OK, I'll admit I don't know much about gaming companies, but I do know a bit about making yourself attractive to the folks you want to be hired by.
You don't have time to design and create a full-blown massively multiplayer game, fine, I understand, I barely have free time. Have you at least taken the time to build your gaming related coding skills?
How familiar are you with the various 3D interfaces, have you built small demo apps to teach yourself anything? How is your knowledge of physics and calculus, been there done that, have a textbook on the shelf or in a box somewhere? Or have you been touching up the old math skills lately?
See where I'm heading, by taking an active interest, learning the basics, understanding what's involved, you are making yourself more attractive as a prospect. If I was looking for folks, your experience would weigh in well, but how much am I going to have to teach you from scratch. Compared to someone who at least has done some short demos, or has built their own games, you're looking like a lot of extra work.
You mention design as well. Have you ever sat down and roughed out a complete plan for a game? Planned out the artwork, the psuedo-ai, the plot, the music.
Here's my 0.02USD. Build a game from scratch (I know what you said, hear me out). It doesn't have to be Quake IV, build a toddler game. Something that talks and puts up pretty pictures when a kid hits a letter on the keyboard.Pretty basic sounding, but it's complex enough to give you some time with developing the app (make it cross platform to really impress) designing the app, test usability on peoples children, go all out.
You may find that you absolutely despise game development. I know I did. I think a lot of people have a pipe dream about how cool it would be doing game development, and the reality check is might harsh.
You mentioned VMWare in the question and I just wanted to point out something for anyone that doesn't know. VMWare virtualizes PC hardware, it won't run on a PPC. VirtualPC was mentioned before and that seems to be the accepted PC on Mac emulation solution.
Not applicable. If you read a little deeper the consultants hired by the plantiffs had the courts permission to test the security of the network.
They were originally going to attack from the outside first then attack from the inside. They found that the outside security was so woefully inadequate that it wasn't worth testing from the inside.
I run Afterstep and Mandrake 7.2 (came with that version, don't know why they took it off newer versions) on a 32mb machine at home. Afterstep has a very small footprint. If you are running a different version of Mandrake you'll have to grab the code from Afterstep.org (which seems to be dead in the water as I write this)
Yeah, either replace the network card with an ethernet one (usually they have a built in LPD that you can use, check the docs to be sure) or put linux on an old junky 486/slow-pentium, use the parallel port connection to the printer, and lpd on the linux box
We've always approached it from the point of view of protecting data. You/need/ enough UPS to get everything shut down clean (preferrably your UPS has a cable that hooks into the server and matching software that shuts down the server automatically when the power has been off a certain amount of time).
Even having the whole datacenter protected by one solution might not be enough. One thing I saw at one of our huge customers whose whole raised floor (2 mainframes, AS/400s, ~120 intel servers) was UPS'd by some huge horking industrial strenght thingie. When the power switched over to backup sometimes there was enough of a lag to knock out half of the Intel boxes, and at least twice when the UPS switched on the breakers blew on the raised floor. So we wound up putting small UPSes on all the critical boxes, just enough to keep'em going while big bertha came online.
The main thing you need to do is figure out what machines have to stay up, and what machines just need enough juice to shut down clean. All the major UPS suppliers have formulas that show you how to calculate the size of the UPS you need to keep things going. Make sure the UPSes you get have at least basic connectivity so that either when the power is out for a certain time, or (even better, but only from more advanced units) when there is only a certain amount of juice left, a signal is sent and your server can power down clean (and even tell other servers on the same UPS to power down, maybe even page you so you know to come in early and bring everything back up).
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YAMD by Nate Eldredge has much of the functionality your looking for. Plus, you don't have to recompile your code to use it!
You don't have time to design and create a full-blown massively multiplayer game, fine, I understand, I barely have free time. Have you at least taken the time to build your gaming related coding skills?
How familiar are you with the various 3D interfaces, have you built small demo apps to teach yourself anything? How is your knowledge of physics and calculus, been there done that, have a textbook on the shelf or in a box somewhere? Or have you been touching up the old math skills lately?
See where I'm heading, by taking an active interest, learning the basics, understanding what's involved, you are making yourself more attractive as a prospect. If I was looking for folks, your experience would weigh in well, but how much am I going to have to teach you from scratch. Compared to someone who at least has done some short demos, or has built their own games, you're looking like a lot of extra work.
You mention design as well. Have you ever sat down and roughed out a complete plan for a game? Planned out the artwork, the psuedo-ai, the plot, the music.
Here's my 0.02USD. Build a game from scratch (I know what you said, hear me out). It doesn't have to be Quake IV, build a toddler game. Something that talks and puts up pretty pictures when a kid hits a letter on the keyboard.Pretty basic sounding, but it's complex enough to give you some time with developing the app (make it cross platform to really impress) designing the app, test usability on peoples children, go all out.
You may find that you absolutely despise game development. I know I did. I think a lot of people have a pipe dream about how cool it would be doing game development, and the reality check is might harsh.
D'oh, typed the name in wrong. Duh, also see this page for a more in-depth explanation.
System Installer Suite I can't say enough about how cool this project is. Plus the developers all hang out on irc.openprojects.net in #sisuite.
Net::RawIP is pretty awesome, and perl is good for throwing test tools together quick.
So class, remember to fill out those change of address forms...
You mentioned VMWare in the question and I just wanted to point out something for anyone that doesn't know. VMWare virtualizes PC hardware, it won't run on a PPC. VirtualPC was mentioned before and that seems to be the accepted PC on Mac emulation solution.
Not applicable. If you read a little deeper the consultants hired by the plantiffs had the courts permission to test the security of the network. They were originally going to attack from the outside first then attack from the inside. They found that the outside security was so woefully inadequate that it wasn't worth testing from the inside.
I run Afterstep and Mandrake 7.2 (came with that version, don't know why they took it off newer versions) on a 32mb machine at home. Afterstep has a very small footprint. If you are running a different version of Mandrake you'll have to grab the code from Afterstep.org (which seems to be dead in the water as I write this)
Yeah, either replace the network card with an ethernet one (usually they have a built in LPD that you can use, check the docs to be sure) or put linux on an old junky 486/slow-pentium, use the parallel port connection to the printer, and lpd on the linux box
We've always approached it from the point of view of protecting data. You /need/ enough UPS to get everything shut down clean (preferrably your UPS has a cable that hooks into the server and matching software that shuts down the server automatically when the power has been off a certain amount of time).
Even having the whole datacenter protected by one solution might not be enough. One thing I saw at one of our huge customers whose whole raised floor (2 mainframes, AS/400s, ~120 intel servers) was UPS'd by some huge horking industrial strenght thingie. When the power switched over to backup sometimes there was enough of a lag to knock out half of the Intel boxes, and at least twice when the UPS switched on the breakers blew on the raised floor. So we wound up putting small UPSes on all the critical boxes, just enough to keep'em going while big bertha came online.
The main thing you need to do is figure out what machines have to stay up, and what machines just need enough juice to shut down clean. All the major UPS suppliers have formulas that show you how to calculate the size of the UPS you need to keep things going. Make sure the UPSes you get have at least basic connectivity so that either when the power is out for a certain time, or (even better, but only from more advanced units) when there is only a certain amount of juice left, a signal is sent and your server can power down clean (and even tell other servers on the same UPS to power down, maybe even page you so you know to come in early and bring everything back up).