I'm a consultant. I don't pay MS any yearly support fee. I do subscribe to MSDN, but the yearly cost on that is like 600 bucks.
The companies I was working for when the two biggest problems occured with SQL Server, both were not dealing directly with MS. They were buying their MS Product from a third party ( no MS -Select). they were pretty large, but had no direct deals with MS. Dell/Compaq-hp was who they went to with any issues.
I think MS is smart enough to realize if someone's having an issue with SQL Server, it's more than likely not running a beauty parolors hair-management-system, and so they take extra care for those calls.
Kinda like, I expect better support calling on the Visual C++ line, then calling ont he Excel VBA help line.
I've had my share (roughly four) of 'major' issues with SQL Server, all with very large databases (ie, just rebuild it from a backup wasn't an alternative). Calling MS PSS is always the last choice. In all cases I found the SQL Server support beyond incredible. In two cases I had them sending me a runtime debugging monitor and they had top tier PSS support actually watch and log in realtime SQL Server taking a crap.
The issue in one case had to do with computed columns and indexed views. While syntaxtically legit what I wrote to occur on that column, it defeated the Deterministic/non-Deterministic requirement check, and this at some point led to an invalid mem read.
The amount of support I got was almost too much to handle. The app was not fully in production (call it final testing), and I was almost receiving too much communication and phone calls from MS PSS on the issue (was damn busy). They figured out a work around for me, tested it against the database for me (that was one big-ass rar file I set them. around 62gig for the set of data we were testing aginst, they downloaded it all weekend). To develop the work around they even looked at my data access layer and made sure the performance would be adequate.
And, in the end, this PSS support call was free. The problem was in SQL server, not hardware or setup.
I have other stories for the other serious problems I've had with sql. I can't attest to this level of support on any other MS product, but with SQL, you get more than what you pay for.
p.s, as part of the anti-FUD, can you post the KB article # that has "Known issue since 2003, no workaround available" in it.
from the actual EXHIBIT A attached to the affadvit:
EXHIBIT A System operation (Please read the AIX 5.2 documentation before attempting to use this system)
To power up the system, press the power button on the front panel. To reboot the system, run the 'reboot' command as root. To shutdown the system run the 'shutdown -F' command as root. To power up after shutdown, press the power button on the front panel. CMVC operation (Please read the CMVC documentation before attempting to use the CMVC GUI or CMVC command line interfaces)
The aix and admin CMVC families will automatically start on system startup or reboot. To start or restart the CMVC families, run the following commands as root:
StartAIX.ksh - to restart the aix CMVC family StartAdmin.ksh - to restart the admin CMVC family To run CMVC commands on the aix and admin CMVC families
Log on the system as the scoid ID The scoid CMVC ID has hostlist access setup, no password needed to access the CMVC families The scoid CMVC ID has superuser authority to the families (refer to the CMVC docs for superuser description) To run the CMVC GUI interface run the 'cmvc' command (refer to the CMVC docs for help on the CMVC GUI)
To set the family to access from the CMVC GUI:
Select "Set Family . .." from the "Options" pull down Enter either "aix" or "admin" in the "Family:" field the - or -
The "CMVC_FAMILY" environment variable can be set to "aix" or "admin" CMVC command line commands can be run from the command prompt (refer to the CMVC docs for help on the CMVC command line interface)
To set the family to access for the CMVC command line interface:
The "-family" parameter on the command can be set to "aix" or "admin" - or - - or -
The CMVC_FAMILY" environment variable can be set to "aix" or "admin"
aix family address: aix@@7260 admin family address: admin@@7265 user2diffs usage (user2diffs command is located in/home/scoid)
These stories are ridiculous. Both the original article, which is complete fiction and this one. No doubt based a small amount on some stupid user and a micron of truth, but there is no way it went down the way it did. It's like an alt.sex story where the writer is some hero with twenty beautiful nymph wives, black belt in ten different diciplines, knows eight languages, and has the lasting power of a steer during spring.
Fidel's story here is crap. No moron script kiddie is going to know how to even _attempt_ to delete the RPC service. It would require knowing exactly where to go to in the registry hive, and a permission change to even let a non-system account go and delete it. And you better be sure to get the CurrentControlXXX instance sub-keys as well.
I know this is just human nature to tell stories like these, and theres some funny moments in some of these stories, but maybe my brain just doesn't work the same way as yours. I read them and cringe at the lack of humility in the authors of these vain works.
Yeah yeah, we get it. You're smarter than others. Great. Maybe you should start a reality TV show with two dumb blond sisters and make fun of people who know less than you.
in most warehouses i've walked through there's often time product, grease, water, or any number of things on the floors. At times, the fork lift will slid through them in full brake. I've seen people play games with it it can become so slick (especially on polished concrete floors).
... what the hell do you know about the US High School system?
Your opionion states that you are obviously partial to your view of Bill Gates being an ass, and you're intolerent of anything he or his money helps accomplish.
I bet you got something pithy to say about the 4.1 billion dollars he's given away in his foundations Global Health Initiative, the 2.2 billion in Education, 300 million to Global Libraries, and 500 million to local communities in the Pacific Northwest.
It's all the same drivel with a few words edited
funny, i was thinking the same thing about your post.
Carefull.. you're getting pretty close with the Auschwitz reference.
Look kid. It's great you can use your Steam account and play games. But a lot of others can not, and some of them like me use steam on only one computer.
And by logoff, I simply mean close down steam. I didn't do anything fancy lastnight. I quit CS:S, exited steam, and shutdown my machine.
The fact we have to experience this at all is a failure on Valve part of our agreement. The fact they make no offical mention of it, no status, no 'we are busy looking into the matter' is another strike against Valve. It shows how much they care about their customers on a Saturday.
There's no way I'm going to let you turn this into it's the fans and customers who are at fault here.
Same old flame we see anytime there's a technical glitch that doesn't affect everyone.
but it works for me
Great. So screw the rest of us that have been using it fine for the last two months, only to wake up to this mess this morning. Obviously, gnomes invaded half of the steam users out there and futzed with their settings. It's the users fault!
Your loyalty to Valve is noted. But it's worthless in this topic. If you want to add something, then try logging off steam, rebooting your computer, and logging back on. Does that work for you? If so that would shed some light on things. Not that I trust you one bit to actually take the risk.
I mean, if it happened to you and you had to admit it, your previous posts would make you look like quite the fool.
If you disable your NIC or un-plug your connection, off-line mode will kick in. But it won't help in this issue. Once you get the message: "Steam is having trouble connecting to the Steam servers." Then it's too late. Your offline login info is gone or invalidated:
Steam - Error Unable to connect to the Steam network. 'Offline mode' is unavailable because there is no Steam login information stored on this computer. You will not be able to use steam until you can connect to the Steam network again. To check the status of the Steam network please visit http://steampowered.com/status
Re:I haven't played this, but what I'm hearing is
on
Steam Users Steamed
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Well, in fact, it does not _all_ go down. You can leave the Steam tray app running and it will remain 'logged in' for an underterminate amount of time (at-least several days I believe).
I have been exiting and closing Steam completely when I finish for the night. Requiring me to re-authenticate each day when I want to play CS:S or HL2 again. This obviously has bit me in the butt.
Regardless, authentication is so lightweight and featureless that as a software engineer I find the fact the service isn't working unimaginable. I know we've all (those who've played MMOG) have experiecned this in the past, but come on. Surely by now the fault tolerent designs of corporate banking/trading software has finally seeped into game server authentication. Multiple masters, distributed, clustered, geographically dispersed, big-ip'd or hell even round-robin with 1s TTLs. Anything to provide some redundancy.
This smells more like a data glitch then a software/hardware glitch. I heard they were going to be doing some account maint to disable some accounts that were being sold on e-bay and passed around pirate IRC channels.
I'd bet heavily that this is the result of a very poorly formulated UPDATE sql statement. And piss-poor backup/recovery strategy.
I know your post was flamebait, but in case others are wondering this doesn't work with the current problem the Steam network is having.
Also, we aren't even given the option to Start Off-Line. You can force it by disconnecting your network media or disabling your interface. But even then, it won't work.
Re:Easy work around for steam connection problem
on
Steam Users Steamed
·
· Score: 1
You would think... but it doesn't work. It seems to have removed/delted/invalidated the login info on our machines. Which is probably tied to why I get the login box with my password 'blank' (even though it's set to be remebered). In addition, other more adventurous users tried to use the reset password option, and got an e-mail back saying their account didn't exists. Obviously something Very Bad (tm) happened last-night:
Steam - Error Unable to connect to the Steam network. 'Offline mode' is unavailable because there is no Steam login information stored on this computer. You will not be able to use steam until you can connect to the Steam network again. To check the status of the Steam network please visit http://steampowered.com/status
You should at least read the threads above your post. That's what you failed to do.
I've been using Steam/HL2/CS:S for the past 2 months. Without a problem. Lastnight I played CS:S until about three in the morning. Today I woke up, and when i ran CS:S I got a Steam login prompt, with my password blank. I re-rentered my password and got the message all the others see.
This is a real problem. I've been down all day, many others as well. If you look on any forum for any Steam powered game you will find a thread about this issue.
One of the most annoying things is Valve's silence. This harkens back to the early days of MMOG's when the companies wouldn't update news pages about downtime. EA/UO use to do it for fear of lawsuits before that got revamped. EQ went through it's period of silent denial over loging/authentication issues.
Valve is making a rookie mistake. The should have immediately updated the KB article the 'server unavable' dialog box connects to with info that a system wide downtime is in effect. Second to that, they should have updated the status page. They have a network status, they should have put a small blurb at the top of the page that mentions problems people are experiencing logging in, and that the issue is being looked into.
Or hell, have an actualy moderator put up a sticky thread on the forums if you really have that pathetic of a support infrastructure to do the above two recommendations.
Also, if you want to offer an honest opinion, log off your Steam account, reboot your computer, and try to log back in again. 3 to 1 you can't. I've had three friends lose there ability to play because they shut down/logged off steam while trying to log in other friends.
If a very large corporation came up with a cure for cancer (let's assume they haven't already, because obviously the drug companies have and are just holding out hoping to up the necessity and thus price of this drug) the denizens of Slashdot would bitch that the overflow of people not dieing to the disease will now cause an increase in methane production due to their shit, and thus hasten the ozone depletion and cause a catastrophic rapid climate change.
It's slashdot. Trust no one or thing with a income larger than 1% above poverty line of your specific country.
I haven't gotten one.. yet. I'm curious how it will handle NAT'd public WiFi spots when you can't poke a hole through the NAT/Firewall. Apparently it still works if it's only NAT'd once (multiple NAT's within NAT's cause the phone to fail I read). Maybe it goes into Poll mode or something.
If your IDE/Editor of choice, had outputed all your code in that XML fashion, a very simple XSL transform that compared the function signature of the 'stdio.h' lib to all your 'fncall' tags, could have easily warned you of such an impending failure.
1. Nothing. "printf 0" I doubt would compile. 2. It's not easier to read for a human. But the purpose of this article was that it would be easier to read for a program. And the reader/parser would be far more language agnostic, which allows more reuse of Testing, AOP, and Security Auditing tools against different codebases written in different languages.
Either way, this is slashdot. It's only a matter of time until someone post how coding in machine specific binary is the only way to code, blah blah blah, xml is fat, blah blah blah can you make an xml schema for xml schema, blah blah SGMIL blah.
We believe that next-generation programming systems will most likely store source code as XML, rather than as flat text. Programmers will not see or edit XML tags; instead, their editors will render these models to create human-friendly views, just like Web browsers and other WYSIWYG editors. For example, a program stored on disk like this:
would be viewed and edited like this:// Only replace below threshold if (record.age > threshold) {
record.release(); }
Crucially, code will not be stored as uninterpreted CDATA within XML documents and programmers will not see (much less type in) XML tags. Such a representation would have all the disadvantages of JSPs, Ant, and other hybrid systems, without bringing any tangible benefits. Instead, XML will represent the program's deep structure. Only time and experimentation will tell whether this turns out to be something like an annotated syntax tree or something more abstract.
It's not that big of a deal to implement. Just get the major IDE's to play along, all will no doubt retain the ability to persist or convert to ASCII tokens when needed. The benefit comes when your in a very large enterprise project and you want to write some automated code testing or style checking, or even security audits. Being abstracted from the specific languages TOKENS lets you write a relative language neutral code auditor with ease.
I'd easily use XSL + XPATH to do some major change over using a big ass regex.
Look at the ad on the bottom of that JesusSave.us site: http://www.preparingdaughters.com/ "PreparingDaughters.com, Dedidcated to building up Godly young ladies. *Now With Recipes!*"
Jesus H. Christ, they're cooking their children! These sickos must be stopped.
Based on the purpose of XML, part of the requirements to meet that purpose is for a human to both be able to easily read and write XML. Type a GT or LT sign via the keyboard is far easier than figuring out how to impound a high-ascii character into some data your are scribing.
The proble your decscribed above, is one of those applications. It is their job to police the correct syntax of the language they are accepting. If said syntax is invalid, they should fail with an error. If said syntax happens to be valid, by chance, but not what the writter meant, well, tough shit. The human made a mistake, and god forbid if the computer isn't programmed for the less than.00001% chance of things.
No idea if they had patents on it. If this French company got there first, these would seem to be very lucrative patents.
As for SciFi being there first, that's hardly an argument we (Geeks) want to see used. If companies can't make money off a technique or concept because a SciFi writer wrote about it abstractly, they will not invest the money needed to create such a technology. We'd have to sit around and wait for some gigantic government initiative like the Space Shuttle to get technology we've long dreamed for. And even then.. it's rarely in a form we can benefit from.
Remeber, its 1% inspiration/ 99% perspiration.
It's gret these SciFi writers inspired our engineers, but the effort that goes in to producing viable products should not remain un-rewarded.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm a consultant. I don't pay MS any yearly support fee. I do subscribe to MSDN, but the yearly cost on that is like 600 bucks.
The companies I was working for when the two biggest problems occured with SQL Server, both were not dealing directly with MS. They were buying their MS Product from a third party ( no MS -Select). they were pretty large, but had no direct deals with MS. Dell/Compaq-hp was who they went to with any issues.
I think MS is smart enough to realize if someone's having an issue with SQL Server, it's more than likely not running a beauty parolors hair-management-system, and so they take extra care for those calls.
Kinda like, I expect better support calling on the Visual C++ line, then calling ont he Excel VBA help line.
I got to call bull on this one.
I've had my share (roughly four) of 'major' issues with SQL Server, all with very large databases (ie, just rebuild it from a backup wasn't an alternative). Calling MS PSS is always the last choice. In all cases I found the SQL Server support beyond incredible. In two cases I had them sending me a runtime debugging monitor and they had top tier PSS support actually watch and log in realtime SQL Server taking a crap.
The issue in one case had to do with computed columns and indexed views. While syntaxtically legit what I wrote to occur on that column, it defeated the Deterministic/non-Deterministic requirement check, and this at some point led to an invalid mem read.
The amount of support I got was almost too much to handle. The app was not fully in production (call it final testing), and I was almost receiving too much communication and phone calls from MS PSS on the issue (was damn busy). They figured out a work around for me, tested it against the database for me (that was one big-ass rar file I set them. around 62gig for the set of data we were testing aginst, they downloaded it all weekend). To develop the work around they even looked at my data access layer and made sure the performance would be adequate.
And, in the end, this PSS support call was free. The problem was in SQL server, not hardware or setup.
I have other stories for the other serious problems I've had with sql. I can't attest to this level of support on any other MS product, but with SQL, you get more than what you pay for.
p.s, as part of the anti-FUD, can you post the KB article # that has "Known issue since 2003, no workaround available" in it.
These stories are ridiculous. Both the original article, which is complete fiction and this one. No doubt based a small amount on some stupid user and a micron of truth, but there is no way it went down the way it did. It's like an alt.sex story where the writer is some hero with twenty beautiful nymph wives, black belt in ten different diciplines, knows eight languages, and has the lasting power of a steer during spring.
Fidel's story here is crap. No moron script kiddie is going to know how to even _attempt_ to delete the RPC service. It would require knowing exactly where to go to in the registry hive, and a permission change to even let a non-system account go and delete it. And you better be sure to get the CurrentControlXXX instance sub-keys as well.
I know this is just human nature to tell stories like these, and theres some funny moments in some of these stories, but maybe my brain just doesn't work the same way as yours. I read them and cringe at the lack of humility in the authors of these vain works.
Yeah yeah, we get it. You're smarter than others. Great. Maybe you should start a reality TV show with two dumb blond sisters and make fun of people who know less than you.
in most warehouses i've walked through there's often time product, grease, water, or any number of things on the floors. At times, the fork lift will slid through them in full brake. I've seen people play games with it it can become so slick (especially on polished concrete floors).
Danny Noonan: I don't think I'm going to be able to go to colege. My parents don't have the money.
Judge Smails: Well, the world needs ditch diggers, too.
Your opionion states that you are obviously partial to your view of Bill Gates being an ass, and you're intolerent of anything he or his money helps accomplish.
I bet you got something pithy to say about the 4.1 billion dollars he's given away in his foundations Global Health Initiative, the 2.2 billion in Education, 300 million to Global Libraries, and 500 million to local communities in the Pacific Northwest.
funny, i was thinking the same thing about your post.
Carefull.. you're getting pretty close with the Auschwitz reference.
Look kid. It's great you can use your Steam account and play games. But a lot of others can not, and some of them like me use steam on only one computer.
And by logoff, I simply mean close down steam. I didn't do anything fancy lastnight. I quit CS:S, exited steam, and shutdown my machine.
The fact we have to experience this at all is a failure on Valve part of our agreement. The fact they make no offical mention of it, no status, no 'we are busy looking into the matter' is another strike against Valve. It shows how much they care about their customers on a Saturday.
There's no way I'm going to let you turn this into it's the fans and customers who are at fault here.
People with both 0:0 and 0:1 id's are having issues, or not having issues.
Great. So screw the rest of us that have been using it fine for the last two months, only to wake up to this mess this morning. Obviously, gnomes invaded half of the steam users out there and futzed with their settings. It's the users fault!
Your loyalty to Valve is noted. But it's worthless in this topic. If you want to add something, then try logging off steam, rebooting your computer, and logging back on. Does that work for you? If so that would shed some light on things. Not that I trust you one bit to actually take the risk.
I mean, if it happened to you and you had to admit it, your previous posts would make you look like quite the fool.
Well, in fact, it does not _all_ go down. You can leave the Steam tray app running and it will remain 'logged in' for an underterminate amount of time (at-least several days I believe).
I have been exiting and closing Steam completely when I finish for the night. Requiring me to re-authenticate each day when I want to play CS:S or HL2 again. This obviously has bit me in the butt.
Regardless, authentication is so lightweight and featureless that as a software engineer I find the fact the service isn't working unimaginable. I know we've all (those who've played MMOG) have experiecned this in the past, but come on. Surely by now the fault tolerent designs of corporate banking/trading software has finally seeped into game server authentication. Multiple masters, distributed, clustered, geographically dispersed, big-ip'd or hell even round-robin with 1s TTLs. Anything to provide some redundancy.
This smells more like a data glitch then a software/hardware glitch. I heard they were going to be doing some account maint to disable some accounts that were being sold on e-bay and passed around pirate IRC channels.
I'd bet heavily that this is the result of a very poorly formulated UPDATE sql statement. And piss-poor backup/recovery strategy.
I know your post was flamebait, but in case others are wondering this doesn't work with the current problem the Steam network is having.
c id=11518258
Also, we aren't even given the option to Start Off-Line. You can force it by disconnecting your network media or disabling your interface. But even then, it won't work.
My post to someone else explains this: http://games.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=137739&
You should at least read the threads above your post. That's what you failed to do.
I've been using Steam/HL2/CS:S for the past 2 months. Without a problem. Lastnight I played CS:S until about three in the morning. Today I woke up, and when i ran CS:S I got a Steam login prompt, with my password blank. I re-rentered my password and got the message all the others see.
This is a real problem. I've been down all day, many others as well. If you look on any forum for any Steam powered game you will find a thread about this issue.
One of the most annoying things is Valve's silence. This harkens back to the early days of MMOG's when the companies wouldn't update news pages about downtime. EA/UO use to do it for fear of lawsuits before that got revamped. EQ went through it's period of silent denial over loging/authentication issues.
Valve is making a rookie mistake. The should have immediately updated the KB article the 'server unavable' dialog box connects to with info that a system wide downtime is in effect. Second to that, they should have updated the status page. They have a network status, they should have put a small blurb at the top of the page that mentions problems people are experiencing logging in, and that the issue is being looked into.
Or hell, have an actualy moderator put up a sticky thread on the forums if you really have that pathetic of a support infrastructure to do the above two recommendations.
Also, if you want to offer an honest opinion, log off your Steam account, reboot your computer, and try to log back in again. 3 to 1 you can't. I've had three friends lose there ability to play because they shut down/logged off steam while trying to log in other friends.
Dude, it's Slashdot.
If a very large corporation came up with a cure for cancer (let's assume they haven't already, because obviously the drug companies have and are just holding out hoping to up the necessity and thus price of this drug) the denizens of Slashdot would bitch that the overflow of people not dieing to the disease will now cause an increase in methane production due to their shit, and thus hasten the ozone depletion and cause a catastrophic rapid climate change.
It's slashdot. Trust no one or thing with a income larger than 1% above poverty line of your specific country.
http://voipstore.pulver.com/product_info.php?prod
I haven't gotten one.. yet. I'm curious how it will handle NAT'd public WiFi spots when you can't poke a hole through the NAT/Firewall. Apparently it still works if it's only NAT'd once (multiple NAT's within NAT's cause the phone to fail I read). Maybe it goes into Poll mode or something.
Still, cool either way.
here, save this kid from being unable to use his DSL for the next 8 hours:
r s/TOQCv1_0.pdf [Coral Link]
http://home.swiftdsl.com.au.nyud.net:8090/~chille
If your IDE/Editor of choice, had outputed all your code in that XML fashion, a very simple XSL transform that compared the function signature of the 'stdio.h' lib to all your 'fncall' tags, could have easily warned you of such an impending failure.
1. Nothing. "printf 0" I doubt would compile.
2. It's not easier to read for a human. But the purpose of this article was that it would be easier to read for a program. And the reader/parser would be far more language agnostic, which allows more reuse of Testing, AOP, and Security Auditing tools against different codebases written in different languages.
Either way, this is slashdot. It's only a matter of time until someone post how coding in machine specific binary is the only way to code, blah blah blah, xml is fat, blah blah blah can you make an xml schema for xml schema, blah blah SGMIL blah.
It's not that big of a deal to implement. Just get the major IDE's to play along, all will no doubt retain the ability to persist or convert to ASCII tokens when needed. The benefit comes when your in a very large enterprise project and you want to write some automated code testing or style checking, or even security audits. Being abstracted from the specific languages TOKENS lets you write a relative language neutral code auditor with ease.
I'd easily use XSL + XPATH to do some major change over using a big ass regex.
Look at the ad on the bottom of that JesusSave.us site: http://www.preparingdaughters.com/
"PreparingDaughters.com, Dedidcated to building up Godly young ladies. *Now With Recipes!*"
Jesus H. Christ, they're cooking their children! These sickos must be stopped.
Based on the purpose of XML, part of the requirements to meet that purpose is for a human to both be able to easily read and write XML. Type a GT or LT sign via the keyboard is far easier than figuring out how to impound a high-ascii character into some data your are scribing.
.00001% chance of things.
The proble your decscribed above, is one of those applications. It is their job to police the correct syntax of the language they are accepting. If said syntax is invalid, they should fail with an error. If said syntax happens to be valid, by chance, but not what the writter meant, well, tough shit. The human made a mistake, and god forbid if the computer isn't programmed for the less than
Microsoft needs Wizards
Wow, if only I hadn't been 9, and if only I had access to a nntp and uucp.
Tunable Microlens
No idea if they had patents on it. If this French company got there first, these would seem to be very lucrative patents.
As for SciFi being there first, that's hardly an argument we (Geeks) want to see used. If companies can't make money off a technique or concept because a SciFi writer wrote about it abstractly, they will not invest the money needed to create such a technology. We'd have to sit around and wait for some gigantic government initiative like the Space Shuttle to get technology we've long dreamed for. And even then.. it's rarely in a form we can benefit from.
Remeber, its 1% inspiration/ 99% perspiration.
It's gret these SciFi writers inspired our engineers, but the effort that goes in to producing viable products should not remain un-rewarded.