last time i bought appliances i had to show my army discharge papers to get a nice 20% discount. saved hundreds of $$$ that day
The last time I bought an appliance, all I had to do was ask them to give me price that they would if the item was on it's best sale, and they did.
Since there are dozens of places to buy most anything, asking such a question costs you nothing, and might get you what you want. But, you have to be serious about walking away and going somewhere else to buy.
I generate a new email address on one of my domains for every new interaction with a new vendor. The process requires approximately ten seconds of my time, and that address could vanish just as easily.
And I thought I was the only one paranoid enough to do this.
As you say, it's trivially easy, and has a huge upside. It also has showed me that the big companies really aren't a problem, even though they want as much data and want to advertise as much as the next guy. Less than 10 sites (out of over 500) have ever been a real problem, and a couple of times it has enabled me to alert the site to the fact that their list of e-mail addresses has been stolen.
Exceptions should NOT be used for 'normal' errors. They should be used for events that are, well, exceptional.
What is the basis of this strange belief?
The standard case is trying to open a file that doesn't exist. This isn't an "exception", or even really an error. Many times, it's a test to see if the file exists to allow an overwrite warning. Yes, there are ways to check this without the "error" (like iterating through all the file names returned in the directory list to see if the file is there), but these have their own issues (what if the directory itself doesn't exist?), and can also be slow.
There are many languages/libraries that force you to handle a "file doesn't exist" using the try/catch syntax, while others place any result in the return value. Since you really need to examine that return value anyway, handling an exception is a lot of extra work for no good reason.
Truly exceptional things are like running of disk space, having the disk removed/fail/whatever. In other words, if the problem has to be solved outside the program that is catching the exception, then that is a good use of an exception. If the program can resolve the issue, then an exception is usually overkill.
Regulation Fair Disclosure requires that when a company discloses information to investors, that its able reach all investors at the same time. If an investor was not a fan of Netflix, they would not have the opportunity to receive the information.
If an investor didn't read the Netflix blog, they might not have the opportunity to received the information, either. Likewise, if something is published in the Wall Street Journal, if you don't subscribe, you might not get the information.
This is one of the reasons why companies hold conference calls, issue press releases, etc regarding information pertinent to an investor, so that it's disclosed fairly to everyone.
Someone who doesn't listen directly to a conference call, but instead reads a transcript released by the company after the event doesn't have the information as soon as other people, but the SEC doesn't consider that "unfair", even though there are often limitations on who can particpate in those conference calls. There is no barrier that limits someone from "liking" a company on Facebook, so the information is just as "public" as any other release of information. If the SEC doesn't realize this, then they are going to have some serious challenges to the ancient ways they regulate public companies.
In my office we have a smart phone app that runs on the desktop, when a call comes in you can put the headset on (if you're not already wearing it) and take the call, much like you pick up the handset from a traditional phone.
So, in order to receive a "phone call", your computer needs to be running, the phone app needs to be running, the network connection needs to be working, and the phone server software (which translates from POTS to your VOIP system) needs to be working. In addition, you still need enough POTS infrastructure to be able to handle simultaneous calls to the VOIP server.
I suppose you could let a third party handle the conversion and just run VOIP from them to your office, but then you end up relying on the Internet connection between them and you, and you get some pretty nasty vendor lock in (if they raise your monthly fee, you pretty much have to pay, at least for long enough to find a different provider that is compatible with your existing headsets).
Pizza boxes (1U) don't offer hot swapable HD bays, making them less than ideal for your VMware server.
Although having hot-swap bays in an ESX(i) server is nice, one of the whole points of the VMware infrastructure is that you can down a physical machine for maintenance without affecting any services.
You'd still have some sort of redundant disk (RAID-1 at least) on the ESX server, and if a drive fails, you just migrate all the VMs to a different server, replace the failed drive, let the RAID rebuild while nothing is running on that machine (which means the rebuild can be given high priority and complete more quickly) and then bring the machine back into service. Then, VMware DRS will eventually move VMs back onto the machine to load balance the cluster.
All of this makes post-processing a lot easier; The system can be loaded once a day (before I go to work), and when I get home, it will have ripped about 13 bluray discs.
Unless you are just storing the ISO images, I have found that all the other stuff that has to be done to the movie (cropping, filtering/color correction decisions, which audio tracks to keep and in what format, identifying which playlist corresponds to which TV episode, accurate chapter placement, etc.) take long enough compared to the 20-40 minutes it takes to get the Blu-Ray onto the hard drive that I have plenty of stuff to do on the last ripped disc while the current one rips in the background.
If I am re-ripping for some reason, then all the decisions have been made and the ripping is the longest time factor. But, unless I have to redo everything I own (unlikely, as the movies are stored on a RAID array and backed up daily to a separate machine), I can't see the need for any automation of feeding the discs. If I really had to do it, I'd spend $200 and buy 4 10x Blu-Ray drives and put them in one of the many older PCs I have sitting around. Since every motherboard in those machines has 6 SATA ports (and some 8 or more), I could easily do 12 rips a day (start 4 in the morning, 4 when I get home, and 4 before I go to bed) and maybe 16 or 20.
The software you actually want to use is Exact Audio Copy. You want to use Secure Mode with NO C2, accurate stream, disable cache. Yes, we said DISABLE cache.
Many modern drives are built in such a way that "Secure Mode" won't give you any different results from any other mode, but will slow you down a lot. In particular, neither of the drives I recommend in my other post require you to enable the EAC features that result in very slow reads, yet you will still get the same output.
Plextors are generally regarded as the fastest/most accurate although they really don't make them anymore (they do but they are just rebranded Lite-Ons).
I've had good luck with both Lite-On and LG optical disk writers (there's no savings in getting just a reader, and the writers are generally more forgiving).
I just tested, and my Lite-On Blu-Ray writer took 2:10 to rip a 66 minute CD to WAV, while the LG DVD writer took 2:33 for the same disc. I had to do a re-rip of my 500 disc collection a while back, and these times agree with my memory that by using both drives, I didn't really have time to get up to do anything...I just sat there feeding discs to alternating drives.
The standard mode of long distance transportation in MMOS and even some SPRPGs is teleportation. Travel speed doesn't enter the equation.
Sure it does, unless the teleport can go anywhere (as I stated, which I guess you didn't read). If you limit the distance, then even an enormous limit won't allow full exploration in a timely manner. Likewise, no system I know of allows infinite use of such powers as teleportation. The spell/effect takes time to cast, plus you must have the manna/energy/whatever to perform it, and collection of that takes time.
And I'm sure it was unintentional, but at your speed of light, time becomes irrelevant too. Any travel at the speed of light in vacuum becomes teleportation in the time frame of the traveler.
Not in the physics of my game. See what I did there?
That said, even if the game follows this, it doesn't matter, because it still takes time in an external frame of reference, which means that calculations have to be done for what happened to the rest of the world during the time the player was travelling, and that takes actual computer time. In addition, it would be no fun for the player to have to deal with time-dilation effects as the rest of the world ages but the hero does not.
(And not that it matters if you have teleportation, but even at sub-light speeds, relativism enters the equation - at 99.95% of c, going your two light years would only take 22.5 days. Even at a pedestrian 95% of c, you don't travel 0.95 light years per year, but more than 3 lyr/yr, due to the Lorenz factor. And in a game, there's no reason to limit speeds thus.)
Yes, there is a reason to limit speeds. For example, there may not be any way to travel faster than on the back of an animal, simply because the game is set in those times.
But, even with something like teleportation, if you require an ten minutes of game time to build up enough energy/manna/whatever to teleport one light second, you are only traveling at 0.17% of the speed of light. This is a very reasonable game mechanic, and something that every gamer would understand.
That speed is very fast, and you could cover vast distances very quickly, and even allow automation so that as long as every time you end the teleport if there is no hostile encounter, the "wait" is instant in real-time (still taking 10 minutes of game time). If it takes about 1 second to do all the calculations each time you move (it is a procedurally generated universe, after all), you are effectively "traveling" at the speed of light. So, again, it would take 2 real years of playing the game just to travel across the game world, not even exploring.
And, all this assumes my insane millimeter precision. Using the "seed' method from TFA, the actual size of a 64-bit universe is likely 3 to 10 orders of magnitude larger.
And thats the main reason people shop online instead of locally.
When everyday prices at Amazon are 20-50% off compared to B&M regular prices, saving the 5-10% sales tax is just an extra bonus.
Add in the fact that you can get a wide variety of used items in very good condition, and that you can buy shoes, video games, gardening tools, and food all without leaving your chair, and that is the main reason people shop online instead of locally. I purchased 20 Blu-Ray movies this past week for a grand total of $130 (including shipping), all without leaving my house, so I didn't have to fight any crowds. Some of what I bought was Amazon price matching B&M stores, and I'm sure Amazon had a lot more than 3 copies in stock at that price, but the 4 films from the "Marvel Cinematic Universe" that I got for $28.90 when Best Buy wanted to charge $89 certainly weren't a price match.
I've started buying components from Amazon instead of Newegg.
One thing about Newegg that is much better is the search. Newegg has a much better computer-item-specific directed search.
Also, if you just type something like "radeon hd 7950" then click on "desktop graphics cards", Newegg returns nothing but video cards that have that chip, while doing the same at Amazon and clicking "Computer Graphics Cards" results in many other cards, most of which show up first if you sort by ascending price.
No medium to large company really allows the possibility of just running an install script for anything of any complexity.
So what you are saying is that because some companies lock down their systems so that they must manually configure everything, no one should ever create any installers?
The point is not that an installer fails to do something because of an obscure config. Instead it is that the installer completely assumes a very specific config that isn't the default and then doesn't either automate or give you good instructions on how to make sure the dependencies are fulfilled.
They might use akamai so custom tags have to go on each page.
Assuming you are talking about a product that front-ends a web server (like a CMS, storefront, or forums), this really isn't part of an "install", but instead should be provided by settings in the software once it is running. Adding custom tags to a web page is no different from changing a font in Word document, and shouldn't be part of an install.
The solution I am working on right now involves connecting to MS-SQL, RabbitMQ, and MongoDB. It's utilizing IIS, Node.js, as well as.Net... you're suggesting I should go back and create installers for this system that is only running in one production environment, and a handful of stage/dev environments?
Yes, if the "stock" install of a product that your is a dependency for your "system" isn't good enough, then at the very least you need to supply a script that will change the config of that product to your liking. If at all possible, that script should be run as part of your installer, asking for passwords and connection information if necessary.
For example, if your system depends on a DBMS, obviously you need to provide a script that creates the actual database you need. If the DBMS needs changes to its config (for example, more memory use than a stock install), then you need to script that as well. It may not be possible to have these scripts run directly as part of your install, but you can pause your install, present the script, tell the user to copy/paste the script and run it on the appropriate machine. If the user clicks "Next" but hasn't actually run the script, then your overall install might fail, but that's not your fault.
So, no, we don't expect you to create a custom installer for some third party product, but we do expect you to automate any changes needed to those third party products.
I think you're mistaken about error rates. It probably depends a lot on the environment and external factors, but I haven't had a single error in about 6 months.
Although this article seems to have some contradictions, overall Google's data shows that really good memory still has more errors than you would suspect. Here you can see more raw data.
Even using the best numbers from manufacturers, 32GB of RAM will have a bit error every 3 years. With the wide range listed on that page, you don't even have to get close to the worst numbers to get errors every couple of weeks. Those errors may not result in a major problem, or they could happen inside something like an MP3 file, where the error just gets converted to silence for a millisecond, so they could go completely undetected.
And, there's always anecdotal evidence. As for mine, I only see one correctable error in 60GB of total RAM (15x4GB) in the past year.
It also seems contradictory to overclock a system with ECC, because overclocking reduces the safety margins in the CPU.
Not with current Intel CPUs, and some of the AMDs. 25% overclock is almost child's play, and as long as you can keep the temperature reasonable, 50% isn't out of the question with no risk at all. This is assuming all you change is the multiplier. If you start messing around with the base clock, that can cause subtle yet serious instability. But, kicking up the multiplier of only the CPU doesn't change RAM access at all. Since most RAM also has a lot of unused performance, as long as you use stock settings for it, you're not going to get any instability there.
However, from a mortal human's perspective, 64-bit is infinite.
You're presuming that you'll be limited to walking or other slow means of transportation. And that there are no bots involved.
Actually, no, he isn't.
Let's just say that you have millimeter precision in a 64-bit integer, which would make the world 18,446,744,073,709,551 meters across. Even at the speed of light, it would take 61,531,714 seconds to traverse that distance, or nearly two years. Got that...we're talking about a world that is two light years across.
So, as long as you limit travel to some reasonable speed (e.g., 300km/sec, or nearly 10 times faster than anything man-made has ever travelled), the world is infinite for all practical purposes, even with a "faster time passage" UI. Likewise, teleportation could have a limited distance (even thousands of miles) and not be a problem unless it took literally zero time to complete.
And, this is assuming that the 64-bit number is used to directly map each millimeter. If, instead, it is a more granular area and the sub-areas are procedurally generated (which is what TFA says), then perhaps the resolution is a somewhere between 1 and 100 meters. This increases the world size to anywhere from 2,000 to 200,000 light years.
I bet even with a world as big as the Milky Way galaxy, there will be people who complain that the game is overpriced.
And a bunch of boards that are sold as server boards, although they don't seem to have a lot of server features, and "server" seems to be used as a moniker for "supports Xeon and ECC if you so choose".
Yeah, on Newegg, the "Server Motherboards" section should really be called "Server/Workstation".
But IMHO, it should be standard except for ultimate-speed-crash-and-burn computers that also use TLC SSDs in RAID 0.
Based on some of the statistics I have seen, 16GB of RAM will have a single-bit error every month or so, which means that when 32GB really becomes a "standard" size from places like Dell, ECC becomes a requirement to avoid a BSOD every couple of weeks. I know that not every error will be in such a critical location, but it still seems likely that Murphy will have a lot to say about such things. I consider myself lucky that my non-ECC 12GB desktop only sees a spurious reboot about every 3 months. Every other system I have with 8GB or more runs ECC, and my next "desktop" likely will as well, despite the added cost. I will miss all the free clock cycles, though, as you generally can't overclock Xeons.
All ASUS motherboards support ECC AFAIK, as do the new AMD CPUs.
Pretty much no non-server/workstatiion motherboards for Intel chips support ECC. Asus does have the P9X79WS, though, so that's one. Although every AMD CPU supports ECC, not every AMD motherboard supports it. So, I stand by my statement that the vast majority of motherboards don't support ECC.
To be honest, though, if you don't want two or more graphics cards, there are a lot of Intel server/workstation motherboards that are great for general-purpose computing (or gaming with a single x16 card). But, those are a lot more expensive ($150 vs. $65 for a socket 1155 board).
Unbuffered ECC memory is cheap now, sometimes cheaper than non-ECC, like 250€ for a 4x8GB pack.
Yeah, the equivalent of US$320 is lot less than $110 for 32GB (4x8GB) non-ECC RAM...(I know it's lame, but)...NOT.
16 GB ECC memory should be standard now, with RAM prices as low as they are.
Unfortunately, the vast majority of motherboards sold can't support ECC memory at all.
And, despite the low price of memory, ECC has a huge premium in price (as much as 100% for registered ECC) even though it needs only 12% more components.
this just makes Mozilla look Mickey mouse, because IE comes in 64 bit and has for something like 7 years now poor lame Mozilla can't even write well enough to tell the difference between 32bit and 64bit bugs.
And yet, on a recently-installed Windows 7, there are web pages that don't work correctly when using the 64-bit version of IE.
Maybe it's a problem with plugins, maybe it's the browser...I don't know and don't really care...I just care that the web pages don't work right. I discovered this when I found out that typing "iexplore" in the Start Menu search box results in the 64-bit version being run.
Besides, who really needs a browser than can access more than 3GB of RAM? Google doesn't think that it's necessary, either.
Perhaps you should co-lo your own gear where you can run daily patches and reboots and only affect your own stuff.
Unless the OP is sharing an actual Windows instance with other clients (which would mean he should be paying about $1/month in fees), rebooting his instance should only affect him.
It's possible that he is paying for a Windows instance on top of Hyper-V, and the underlying OS isn't getting patched, but that really shouldn't be much of a security risk for the OP, as the hypervisor OS isn't visible to the outside world. Likewise, even if he is sharing access to back-end services like SQL server, it's unlikely that the API he is using to connect to those services is vulnerable in such a way that a patched client would be a problem for an unpatched server. It's far more likely that there are SQL injection or other issues on the clients than a non-administrator connection to an unpatched server causing a compromise.
Poker machines are morally disgusting. They're basically a way of imposing a tax on people too stupid or hopeful to know better.
There's a huge difference between a video poker machine and a slot machine.
A slot machine is completely random and you have no control over the result. Video poker, on the other hand, can actually be a statistical money maker for the player if they know how to play and the machine has a favorable payout table. Don't quit your day job, though, because even playing at $10/hand you'd only make around $10/hour though perfect play. Between free drinks and comp benefits, you can end up spending only $1-2/hour for entertainment, which isn't bad.
You're right that you don't need root, per se, but there are a lot of devices out there with sideloading disabled
AT&T was really the only carrier that did this, and they re-enabled the checkbox (which gives the user the choice) quite a while ago. I don't have AT&T, but Amazon had warnings on their app pages about AT&T, and I haven't seen those in nearly a year.
At this point, no Android device requires root to install an app, regardless of source.
Define perfectly good. It sounds like you mean old computers because you cant buy new computers with xp on it. I would never define old computers as perfectly good.
I'm running XP on a Core i7-920 which is now 4 years old, and performance is not an issue. I do video and audio editing, run VMs, and do all the "boring" tasks (e-mail, web browsing, etc.) and all run just fine. The only real performance roadblocks are ones that a new computer likely wouldn't help with (disk drive and network, when moving 30-40GB of data around), although an SSD upgrade could help some.
There definitely isn't anything that Windows 7 or 8 would allow me to do better than I am doing it right now. I might be able to play some games that I can't play now, but that's really the only issue, but it has nothing to do with performance, and it's exactly the point of TFA...artificially limiting newer versions of DirectX to the newer OS will make some people upgrade, but only gamers.
windows 8 is a performer.
What, exactly, does Windows 8 do faster than any previous OS? Every benchmark out there shows that Windows 8 is pretty much exactly the same as Windows 7 as far as application performance is concerned. Likewise, Windows 7 is pretty much the same as Windows XP. Many people think that every newer OS is much faster, but that's usually because they got that newer OS when they purchased a new PC.
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last time i bought appliances i had to show my army discharge papers to get a nice 20% discount. saved hundreds of $$$ that day
The last time I bought an appliance, all I had to do was ask them to give me price that they would if the item was on it's best sale, and they did.
Since there are dozens of places to buy most anything, asking such a question costs you nothing, and might get you what you want. But, you have to be serious about walking away and going somewhere else to buy.
I generate a new email address on one of my domains for every new interaction with a new vendor. The process requires approximately ten seconds of my time, and that address could vanish just as easily.
And I thought I was the only one paranoid enough to do this.
As you say, it's trivially easy, and has a huge upside. It also has showed me that the big companies really aren't a problem, even though they want as much data and want to advertise as much as the next guy. Less than 10 sites (out of over 500) have ever been a real problem, and a couple of times it has enabled me to alert the site to the fact that their list of e-mail addresses has been stolen.
Exceptions should NOT be used for 'normal' errors. They should be used for events that are, well, exceptional.
What is the basis of this strange belief?
The standard case is trying to open a file that doesn't exist. This isn't an "exception", or even really an error. Many times, it's a test to see if the file exists to allow an overwrite warning. Yes, there are ways to check this without the "error" (like iterating through all the file names returned in the directory list to see if the file is there), but these have their own issues (what if the directory itself doesn't exist?), and can also be slow.
There are many languages/libraries that force you to handle a "file doesn't exist" using the try/catch syntax, while others place any result in the return value. Since you really need to examine that return value anyway, handling an exception is a lot of extra work for no good reason.
Truly exceptional things are like running of disk space, having the disk removed/fail/whatever. In other words, if the problem has to be solved outside the program that is catching the exception, then that is a good use of an exception. If the program can resolve the issue, then an exception is usually overkill.
Regulation Fair Disclosure requires that when a company discloses information to investors, that its able reach all investors at the same time. If an investor was not a fan of Netflix, they would not have the opportunity to receive the information.
If an investor didn't read the Netflix blog, they might not have the opportunity to received the information, either. Likewise, if something is published in the Wall Street Journal, if you don't subscribe, you might not get the information.
This is one of the reasons why companies hold conference calls, issue press releases, etc regarding information pertinent to an investor, so that it's disclosed fairly to everyone.
Someone who doesn't listen directly to a conference call, but instead reads a transcript released by the company after the event doesn't have the information as soon as other people, but the SEC doesn't consider that "unfair", even though there are often limitations on who can particpate in those conference calls. There is no barrier that limits someone from "liking" a company on Facebook, so the information is just as "public" as any other release of information. If the SEC doesn't realize this, then they are going to have some serious challenges to the ancient ways they regulate public companies.
In my office we have a smart phone app that runs on the desktop, when a call comes in you can put the headset on (if you're not already wearing it) and take the call, much like you pick up the handset from a traditional phone.
So, in order to receive a "phone call", your computer needs to be running, the phone app needs to be running, the network connection needs to be working, and the phone server software (which translates from POTS to your VOIP system) needs to be working. In addition, you still need enough POTS infrastructure to be able to handle simultaneous calls to the VOIP server.
I suppose you could let a third party handle the conversion and just run VOIP from them to your office, but then you end up relying on the Internet connection between them and you, and you get some pretty nasty vendor lock in (if they raise your monthly fee, you pretty much have to pay, at least for long enough to find a different provider that is compatible with your existing headsets).
Pizza boxes (1U) don't offer hot swapable HD bays, making them less than ideal for your VMware server.
Although having hot-swap bays in an ESX(i) server is nice, one of the whole points of the VMware infrastructure is that you can down a physical machine for maintenance without affecting any services.
You'd still have some sort of redundant disk (RAID-1 at least) on the ESX server, and if a drive fails, you just migrate all the VMs to a different server, replace the failed drive, let the RAID rebuild while nothing is running on that machine (which means the rebuild can be given high priority and complete more quickly) and then bring the machine back into service. Then, VMware DRS will eventually move VMs back onto the machine to load balance the cluster.
So now things are going for lower power, lower operating temperature and all that. What sort of things benefit from that?
Racks and racks of servers.
Every saving of one watt in TDP of the processor can double (or more) in savings in less cooling of the building.
All of this makes post-processing a lot easier; The system can be loaded once a day (before I go to work), and when I get home, it will have ripped about 13 bluray discs.
Unless you are just storing the ISO images, I have found that all the other stuff that has to be done to the movie (cropping, filtering/color correction decisions, which audio tracks to keep and in what format, identifying which playlist corresponds to which TV episode, accurate chapter placement, etc.) take long enough compared to the 20-40 minutes it takes to get the Blu-Ray onto the hard drive that I have plenty of stuff to do on the last ripped disc while the current one rips in the background.
If I am re-ripping for some reason, then all the decisions have been made and the ripping is the longest time factor. But, unless I have to redo everything I own (unlikely, as the movies are stored on a RAID array and backed up daily to a separate machine), I can't see the need for any automation of feeding the discs. If I really had to do it, I'd spend $200 and buy 4 10x Blu-Ray drives and put them in one of the many older PCs I have sitting around. Since every motherboard in those machines has 6 SATA ports (and some 8 or more), I could easily do 12 rips a day (start 4 in the morning, 4 when I get home, and 4 before I go to bed) and maybe 16 or 20.
The software you actually want to use is Exact Audio Copy. You want to use Secure Mode with NO C2, accurate stream, disable cache. Yes, we said DISABLE cache.
Many modern drives are built in such a way that "Secure Mode" won't give you any different results from any other mode, but will slow you down a lot. In particular, neither of the drives I recommend in my other post require you to enable the EAC features that result in very slow reads, yet you will still get the same output.
Plextors are generally regarded as the fastest/most accurate although they really don't make them anymore (they do but they are just rebranded Lite-Ons).
I've had good luck with both Lite-On and LG optical disk writers (there's no savings in getting just a reader, and the writers are generally more forgiving).
I just tested, and my Lite-On Blu-Ray writer took 2:10 to rip a 66 minute CD to WAV, while the LG DVD writer took 2:33 for the same disc. I had to do a re-rip of my 500 disc collection a while back, and these times agree with my memory that by using both drives, I didn't really have time to get up to do anything...I just sat there feeding discs to alternating drives.
The standard mode of long distance transportation in MMOS and even some SPRPGs is teleportation. Travel speed doesn't enter the equation.
Sure it does, unless the teleport can go anywhere (as I stated, which I guess you didn't read). If you limit the distance, then even an enormous limit won't allow full exploration in a timely manner. Likewise, no system I know of allows infinite use of such powers as teleportation. The spell/effect takes time to cast, plus you must have the manna/energy/whatever to perform it, and collection of that takes time.
And I'm sure it was unintentional, but at your speed of light, time becomes irrelevant too. Any travel at the speed of light in vacuum becomes teleportation in the time frame of the traveler.
Not in the physics of my game. See what I did there?
That said, even if the game follows this, it doesn't matter, because it still takes time in an external frame of reference, which means that calculations have to be done for what happened to the rest of the world during the time the player was travelling, and that takes actual computer time. In addition, it would be no fun for the player to have to deal with time-dilation effects as the rest of the world ages but the hero does not.
(And not that it matters if you have teleportation, but even at sub-light speeds, relativism enters the equation - at 99.95% of c, going your two light years would only take 22.5 days. Even at a pedestrian 95% of c, you don't travel 0.95 light years per year, but more than 3 lyr/yr, due to the Lorenz factor. And in a game, there's no reason to limit speeds thus.)
Yes, there is a reason to limit speeds. For example, there may not be any way to travel faster than on the back of an animal, simply because the game is set in those times.
But, even with something like teleportation, if you require an ten minutes of game time to build up enough energy/manna/whatever to teleport one light second, you are only traveling at 0.17% of the speed of light. This is a very reasonable game mechanic, and something that every gamer would understand.
That speed is very fast, and you could cover vast distances very quickly, and even allow automation so that as long as every time you end the teleport if there is no hostile encounter, the "wait" is instant in real-time (still taking 10 minutes of game time). If it takes about 1 second to do all the calculations each time you move (it is a procedurally generated universe, after all), you are effectively "traveling" at the speed of light. So, again, it would take 2 real years of playing the game just to travel across the game world, not even exploring.
And, all this assumes my insane millimeter precision. Using the "seed' method from TFA, the actual size of a 64-bit universe is likely 3 to 10 orders of magnitude larger.
And thats the main reason people shop online instead of locally.
When everyday prices at Amazon are 20-50% off compared to B&M regular prices, saving the 5-10% sales tax is just an extra bonus.
Add in the fact that you can get a wide variety of used items in very good condition, and that you can buy shoes, video games, gardening tools, and food all without leaving your chair, and that is the main reason people shop online instead of locally. I purchased 20 Blu-Ray movies this past week for a grand total of $130 (including shipping), all without leaving my house, so I didn't have to fight any crowds. Some of what I bought was Amazon price matching B&M stores, and I'm sure Amazon had a lot more than 3 copies in stock at that price, but the 4 films from the "Marvel Cinematic Universe" that I got for $28.90 when Best Buy wanted to charge $89 certainly weren't a price match.
I've started buying components from Amazon instead of Newegg.
One thing about Newegg that is much better is the search. Newegg has a much better computer-item-specific directed search.
Also, if you just type something like "radeon hd 7950" then click on "desktop graphics cards", Newegg returns nothing but video cards that have that chip, while doing the same at Amazon and clicking "Computer Graphics Cards" results in many other cards, most of which show up first if you sort by ascending price.
No medium to large company really allows the possibility of just running an install script for anything of any complexity.
So what you are saying is that because some companies lock down their systems so that they must manually configure everything, no one should ever create any installers?
The point is not that an installer fails to do something because of an obscure config. Instead it is that the installer completely assumes a very specific config that isn't the default and then doesn't either automate or give you good instructions on how to make sure the dependencies are fulfilled.
They might use akamai so custom tags have to go on each page.
Assuming you are talking about a product that front-ends a web server (like a CMS, storefront, or forums), this really isn't part of an "install", but instead should be provided by settings in the software once it is running. Adding custom tags to a web page is no different from changing a font in Word document, and shouldn't be part of an install.
The solution I am working on right now involves connecting to MS-SQL, RabbitMQ, and MongoDB. It's utilizing IIS, Node.js, as well as .Net ... you're suggesting I should go back and create installers for this system that is only running in one production environment, and a handful of stage/dev environments?
Yes, if the "stock" install of a product that your is a dependency for your "system" isn't good enough, then at the very least you need to supply a script that will change the config of that product to your liking. If at all possible, that script should be run as part of your installer, asking for passwords and connection information if necessary.
For example, if your system depends on a DBMS, obviously you need to provide a script that creates the actual database you need. If the DBMS needs changes to its config (for example, more memory use than a stock install), then you need to script that as well. It may not be possible to have these scripts run directly as part of your install, but you can pause your install, present the script, tell the user to copy/paste the script and run it on the appropriate machine. If the user clicks "Next" but hasn't actually run the script, then your overall install might fail, but that's not your fault.
So, no, we don't expect you to create a custom installer for some third party product, but we do expect you to automate any changes needed to those third party products.
I think you're mistaken about error rates. It probably depends a lot on the environment and external factors, but I haven't had a single error in about 6 months.
Although this article seems to have some contradictions, overall Google's data shows that really good memory still has more errors than you would suspect. Here you can see more raw data.
Even using the best numbers from manufacturers, 32GB of RAM will have a bit error every 3 years. With the wide range listed on that page, you don't even have to get close to the worst numbers to get errors every couple of weeks. Those errors may not result in a major problem, or they could happen inside something like an MP3 file, where the error just gets converted to silence for a millisecond, so they could go completely undetected.
And, there's always anecdotal evidence. As for mine, I only see one correctable error in 60GB of total RAM (15x4GB) in the past year.
It also seems contradictory to overclock a system with ECC, because overclocking reduces the safety margins in the CPU.
Not with current Intel CPUs, and some of the AMDs. 25% overclock is almost child's play, and as long as you can keep the temperature reasonable, 50% isn't out of the question with no risk at all. This is assuming all you change is the multiplier. If you start messing around with the base clock, that can cause subtle yet serious instability. But, kicking up the multiplier of only the CPU doesn't change RAM access at all. Since most RAM also has a lot of unused performance, as long as you use stock settings for it, you're not going to get any instability there.
However, from a mortal human's perspective, 64-bit is infinite.
You're presuming that you'll be limited to walking or other slow means of transportation. And that there are no bots involved.
Actually, no, he isn't.
Let's just say that you have millimeter precision in a 64-bit integer, which would make the world 18,446,744,073,709,551 meters across. Even at the speed of light, it would take 61,531,714 seconds to traverse that distance, or nearly two years. Got that...we're talking about a world that is two light years across.
So, as long as you limit travel to some reasonable speed (e.g., 300km/sec, or nearly 10 times faster than anything man-made has ever travelled), the world is infinite for all practical purposes, even with a "faster time passage" UI. Likewise, teleportation could have a limited distance (even thousands of miles) and not be a problem unless it took literally zero time to complete.
And, this is assuming that the 64-bit number is used to directly map each millimeter. If, instead, it is a more granular area and the sub-areas are procedurally generated (which is what TFA says), then perhaps the resolution is a somewhere between 1 and 100 meters. This increases the world size to anywhere from 2,000 to 200,000 light years.
I bet even with a world as big as the Milky Way galaxy, there will be people who complain that the game is overpriced.
And a bunch of boards that are sold as server boards, although they don't seem to have a lot of server features, and "server" seems to be used as a moniker for "supports Xeon and ECC if you so choose".
Yeah, on Newegg, the "Server Motherboards" section should really be called "Server/Workstation".
But IMHO, it should be standard except for ultimate-speed-crash-and-burn computers that also use TLC SSDs in RAID 0.
Based on some of the statistics I have seen, 16GB of RAM will have a single-bit error every month or so, which means that when 32GB really becomes a "standard" size from places like Dell, ECC becomes a requirement to avoid a BSOD every couple of weeks. I know that not every error will be in such a critical location, but it still seems likely that Murphy will have a lot to say about such things. I consider myself lucky that my non-ECC 12GB desktop only sees a spurious reboot about every 3 months. Every other system I have with 8GB or more runs ECC, and my next "desktop" likely will as well, despite the added cost. I will miss all the free clock cycles, though, as you generally can't overclock Xeons.
All ASUS motherboards support ECC AFAIK, as do the new AMD CPUs.
Pretty much no non-server/workstatiion motherboards for Intel chips support ECC. Asus does have the P9X79WS, though, so that's one. Although every AMD CPU supports ECC, not every AMD motherboard supports it. So, I stand by my statement that the vast majority of motherboards don't support ECC.
To be honest, though, if you don't want two or more graphics cards, there are a lot of Intel server/workstation motherboards that are great for general-purpose computing (or gaming with a single x16 card). But, those are a lot more expensive ($150 vs. $65 for a socket 1155 board).
Unbuffered ECC memory is cheap now, sometimes cheaper than non-ECC, like 250€ for a 4x8GB pack.
Yeah, the equivalent of US$320 is lot less than $110 for 32GB (4x8GB) non-ECC RAM...(I know it's lame, but)...NOT.
16 GB ECC memory should be standard now, with RAM prices as low as they are.
Unfortunately, the vast majority of motherboards sold can't support ECC memory at all.
And, despite the low price of memory, ECC has a huge premium in price (as much as 100% for registered ECC) even though it needs only 12% more components.
this just makes Mozilla look Mickey mouse, because IE comes in 64 bit and has for something like 7 years now poor lame Mozilla can't even write well enough to tell the difference between 32bit and 64bit bugs.
And yet, on a recently-installed Windows 7, there are web pages that don't work correctly when using the 64-bit version of IE.
Maybe it's a problem with plugins, maybe it's the browser...I don't know and don't really care...I just care that the web pages don't work right. I discovered this when I found out that typing "iexplore" in the Start Menu search box results in the 64-bit version being run.
Besides, who really needs a browser than can access more than 3GB of RAM? Google doesn't think that it's necessary, either.
Perhaps you should co-lo your own gear where you can run daily patches and reboots and only affect your own stuff.
Unless the OP is sharing an actual Windows instance with other clients (which would mean he should be paying about $1/month in fees), rebooting his instance should only affect him.
It's possible that he is paying for a Windows instance on top of Hyper-V, and the underlying OS isn't getting patched, but that really shouldn't be much of a security risk for the OP, as the hypervisor OS isn't visible to the outside world. Likewise, even if he is sharing access to back-end services like SQL server, it's unlikely that the API he is using to connect to those services is vulnerable in such a way that a patched client would be a problem for an unpatched server. It's far more likely that there are SQL injection or other issues on the clients than a non-administrator connection to an unpatched server causing a compromise.
Poker machines are morally disgusting. They're basically a way of imposing a tax on people too stupid or hopeful to know better.
There's a huge difference between a video poker machine and a slot machine.
A slot machine is completely random and you have no control over the result. Video poker, on the other hand, can actually be a statistical money maker for the player if they know how to play and the machine has a favorable payout table. Don't quit your day job, though, because even playing at $10/hand you'd only make around $10/hour though perfect play. Between free drinks and comp benefits, you can end up spending only $1-2/hour for entertainment, which isn't bad.
You're right that you don't need root, per se, but there are a lot of devices out there with sideloading disabled
AT&T was really the only carrier that did this, and they re-enabled the checkbox (which gives the user the choice) quite a while ago. I don't have AT&T, but Amazon had warnings on their app pages about AT&T, and I haven't seen those in nearly a year.
At this point, no Android device requires root to install an app, regardless of source.
Define perfectly good. It sounds like you mean old computers because you cant buy new computers with xp on it. I would never define old computers as perfectly good.
I'm running XP on a Core i7-920 which is now 4 years old, and performance is not an issue. I do video and audio editing, run VMs, and do all the "boring" tasks (e-mail, web browsing, etc.) and all run just fine. The only real performance roadblocks are ones that a new computer likely wouldn't help with (disk drive and network, when moving 30-40GB of data around), although an SSD upgrade could help some.
There definitely isn't anything that Windows 7 or 8 would allow me to do better than I am doing it right now. I might be able to play some games that I can't play now, but that's really the only issue, but it has nothing to do with performance, and it's exactly the point of TFA...artificially limiting newer versions of DirectX to the newer OS will make some people upgrade, but only gamers.
windows 8 is a performer.
What, exactly, does Windows 8 do faster than any previous OS? Every benchmark out there shows that Windows 8 is pretty much exactly the same as Windows 7 as far as application performance is concerned. Likewise, Windows 7 is pretty much the same as Windows XP. Many people think that every newer OS is much faster, but that's usually because they got that newer OS when they purchased a new PC.