the issue is most clients hit DNS servers which cache lookups. the bigger the network the client is on (AOL, Time Warner cable,...etc..etc) the more skewed your "load balancing" get. If all roadrunner users are hitting 1 IP because that's the IP that got Cached for the next X seconds/mins/hours the server is helpless.
If you were to send the client alist of available IP:PORT, it could then do a random on it, and not be affected by bandwidth-saving-dns-cache-entries that network administers love to use.
Or, like i said in another response, clients needs to go Authortative on every DNS lookup.
Worse than that, most clients will get a CACHED dns entry, because they access dns through a firewall, proxy, NAT, AOL DNS Servers, Cable Modem Co. DNS servers...etc..etc.
Caching is what kills RRDNS, and unless you go Authorative on evern DNS lookup, you can't be sure you aren't getting cached records.
Relying on a single tracker is really no different than relying on a single web site. Any well-colocated machine is plenty reliable enough, and if you really need failover you can do it at the DNS level
sigh..
I don't think he gets it. First, we've already discussed the virtues/sins of DNS round-robin. But basically, when DNS round-robin doesn't solve your problem, you have to go to Big-IP. Which means 'free' tracker sites will need complex setup for failover/redundancy.
If the Tracker itself, had this built in, i propose it could do it more efficently, and with less setup hassle. Imagine being able to setup a mirror by simply having the admin place your new "cluster-able" tracker IP:Port on an approved mirror list. The main tracker could refer clients to a mirror after behind-the-scenes communication to determine which mirror has least load.
A step below this, but better than DNS round-robin, would be to give the client an array of tracker addresses. This is better than DNS because you don't get the stalled server mixed with cached DNS record causing inaccessibility. The clients could try connections randomly to the servers in the array, and prevent cached dns records for altering distribution.
DoD has a bandwidth problem now trying to control and get imagery from airborne Predator UAV's, what happens when you wire the individual soldier?
They don't have a bandwidth problem, CNN, FOX.. et. al have a bandwidth problem. The Military bought all the commercial sat times for the war. It was very cost effective. They have enough bandwidth using commercial sats, and that will last them until the new comm constellation goes online in 2010. Not to mention, their stake in Global Crossing keeps their terrestial bandwidth in huge supply.
Where is this bandwidth going to come from?
When all your soldiers are routers and are sharing spectrum, the aggregate of them ADDS to your bandwidth, not subtracts. You no longer have just one path (humvee->sattelite->another humvee) you now could possible relay over a 'human' network. The more nodes, the more possible paths. Setup a fixed node with some high long range emf link back to home base, or bounce it off a sat.
Can this be subject to monitoring and how is it going to be secured?
I laugh everytime I see a statement like this on slashdot. I sometime forget everyone on slashdot believes they are somehow unique and think of things noone else could. Gee, do you think they should encrypt the network? Gee can it be monitored? The fact you even thought of this should tell you the military has thought of it as well.
For that matter can it withstand an EMP pulse?
Probably not. But just because their is some way for the enemy to take away your advantage doesn't mean you shouldn't use it. If they EMP you, it won't be a big area. A few units in close proximity to each other could all go down at once, but again, so what. They are trained to use the advantage when they have it. When they don't, they issue orders using vocal resonance called SHOUTING.
If I wanted to take out communicating enemy forces using modern comm gear that is not hardened, a small tactical nuke would do just fine
Umm, a small tactical nuke will kill them. Lack of communication at that point is moot. See above comment.
And what about the possibility of interception even if it is secure?
Well then it wouldn't be secure would it.
What if a unit that has a base unit to receive updates is captured, then parts of the system (or the whole system) is compromized
What if you capture and torture a prisoner for the information? Is the war lost? No, you expect and antcipate your enemys move. You anticipate that they may get to a Humvee which the engine is still running (the keys reset when the engine is turned off, and after a idle timeout). You are vulnerable while that stolen humvee goes unreported. But your troops should never be out of contact. At worse, you enemy has a few hours of information to the whereabouts of some of your troops. At best, you know they stole the humvee, you know they are using it, and you feed them false data. So the enemy knows your location, again, you lost an advantge, not the war. They still have to act on that information, and in the end, some grunt with a finger on the trigger can save the day by killing before being killed.
This will take years of testing before it ever becomes reality, I wouldn't hold my breath.
It was used in Iraq. So you could have held your breath. Not the full power of it, and not as many sensors, but Captains in the field had realtime data and video communication via a distributed wirless net. The net had to be setup by grunts, and pushed forward with the troops, but it was done. There's lots of space the EM world. Especially when you dont have to care about the FCC.
I know slashdot is home of the cynics, but for once, i'd like to see comments about "wow, this is cool technology, i wonder how we could find out more about it, i wonder if we could get an interview with people making this stuff, talk to the geeks, discuss their routing choices...etc". Instead of all this "this is dumb, some script kiddie is going to DDOS our soldier, as they look up porn on their embedded internet connections.
First off, skip VB6 and anything before it. Go to.Net. You can do true OO programming using VB.Net, C#, C++ and a bunch of other.Net CLI languages. They can all communicate with ANY sort of DLL/COM combo your board manufacutuers give you.
Second, dump Win95 NOW. Your logic on why you don't want too is flawed. WinNT/2K has nothing in common with Win95. They are Two different products. Your not "Upgrading" your buying a different product.
Win95 was designed for the home, and a stepping point from DOS. Not as some sort of platform for stability and IO/Data Gathering, Realtime acquisition..etc. It's a hack and an old one at that. Would you use a build of Linux from 1995? 98? Hell no.
I'm really serious on this last point. Many people fail to realize just how stable Windows 2000 is. I'm amazed Win95 is still floating around in labs like this. Win98 is no better either (same thing). Did it come on the computer? I think i've been running win2k for nearly 5 years now in October. That's about the limit for a development platform imo (win2003 i'll ugprade to at SP1 level).
If you can find an Open Source alternative using Linux and other free stuff great. But honestly, I bet you end up spending more time getting things up and running and working, then programming/inventing.
Whatever you do, dont use VB6. It's not worth 'learning'. Stick to a.Net language, or if you're a good programmer, and you know C/C++ use that.
Think of it this way, these guys know probably better than anyone else NOT on the AOL IM team, just how much of IM conversations are monitored, logged, mined for information, media metrics...etc.
Not to mention, they work in that environment, they prolly want to be able to say "god damn, our executive VP is a bitch" and not have some network engineer provide a log documenting that conversation later.
Yeah, i wish it scalled, but wtf, its opensource. Go make it scale. For now, 10-50 is plenty for most groups of online friends.
Personally, I'd loved to see technology like Pastry get hacked into it.
WASTE is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or
(at your option) any later version.
WASTE is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
GNU General Public License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
along with WASTE; if not, write to the Free Software
Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307 USA */
It seems like it would work if users to DNS servers were evenly distributed.
But when you have a large portion of users coming from broadband sources like a cable company (or a nation wide cable company... timewarner) some of those companies use their own hierarchy to save DNS lookups. Which means, a group of cable modem users from a specic cable company may all be refered to the same IP for a given round robin DNS.
If everyone in the world individually request the IP for a given round-robin host, they use, i agree, the lookups should be 50/50 between two hosts. Although, you must realize, this still does not _distribute load_. if one server as 10k 'light' users and the other has 10k 'heavy' users, you've solved nothing.
The way in which your using RR DNS, or the application for which you are using it, really dictates whether it's effective. For simple websites, most of the time, RR can save you from expensive big-ip solutions. But the BitTorrent tracker is rather a specialized application, and busy one at that. It needs true load balancing, where if a tracker is near capacity it can refer users to another tracker, or the.torrent should have more than 1 tracker in it.
This requires a small change to the protocol, and a large change to tracker servers (independent but colloborating trackers will want to share tracker information to keep a single unified view of the statistics and seed/user data).
Popular tracker sites (where you submite a.torrent, and it modifies it and becomes the primary tracker) seem to have a scaling issue. I won't mention the site but their are trackers that get 2,000,000 hits a day, and 50k-65k visitors. Trying to download a torrent tracked by an overused tracker such as this one, can be frustrating. While bigger/faster hardware is a temporary solution, what other options exist for scaling trackers better?
Now, I'll also say, I wonder about performance of PHP trackers (as this one is).
I also saw some place where you mentioned the should use round-robin DNS for the tracker host to "scale". This isn't a good solution though, as any network engineer who runs a large internet accessible website will tell you. Cachine of DNS records make round-robin not as effective as it needs to be.
I saw a suggestion where a.torrent could have an array of tracker sites, that seemed like a quick and easy hack to get some scalability, have you seen or thought of any others?
I bought it mainly because all I heard (granted from the creators) was how cool their "Hacking the MAtrix" was going to be. I being a fan of that sort of thing believed them.
Hacking the Matrix is nothing short of a simple "Do A, opens B, Do B, opens C, Do C, Opens D...". There might be a branch in their, and their might be a "you landed on on jail, go back to start do not collect 200 dollars".
It _LOOKS_ like it's going to be cool, but it's _NOT_. And if your early in the game, it's worthless. All the future maps are locked, you can't drop weapons until you unlock the map and find the code. And you can't do any additional "trainings" (like sword fighting) until you win the game.
I was hoping for some sort of OS emulator that was more than just a dumb down shell script with facade commands. I could think of a lot of ways a programmer I could make a cool "more real than real" hacking game (put buffer overflows in the read.exe and play.exe command. teach a new generation about machine code. make up some simple BS machine code language for a fictional processor, leave a manual about it in a hidden directory).
So who cares though, it's just the hacking game that sucks right? That was more a freebie anyway?
Wrong.
Next thing, and I can only bitch about this on the XBOX version, but the Controls SUCK. You can not assign actions to buttons. You have simply 3 prebuilt configurations to choose from. I HATE IT WHEN DEVELOPERS ARE LAZY LIKE THIS.
If you want to be able to strafe on the XBOX, then you have to move the FOCUS ability to the 'thumbstick button' (thumbstick click). The left thumbstick is how you move mind you. Focus is like 'the force', and you have a limited amount, So you really want to be able to enable it in very precise increments at a precise time. It really should be on a trigger finger, and dished out while performing a movement + jump + and firing weapons (which your thumbs should be doing). There is NO CONFIGURATION that you can choose that allows this to occur.
Also, if you want strafe, then their is no way to use the "TARGET LOCK" command. Sorry, it's not mapped to ANYTHING.
Another annoying thing is the First Person mode. You go into First Person mode my moving the right thumbstick. You can't move while in FPS mode. It's really annoying. Not so much the not moving in first person, but the fact that I can't control the camera while i'm running in third person mode. The combination of my movement (left thumbstrick) and my camera control (right thumbstick) should ALWAYS merge together and perform some sort of vector change. This then gives you the ability to let the left thumbstick left/right act as strafe. Think of it, as the right thumbstrick controlling your head (where you look, where you go when running straight).
Instead in the Enter the Matrix, you control your character like it's a tank.
Maybe they did this to try and free up your right thumb to push a bunch of useless kick+punch+jump combos. But i must rather of had combos with trigger fingers and direction.
Maybe i'm spoiled by HALO, Metal Gear Solid and other games, but the controls for Enter the Matrix really ruined it for me.
As for the kung-fu style action (a'la Matrix) everyone is say is so cool, well it's neat. I'll give them that, but it has NOTHING TO DO WITH THE PLAYER. I did a few tests where during some 4 on 1 fights I just started mashing combos of focus+jump+movement and my character would destroy them. It takes the same amount of skill as "hack the matrix" took. Press A, Press B, Press C, Press D. Wow, look at those amazing manuvers i just did, i'm so good.
This game sucks, and if you've played enough games long enough, you'll see and know why within the first 5mins, and confirmed after the first hour.
but because of X-Prize pressure, they are scraping that plan for now. John Carmack said in one of his diaries, that if someone else got the X-Prize before AA, then they'd go back to a powered landing (true VTVL SSTO).
Funny, they don't seem to promote that anywhere on their site.
All I see are things like "EUROPE'S LARGEST GNU/LINUX EXHIBITION AND CONFERENCE"
New Thinking
LinuxTag is Europe's largest annual convention for Free Software focusing on GNU/Linux. This event is aimed at everyone interested in Free Software, from novices and newcomers to experienced GNU/Linux fans--including the developer community and IT decision makers.
Information, Orientation, Innovation Concentrated information about new products, trends and strategies will be presented by renowned international experts from all areas of the Free Software scene in the lecture series held during the exhibition.
Participate in LinuxTag LinuxTag offers you a wide range of opportunities.
Support LinuxTag as a sponsor for optimum positioning in LinuxTag advance publicity. For more information please contact Thomas Grieshaber who will be more than happy to answer your questions.
Wouldn't this be like E3 suing Electronic Arts because Electronic Arts alleges IP violation in say a ID Software Game?
Or like COMDEX suing Motorola, because they allege Ericsson stole some technology.
LinuxTag is a conference, a media event. I think they are grossly overstepping their bounds.
Would a "Car Show" sue a major car manufacturer because said manufacturer comes up with some legal case that threatens to make all other manufacturers indebted to them? They might be pissed, but filing some legal suit for such a 4th party participant in the field is misuse of the system.
Games like counter-strike have kick. The bots i've seen take the kick into account, about as well as a good player would. Shoot in burts, and know to pull down between burts bya certain amount based on your exp with that gun.
I agree the CRC'ing of the game, and the typical PunkBunster systems are inadequate. Giving the client only the information that is immediately needed and visible to said client is costly, and prevents lag optimizations from working.
Banning cheaters is good, if you have some sort of unique ID. This is one of the usefull things PunkBuster does do. Though for freeware games like Enemey Territory, you can regenerate a new PB GUID by simply deleting the fake cd key file.
Honestly, I know i'll get a lot of flack on/. about this, but this is one of the reasons i look forward to MS Pallidum/Trusted Computing. I could enable Trusted Computing for my games, and servers could require that it be enabled if you want to play in a tournment or such. This would make the client for all practicality, physically secure against cheats. You could leave in all optimization code, knowing that the client code will not be modified.
I'd buy a Palladium motherboard for that capability alone.
Approximately one kilogram of dry ice is used for every square kilometre of rain cloud. Rainclouds will be burst at a safe distance of 30 miles (50km) outside the city, where locals,
used to sudden rain on fine days, will have their umbrellas ready
For the good of mother russia you will enjoy a shitty Friday. Dosvidanya!
Russia's first private weather controlling agency, the Atmosphere Technologies Agency, will be taking part in the delicate operation.
It is hoping for rainclouds. "No rainclouds equals no pay," Viktor Petrov, the deputy director, said.
Six Easy Pieces- Richard Feynman Six Not-So-Easy Pieces- Richard Feynman Both are from a two year series of lectures he gave at CalTech to freshmen/sophmores after he was essentially begged to by administrators. Feynman is quite a character (as seen in Surely Your Joking Mr. Feynman which should be every geeks BIBLE. This man alone holds the key to getting every geek laid. READ THIS BOOK AT SOME POINT IN YOUR LIFE, hopefully early) Anyhow, the six easy and six not-so-easy are a bunch of different lectures on all the fudementals of physics. Great stuff, he explains most things in what i consider a more natural way. In the easy lectures, math doesn't really even play into it. In the not so easy, he hits on some parts that he is forced to use math to show what's so cool
QED The Strange Theory of Light and Matter is another amazing book by Feynman. This book basically tells the story of light, and by doing so, explains how everything (except gravity and strong nuclear force) works. Actually, towards the end, their is some theories that speculate strong nuclear force, and the unique rules that govern light are similiar, but with different particles (photons to muons or something). The way light works is really mind bending. Something as simply as a partial reflection off a pane of glass, is some unintuitive, and when you see the tricks behind the scene that mother nature pulls, you'll beleive in a type of magic again. Excellent book.
The Future of Spacetime which is a collection of essays from Hawking, Kip Thorne, Igor Novikov, Tim Ferris and Alan Lightman. It deals primarily with spacetime, and talks a lot about TimeTravel. After you read it, your pretty certain Time Travel isn't going to happen, but it's mainly because the odds of it are so remote (1/10^100^100^100^100 or something). Still, they hit on all the cool topics, and bring it down to earth so to speak. Kips essay is the best, he talks about what's happening now and what to expect by 2008, 2010, 2015, and 2030. All these very powerfully gravity wave dectators are coming online, and the future is a gold mine for physics.
Universe in a Nutshell by Hawking is nice. Illustrations are good. But it's more a coffe table book. Good for conversations. After reading the above list of books, you find this one elementary. Which is a neat feeling.
And after reading all that, and seeing all the complex ways that math is twisted to make the model fit the physics, and you hear all the stories about the abitrary constants that get put in things we have no idea why, then, and only then, read Wolframs A New Kind of Science and wonder... wonder what if science bet on the wrong horse in the math we use to extend our theories. Wonder if there isn't a better, more simpler way.... wonder if you'll ever read the entire 800 pages of text......
Typical slashdot reaction. All the lefties come flying out of their coffee shops shouting about how the end is nigh, 1984 is here, the Government has gone to the darkside... yada yada yada.
Yet in the same breath, on the next article these same people will shout how the borders are still not secure, how Homeland Security is doing nothing. How airport security and immigration services are morons.
Yet they do their job, by the book, and people gasp that they are some militia of Bush that's been indoctrine to hate France or some bullshit.
They are doing their job, by the book. Is this a result of terrorism in the US? Yeah, i would hope things are much more strict these days.
THIS WOULD BE A STORY IF THE MORON JOURNALIST COULD NOT GET PRESS VISAS!
Instead it's a non story because they didn't even try, and complained when our border security rightly bitchslapped them back to France.
Here's the deal on the waiver's too:
The journalists tried to enter the country under a visa waiver program that allows citizens of 27 friendly countries to visit the United States for up to 90 days on business and pleasure.
But the journalists lacked special press visas that have been required for several years, Arcaute said.
A Homeland Security spokesman said yesterday that U.S. visa waivers applying to tourists and business travelers from 27 countries, including France, specifically exempt working foreign journalists, who must have visas. The spokesman said that handcuffing the expelled travelers during transport to a detention facility until they can be put on the next flight home was standard operating procedure.
Similar incidents took place long before the current bilateral difficulties, Loiseau said. Although temporary arrangements have sometimes been made for visa-less travelers at other U.S. entry points, she said, Los Angeles has always been "particularly difficult."
playing DVD movies rock. I love the zoom and pan ability as well. Maybe all DVD players have that, but it was a nice touch on the XBOX.
I used to use my PS2 to play DVD's. I never had a 'remote' for it though, I justed used the joystick. That wasn't the greatest. But the XBOX DVD/Remote combo worked really well. It's my primary DVD player, you get the AC3 out, as well as HDTV if your TV can handle it. All that other jazz. I'm sure the offset the cost of testing and perfecting the DVD playback capability by forcing users to buy the DVD remote to playback DVD's.
Well worth it in my opinion.
The only issue I had with DVD's and XBOX was when playing Morrowind. I later found out the losers at Bethesda used the "Dirty Disc" error as their catch-all exception handler. So whenever you saw "Dirty Disc" you essentially had an uncaught exception coming from the software. Pathetic.
Jesus you didn't even bother reading the patents did you?
Your basing you comments on the title of the patents alone. Talk about a waste of time and effort.
You know what, I seem to always end up posting on these patent articles, after speading half and hour reading the patents, explaining in a paragraph to people who obviously don't care, what the patent is truly about.
but i'm not going to do it this time. i'm too tired, and in the end, who cares. Your wrong, you didn't read'm, they are nothing like SSH/SSL. And while ZKT is fine for DSS it alone is worthless on an XBOX if you want the XBOX to be secure in a LAN/WAN environment.
Slashdot Mirror
the issue is most clients hit DNS servers which cache lookups. the bigger the network the client is on (AOL, Time Warner cable, ...etc..etc) the more skewed your "load balancing" get. If all roadrunner users are hitting 1 IP because that's the IP that got Cached for the next X seconds/mins/hours the server is helpless.
If you were to send the client alist of available IP:PORT, it could then do a random on it, and not be affected by bandwidth-saving-dns-cache-entries that network administers love to use.
Or, like i said in another response, clients needs to go Authortative on every DNS lookup.
-malakai
Worse than that, most clients will get a CACHED dns entry, because they access dns through a firewall, proxy, NAT, AOL DNS Servers, Cable Modem Co. DNS servers...etc..etc.
Caching is what kills RRDNS, and unless you go Authorative on evern DNS lookup, you can't be sure you aren't getting cached records.
-malakai
complmenting an AC's troll prowess... on something as slight as that... smells fishy to me.
-malakai
sigh..
I don't think he gets it. First, we've already discussed the virtues/sins of DNS round-robin. But basically, when DNS round-robin doesn't solve your problem, you have to go to Big-IP. Which means 'free' tracker sites will need complex setup for failover/redundancy.
If the Tracker itself, had this built in, i propose it could do it more efficently, and with less setup hassle. Imagine being able to setup a mirror by simply having the admin place your new "cluster-able" tracker IP:Port on an approved mirror list. The main tracker could refer clients to a mirror after behind-the-scenes communication to determine which mirror has least load.
A step below this, but better than DNS round-robin, would be to give the client an array of tracker addresses. This is better than DNS because you don't get the stalled server mixed with cached DNS record causing inaccessibility. The clients could try connections randomly to the servers in the array, and prevent cached dns records for altering distribution.
-Malakai
They don't have a bandwidth problem, CNN, FOX.. et. al have a bandwidth problem. The Military bought all the commercial sat times for the war. It was very cost effective. They have enough bandwidth using commercial sats, and that will last them until the new comm constellation goes online in 2010. Not to mention, their stake in Global Crossing keeps their terrestial bandwidth in huge supply.
When all your soldiers are routers and are sharing spectrum, the aggregate of them ADDS to your bandwidth, not subtracts. You no longer have just one path (humvee->sattelite->another humvee) you now could possible relay over a 'human' network. The more nodes, the more possible paths. Setup a fixed node with some high long range emf link back to home base, or bounce it off a sat.
I laugh everytime I see a statement like this on slashdot. I sometime forget everyone on slashdot believes they are somehow unique and think of things noone else could. Gee, do you think they should encrypt the network? Gee can it be monitored? The fact you even thought of this should tell you the military has thought of it as well.
Probably not. But just because their is some way for the enemy to take away your advantage doesn't mean you shouldn't use it. If they EMP you, it won't be a big area. A few units in close proximity to each other could all go down at once, but again, so what. They are trained to use the advantage when they have it. When they don't, they issue orders using vocal resonance called SHOUTING.
Umm, a small tactical nuke will kill them. Lack of communication at that point is moot. See above comment.
Well then it wouldn't be secure would it.
What if you capture and torture a prisoner for the information? Is the war lost? No, you expect and antcipate your enemys move. You anticipate that they may get to a Humvee which the engine is still running (the keys reset when the engine is turned off, and after a idle timeout). You are vulnerable while that stolen humvee goes unreported. But your troops should never be out of contact. At worse, you enemy has a few hours of information to the whereabouts of some of your troops. At best, you know they stole the humvee, you know they are using it, and you feed them false data. So the enemy knows your location, again, you lost an advantge, not the war. They still have to act on that information, and in the end, some grunt with a finger on the trigger can save the day by killing before being killed.
It was used in Iraq. So you could have held your breath. Not the full power of it, and not as many sensors, but Captains in the field had realtime data and video communication via a distributed wirless net. The net had to be setup by grunts, and pushed forward with the troops, but it was done. There's lots of space the EM world. Especially when you dont have to care about the FCC.
I know slashdot is home of the cynics, but for once, i'd like to see comments about "wow, this is cool technology, i wonder how we could find out more about it, i wonder if we could get an interview with people making this stuff, talk to the geeks, discuss their routing choices...etc". Instead of all this "this is dumb, some script kiddie is going to DDOS our soldier, as they look up porn on their embedded internet connections.
-malakai
First off, skip VB6 and anything before it. Go to .Net. You can do true OO programming using VB.Net, C#, C++ and a bunch of other .Net CLI languages. They can all communicate with ANY sort of DLL/COM combo your board manufacutuers give you.
.Net language, or if you're a good programmer, and you know C/C++ use that.
Second, dump Win95 NOW. Your logic on why you don't want too is flawed. WinNT/2K has nothing in common with Win95. They are Two different products. Your not "Upgrading" your buying a different product.
Win95 was designed for the home, and a stepping point from DOS. Not as some sort of platform for stability and IO/Data Gathering, Realtime acquisition..etc. It's a hack and an old one at that. Would you use a build of Linux from 1995? 98? Hell no.
I'm really serious on this last point. Many people fail to realize just how stable Windows 2000 is. I'm amazed Win95 is still floating around in labs like this. Win98 is no better either (same thing). Did it come on the computer? I think i've been running win2k for nearly 5 years now in October. That's about the limit for a development platform imo (win2003 i'll ugprade to at SP1 level).
If you can find an Open Source alternative using Linux and other free stuff great. But honestly, I bet you end up spending more time getting things up and running and working, then programming/inventing.
Whatever you do, dont use VB6. It's not worth 'learning'. Stick to a
-Malakai
put on your conspiracy hats...
Think of it this way, these guys know probably better than anyone else NOT on the AOL IM team, just how much of IM conversations are monitored, logged, mined for information, media metrics...etc.
Not to mention, they work in that environment, they prolly want to be able to say "god damn, our executive VP is a bitch" and not have some network engineer provide a log documenting that conversation later.
Yeah, i wish it scalled, but wtf, its opensource. Go make it scale. For now, 10-50 is plenty for most groups of online friends.
Personally, I'd loved to see technology like Pastry get hacked into it.
-malakai
Try searching on 'GNU General Public License' Einstein.
It seems like it would work if users to DNS servers were evenly distributed.
.torrent should have more than 1 tracker in it.
But when you have a large portion of users coming from broadband sources like a cable company (or a nation wide cable company... timewarner) some of those companies use their own hierarchy to save DNS lookups. Which means, a group of cable modem users from a specic cable company may all be refered to the same IP for a given round robin DNS.
If everyone in the world individually request the IP for a given round-robin host, they use, i agree, the lookups should be 50/50 between two hosts. Although, you must realize, this still does not _distribute load_. if one server as 10k 'light' users and the other has 10k 'heavy' users, you've solved nothing.
The way in which your using RR DNS, or the application for which you are using it, really dictates whether it's effective. For simple websites, most of the time, RR can save you from expensive big-ip solutions. But the BitTorrent tracker is rather a specialized application, and busy one at that. It needs true load balancing, where if a tracker is near capacity it can refer users to another tracker, or the
This requires a small change to the protocol, and a large change to tracker servers (independent but colloborating trackers will want to share tracker information to keep a single unified view of the statistics and seed/user data).
-malakai
Popular tracker sites (where you submite a .torrent, and it modifies it and becomes the primary tracker) seem to have a scaling issue. I won't mention the site but their are trackers that get 2,000,000 hits a day, and 50k-65k visitors. Trying to download a torrent tracked by an overused tracker such as this one, can be frustrating. While bigger/faster hardware is a temporary solution, what other options exist for scaling trackers better?
.torrent could have an array of tracker sites, that seemed like a quick and easy hack to get some scalability, have you seen or thought of any others?
Now, I'll also say, I wonder about performance of PHP trackers (as this one is).
I also saw some place where you mentioned the should use round-robin DNS for the tracker host to "scale". This isn't a good solution though, as any network engineer who runs a large internet accessible website will tell you. Cachine of DNS records make round-robin not as effective as it needs to be.
I saw a suggestion where a
-malakai
I bought it for XBOX, and I can't stand it.
I bought it mainly because all I heard (granted from the creators) was how cool their "Hacking the MAtrix" was going to be. I being a fan of that sort of thing believed them.
Hacking the Matrix is nothing short of a simple "Do A, opens B, Do B, opens C, Do C, Opens D...". There might be a branch in their, and their might be a "you landed on on jail, go back to start do not collect 200 dollars".
It _LOOKS_ like it's going to be cool, but it's _NOT_. And if your early in the game, it's worthless. All the future maps are locked, you can't drop weapons until you unlock the map and find the code. And you can't do any additional "trainings" (like sword fighting) until you win the game.
I was hoping for some sort of OS emulator that was more than just a dumb down shell script with facade commands. I could think of a lot of ways a programmer I could make a cool "more real than real" hacking game (put buffer overflows in the read.exe and play.exe command. teach a new generation about machine code. make up some simple BS machine code language for a fictional processor, leave a manual about it in a hidden directory).
So who cares though, it's just the hacking game that sucks right? That was more a freebie anyway?
Wrong.
Next thing, and I can only bitch about this on the XBOX version, but the Controls SUCK. You can not assign actions to buttons. You have simply 3 prebuilt configurations to choose from. I HATE IT WHEN DEVELOPERS ARE LAZY LIKE THIS.
If you want to be able to strafe on the XBOX, then you have to move the FOCUS ability to the 'thumbstick button' (thumbstick click). The left thumbstick is how you move mind you. Focus is like 'the force', and you have a limited amount, So you really want to be able to enable it in very precise increments at a precise time. It really should be on a trigger finger, and dished out while performing a movement + jump + and firing weapons (which your thumbs should be doing). There is NO CONFIGURATION that you can choose that allows this to occur.
Also, if you want strafe, then their is no way to use the "TARGET LOCK" command. Sorry, it's not mapped to ANYTHING.
Another annoying thing is the First Person mode. You go into First Person mode my moving the right thumbstick. You can't move while in FPS mode. It's really annoying. Not so much the not moving in first person, but the fact that I can't control the camera while i'm running in third person mode. The combination of my movement (left thumbstrick) and my camera control (right thumbstick) should ALWAYS merge together and perform some sort of vector change. This then gives you the ability to let the left thumbstick left/right act as strafe.
Think of it, as the right thumbstrick controlling your head (where you look, where you go when running straight).
Instead in the Enter the Matrix, you control your character like it's a tank.
Maybe they did this to try and free up your right thumb to push a bunch of useless kick+punch+jump combos. But i must rather of had combos with trigger fingers and direction.
Maybe i'm spoiled by HALO, Metal Gear Solid and other games, but the controls for Enter the Matrix really ruined it for me.
As for the kung-fu style action (a'la Matrix) everyone is say is so cool, well it's neat. I'll give them that, but it has NOTHING TO DO WITH THE PLAYER. I did a few tests where during some 4 on 1 fights I just started mashing combos of focus+jump+movement and my character would destroy them. It takes the same amount of skill as "hack the matrix" took. Press A, Press B, Press C, Press D. Wow, look at those amazing manuvers i just did, i'm so good.
This game sucks, and if you've played enough games long enough, you'll see and know why within the first 5mins, and confirmed after the first hour.
-Malakai
but because of X-Prize pressure, they are scraping that plan for now. John Carmack said in one of his diaries, that if someone else got the X-Prize before AA, then they'd go back to a powered landing (true VTVL SSTO).
-Malakai
All I see are things like "EUROPE'S LARGEST GNU/LINUX EXHIBITION AND CONFERENCE"
-Malakai
Wouldn't this be like E3 suing Electronic Arts because Electronic Arts alleges IP violation in say a ID Software Game?
Or like COMDEX suing Motorola, because they allege Ericsson stole some technology.
LinuxTag is a conference, a media event. I think they are grossly overstepping their bounds.
Would a "Car Show" sue a major car manufacturer because said manufacturer comes up with some legal case that threatens to make all other manufacturers indebted to them? They might be pissed, but filing some legal suit for such a 4th party participant in the field is misuse of the system.
-malakai
Are we no longer allowed to talk about an article if it hurts a country's nationalism?
-malakai
-malakai
Games like counter-strike have kick. The bots i've seen take the kick into account, about as well as a good player would. Shoot in burts, and know to pull down between burts bya certain amount based on your exp with that gun.
/. about this, but this is one of the reasons i look forward to MS Pallidum/Trusted Computing. I could enable Trusted Computing for my games, and servers could require that it be enabled if you want to play in a tournment or such. This would make the client for all practicality, physically secure against cheats. You could leave in all optimization code, knowing that the client code will not be modified.
I agree the CRC'ing of the game, and the typical PunkBunster systems are inadequate. Giving the client only the information that is immediately needed and visible to said client is costly, and prevents lag optimizations from working.
Banning cheaters is good, if you have some sort of unique ID. This is one of the usefull things PunkBuster does do. Though for freeware games like Enemey Territory, you can regenerate a new PB GUID by simply deleting the fake cd key file.
Honestly, I know i'll get a lot of flack on
I'd buy a Palladium motherboard for that capability alone.
-malakai
read this way back from 8/25/02 on tomshardware then read about the current dealings.
It's amazing how quick the 'good guys' get sleazy. Maybe when NVIDIA bought out 3Dfx they got some bad apples....
-malakai
For the good of mother russia you will enjoy a shitty Friday. Dosvidanya!
Man, what a business model...
-Malakai
Six Easy Pieces- Richard Feynman
Six Not-So-Easy Pieces- Richard Feynman
Both are from a two year series of lectures he gave at CalTech to freshmen/sophmores after he was essentially begged to by administrators. Feynman is quite a character (as seen in Surely Your Joking Mr. Feynman which should be every geeks BIBLE. This man alone holds the key to getting every geek laid. READ THIS BOOK AT SOME POINT IN YOUR LIFE, hopefully early)
Anyhow, the six easy and six not-so-easy are a bunch of different lectures on all the fudementals of physics. Great stuff, he explains most things in what i consider a more natural way. In the easy lectures, math doesn't really even play into it. In the not so easy, he hits on some parts that he is forced to use math to show what's so cool
QED The Strange Theory of Light and Matter is another amazing book by Feynman. This book basically tells the story of light, and by doing so, explains how everything (except gravity and strong nuclear force) works. Actually, towards the end, their is some theories that speculate strong nuclear force, and the unique rules that govern light are similiar, but with different particles (photons to muons or something). The way light works is really mind bending. Something as simply as a partial reflection off a pane of glass, is some unintuitive, and when you see the tricks behind the scene that mother nature pulls, you'll beleive in a type of magic again. Excellent book.
The Future of Spacetime which is a collection of essays from Hawking, Kip Thorne, Igor Novikov, Tim Ferris and Alan Lightman. It deals primarily with spacetime, and talks a lot about TimeTravel. After you read it, your pretty certain Time Travel isn't going to happen, but it's mainly because the odds of it are so remote (1/10^100^100^100^100 or something). Still, they hit on all the cool topics, and bring it down to earth so to speak. Kips essay is the best, he talks about what's happening now and what to expect by 2008, 2010, 2015, and 2030. All these very powerfully gravity wave dectators are coming online, and the future is a gold mine for physics.
Universe in a Nutshell by Hawking is nice. Illustrations are good. But it's more a coffe table book. Good for conversations. After reading the above list of books, you find this one elementary. Which is a neat feeling.
And after reading all that, and seeing all the complex ways that math is twisted to make the model fit the physics, and you hear all the stories about the abitrary constants that get put in things we have no idea why, then, and only then, read Wolframs A New Kind of Science and wonder... wonder what if science bet on the wrong horse in the math we use to extend our theories. Wonder if there isn't a better, more simpler way.... wonder if you'll ever read the entire 800 pages of text......
-Malakai
Yet in the same breath, on the next article these same people will shout how the borders are still not secure, how Homeland Security is doing nothing. How airport security and immigration services are morons.
Yet they do their job, by the book, and people gasp that they are some militia of Bush that's been indoctrine to hate France or some bullshit.
They are doing their job, by the book. Is this a result of terrorism in the US? Yeah, i would hope things are much more strict these days.
THIS WOULD BE A STORY IF THE MORON JOURNALIST COULD NOT GET PRESS VISAS!
Instead it's a non story because they didn't even try, and complained when our border security rightly bitchslapped them back to France.
Here's the deal on the waiver's too:
-Malakai
Here's your comments in a nutshell:
Holy worthless. Score 4 on this guy? WHY?
-malakai
playing DVD movies rock. I love the zoom and pan ability as well. Maybe all DVD players have that, but it was a nice touch on the XBOX.
I used to use my PS2 to play DVD's. I never had a 'remote' for it though, I justed used the joystick. That wasn't the greatest. But the XBOX DVD/Remote combo worked really well. It's my primary DVD player, you get the AC3 out, as well as HDTV if your TV can handle it. All that other jazz. I'm sure the offset the cost of testing and perfecting the DVD playback capability by forcing users to buy the DVD remote to playback DVD's.
Well worth it in my opinion.
The only issue I had with DVD's and XBOX was when playing Morrowind. I later found out the losers at Bethesda used the "Dirty Disc" error as their catch-all exception handler. So whenever you saw "Dirty Disc" you essentially had an uncaught exception coming from the software. Pathetic.
-Malakai
Jesus you didn't even bother reading the patents did you?
Your basing you comments on the title of the patents alone. Talk about a waste of time and effort.
You know what, I seem to always end up posting on these patent articles, after speading half and hour reading the patents, explaining in a paragraph to people who obviously don't care, what the patent is truly about.
but i'm not going to do it this time. i'm too tired, and in the end, who cares. Your wrong, you didn't read'm, they are nothing like SSH/SSL. And while ZKT is fine for DSS it alone is worthless on an XBOX if you want the XBOX to be secure in a LAN/WAN environment.
-malakai
MS IS BEHIND THIS!!!
-Malakai