogs are similiar. Whatever you don't pay in state tax, you will normally pay for in shipping fees.
The "Use Tax" is absurd. If the states which wish to impose sales tax on internet purchases, it should only to ONLY the stae in which the company resides. This would make states compete for the business of such companies. States would soon learn it's far better to not charge end users, but directly tax these companies earnings their the income of their employees.
Yet another form of short term legislation, which can't see beyond the next hill.
From the actual website, under "more information"
W ho
https://www.donotcall.gov/FAQ/FAQBusiness.aspx#
One caveat: if a consumer asks a company not to call, the company may not call, even if there is an established business relationship. Indeed, a company may not call a consumer - regardless of whether the consumer's number is on the registry - if the consumer has asked to be put on the company's own do not call list.
Basically if you ask them not to call when you sign up for their services, they are legally obligated to NOT call you.
I've had telemarketers attempt to bullshit me by saying, "we're the phone company, we're allowed to call you", at which point I throw them the riot act. It's BS, and they obviously have only read as far as they wanted to read, and no further.
>> Its good to have diversity in your language choices, because different languages have different strengths and weaknesses, and having a good command of more than one can often make you much better, individually.
One issue is that rexx when compared to perl, pales in comparison. There are reasons for diversity with regard to differnt language styles, as each serves a niche, but you're kidding yourself if you think rexx serves any purpose for future scripting development.
There are reasons for python, perl, tk/tcl, C, C++, C#, java, lisp, and even smalltalk... but rexx? Lacking in the strengths of perl, and yet having more glaring weaknesses, with little in the way of development and integration that perl already has in a stronger and more up to date fashion.
Only reason to learn rexx is to help support previously written applications that would require too much time and effort to rewrite in a better support scripting language.
How many people are outraged by spam and telemarketers, but wouldn't bat an eyelash to getting junk mail? There's an obvious difference, the cost of sending is placed upon the advertiser, rather than the recipient when it comes to US postal, it's also far less intrusive.
Let's face it though, if it's not bills, what else comes in your snail mail inbox? More and more people are using email to replace snail mail, even during the Iraq conflict, email and phone were used to convey messages to friends and families. It is because society has relegated these forms of communication that we find spam and telemarketers so abhorrent. They intrude upon our private lives, take away significant portions of our time.
Parsing mail logs on an MTA I run for several domains, the amount of incoming spam has been increasing steadily. For people who abhor RBL's (and what they stand for), let me tell you it's getting to the point where the bandwidth constraints for spam are growing to the point where RBL lists must be considered, if only to prevent the levels of bandwidth usage for delivering the data portion of the email into the MTA, only to be rejected by another filter at the user's inbox level.
I get sick and tired of people saying, "they're fine with spam", or "they're getting used to it". This selfish myopia is exactly what's wrong with this country and how it legislates laws. There are technical reasons as to why spam has become problematic, and imposing some 'tariff or charge' upon the general populace won't deter people from going offshore to peddle their message, and furthermore having advertisers flood my inbox.
Bandwidth isn't cheap. There's a lot of websites that usually charge for their content, or provide a captive audience that allows for ads to be directed. Email is not a captive audience, and it's assanine to assume as such.
Who's the brainchild that comes up with these emails that attempt to bypass filters explicitly put into place to stop them? Do these obvious failures at sentient thought processes understand that people don't want to see their message, and attempting to go around filters only pisses people off more. It's these same brain surgeons who came up with popup advertising, and you have to wonder what levels of cloning testing was done to create these marketing wizards.
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Now, he may be serious with his accusations against open source. His message borders on the evangelical against open source software? A proprietary, Microsoft zealot, which is no better or worse than a rabid Linux Zealot?
There's already a rebuttal editoral on Devx.com's main webpage by another Engineer there.
http://www.devx.com/opensource/Article/20135
Now as to whether this was some kind of publicity stunt to garner more traffic to their website, since before today I'd never heard of them... they've been quite successful. They've probably seen more traffic today than in quite a while, but it seems likes an infantile cry for attention.
Why not? It's obviously that absurd and completely ridiculous claims can be made for public perusal (aka SCO) and gather quite a bit of the media spotlight. It's a precedent already set in our culture that favors glitz and glamor over substance.
>> However, in the United States of America, Microsoft has never been able to trademark the term 'Windows' in any fashion.
Actually, both Microsoft and Windows are (R) registered trademarks of Microsoft within the United States. If you pull out your CD's you'll notice that both have an (R) by them...
How many people really get involved with politics unless it affects them? It's the most common remark, that people don't care unless they benefit. From the top/down, politics is about personal gain, whether it be Senators and/or Reps who must juggle the good of the nation versus that of their own constituency. You'll often see the same in MMO's, where the loudest voices are quite often those who have something to eitehr gain or lose.
The largest outcry of customer response in MMO's have typically been the extreme gamers with an agenda, or those who currently reside in an operational game that feel either disenfranchised or threatened by the development cycle.
During game development, you have the RP'ers who want elements that allow them the freedom to practice role playing, although each person may have a completely separate intrepretation of this. You'll have the hardcore players who'll want rather strict rules of PvP, as cutthroat as possible. You'll have other players, the perennial drifters from game to game, who want the perfect utopia.
Once the game has been launched, you'll have factions built within the gaming community. The vocal components will voice their concerns over whether certain aspects are unbalancing. In a class style system (which most are), you'll have classes, which fearing nerfs will be quite adamant in professing their perceived flaws so that they will pose less of a target to the masses. You'll have others, who might feel their class is disenfranchised and not seeing the same benefits from the company, wanting dev attention.
This is fine for MMO's where not only is "all characters are created equal" the creed, it's also, "all characters must remain equal, regardless of time, effort or ambition". MMO's cater far more towards the Lowest Common Denominator than you'll find in modern society. You can't take these same concepts of lowering the bar of achievement and transferring them to the real world, otherwise you end up with schools that don't teach children how to compete.
Basically people are only willing to speak up when it benefits them, since our "Commercialistic Democracy" as a whole centers around being selfish. People will cater to that which benefits themselves the most, and given a choice, they don't care unless it affects them.
Those who typically have an agenda are those you normally fear the most. People with a single item or issues they wish to push through. Yes, the US is founded upon fervent idealism, but far too often you have passion coupled with politics. Political issues that are far more emotional than objective, and yet you're creating laws for the populace. One thing you want to avoid is kneejerk "nerfs" in the real world, that purely emotional, otherwise you end up with such far reaching laws like the Patriot Act.
I believe one of the major reasons for moving towards R5 for Lotus Notes was the "web"-alization of the client. IBM and Lotus both toted the new R5 client as being just a beefed up web browser.
There was also a strong push towards Domino, a web frontend to the actual data, and if you're just using Notes as an email/calender/organizer, Domino could fill that need. One of the problems I've seen though is that Domino tends to require more horsepower on the backend server.
There was a R4 client that ran on AIX, so there was code out there. I believe most of the original code for the client as originally written on AIX, then they moved all development over to Wintel side of the house. A lot of IBM's projects were coming out on Windows, and it takes times for companies to shift their development strategies.
There's been a lot of discussion on how Raph 'failed' both UO and SWG. His concept of what he thinks players want is similiar to how you treat an ant farm. The issue that most players take with this... noone wants to be treated like a worker drone ant, and to be told point blank, well that's a slap in the face.
Raph should take a close look at FFXI, and remind himself that people want to play a game. The word MMORPG ends in G, and that should be the most important aspect, not creating some sort of microcosm of human society. People often play their games as a form of escapism, to get away from the everyday world. They don't want every aspect of reality within this world. Players "pay to play", this isn't a MUD, where devs can play as gods. Customers are just that, and a clash of egos between players and devs does more to hurt the genre.
Another thing people want is content. Not make your own world type content, but real content, that they've paid for. The idea is that MMO's should be worlds built for players, not built BY players. Vocal minorities among players will say one thing, but it's often "pie in the sky" ideals. The vast majority of players will determine what they want, aka "Skinner Box" mentalities via money they've spent.
One of the primary concerns for a multi-node cluster is insured latency among all components within the cluster. It doesn't have to be the fastest, it just needs to insured exacting timing for latency across all nodes. IBM can do this with their "wormhole" switch routing on SP and has done this with Myranet on their Intel X-series clusters.
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From most of my reading with Infiniband, it was designed from the ground up as a NAS style solution, than for large multi-node cluster computing. I'm curious as to if they have any issues with cluster latency.
http://www.nwfusion.com/news/2002/1211sandia.ht
The primary timings and white papers I've seen published for Infiniband have been for small clustered filesystem access. Although it's burst rate is much higher than Myranet, it's hard to find any raw retails for their multiple node latency normalization.
I hope it scales, since Intel's solution appears to be less cost prohibitive than some of the other solutions offered on the market, and would really open up the market even for smaller clusters (16-36 node) for business use.
Regardless of how omniscient you would like game developers to be, they are often underestimating the ability of several thousand rabid gamers, and to what extents a player will go to in order to gain an advantage of edge. No amount of testing can simulate the hundreds of man hours of play that goes into each game week of an online game.
This article discusses Blizzard, and yet the biggest names they cite to leave Blizzard were part of Blizzard North (Diablo fame). There's several games and companies under the VU standard, including 2 or 3 MMO's. There doesn't seem to be an issue with someone buying Blizzard, there seems to be an issue with VU using them as a carrot to sell off the rest of their gaming unit.
Dr. Bartle was a trend setter for a genre that is still in it's growth stage. Much like how Gordon Moore was able to set words to a trend that was formulating before him, Bartle attempted to attach theories to a microcosm of online societies.
Without intending to, I may have damaged the reputation of Dr. Bartle and of his book, and I feel an obligation to set the record straight with an actual review of his book.
Nice to know that Dave attempts to offset his first treatise with an almost narcissistic comment. A thorough review of Dave's background, as well as following his comments on various boards when he worked for Mythic Entertainment will show a clear disdain for his predecessors within the industry. An egocentrism that seems to permeate most "Devs" for online games that goes all the way down to MUD's.
Bartle is not a Fred Brooks or Don Knuth, but his background, his past accomplishments and achievements does tend to merit more weighing to his analysis and prose.
Rackshack offers a lot of bandwidth, and if you know what you're doing, you can do whatever you want with that server. I co-opt'ed for a server with a friend, and we parcel out webspace to various friends, in return they chip in for a portion of the cost which lowers the monthly cost of the server to $20 for us.
They have some other options if you don't want to administrate the server yourselves. I like it since it's basically a rented server that they provided to us.
For anyone who uses Ogg Vorbis, Netrek is the reason why the files end in .ogg.
In "modern" terms, to "ogg" is similiar to "zerg". Before there was zerg, there was ogg. And nothing grants satisifaction like "dooshing" a starbase.
Netrek was team versus team "capture the flag" over the internet before first person shooters became all the rage. It was great back in 1992, I still remember playing on Paradise servers back in 1993.
It was a relatively simple concept that mostly college kids played. Simple, and yet elegant.
Recently I did some googling to find out what happened to it, and it appears for the most part that netrek has died off with the advent of most of the online games available. The low tech sprite based graphics just doesn't appeal to kids nowadays.
I can "feel good" right up until the point where I'm patching my MTA yet again.
Say what you want about Dan, his product (qmail) hasn't changed for several years.
For something as "simple" as a MTA, there's no reason to recompile a fix every few months due to "yet another" buffer overflow. In the corporate world, this becomes doubly important.
Postfix is relatively secure, compared to sendmail.
I have used TightVNC with max compression, 8-bit display and 800x600 resolution over a 26.4baud modem with reasonably useful results. It was far better than using plain X11-protocol (Exceed) for graphical applications.
After a comparison of several commerical products at work, including both Exceed and VNC, VNC won out. Considering you can run VNC through a tunnel SSH connection, that could also setup your compression, what is so "out" about it?
Quite often the argument is "who has the bigger number"? The PC processor is often attractive due to it's higher number versus... a Mac. Obviously it isn't an "apples to apple" comparison, different architectures rarely are.
The number of cycles for your pipeline, versus the number of concurrent threads of execution through the same pipelines?
I've always considered the intel family to be a very racy and fast sports cars. Versus other processors which tend to be a little slower trucks. They don't go as fast, but they carry more payload. In today's market of "multi-tasking", well written programs can take advantage of a processor that doesn't get bogged down with "stalled" pipes. Also the frequency can only be "cranked up" so high...
There is also a focus on where is Adobe commiting their development work. There is a lot to be said for programs written and developed natively, versus those which must be ported over to other platforms. Carmack originally developed on the Mac first for Q3, due to the inherent limitations for that platform. That made porting it to Linux and Windows much easier.
Too often the HZ on the processor is used as a crutch to explain away the lack of development know-how (or lack of funding) for multiple Operating Systems. There are so many products on the market today that are only support on 2k/NT. Sadly any port to another OS is dismally lacking... and the platform is blamed for this.
Is Adobe still focusing the majority of their development on Apple? Was the conversion from OS9 to OSX too difficult for them to handle? Are they writing native code? I think it was reckless for Adobe to make the blanket statement that PC is faster, and sounds more like some internal pissing match between the companies.
I originally chose this shell back in '92 for the right hand prompt. A 'spiff' feature for a shell chocked full of features. It was also the first shell to have a truly programmable completion. It has all the interactive add-on's for tcsh, with the base template built off of Korn Shell (so you don't have issues with scripting in something separate from a Bourne derivative).
The z-shell is so filled with features at this point, it's nearly become the "emacs" of shells, and yet, it's memory footprint for the same tasks is smaller than either bash or tcsh.
How much can you reliably run through an SSH connection to w2k, and still do what you need to be done?
To a certain limited extent, it's possible depending upon your application (aka a w2k DNS server). But as far as convenience of use for most major vendor apps on w2k, ssh isn't viable, unless either MS or someone else is able to encapsulate a PC anywhere through a tunneled ssh connection (similiar to what you can do with VNC).
The high end niche is marketed more by the hardware than the software. The technology of LPAR's on the Regatta (high end rs6k) is nearly on par with mainframe technology. It's also at a price point of over a quarter of a million (after discounts).
Linux is not an Enterprise level Unix. That isn't its niche. It's an OS for low-mid range hardware.
The argument for Unix versus Windows has been... Unix is expensive hardware with cheap (nearly free software). Windows is the exact opposite, cheap and redundant hardware with expensive software licensing. Trying to license Microsoft SQL can be as onerous as trying to negotiate an Oracle contract.
Are there other things available in Enterprise Linux? Sure, it's called licensed software. Enterprise level companies are extremely leary of deploying software unless it's licensed. They don't want to hear the word "free". "Free" in their minds often means there is noone to sue.
Also with corporate enterprise, there is a sincere fear of employee empowerment. No company wants to be held hostage by their employees. With Linux, the power is within the administrator to have full control over the operating system. Most companies have no way of watching the watchers to this level, especially with knowledgable, disgruntled employees. It's not a sound argument, but it's one that is often tossed out there.
Other more obvious things include mature LVM (logical volume management). Being able to add and grow filesystems on the fly. Active and mature SAN access. The VMM has come a long way from the 2.x kernel, but still needs to play catch-up.
You realize the ideal setup for an AIX 5.x server? You optimize the server (performance wise) for ZERO percent paging space. There are certain tools that come with the operating system at the kernel level you just won't find with Linux unless you're a kernel hacker... Companies don't have the luxury of hiring kernel hackers to administrate their systems.
For a person who's beta tested and played AC2, Daoc, EQ and AO, this decision rackles most people.
It's seen as an obvious money grap decision to appease the masses of casual players. AC2 still has 3 base professions, with 6 specializations. It STILL gives you the option to play more then one character per server.
DAOC came out and decided to restrict your play to only 4 characters per regular server (the hardcore PvP and test servers were allowed more), they have since changed this rule since the competition offers more.
If this game honestly wants the staying power, and appease the masses who actually play, not just the Star Wars fanbois, they'll allow more then the SCS.
"New Concept" indead. Star Wars: Galaxies, Episode 4, A New Hype.
Of course, anyone who pays $$$ for modern Sun kit is an idiot if they want to run anything other than Solaris on it, because Solaris, as well as being a solid and powerful Unix implementation in its own right, is designed from the ground up for SPARC hardware, it doesn't have to make any compromises for compatibility's sake.
You realize that OpenBSD's focus is primarily security. Having spent 3 years running Solaris, and seeing some of the blatantly brain dead buffer overflows demonstrated, it's not that hard to understand why some people would rather run OpenBSD.
Anyone remember back in 1995, Solaris 2.6, when the stack crushing bug arose, and how long it took Sun to fix this issue? This was AFTER a publically available patch was created outside of Sun as a workaround, while we waiting for the "official" patch to arise.
Theo said he would prefer to run openbsd.org on Ultrasparc architecture, since it provides certain levels of hardware security, from following the thread on the BSD forums.
He's not exactly the easiest person to get along with, but to be honest, this is on par for Sun's dealings with the Open Source commnuity. Sun at times deals with the community like Digital did back in the day. And like Digital, I can honestly see Sun fading into the sunset, from an operating system perspective.
AIX / HP provide the enterprise level OS's, with several features that are not found in the core of Solaris. AIX with 5.2 has attempted to bridge the gap with Linux, in providing a common environment shared with Open Source applications, including having RPM's integrated with their own package management (as a side note, AIX's LPP package management is more sound then RPM's, IMHO).
Linux has been edging into the low-to-mid end market, even stealing Sun's thunder with Oracle buy-in. Sun is being squeezed in the middle, and must decide whether they want to focus on the high-end enterprise, or the middle tier web/app/database servers.
AIX has it's association with Websphere and DB2. Sun has to decide whether it's operating system is worth the cost, or whether they are a hardware company. Unfortunately as long as companies feel they must only run specific OS'es on their Hardware (Apple), they will continue to relegate themselves to a niche market that is ultimately self-limiting.
IBM still has the monopoly on Z-series Mainframes (Amdahl pulled out of that market). Their philosophy has always been expensive hardware, cheap to free software, and hefty support and services contracts. They make their continued money through licenses and services.
Unfortunately I've found job scheduling commercial software to often be less reliable then cron/at jobs. There are a few nice features available to them that is not available in cron/at.
1. the ability to list ancestors/descendant jobs, the first job(s) must complete before the next job is kicked off. Of course you must break up your job into smaller components.
2. cross platform scheduling, the ability to schedule jobs on more then one platform. I'm sure there are plenty of ways to schedule for jobs to be kicked off on NT or what not, but what about the mainframe?
3. central log maintence, if done correctly can keep the jobs in sync, which can be vitally important when you've got jobs that span your entire environment.
I really wish there was a unix based solution that encompassed all of these. There's a probably a good reason as to why there isn't an open source/"free" alternative for this process. The people who need it are less likely to use a free product. You're dealing with people so entrenched in archaic business practices, that it is difficult sometimes to authorize the use perl in your environment without going through weeks of business jutification.
It's easy to setup an existing framework to work correctly on Unix. Computer Associates has one. At times it seems to be the most bass-ackwards implementation I have seen, but then I have to remember it was originally designed for the mainframe.
With qmail, it's rather easy to setup a "generic" address prefix.
You can setup email to
d-*@insertyourdomainhere.com
Then, when you give out your email address, you can selectively choose a descriptive name.
Let's say I need to give the New York Times an address, and I want to see if they ever expose my email address.
I send them d-nytimes@insertyourdomainhere.com.
With beauty of this solution is with qmail, by default anything to d-* will be accepted. If this address is exposed, I can make an explicit rule to deny this address, basically decomissioning it.
I've had to do that with Onsale, when they either sold or exposed my email address. Real has also exposed my email address.
If you REALLY need to give out your email, it should be a disposible address. With qmail it's also possible to come up with email addresses that expire after a set time.
The main problem with this solution is that it doesn't SOLVE the issue. It only hides it. The email is still wasting processor time and bandwidth. Unfortunately the only way to fix the problem is to prevent spammers from spamming. As long as network providers feel they can make a buck off this scum, there will continue to be spammers.