Because of the time required to charge vehicles, we'd need a cord station at pretty much every parking space everywhere for widespread use of pure electrics to be tenable.
I've been following this company "Better Place" for a while now, and they have some pretty interesting ideas about how to solve this problem. First of all, everyone would pay their companies a monthly fee for battery service. This fee would be about half what it costs the average family for gas, so they end up saving money. In return, they charge the batteries, maintain them, refurbish them when they eventually fail, and take all of the hassle of battery maintenance off your hands. People get a charging station installed in their home. The charging stations can feed power both directions, so essentially the electrical companies get free storage capacity that can be tapped during periods of peak demand (say, evenings after everyone gets home from work) running your electric meter backwards, and then charge themselves late at night when power is cheap.
I believe the vehicles have a range of about 100 miles on a charge. All of this is tied together with a smart GPS navigation computer, that knows how many miles you drive to work every day, how far away your home is, and where your daily or weekly errands take you. It learns your habits so that it can plan when you need to recharge.
To solve the problem that will inevitably come up, say, you're at the office and realize you need to make a trip that's 50 miles away and you only have 30 miles of charge left on your battery, you simply punch in the destination you're going, and when the computer realizes you don't have enough charge left, it will simply direct you to the nearest gas station. All gas stations will be retrofitted with hydraulic systems that can swap your battery out for a fully charged one in about 5 minutes. Remember because you're just paying Better Place for the battery service, they maintain it and make sure it is charged and ready for you.
Altogether, I think it is a very well thought out system, although right now it is easier to install in small areas like Israel and Hawaii, where there isn't much geographic distance between gas stations, and you don't have thousands of gas stations to retrofit with their battery swapping stations. I'm a little surprised that Australia is implementing it, because of the large distances, but I can see it working well in any large metropolitan area.
So you'll get tossed into an income bin with people of similar relative experience. Having a scarce skill will push your income towards the top of that bin. So if the range for "Developer 1" is $52,000 - $75,000, you'll be closer to the upper end. If you're comfortable being a contract consultant under your own name, you'll probably be able to get a decent hourly, whatever your local market goes for.
Companies that still run Cobol are going to be facing some harsh realities very soon. A retiring work force with nobody younger that is going to replace them.
If you really want to make money programming Cobol, think of yourself as a mercenary, a hired gun. Become top in your field, be young, in your 20s or 30s, and contract. You should be able to command well over $100 an hour. You should be able to cherry-pick the best jobs available, for the best companies available. In a few years these companies will be desperate to hire anyone that isn't hooked up to a life support machine to keep from having to replace their entire Cobol infrastructure.
$75,000 a year is chump change, my friends. Don't sell yourself short. If you can learn the "skillz" to succeed, and be one of the best, you can easily charge $200,000.
I'll grant you three of five, but "lane splitting" (legal in California under a large range of circumstances) really IS the best method of getting around Southern California. It doesn't add to the danger, if done reasonably, and the time savings are enormous. I've cut some trip times in half that way (90 min by car to 45 min on the bike), without speeding.
It may indeed be faster, but it sure as hell isn't safe. Riding on a motorcycle is hazardous enough. When you're "lane splitting", all it takes is one car changing lanes or pulling over to the side of his lane, or another driver opening his car door to put you in the ER.
How many times have you seen morning drivers open their car door in stopped traffic to dump out their coffee? Now how would you like to find out what happens when an object moving 40 mph (you) collides with a stationary object (car door)?
Has anybody checked the price of a Red Hat subscription lately? It ain't cheap. In fact, it's cheaper to get M$ bundled with a server than it is to get a one year Red Hat subscription, given that you need to renew (read= pay more $$$) each year, and Linux engineers can command more salary simply because there are fewer of them than there are Windows engineers (oxymoron, I know.).
You may be right about us Linux engineers commanding higher salaries, but Red Hat is not more expensive than Windows to license.
Do this: Next time you need to buy an HP Proliant server, ask your HP rep how much it costs to bundle a 3 year Red Hat subscription/license with it. It's only a few hundred dollars extra for 24/7 support. This is lower than the cost of a Windows Server 2003/2008 license alone. Not to mention with the Windows Server 2003/2008 system you have to pay Microsoft an additional $300 per support incident. With Red Hat it's included in the cost of licensing/subscription.
The myth that Red Hat costs more for support than Windows is just plain FUD spread by Microsoft's marketing department. If you buy it straight from Red Hat and pay full retail price, then yes, it's expensive, but if you buy it from HP and they bundle it with the server, it's cheap.
And the support contracts for distros like Red Hat(last time I checked,its been a few years) will eat any savings that they had from switching.
You're doing it wrong. The next time you need an HP Proliant server, ask your HP rep to bundle a 3-year Red Hat subscription/license with it. It will only add a few hundred dollars onto the cost of the server, far less than a Windows Server 2003/2008 license, and you'll get real support (1st and 2nd tier at HP, 3rd tier at Red Hat). Most servers are decommissioned after 3 years anyway.
The myth that Red Hat support is more expensive than Microsoft is just that, a Myth. With HP servers, I can get support for a few hundred dollars for 3 years. For Microsoft, several hundred dollars just pays for the software license. Support costs $300 an incident after that.
Of course not, and that's my point: the world does not revolve around servers. Some of us use Linux on the desktop, and if the kernel developers don't get their head out of their asses and realize that, the year of "Linux on the desktop" will never come.
Well, regardless of whether the world revolves around servers or not, if the kernel developers can make Linux stable and fast on large servers with 64GB-512GB of memory and 16-32 cores, chances are it'll run pretty well on your desktop as well.
If you are a sysadmin and it takes you 72 hours to fsck a 1TB drive, you should be fired.
Try doing an fsck on a large ext2 filesystem with lots of small files and directories. It could take between hours and days, depending on the number of inodes. I've seen some seriously wtf moments when people realized how long it would take their mailserver to come back online, and management was not pleased that they chose to use a non-journaling filesystem. Mind you, this is before ext3 was default and journaling filesystems on Linux were pretty experimental. Of course, at the time, a better choice for mailserver would have been a Solaris box running UFS with journaling, but they thought the poor little Dell running Red Hat with ext2 would be fine.
You must be running Windows. Serves you right. If you were running Linux, you wouldn't be having these problems. I haven't seen a kernel panic since 1996, and you wouldn't either if you stopped running the daily build from Linus's git tree on crappy hardware from the thrift shop.
Bullshit. I run Linux on the best HP hardware money can buy, brand new Proliants, and you still get a kernal oops/panic if you have a bad memory DIMM or a failed CPU or something. No operating system is immune to hardware failures.
I used to do that, and then I got a UPS instead and switched back to pure ext2. The performance hit from journalling is simply too high to tolerate. A decent UPS (pretty much anything made by APC) will prevent the crashes in the first place, solving the problem completely and without any unnecessary overhead. With UPS prices being as low as they are, there is no excuse for not having one, so I think that journalling will become obsolete in some near future.
Yeah, because systems never kernel panic, or crash for any other reason than power outages... Wake me up after you've been waiting for fsck to finish on your 1TB drive and it's been running for the last 72 hours.
Whether or not you've had a system shutdown uncleanly in the past, you certainly will at some time in the future, so why not just use ext3 and save yourself the headache of a 3 day long fsck?
It's also painfully obvious that you've never worked as a sysadmin before. You try explaining to your manager that the reason why your company's server will take 3 days to come back online is that you wanted to save a few microseconds of latency when users were accessing files...
So, you've made patches that are 1.5G in size to the client and who knows how large server side to...how many realms of WoW are there?
These aren't exactly server patches you can stagger either.
Actually, Blizzard could learn a lot of lessons from Arenanet, the creators of Guild Wars, about how to do proper patches. Guild Wars has the capability to slipstream patches in real-time into the game. Players that are playing on the older version don't even need to log out, they just remain in a separate instance until they relog and download the new update, which takes about 2 seconds (literally) to download and patch on a high speed connection.
Even expansion packs in Guild Wars are streamed in the background while players are playing (using only a small amount of network bandwidth so as not to disrupt the gaming experience) weeks in advance, so that on the day the xpac is released, you log in and within seconds are up and running in the new version. I know Blizzard has a BitTorrent downloader that starts downloading new patches a few days in advance, but it only runs when the game isn't running, and the patch day process is always a huge 15 minute long process as it churns through and updates all of your files.
Arenanet really has the best patching system I've ever witnessed in a client/sever application the size of an MMO. The ability to slipstream patches and fixes in realtime without adversely affecting players experience (ie Downtime) is amazing and pretty much unheard of in the MMO industry.
Diablo is an amazingly fun game (I'm replaying it just now for the first time in almost 10 years), but it lacks all of the UI features that make D2 so great. It would require trivial amounts of effort to update this game to 2008 playability standards, if we had the source.
I would love to see open source versions of Diablo and other great Blizzard games. I'm 99% sure we will never see them. The reason why is that a game is basically 2 components:
1. Art assets, such as textures, character models, shaders, etc. 2. The game code that tells your computer how to render those art assets.
I could see some game code eventually being open sourced, but the art assets that make up most of the game will most likely never be open sourced. The reason is that for a company like Blizzard, their art is their IP. The most important asset they have is the "look and feel" of their games. They would be too afraid that under a creative commons license, some competitor could use their art assets to generate a Diablo "look-alike" that would ruin the Diablo brand, or just dilute it.
Also, a lot of game companies re-use art assets in newer games. Blizzard has done this with all of the Warcraft games. Sure, they might add detail to some of the textures and models, but look at how similar some of the models in Warcraft 3 are to World of Warcraft, and you'll see what I mean.
Art assets get re-used all the time, and I can't see a game company like Blizzard giving up their "crown jewels", which are basically the art that goes into their games.
If all combustion fuels cars were made with a moisture adding system the mileage improves significantly. A mist of water sprayed into the cylinder makes the combustion engines run much cooler (higher efficiency, shhh) but it also increases engine horsepower. The water is instantly flash-heated by the fuel explosion into steam for an instant expansion of 1:800 => making all your combustion engines be a partial Steam Engine by piping some H2O mist in through a vacuum tube port.
Oh my god, you really are cuckoo for cocoa puffs, aren't you?
If you haven't seen it yet, I'd recommend checking out Tabula Rasa . It's one of the better RPGs set in space, and I like how it has adopted ideas from science fiction writers like Vinge. Going into space seems a great way to support it, but it's a pity that the mass media now considers human spaceflight so meh that even a freakin' computer game legend going into orbit won't win too much attention for the game.
Tabula Rasa was absolute crap. I played the beta and the release. The last decent games Lord British made was the Ultima series. Face it, he's a washed up game designer that is past his prime.
What is your position on cross-platform computer gaming? Is there a viable market for MacOS and Linux gaming in your view?
We already know the answer to this question. Mac and PC are simultaneously released for all major Blizzard games, and most of them work in Wine, even if it isn't officially supported.
To Jeffrey Kaplan (aka Tigole), game director for World of Warcraft: How does your team balance class, race & profession specific traits? I have seen the new trees for the expansion & I naturally have some concerns. But how do you measure when something is 'unfair?' Do you measure in game reports, analyze logs, play them yourselves? What is your strategy?
I would like to know why World of Warcraft doesn't have a more PvP-centric focus. The Warcraft and Starcraft RTS series have always heavily centered around player vs. player battles, and they have always been heralded as having very good game balance. Yet, for some reason, when World of Warcraft was released, PvP wasn't even in the game initially, and seems to have been added as an afterthought, creating a lot of game balance issues. Even to this day, it seems that PvP in World of Warcraft arenas is heavily unbalanced and favors certain class compositions over all others (Warrior, Druid, Warlock seem to dominate).
What lessons has World of Warcraft learned from the highly successful Warhammer Online launch that happened recently, and when can we expect to see some of the best features from this new game implemented in World of Warcraft? I personally would like to see the public quest system implemented in World of Warcraft, as well as the realm vs. realm lakes with siege warfare, keeps, and real meaningful PvP.
My nightmare is having an electric car during and evacuation for a hurricane. It is hard enough now to find gas to get out, not to mention if you screw up, and are in traffice for up to 20 hours (hot days with the AC running). You'd be stranded pretty badly in an electric car...not to mention, it might be hard to work the battery swap thing here since everyone would need one at once.
You bring up a very good point. On the other hand, maybe you could just decide to move to a city that doesn't get hit by a hurricane every few years... There's a reason why houses are dirt cheap in the Gulf coast areas... It's often not even worth it to live there.
Think about global warming and how just a few degree increase in ocean temperature will affect the hurricane season, and if you're smart you'll move the hell out of there. There will be a lot more Ikes, trust me.
And he's right about the US media becoming like the British media. There are no "neutral" media outlets anymore, if indeed they ever existed in the first place. Much as the UK has red papers and Tory papers, US news outlets now all have a bias of some kind. Fox is well known for tending to the right, CNN trended left in the early 90's (that one was a shame, as they were the only truly unbiased news outlet in America during the late 80's). NBC has gone so blatantly to the left that we call it's cable outlet "MSDNC".
No, pretty much all the mainstream media outlets in the US trend right. When you are owned by multi-national corporations that make $billions profiteering from a failed war in Iraq, it's hard not to get biased. Take, for example, GE, which owns NBC, and also sells weapons systems used in Iraq. MSNBC had this little problem of Keith Obermann, a democratic-leaning pundit, similar to the Hannity character on Faux news. Well, he got shutup pretty heavily because some bigwigs over at GE didn't like his "radical left-leaning views".
It's pretty hard to argue that the media in the US is anything but biased to the right. They're all owned by huge corporations that have a vested interest in furthering their right-wing agenda.
Henry Paulson, the CEO of Goldman Sachs until 2006 and current U.S. Treasury Secretary succeeded in scaring the public and Congress into giving him a $700B blank check to bail out his friends. If you think that money will "trickle down" to you or small business owners, or anyone other than the people it's directly going to, you are mistaken.
Not only that, this article (sorry, NYTimes reg required) details how Henry Paulson, back in 2004, asked the SEC to deregulate Goldman Sachs and other banks to allow them to take on this toxic mortgage debt in the first place.
We have just been ripped off by the most elaborate con in the history of the world. We let a banker tell us "let us break the rules so we can make more money", then when he did and the bottom fell out, we gave him even more money to keep him from going out of business.
My only hope is that the voters check for who is voting for this and get rid of them next election.
Some of you may remember the Presidential debate only 6 days ago. As soon as I saw this story, I recalled McCain's argument for lowering business taxes. He used a very specific example...Ireland.
McCain may have called it, but it's his party's philosophy of deregulation and making it easier for companies to move assets outside the country that caused this.
What Obama wants to do to solve this is to give tax breaks to companies that decide to keep operations and jobs in the US. That way there is a tax incentive for them to not relocate overseas. Right now there are so many loopholes for corporations to have a P.O. Box in the Cayman Islands and rarely ever pay a dime of taxes. Look at how Haliburton relocated to the Middle East. That has to be one of the most blatant tax dodges I've ever seen, yet we're still giving them $billions in contracts.
In any case, the tax code needs to be cleaned up. You don't want to just increase corporate taxes because that will encourage an even greater amount of companies to leave. You need to close the loopholes allowing companies to transfer assets outside the country without paying taxes, and you need to give tax breaks to companies that create jobs in the US. That will get things back on track and that is what Obama is planning on doing.
The middle-class need tax relief. So let's tax the big companies they all work for much more heavily.
No, let's not tax them any more. Let's instead give tax breaks to companies that don't outsource American jobs, thereby encouraging them to stay here.
Thanks Obama! That really helped a lot!
In case you haven't pulled your head out of your ass long enough to notice, Obama isn't president yet. How does Obama's future economic policy explain why companies are relocating over the past several years? Answer: It doesn't, it's the Bush failed economic policies of deregulation that are encouraging companies to dodge taxes overseas.
So, and my professor suggested this, maybe the ideal swap size is ZERO. What if your operating system just operated under the concept of "If you can't fit it in 4 gigs, tough. Just wait until memory is free. I'm not even going to bother to split memory into pages because I'm always going to use RAM, not a hard drive page.
Both you and your professor are ignoring the fact that inactive pages in memory can be paged out to disk, freeing up that memory to be used as a disk cache and increasing performance. Do you really need some shared object sitting in memory the entire time when it is only rarely used by program foo? There really is a valid reason to have virtual memory, even in today's large memory systems.
If you were running Oracle - here is what they recommend:
RAM -> Swap Space
1 GB - 2 GB -> 1.5 times the size of RAM
2 GB - 8 GB -> Equal to the size of RAM
more than 8GB -> 0.75 times the size of RAM
I don't know if this would carry across to general computing - it seems to me if it's enough for an Oracle RDBMS server, it ought to do it for most things.
The Oracle recommendations as a general rule are good, however, I've recently been deploying Oracle RAC nodes with 64GB of memory each, and I'm wondering if 48GB of swap is overkill. I think in the next few months I'll be deploying nodes with 128GB of memory and I'm pretty sure 96GB of swap is not necessary. At a certain point, don't the rules break down?
The reason this becomes an issue is that I only have a pair of 146GB drives for root disks (mirrored) so you start to run out of space for Red Hat, Oracle, and the other software that should normally be on root.
So if lack of a veto-proof majority is justification for blaming Bush for the actions of Congress, then it's justification for blaming Clinton for the actions of Congress.
You still don't understand... The repubs have controlled congress for 6 of 8 years of Bush's presidency. How can you even call it a Democrat controlled congress when it wasn't the case?
But do remember that everything that goes before Congress now does so with the approval of the Democrats, who have been in charge there for most of Bush's presidency.
I want some of whatever it is that you're smoking. The Repubs have been in control of both houses from 1994 up to 2006. It was only in 2006 that the Dems got the slimmest of majority in congress, and even still it is not a veto proof majority so they can't really do much except go along with Bush... I wish they would stand up to him a little more.
Note, by the way, that the author(s) of a Bill aren't nearly so important as the people who vote for it.
I would say that when you have the author of one of the worst finance bills in the history of our country that also writes the economic policy for a potential future President, that is a big deal . These guys are crooks, liars, and have been giving special perks to their cronies for decades now. We're just starting to see the real downside emerge.
Oddly enough, when I look up that Bill, I find it was approved by both Parties (90 votes for in the Senate, 343 in the House), and signed by a Democratic President (Clinton was President in 1999, remember?).
If it was an evil Republican plot to rob the dear people, then why did the "Defenders of All That is Good and Right" (aka the Democrats) approve it? Remember, most of them voted in favour of this also.
This act was also known as the Gramm Leach Bliley act. It was written by a Republican controlled congress and signed into law by President Bill Clinton.
You may have heard of one of the sponsors, Phil Gramm. He is the Gramm in Gramm Leach Bliley... He also wrote John McCain's economic policy and was John McCain's presidential campaign co-chair and his most senior economic advisor, until he made a gaffe on the campaign trail and said "You've heard of mental depression; this is a mental recession," and "We have sort of become a nation of whiners, you just hear this constant whining, complaining about a loss of competitiveness, America in decline." Whoops. I guess McCain had to let him go after he said that on national television.
I love it how the right-wing media is trying to spin this that "it's all Clinton's fault" when we have a law passed by a Republican controlled congress, written by McCain's senior economic advisor. I know you guys like to try and stretch the facts about everything, but the people are starting to get sick of all of the lies and deceit.
Let's face it, deregulation has failed our economy and our nation. Voting for John McCain would be putting the fox in charge of the hen house.
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I've been following this company "Better Place" for a while now, and they have some pretty interesting ideas about how to solve this problem. First of all, everyone would pay their companies a monthly fee for battery service. This fee would be about half what it costs the average family for gas, so they end up saving money. In return, they charge the batteries, maintain them, refurbish them when they eventually fail, and take all of the hassle of battery maintenance off your hands. People get a charging station installed in their home. The charging stations can feed power both directions, so essentially the electrical companies get free storage capacity that can be tapped during periods of peak demand (say, evenings after everyone gets home from work) running your electric meter backwards, and then charge themselves late at night when power is cheap.
I believe the vehicles have a range of about 100 miles on a charge. All of this is tied together with a smart GPS navigation computer, that knows how many miles you drive to work every day, how far away your home is, and where your daily or weekly errands take you. It learns your habits so that it can plan when you need to recharge.
To solve the problem that will inevitably come up, say, you're at the office and realize you need to make a trip that's 50 miles away and you only have 30 miles of charge left on your battery, you simply punch in the destination you're going, and when the computer realizes you don't have enough charge left, it will simply direct you to the nearest gas station. All gas stations will be retrofitted with hydraulic systems that can swap your battery out for a fully charged one in about 5 minutes. Remember because you're just paying Better Place for the battery service, they maintain it and make sure it is charged and ready for you.
Altogether, I think it is a very well thought out system, although right now it is easier to install in small areas like Israel and Hawaii, where there isn't much geographic distance between gas stations, and you don't have thousands of gas stations to retrofit with their battery swapping stations. I'm a little surprised that Australia is implementing it, because of the large distances, but I can see it working well in any large metropolitan area.
Companies that still run Cobol are going to be facing some harsh realities very soon. A retiring work force with nobody younger that is going to replace them.
If you really want to make money programming Cobol, think of yourself as a mercenary, a hired gun. Become top in your field, be young, in your 20s or 30s, and contract. You should be able to command well over $100 an hour. You should be able to cherry-pick the best jobs available, for the best companies available. In a few years these companies will be desperate to hire anyone that isn't hooked up to a life support machine to keep from having to replace their entire Cobol infrastructure.
$75,000 a year is chump change, my friends. Don't sell yourself short. If you can learn the "skillz" to succeed, and be one of the best, you can easily charge $200,000.
Awesome. You, sir, are a true legend, a veritable man among men, an uber-hacker.
Somehow, your sig feels fitting for this entire story.
You can do that with an iPhone too. See fring for more details.
It may indeed be faster, but it sure as hell isn't safe. Riding on a motorcycle is hazardous enough. When you're "lane splitting", all it takes is one car changing lanes or pulling over to the side of his lane, or another driver opening his car door to put you in the ER.
How many times have you seen morning drivers open their car door in stopped traffic to dump out their coffee? Now how would you like to find out what happens when an object moving 40 mph (you) collides with a stationary object (car door)?
You may be right about us Linux engineers commanding higher salaries, but Red Hat is not more expensive than Windows to license.
Do this: Next time you need to buy an HP Proliant server, ask your HP rep how much it costs to bundle a 3 year Red Hat subscription/license with it. It's only a few hundred dollars extra for 24/7 support. This is lower than the cost of a Windows Server 2003/2008 license alone. Not to mention with the Windows Server 2003/2008 system you have to pay Microsoft an additional $300 per support incident. With Red Hat it's included in the cost of licensing/subscription.
The myth that Red Hat costs more for support than Windows is just plain FUD spread by Microsoft's marketing department. If you buy it straight from Red Hat and pay full retail price, then yes, it's expensive, but if you buy it from HP and they bundle it with the server, it's cheap.
You're doing it wrong. The next time you need an HP Proliant server, ask your HP rep to bundle a 3-year Red Hat subscription/license with it. It will only add a few hundred dollars onto the cost of the server, far less than a Windows Server 2003/2008 license, and you'll get real support (1st and 2nd tier at HP, 3rd tier at Red Hat). Most servers are decommissioned after 3 years anyway.
The myth that Red Hat support is more expensive than Microsoft is just that, a Myth. With HP servers, I can get support for a few hundred dollars for 3 years. For Microsoft, several hundred dollars just pays for the software license. Support costs $300 an incident after that.
Well, regardless of whether the world revolves around servers or not, if the kernel developers can make Linux stable and fast on large servers with 64GB-512GB of memory and 16-32 cores, chances are it'll run pretty well on your desktop as well.
Try doing an fsck on a large ext2 filesystem with lots of small files and directories. It could take between hours and days, depending on the number of inodes. I've seen some seriously wtf moments when people realized how long it would take their mailserver to come back online, and management was not pleased that they chose to use a non-journaling filesystem. Mind you, this is before ext3 was default and journaling filesystems on Linux were pretty experimental. Of course, at the time, a better choice for mailserver would have been a Solaris box running UFS with journaling, but they thought the poor little Dell running Red Hat with ext2 would be fine.
Bullshit. I run Linux on the best HP hardware money can buy, brand new Proliants, and you still get a kernal oops/panic if you have a bad memory DIMM or a failed CPU or something. No operating system is immune to hardware failures.
Yeah, because systems never kernel panic, or crash for any other reason than power outages... Wake me up after you've been waiting for fsck to finish on your 1TB drive and it's been running for the last 72 hours.
Whether or not you've had a system shutdown uncleanly in the past, you certainly will at some time in the future, so why not just use ext3 and save yourself the headache of a 3 day long fsck?
It's also painfully obvious that you've never worked as a sysadmin before. You try explaining to your manager that the reason why your company's server will take 3 days to come back online is that you wanted to save a few microseconds of latency when users were accessing files...
Actually, Blizzard could learn a lot of lessons from Arenanet, the creators of Guild Wars, about how to do proper patches. Guild Wars has the capability to slipstream patches in real-time into the game. Players that are playing on the older version don't even need to log out, they just remain in a separate instance until they relog and download the new update, which takes about 2 seconds (literally) to download and patch on a high speed connection.
Even expansion packs in Guild Wars are streamed in the background while players are playing (using only a small amount of network bandwidth so as not to disrupt the gaming experience) weeks in advance, so that on the day the xpac is released, you log in and within seconds are up and running in the new version. I know Blizzard has a BitTorrent downloader that starts downloading new patches a few days in advance, but it only runs when the game isn't running, and the patch day process is always a huge 15 minute long process as it churns through and updates all of your files.
Arenanet really has the best patching system I've ever witnessed in a client/sever application the size of an MMO. The ability to slipstream patches and fixes in realtime without adversely affecting players experience (ie Downtime) is amazing and pretty much unheard of in the MMO industry.
I would love to see open source versions of Diablo and other great Blizzard games. I'm 99% sure we will never see them. The reason why is that a game is basically 2 components:
1. Art assets, such as textures, character models, shaders, etc.
2. The game code that tells your computer how to render those art assets.
I could see some game code eventually being open sourced, but the art assets that make up most of the game will most likely never be open sourced. The reason is that for a company like Blizzard, their art is their IP. The most important asset they have is the "look and feel" of their games. They would be too afraid that under a creative commons license, some competitor could use their art assets to generate a Diablo "look-alike" that would ruin the Diablo brand, or just dilute it.
Also, a lot of game companies re-use art assets in newer games. Blizzard has done this with all of the Warcraft games. Sure, they might add detail to some of the textures and models, but look at how similar some of the models in Warcraft 3 are to World of Warcraft, and you'll see what I mean.
Art assets get re-used all the time, and I can't see a game company like Blizzard giving up their "crown jewels", which are basically the art that goes into their games.
Oh my god, you really are cuckoo for cocoa puffs, aren't you?
Tabula Rasa was absolute crap. I played the beta and the release. The last decent games Lord British made was the Ultima series. Face it, he's a washed up game designer that is past his prime.
We already know the answer to this question. Mac and PC are simultaneously released for all major Blizzard games, and most of them work in Wine, even if it isn't officially supported.
I would like to know why World of Warcraft doesn't have a more PvP-centric focus. The Warcraft and Starcraft RTS series have always heavily centered around player vs. player battles, and they have always been heralded as having very good game balance. Yet, for some reason, when World of Warcraft was released, PvP wasn't even in the game initially, and seems to have been added as an afterthought, creating a lot of game balance issues. Even to this day, it seems that PvP in World of Warcraft arenas is heavily unbalanced and favors certain class compositions over all others (Warrior, Druid, Warlock seem to dominate).
What lessons has World of Warcraft learned from the highly successful Warhammer Online launch that happened recently, and when can we expect to see some of the best features from this new game implemented in World of Warcraft? I personally would like to see the public quest system implemented in World of Warcraft, as well as the realm vs. realm lakes with siege warfare, keeps, and real meaningful PvP.
You bring up a very good point. On the other hand, maybe you could just decide to move to a city that doesn't get hit by a hurricane every few years... There's a reason why houses are dirt cheap in the Gulf coast areas... It's often not even worth it to live there.
Think about global warming and how just a few degree increase in ocean temperature will affect the hurricane season, and if you're smart you'll move the hell out of there. There will be a lot more Ikes, trust me.
No, pretty much all the mainstream media outlets in the US trend right. When you are owned by multi-national corporations that make $billions profiteering from a failed war in Iraq, it's hard not to get biased. Take, for example, GE, which owns NBC, and also sells weapons systems used in Iraq. MSNBC had this little problem of Keith Obermann, a democratic-leaning pundit, similar to the Hannity character on Faux news. Well, he got shutup pretty heavily because some bigwigs over at GE didn't like his "radical left-leaning views".
It's pretty hard to argue that the media in the US is anything but biased to the right. They're all owned by huge corporations that have a vested interest in furthering their right-wing agenda.
Not only that, this article (sorry, NYTimes reg required) details how Henry Paulson, back in 2004, asked the SEC to deregulate Goldman Sachs and other banks to allow them to take on this toxic mortgage debt in the first place.
We have just been ripped off by the most elaborate con in the history of the world. We let a banker tell us "let us break the rules so we can make more money", then when he did and the bottom fell out, we gave him even more money to keep him from going out of business.
My only hope is that the voters check for who is voting for this and get rid of them next election.
McCain may have called it, but it's his party's philosophy of deregulation and making it easier for companies to move assets outside the country that caused this.
What Obama wants to do to solve this is to give tax breaks to companies that decide to keep operations and jobs in the US. That way there is a tax incentive for them to not relocate overseas. Right now there are so many loopholes for corporations to have a P.O. Box in the Cayman Islands and rarely ever pay a dime of taxes. Look at how Haliburton relocated to the Middle East. That has to be one of the most blatant tax dodges I've ever seen, yet we're still giving them $billions in contracts.
In any case, the tax code needs to be cleaned up. You don't want to just increase corporate taxes because that will encourage an even greater amount of companies to leave. You need to close the loopholes allowing companies to transfer assets outside the country without paying taxes, and you need to give tax breaks to companies that create jobs in the US. That will get things back on track and that is what Obama is planning on doing.
No, let's not tax them any more. Let's instead give tax breaks to companies that don't outsource American jobs, thereby encouraging them to stay here.
In case you haven't pulled your head out of your ass long enough to notice, Obama isn't president yet. How does Obama's future economic policy explain why companies are relocating over the past several years? Answer: It doesn't, it's the Bush failed economic policies of deregulation that are encouraging companies to dodge taxes overseas.
Both you and your professor are ignoring the fact that inactive pages in memory can be paged out to disk, freeing up that memory to be used as a disk cache and increasing performance. Do you really need some shared object sitting in memory the entire time when it is only rarely used by program foo? There really is a valid reason to have virtual memory, even in today's large memory systems.
The Oracle recommendations as a general rule are good, however, I've recently been deploying Oracle RAC nodes with 64GB of memory each, and I'm wondering if 48GB of swap is overkill. I think in the next few months I'll be deploying nodes with 128GB of memory and I'm pretty sure 96GB of swap is not necessary. At a certain point, don't the rules break down?
The reason this becomes an issue is that I only have a pair of 146GB drives for root disks (mirrored) so you start to run out of space for Red Hat, Oracle, and the other software that should normally be on root.
You still don't understand... The repubs have controlled congress for 6 of 8 years of Bush's presidency. How can you even call it a Democrat controlled congress when it wasn't the case?
I want some of whatever it is that you're smoking. The Repubs have been in control of both houses from 1994 up to 2006. It was only in 2006 that the Dems got the slimmest of majority in congress, and even still it is not a veto proof majority so they can't really do much except go along with Bush... I wish they would stand up to him a little more.
I would say that when you have the author of one of the worst finance bills in the history of our country that also writes the economic policy for a potential future President, that is a big deal . These guys are crooks, liars, and have been giving special perks to their cronies for decades now. We're just starting to see the real downside emerge.
This act was also known as the Gramm Leach Bliley act. It was written by a Republican controlled congress and signed into law by President Bill Clinton.
You may have heard of one of the sponsors, Phil Gramm. He is the Gramm in Gramm Leach Bliley... He also wrote John McCain's economic policy and was John McCain's presidential campaign co-chair and his most senior economic advisor, until he made a gaffe on the campaign trail and said "You've heard of mental depression; this is a mental recession," and "We have sort of become a nation of whiners, you just hear this constant whining, complaining about a loss of competitiveness, America in decline." Whoops. I guess McCain had to let him go after he said that on national television.
I love it how the right-wing media is trying to spin this that "it's all Clinton's fault" when we have a law passed by a Republican controlled congress, written by McCain's senior economic advisor. I know you guys like to try and stretch the facts about everything, but the people are starting to get sick of all of the lies and deceit.
Let's face it, deregulation has failed our economy and our nation. Voting for John McCain would be putting the fox in charge of the hen house.