Given enough time and energy, even Linux servers can be hacked.
With the growing interest in Linux, I wonder if we'll see more parity of viruses between Windows and Linux.
It also goes to show that the human side is usually where compromises come in to play. Most likely some admin had a weak password that was hacked, and that admin had permission to signing packages or things he should not have had.
I don't care how secure your OS is. If you don't follow proper security procedures, including using strong passwords and giving users only the permissions they need to do their job, you will be hacked.
They have taken all the reasonable precautions, and if their passphrase was strong, then the danger of my servers being compromised by meteor strike is a much greater worry.
The only thing that concerns me is this: In the Fedora announcement, they said with a high level of confidence, they don't believe the passphrase for their signing key was compromised, because they hadn't signed any packages during the period of time the box was compromised. They are going to change the signing key anyway just in case. This is a good thing.
In the Redhat announcement, we can infer the passphrase and signing key were compromised, because the attacker signed invalid openssh packages. Even though the official RHN distribution channel was not compromised, the attacker most likely still has their private key and passphrase and can continue signing packages and attempting to distribute them. Redhat needs to step up and reissue a new signing key. There was no announcement of this.
You see, self-signed certificates are only wide open to MITM attacks if the person monitoring you was replacing all certificates pro-actively before you even visited the website once. If you however have visited the site before, Firefox will warn you that the certicate has changed when a MITM changes it. At this point Firefox should display a big red warning.
You conveniently ignore the fact that there are many times when a customer might be visiting the website for the first time from a new computer. Let's say I'm on vacation, pop into a public library to check my bank balance, and logon to my bank website. How do I know if I'm safe from MITM without a trusted cert? You expect me to remember the fingerprint of my bank's real SSL certificate and check every digit? You expect Joe Average to do this?
Trust and CAs exist for a reason. Underqualified webmasters just need to let this one go. They don't understand the reason trust is required to secure financial data on the internet, and they're just asking us to make everyone less secure because they can't do their job properly and keep their certs up to date.
As it happens I argued against that choice at the time, and again when the self-signed certs issue came up again a few years ago I have consistently argued that the browser should allow ANY connection to be encrypted with ANY key, just don't bother to worry the user about it unless the cert is trustworthy according to the user spec.
Don't you see a small problem with that? Don't let the user know that the free wifi access point they're using internet from is doing a man in the middle attack when they login to their bank account with what they think is SSL? Because, after all, encryption is better than no encryption.
Encryption is not always a good thing, especially if there is no trust. You work at a CA, you should know that. Encryption without trust gives you the false impression that your data is safe. When really, all it takes is a trivial Linux box serving as a transparent proxy at the local free wifi hotspot to capture hundreds or thousands of banking passwords. After all, you get a certificate (even though it's invalid), so you should be able to just not let the user know about it and trust it anyway, right?
I'm not against OSS per se, but I'm skeptical that an individual contributing to an OSS project is a good idea. It's one thing for IBM to invest in Linux (for example). If you invest in Linux, you're effectively donating money to for-profit organizations like IBM and Red Hat. This seems to go *against* your self interest of keeping a healthy job pool for software developers. Sure, read and study OSS, but don't lower your own value by working for free.
Contributing to an OSS project isn't for the money. It's the recognition or street cred. Imagine you're a hiring interviewer at Google. Software engineer #1 comes in the door and you ask him "what have you written?" He says "oh, a bunch of EJBs for an internal corporate app at a bank I used to work at." Software engineer #2 comes in the door and you ask him the same question. He says "oh, a bunch of EJBs for an internal corporate app at a bank I used to work at, and I also wrote Gnifty, an open-source project on Sourceforge."
Which one are you going to hire? You don't have to make a great open source project that everyone has heard of before, but get some of your code out there and it gives you desirability++ because it says a couple of things about you:
1. You don't just code from 9 to 5, you actually do it in your spare time as a hobby, making you a better developer. 2. Your code is out there and they can review it to see how good you are (this might be a bad thing if your code is sloppy).
Those 2 things alone are things that will get you hired by a good company over your average guy that just codes for a living.
Sounds an awful lot like the way rogues (combo points)/warriors (rage) work in WoW.
And I'm sure WoW borrowed those mechanics from another game as well. There's an awful lot of "borrowing" in the MMO industry.
Not exactly, because combo points are just ways to do more damage. High Magic/Waaagh! is different because you can only increase the potency of your damage spells by healing, and you can only increase the potency of your healing spells by damage. They reward you for playing both roles equally, and believe me, it requires a lot of skill to dps while you're keeping your party healed as well!
The bean counters with their MBA's came in and removed 4 of the 6 major cities citing to move this project out by christmas rather than doing it right.
When you play the game and realize that those cities are not just static cities like WoW, with NPCs that stand there and don't do anything, you'll understand why.
Each one of those cities is a full raid type environment designed for end-game players to capture, defeat several bosses within the city, and finally defeat the king of the city himself.
What happens is this: If one side, order or destruction, controls the keeps in all 3 pairings (dwarves v. greenskins, empire vs. chaos, high elves vs. dark elves), they have the ability to challenge the opposing side's capital city. This involves completing massive public quests within the city such as burning down buildings, killing champions (elite mobs), ransacking libraries, overtaking the sewer system, etc. The entire time, you're not only trying to complete these public quests in the opposing capital city, it's being defended by the opposing faction.
So, they chose to leave out 4 of 6 of the capital cities because it was just too much content to balance, especially because the content is not just PvE raid level bosses and the King himself, but also PvP content, essentially trying to kill the bosses and King while you're tackling PvP at the same time. It's just a lot to balance and tune effectively, and they decided it would push the release off too much.
They may release the cities later. I applaud them for wanting to make sure that the parts of the game they do release are of high quality, and not completely full of bugs.
As of now, the Non Disclosure portions of our North American Beta Testing Agreement are now officially lifted. From this point on players may now freely talk about their experiences in the game as well as post screenshots, videos, etc. We will be sending an email out to all our current players with full details about the lift over the next 24 hours. Players with access to our forums can also see the letter there. Players may not talk about nor reprint posts from our forums and our Test Servers (currently Deathsword) are still fully covered by the confidentiality portions of our Beta Testing Agreement. So, other than that, free feel to talk about and share your experiences in WAR.
My thanks go out to everyone who has beta tested and continues to beta test WAR. It has been with your help and feedback that WAR is where it is today. We really appreciate your effort.
WAR is almost upon us!
Mark Jacobs VP, GM Mythic Entertainment
I'm an elder beta tester, and here is my review:
The poor graphics gave me a really bad first impression, but the graphics are honestly better than WoW (not saying much), and we all know that graphics aren't everything, gameplay is king.
So, I decided to give it another shot with the 3.2 patch and jump into RvR.
So far I'm having a blast. You can level and XP in this game through either PvP or questing; you don't have to quest or grind at all. For me this is a major plus because I love levelling through PvP.
I wanted to talk for a second about some of the unique mechanics I noticed, which you might have already heard about before. The archmage I'm playing has a mechanic known as high magic, which the shaman also has, but it's called Waagh!. Basically, how it works is like this: If you cast damage spells, your healing counter goes up from 1 to 5, by a point for each damage spell you cast. If you cast healing spells, your damage counter goes up from 1 to 5, by a point for each healing spell you cast. This counter is like a charge that can be saved, but if you stop casting spells for 10 or 15 seconds you lose all the charges you have. If you cast a bunch of damage spells and build your counter up to 5, your next healing spell that normally would take 3 seconds to cast will be instant, and will heal for more. Likewise, if you build your healing counter up to 5, your next damage spell will hit harder. This unique dynamic encourages people to not just be healbots, but to be in the fray of battle, dishing out damage, and tossing out heals constantly. Every class has a similar unique mechanic, which will be refreshing for those of you used to filling a simple role (like healbot).
The RvR minigames are really well done and I jumped right into a queue with a level 3 archmage (healer, DoT archetype) and was able to contribute to battle right away. Think of instanced battlegrounds, but more fun because there are events that happen during the battle. For example, the RvR I was playing had 2 control points. If Empire or Chaos captured both of those points and held them for 10 seconds, a fireball would shoot out of the points, engulfing everything within about 100 feet and insta-killing everyone that was in it's path. It made things very dynamic because you could capture both points, and everyone would have to run out, resetting the points and allowing them to be captured again by you or the opposing team.
There are also keeps to capture in open RvR (world PvP), and with siege weapons such as catapults, burning oil, doors to break down, etc, it can be very epic. I've been in battles with over a hundred people on each side and the performance is pretty amazing considering how many people are participating.
Not only do you get XP for fighting in RvR, you also get RP, which are like PvP XP. You have two different levels, your Rank which is like your PvE level, and your Renown Rank, which is like your PvP level. When you get to certain Renown Ranks, you get access to buy
You didn't mention HP-UX in your previous post. I'm talking about Linux running on HP Proliant or Sun X4600 servers. So, apples -> oranges. I'm not sure of any LUN limitations on HP-UX.
Which filesystem were you using in your test for disk / i/o bandwidth? ufs? zfs? qfs? vxfs? some other filesystem?
We were using ASM and raw filesystems. ASM is Oracle's own volume manager. You present a bunch of raw LUNs and Oracle does a RAID 0 stripe across them. The data is protected on the storage array using RAID 1+0 or RAID 5.
On Linux, with hundreds of LUNs, you get/dev/sda -/dev/sdz, then you go to/dev/sdaa,/dev/sdab, etc... Very easy to manage. No need to format, label, partition, etc, all of that BS that Solaris requires you to do before you can write to a disk. Just start writing to the raw/dev/sda and you're good.
What if you need real uptime with a load of 80 on a 32 cpu system? Can Linux handle the load and have years of uptime?
Solaris just works and its made for servers. Linux seems always beta quality with its cutting edgness and is desktop oriented. I would not trust my job to it unless its Debian or RHES which costs $$$ as cutting edge features are not needed on a mission critical server. Solaris scales far better than any BSD or Linux distro out there.
Absolute bullshit. I run Red Hat Enterprise Linux (64-bit) on a 4 node AMD Opteron cluster running Oracle RAC. Each server has 32 cores, 128GB of memory, and 8x 4gb HBAs, connected to an HP EVA 8100 SAN. I also tested Solaris 10 on this same hardware, and you know what? It outperforms Solaris 10 on the same hardware. I have the Oracle ORION benchmarks to prove it.
There was a time in the late 90s when Solaris was a far superior OS to Linux for use in the data center. I'm an SCSA, I know, because I started as a Solaris admin long before I worked on Linux. The reality is that now, Linux outperforms Solaris for I/O intensive applications like Oracle database. Why do you think Oracle themselves migrated to Linux a while back? Solaris and Sun have been losing their best and brightest engineers for a long time now, and the quality of their OS shows. It's getting dated. Sure, new features like ZFS are cool, but the core of the OS, where it really counts, hasn't been updated enough to take advantage of the large memory and CPU core footprint that new commodity servers have.
Solaris support has rocked. We've never had an issue that Sun hasn't been able to solve, and yes, we've thrown them some curves (and sliders for that matter). IBM's support has told us on multiple occasions to re-install the system as a fix for a problem. RedHat we've stumped more often than not. HP? Well - they still can't figure out how to handle more than 8 luns per target for scsi (as well as fibre)...
Ok, I'll call you on this one. I'm a SCSA (Solaris Certified System Administrator) and a former Sun SSE. I've worked with Solaris systems going back to 1996 on original Sparcstations (not even Ultrasparcs). I've also worked on Enterprise 10000, 15000, and 25000. We also have a smattering of Sun Fire X4600s, the new AMD Opteron boxes.
I tested Solaris 10 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 (64-bit) on the exact same hardware (X4600), and you know what? Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 performed better on massive storage I/O than Solaris 10. I have the Oracle ORION benchmarks to prove it. We have over 50 LUNs carved from an HP EVA 8100 and presented to these X4600s, on 4x 4gb HBAs per server. They run Oracle RAC, have 4x quad core AMD Opterons, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
Sorry, but Solaris used to be a good OS back in the 90s. They have fallen so far behind it's not even funny. The reality now is that I can run Red Hat and Oracle on a 32 core AMD Opteron box with a hundred LUNs on a fibre channel SAN and it outperforms Solaris now. ZFS is nice, but we use ASM (automated storage management) for Oracle anyway, so ZFS is unnecessary.
Solaris has unfortunately fallen far behind the performance curve, and I doubt they can ever catch up. Your BS about HP not supporting more than 8 LUNs per target is absolutely BS. I can do hundreds of LUNs, and I have systems like that in production.
On support, they all suck. Red Hat, HP, Sun, every one of them sucks. They have all been chasing the bottom and if it ever gets to the point where I'm stumped, they're going to be stumped as well.
Though officials acknowledge more public restrooms are desperately needed, the city has no immediate plans to replace the toilets.
I really don't understand why city officials feel like they need to take my tax money to pay for public toilets. If people want the convenience and luxury of a toilet, they can buy their own damn toilet, or they can go shit in the woods like a bear. Seattle is a pretty messed up place to live if the city thinks they need to spend $5 million so a few homeless people have a place to pee or use drugs.
Seriously, when did we decide as a society that we had to provide free public toilets to everyone? This is just getting ridiculous.
Maybe the "leave me alone and keep government small" ppl happen to be religious types, and they get ridiculed on the latter point in order to demonize the former ideas by association. Just a thought.
Good point, but if so, why do they keep electing people that try to pass "faith-based initiatives"? If they were really for small government and lower taxes, why do they want the government to fund their churches?
Deebs was doing "research and development." This doesn't make him dangerous, but it's entirely possible that he really was violating local zoning laws.
By that same logic, you could have your house raided, computers confiscated, and property stolen just because you were doing "research and development" in your spare time by contributing to an open source project. What exactly is a chemistry hobby other than personal "research and development".
The minute you let them define all research and development as a business only activity, to be done by big business and corporations alone, is the minute you doom us all to modern day serfdom toiling away for our corporate overlords. You might as well outlaw all personal inventions and just give the megacorps a monopoly on our future.
*Sigh*. I know, but the children are busy having a tantrum. Hopefully once they calm down, they'll RTFA later, and ponder for a second whether they'd like to be living next door to this fellow once they move out of their parents' basements.
I would have no problem living next door to him. He violated no laws, had no hazardous chemicals, not even mercury. They said in TFA that he had nothing more dangerous than any household cleaner. Also, the fire was completely unrelated in a second floor air conditioner (his lab was in the basement).
Yeah, but do you remember the scientific facts it was based on? No, you don't, because there largely weren't any.
Nice comment. Notice how he never replied? You can't argue facts and reason with these right-wing nutjobs. He gets his scientific information from Rush Limbaugh and the RNC talking points so once you actually bring facts and logic into the equation he disappears.
Ah, but that's not ALWAYS true - EVE Online has literally no limits on character capability - given enough time and money to buy skillbooks, you can get every single skill in the game to the maximum level, fly any ship, use any equipment...
PvP games are the big exception to the rule. I'd much rather play a PvP-centric game where my opponent is another thinking player than repeat the same boring raid content over and over again. I wish more game publishers would focus on creating a good PvP-centric game where empire building, large scale warfare, and full loot is available. Unfortunately, most normal people don't like these games.
Personally, I can't wait until WAR comes out... It looks like it will have some amazing PvP.
I'd love to think that there's some 8-year-old kid out there crouched in front of an old monochrome amber monitor yelling "XYZZY!" "PLUGH!" and "THESE TWISTY PASSAGES ARE ALL ALIKE!"
It wasn't the masks so much as the fact that they were black and the t-shirts the athletes were wearing at the time that pissed people off:
It looks to me as if China has a pro-nationalist, anti-foreigner blog community that is every bit as scary as the Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, right-wing blog community here in the US. These guys will write anything as long as it has a few themes that are totally false:
1. Tibet is, was, and always will be part of China. (Remember, I said this was false, this is just the type of email spam I've seen) 2. Taiwan is, was, and always will be part of China. (Again, false, but apparently their schools don't teach real history) 3. Americans are all pigs, China first, blah blah blah...
Anyway, it kind of gets under my skin when I hear from my girlfriend, who is asian (Taiwanese to be precise) that some of her friends forward these chain emails to her about how Tibet is, was, and always will be part of china.
I'd love to have a conversation with one of these nut-jobs and tell them how fucked up they are when they believe whatever they learn in their nationalist school system, but sadly it would probably be like trying to talk a Republican into believing that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11, and that he also had no WMDs... Again, these are the type of people that are just like right-wingers here in the US. Facts don't matter. They are indoctrinated with their nationalist dogma.
Personally, I don't see how anyone could take more than a 20 minute commute. I'd take a significant pay cut (well right now I'm jobless, but in theory... work with me here) to work within a short bus/bike ride from home. Here's to hoping that people will start building commercial properties in Riverside County.
You just answered your own question right there. We take hour long commutes so that we can live in an area that actually has an economy and jobs. Personally, I'd rather live somewhere I can make six figures but have to commute 2 hours round trip to work, than an economically depressed area where I can only make $30k and have to worry about my job security (if you lose your job, where else can you get work?). At least I can save enough money that I can move to the middle of nowhere and retire in one of those cheap houses in the "rust belt"...
Then again, social responsibility may encourage them to boycott the australian release, causing the game to have horrible sales in australia, but phenomenal sales everywhere else in the world... that might make the publisher put some pressure on the classification board, and get them to change their policies.
Better yet, the publisher should just refuse to release in a country that wants to censor content. Then when enough bootleg copies flood the market from overseas the ratings board might realize how ridiculous it is trying to protect their children from little 1s and 0s floating around on the internet...
How come MMOs get labeled with this "problem" of not having infinite content. I can't remember someone complaining that they got bored with Oblivion after spending 40 hours playing. If you've played an MMO so long that you've maxed out your character (and maybe a 2nd player), and are now bored with the PVP, haven't you got enough out of it? Is that really a problem that needs, or even can, be solved? Try another game...
The problem isn't with the players getting bored. That happens with all games. The problem is that the business model for an MMO relies on continued subscription fees in order to keep people playing. So that means the developer must stretch out a finite amount of content for an infinite amount of time. They do this by placing artificial limitations on your character and creating things like "raid lockouts" where you can only kill a certain boss once a week to have a small percentage chance of getting the gear that will make your character more powerful.
The only reason why WoW is so successful is that they have perfected this process. First, they create a character class with all of these special powers and abilities, then, they remove all of the special abilities and put them on gear that you must acquire to unlock the full potential of your character. Then, with raid lockouts, and the fact that in any given raid there may be 3 or 4 people that need that same piece of gear, and only a 10-20% chance that it will drop in the first place, they can pretty much guarantee that the average subscription will last 1-2 years before your character is fully equipped. By that time, the expansion will be out, making all of your gear worthless, and the cycle repeats.
Seriously, when I started calculating the number of weeks and months it would take me to repeat the same content over and over again, just to fully equip my character, that was when I got frustrated and decided to cancel my account. It's a contrived system of intentionally withholding rewards just long enough so that they can eke out a few more months of subscription revenue from you, the customer.
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It also goes to show that the human side is usually where compromises come in to play. Most likely some admin had a weak password that was hacked, and that admin had permission to signing packages or things he should not have had.
I don't care how secure your OS is. If you don't follow proper security procedures, including using strong passwords and giving users only the permissions they need to do their job, you will be hacked.
The only thing that concerns me is this: In the Fedora announcement, they said with a high level of confidence, they don't believe the passphrase for their signing key was compromised, because they hadn't signed any packages during the period of time the box was compromised. They are going to change the signing key anyway just in case. This is a good thing.
In the Redhat announcement, we can infer the passphrase and signing key were compromised, because the attacker signed invalid openssh packages. Even though the official RHN distribution channel was not compromised, the attacker most likely still has their private key and passphrase and can continue signing packages and attempting to distribute them. Redhat needs to step up and reissue a new signing key. There was no announcement of this.
IE does not "troop on regardless." It gives a similar nasty looking warning, as well it should.
You conveniently ignore the fact that there are many times when a customer might be visiting the website for the first time from a new computer. Let's say I'm on vacation, pop into a public library to check my bank balance, and logon to my bank website. How do I know if I'm safe from MITM without a trusted cert? You expect me to remember the fingerprint of my bank's real SSL certificate and check every digit? You expect Joe Average to do this?
Trust and CAs exist for a reason. Underqualified webmasters just need to let this one go. They don't understand the reason trust is required to secure financial data on the internet, and they're just asking us to make everyone less secure because they can't do their job properly and keep their certs up to date.
Don't you see a small problem with that? Don't let the user know that the free wifi access point they're using internet from is doing a man in the middle attack when they login to their bank account with what they think is SSL? Because, after all, encryption is better than no encryption.
Encryption is not always a good thing, especially if there is no trust. You work at a CA, you should know that. Encryption without trust gives you the false impression that your data is safe. When really, all it takes is a trivial Linux box serving as a transparent proxy at the local free wifi hotspot to capture hundreds or thousands of banking passwords. After all, you get a certificate (even though it's invalid), so you should be able to just not let the user know about it and trust it anyway, right?
Contributing to an OSS project isn't for the money. It's the recognition or street cred. Imagine you're a hiring interviewer at Google. Software engineer #1 comes in the door and you ask him "what have you written?" He says "oh, a bunch of EJBs for an internal corporate app at a bank I used to work at." Software engineer #2 comes in the door and you ask him the same question. He says "oh, a bunch of EJBs for an internal corporate app at a bank I used to work at, and I also wrote Gnifty, an open-source project on Sourceforge ."
Which one are you going to hire? You don't have to make a great open source project that everyone has heard of before, but get some of your code out there and it gives you desirability++ because it says a couple of things about you:
1. You don't just code from 9 to 5, you actually do it in your spare time as a hobby, making you a better developer.
2. Your code is out there and they can review it to see how good you are (this might be a bad thing if your code is sloppy).
Those 2 things alone are things that will get you hired by a good company over your average guy that just codes for a living.
Not exactly, because combo points are just ways to do more damage. High Magic/Waaagh! is different because you can only increase the potency of your damage spells by healing, and you can only increase the potency of your healing spells by damage. They reward you for playing both roles equally, and believe me, it requires a lot of skill to dps while you're keeping your party healed as well!
When you play the game and realize that those cities are not just static cities like WoW, with NPCs that stand there and don't do anything, you'll understand why.
Each one of those cities is a full raid type environment designed for end-game players to capture, defeat several bosses within the city, and finally defeat the king of the city himself.
What happens is this: If one side, order or destruction, controls the keeps in all 3 pairings (dwarves v. greenskins, empire vs. chaos, high elves vs. dark elves), they have the ability to challenge the opposing side's capital city. This involves completing massive public quests within the city such as burning down buildings, killing champions (elite mobs), ransacking libraries, overtaking the sewer system, etc. The entire time, you're not only trying to complete these public quests in the opposing capital city, it's being defended by the opposing faction.
So, they chose to leave out 4 of 6 of the capital cities because it was just too much content to balance, especially because the content is not just PvE raid level bosses and the King himself, but also PvP content, essentially trying to kill the bosses and King while you're tackling PvP at the same time. It's just a lot to balance and tune effectively, and they decided it would push the release off too much.
They may release the cities later. I applaud them for wanting to make sure that the parts of the game they do release are of high quality, and not completely full of bugs.
I'm an elder beta tester, and here is my review:
The poor graphics gave me a really bad first impression, but the graphics are honestly better than WoW (not saying much), and we all know that graphics aren't everything, gameplay is king.
So, I decided to give it another shot with the 3.2 patch and jump into RvR.
So far I'm having a blast. You can level and XP in this game through either PvP or questing; you don't have to quest or grind at all. For me this is a major plus because I love levelling through PvP.
I wanted to talk for a second about some of the unique mechanics I noticed, which you might have already heard about before. The archmage I'm playing has a mechanic known as high magic, which the shaman also has, but it's called Waagh!. Basically, how it works is like this: If you cast damage spells, your healing counter goes up from 1 to 5, by a point for each damage spell you cast. If you cast healing spells, your damage counter goes up from 1 to 5, by a point for each healing spell you cast. This counter is like a charge that can be saved, but if you stop casting spells for 10 or 15 seconds you lose all the charges you have. If you cast a bunch of damage spells and build your counter up to 5, your next healing spell that normally would take 3 seconds to cast will be instant, and will heal for more. Likewise, if you build your healing counter up to 5, your next damage spell will hit harder. This unique dynamic encourages people to not just be healbots, but to be in the fray of battle, dishing out damage, and tossing out heals constantly. Every class has a similar unique mechanic, which will be refreshing for those of you used to filling a simple role (like healbot).
The RvR minigames are really well done and I jumped right into a queue with a level 3 archmage (healer, DoT archetype) and was able to contribute to battle right away. Think of instanced battlegrounds, but more fun because there are events that happen during the battle. For example, the RvR I was playing had 2 control points. If Empire or Chaos captured both of those points and held them for 10 seconds, a fireball would shoot out of the points, engulfing everything within about 100 feet and insta-killing everyone that was in it's path. It made things very dynamic because you could capture both points, and everyone would have to run out, resetting the points and allowing them to be captured again by you or the opposing team.
There are also keeps to capture in open RvR (world PvP), and with siege weapons such as catapults, burning oil, doors to break down, etc, it can be very epic. I've been in battles with over a hundred people on each side and the performance is pretty amazing considering how many people are participating.
Not only do you get XP for fighting in RvR, you also get RP, which are like PvP XP. You have two different levels, your Rank which is like your PvE level, and your Renown Rank, which is like your PvP level. When you get to certain Renown Ranks, you get access to buy
You didn't mention HP-UX in your previous post. I'm talking about Linux running on HP Proliant or Sun X4600 servers. So, apples -> oranges. I'm not sure of any LUN limitations on HP-UX.
We were using ASM and raw filesystems. ASM is Oracle's own volume manager. You present a bunch of raw LUNs and Oracle does a RAID 0 stripe across them. The data is protected on the storage array using RAID 1+0 or RAID 5.
On Linux, with hundreds of LUNs, you get /dev/sda - /dev/sdz, then you go to /dev/sdaa, /dev/sdab, etc... Very easy to manage. No need to format, label, partition, etc, all of that BS that Solaris requires you to do before you can write to a disk. Just start writing to the raw /dev/sda and you're good.
Absolute bullshit. I run Red Hat Enterprise Linux (64-bit) on a 4 node AMD Opteron cluster running Oracle RAC. Each server has 32 cores, 128GB of memory, and 8x 4gb HBAs, connected to an HP EVA 8100 SAN. I also tested Solaris 10 on this same hardware, and you know what? It outperforms Solaris 10 on the same hardware. I have the Oracle ORION benchmarks to prove it.
There was a time in the late 90s when Solaris was a far superior OS to Linux for use in the data center. I'm an SCSA, I know, because I started as a Solaris admin long before I worked on Linux. The reality is that now, Linux outperforms Solaris for I/O intensive applications like Oracle database. Why do you think Oracle themselves migrated to Linux a while back? Solaris and Sun have been losing their best and brightest engineers for a long time now, and the quality of their OS shows. It's getting dated. Sure, new features like ZFS are cool, but the core of the OS, where it really counts, hasn't been updated enough to take advantage of the large memory and CPU core footprint that new commodity servers have.
Ok, I'll call you on this one. I'm a SCSA (Solaris Certified System Administrator) and a former Sun SSE. I've worked with Solaris systems going back to 1996 on original Sparcstations (not even Ultrasparcs). I've also worked on Enterprise 10000, 15000, and 25000. We also have a smattering of Sun Fire X4600s, the new AMD Opteron boxes.
I tested Solaris 10 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 (64-bit) on the exact same hardware (X4600), and you know what? Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 performed better on massive storage I/O than Solaris 10. I have the Oracle ORION benchmarks to prove it. We have over 50 LUNs carved from an HP EVA 8100 and presented to these X4600s, on 4x 4gb HBAs per server. They run Oracle RAC, have 4x quad core AMD Opterons, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
Sorry, but Solaris used to be a good OS back in the 90s. They have fallen so far behind it's not even funny. The reality now is that I can run Red Hat and Oracle on a 32 core AMD Opteron box with a hundred LUNs on a fibre channel SAN and it outperforms Solaris now. ZFS is nice, but we use ASM (automated storage management) for Oracle anyway, so ZFS is unnecessary.
Solaris has unfortunately fallen far behind the performance curve, and I doubt they can ever catch up. Your BS about HP not supporting more than 8 LUNs per target is absolutely BS. I can do hundreds of LUNs, and I have systems like that in production.
On support, they all suck. Red Hat, HP, Sun, every one of them sucks. They have all been chasing the bottom and if it ever gets to the point where I'm stumped, they're going to be stumped as well.
This is from the article:
I really don't understand why city officials feel like they need to take my tax money to pay for public toilets. If people want the convenience and luxury of a toilet, they can buy their own damn toilet, or they can go shit in the woods like a bear. Seattle is a pretty messed up place to live if the city thinks they need to spend $5 million so a few homeless people have a place to pee or use drugs.
Seriously, when did we decide as a society that we had to provide free public toilets to everyone? This is just getting ridiculous.
Brilliantly insightful... kudos.
Good point, but if so, why do they keep electing people that try to pass "faith-based initiatives"? If they were really for small government and lower taxes, why do they want the government to fund their churches?
By that same logic, you could have your house raided, computers confiscated, and property stolen just because you were doing "research and development" in your spare time by contributing to an open source project. What exactly is a chemistry hobby other than personal "research and development".
The minute you let them define all research and development as a business only activity, to be done by big business and corporations alone, is the minute you doom us all to modern day serfdom toiling away for our corporate overlords. You might as well outlaw all personal inventions and just give the megacorps a monopoly on our future.
I would have no problem living next door to him. He violated no laws, had no hazardous chemicals, not even mercury. They said in TFA that he had nothing more dangerous than any household cleaner. Also, the fire was completely unrelated in a second floor air conditioner (his lab was in the basement).
Do us all a favor and RTFA yourself.
Nice comment. Notice how he never replied? You can't argue facts and reason with these right-wing nutjobs. He gets his scientific information from Rush Limbaugh and the RNC talking points so once you actually bring facts and logic into the equation he disappears.
PvP games are the big exception to the rule. I'd much rather play a PvP-centric game where my opponent is another thinking player than repeat the same boring raid content over and over again. I wish more game publishers would focus on creating a good PvP-centric game where empire building, large scale warfare, and full loot is available. Unfortunately, most normal people don't like these games.
Personally, I can't wait until WAR comes out... It looks like it will have some amazing PvP.
Ah, those were good times; good times, indeed!
It looks to me as if China has a pro-nationalist, anti-foreigner blog community that is every bit as scary as the Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, right-wing blog community here in the US. These guys will write anything as long as it has a few themes that are totally false:
1. Tibet is, was, and always will be part of China. (Remember, I said this was false, this is just the type of email spam I've seen)
2. Taiwan is, was, and always will be part of China. (Again, false, but apparently their schools don't teach real history)
3. Americans are all pigs, China first, blah blah blah...
Anyway, it kind of gets under my skin when I hear from my girlfriend, who is asian (Taiwanese to be precise) that some of her friends forward these chain emails to her about how Tibet is, was, and always will be part of china.
I'd love to have a conversation with one of these nut-jobs and tell them how fucked up they are when they believe whatever they learn in their nationalist school system, but sadly it would probably be like trying to talk a Republican into believing that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11, and that he also had no WMDs... Again, these are the type of people that are just like right-wingers here in the US. Facts don't matter. They are indoctrinated with their nationalist dogma.
You just answered your own question right there. We take hour long commutes so that we can live in an area that actually has an economy and jobs. Personally, I'd rather live somewhere I can make six figures but have to commute 2 hours round trip to work, than an economically depressed area where I can only make $30k and have to worry about my job security (if you lose your job, where else can you get work?). At least I can save enough money that I can move to the middle of nowhere and retire in one of those cheap houses in the "rust belt"...
Standard right-wing talking point #1 right there. You really should stop getting your scientific information from talk radio.
Better yet, the publisher should just refuse to release in a country that wants to censor content. Then when enough bootleg copies flood the market from overseas the ratings board might realize how ridiculous it is trying to protect their children from little 1s and 0s floating around on the internet...
The problem isn't with the players getting bored. That happens with all games. The problem is that the business model for an MMO relies on continued subscription fees in order to keep people playing. So that means the developer must stretch out a finite amount of content for an infinite amount of time. They do this by placing artificial limitations on your character and creating things like "raid lockouts" where you can only kill a certain boss once a week to have a small percentage chance of getting the gear that will make your character more powerful.
The only reason why WoW is so successful is that they have perfected this process. First, they create a character class with all of these special powers and abilities, then, they remove all of the special abilities and put them on gear that you must acquire to unlock the full potential of your character. Then, with raid lockouts, and the fact that in any given raid there may be 3 or 4 people that need that same piece of gear, and only a 10-20% chance that it will drop in the first place, they can pretty much guarantee that the average subscription will last 1-2 years before your character is fully equipped. By that time, the expansion will be out, making all of your gear worthless, and the cycle repeats.
Seriously, when I started calculating the number of weeks and months it would take me to repeat the same content over and over again, just to fully equip my character, that was when I got frustrated and decided to cancel my account. It's a contrived system of intentionally withholding rewards just long enough so that they can eke out a few more months of subscription revenue from you, the customer.