Regardless of the fact that it is available, 64 bit Windows is not designed as a home user OS. It's designed as a high-performance purpose-built workstation and server OS. Driver compatability is bad with all vendors, not just Apple. Doesn't it seem a bit odd to complain about lack of driver support in an OS that basically comes with a warning label that says "Many device drivers are not supported."
Oh, we here in the US can visit Cuba as well, we just have to fly to Mexico first.
The US embargo of Cuba is not something people in the US take seriously. One of the "perks" of going to Mexico is bringing back a bottle of Cuban rum or a box of cigars. Most of us are mystified why the embargo wasn't lifed in 1991; engagement works better against communism than isolation (see: China.)
More likely, what happened was Take Two went to Microsoft and Sony, and said "We're doing GTA4 on both systems, but only one gets downloadable content. So people who buy a system for this game will buy the system that has downloadable content. Shall we start the bids at $10 million?"
Seeing as GTA is a system seller for a lot of people, the argument makes sense. That $50 million will sell more consoles than $50 million in advertising, so they still probably come out ahead.
It's rev 1 Apple hardware, I don't want it anyway.
Besides, my company pays for my BlackBerry, and a lot of companies have invested in BES infrastructure, so they won't be moving to the iPhone any time soon. We have yet to see anything from Apple about how the iPhone will tie into an existing personal database (like Exchange/outlook, for example) and manual sync, even over Bluetooth, just won't cut it for people used to the BES implementation.
Because some of us may be "hardcore into games" but not feel the need for the latest-and-greatest?
A laptop will run WoW, C&C3, Counter Strike, Half Life 2 and any game more than a year or two old as well as a reasonably new desktop. And it will run them at native resolution and 4xFSAA just fine.
The only reason you actually need a massive gaming rig anymore is if you're running a massive display (24" or larger) off of it. Otherwise, anything better than integrated graphics will probably do just fine at 1280x900.
Hell, there are plenty of college-age Linux nerds here in Austin who would likely be willing and able to do this as a project on an unpaid summer internship.
It does, because you can strip out the stuff you don't use. But if you're trying to run the whole shebang on old hardware, yeah, it's gonna be slow. Fedora and Ubuntu include a lot of stuff that just isn't gonna run well on an older machine. Something like slackware or debian is more appropriate for a smaller machine, because they're designed to be more compatible.
Agreed 100%. With a decent iSCSI offload card, a single server can saturate one of these arrays without breaking a sweat.
It's ok for a file server, or for storing backups, or for storing large files in a small environment. But it's still SATA, you see almost exclusively fiber channel in this space for a reason.
On sheer size, yeah, you can cram a lot of drives into it and SAN them together, but I think you're going to find the performance of a low-end iSCSI SAN to be lacking. I use one as the disk storage component of a disk-to-disk-to-tape backup system, and even then it can be a performance bottleneck. It was a $3000 array loaded with $1200 worth of drives, so I'm not complaining, but if you're looking for blazing fast storage, DAS USCSI360 or SAS is gonna whoop its ass.
In other words: You get what you pay for. Capacity, reliability, speed. Pick any two or be prepared to pay 10 times as much.
Farming is a necessary part of any MMO; but I think what people take issue with is professional farmers who sell in-game money for real-world cash.
In a game like World of Warcraft (where many people seem to take issue with) the ability to craft top-end items are completely out of reach of many players, so they resort to buying what they can, which drives up the market on crafting materials and fees by the few who can actually craft the items.
WoW has very little player-controlled economy. The servers are actually far too small to allow it and the economic choke points are far too concentrated (there are maybe 5 items that are used in about 90% of the crafted weapons/armor) so it's pretty easy for one person to corner the market on a specific item/kind of materials.
EvE seems like the game was designed around the economy, which is why the economy is good. WoW was designed around dungeon crawling and combat, and the economy serves only as motivation for more combat. If all you did in WoW was play the economy, you'd be really bored after a week, hence the amount of gold farming and gold-for-cash sales (because after playing the game for 2 years, you REALLY have no interest in the economy.)
It's not enough to create a package repository system; that much has been done before (Cygwin uses one, for example, and you could pretty easily port apt-get and throw a GUI on it.)
The hard part is creating the package repositories and keeping them up to date, and that's a job that just requires a lot of manpower. A repository system without any repositories is pretty worthless.
Aah, well 6 is pretty nice, especially with respect to BMR on Windows. It actually makes me not want to slit my wrists every time I have to migrate a Windows box between hardware. Though I do have to say the support has gone downhill since Symantec took over...
Um, what? I run NetBackup Server (version 6) on RHEL 4 (kernel 2.6.9) just fine. I have NBU clients running on RHEL 5 (kernel 2.6.18.) You just need compat-libstdc++-296 and compat-libstdc++-33 installed. It even tells you that in the manual.
No idea if earlier versions of NBU work on 2.6, but v6 is old enough now that it can be considered stable.
And 64-bit Flash (Not that I really want such a thing), why is that taking so long? Sick of the 'blip' noise with every page I hit with 64-bit IE wanting me to install flash to see some lame ad. And you click on it and "There's no 64-bit Flash, but you can run Flash on a 32-browser running on your 64-bit OS" And Why The Fuck would I want to do that?
Extended warranties are a ripoff -- on everything *except* laptops. On laptops, the cost of one repair is generally more than the cost of the warranty, and they're almost guaranteed to break within 3 years.
Are you gay? No? Then homosexuality doesn't affect you.
Are you or your girlfriend/wife planning on having an abortion if she gets randomly pregnant? Honestly it's none of my fucking business. That's a decision you and your wife/girlfriend need to make.
The federal government needs to stay out of both these issues. Patent reform is an area that we expect the federal government to regulate and in fact, need them to regulate. The current system will only continue to stifle an expanding economic force and our current patent system, while great for the era of mechanical invention, is too cumbersome for a time when information and ideas are a more valuable commodity than tangible goods.
Patent reform is honestly a more pressing issue than gay marriage or abortion, and those have been at the forefront of election politics for the past 20 years.
I'll second this... Also, responsiveness starts to severely bog down when you have 8-10 VM instances on a box; I use it for testing AJAX web applications and we really can't rely on it for speed because the latency gets pretty bad at that level. I've used Virtuozzo's commercial product in the past, and you can indeed cram ridiculous numbers of VMs per box. We had modest Dell rackmount servers hosting 80-150 VMs and response times were still decent. The migration tools available on their commercial product are also great.
No statistics or numbers (Vivendi holds those tight to their chest) but anecdotally (which ordinarily is not good evidence but it's the best we have,) there aren't very many new players and even older servers that used to be overcrowded seem pretty empty. Newer servers are total wastelands. I'd quote numbers but things like Wowcensus and the like never were very accurate and only Blizzard knows the real subscriber numbers. Even if people aren't cancelling their subscriptions, they're playing a whole lot less than they used to, which leads to cancellation eventually. The magic is sure gone for me, and many others I play with seem to agree.
Those are for production environments; in other words, a bunch of users.
Their testing environment specs are much easier to attain (1G ram, 1.5 gHz machine, RAM is cheap enough that even your "old box server" should have a gig.) If you just want to do something like this in a small environment, a reasonably new old box with $100 of memory should do the trick.
WoW seems to have managed to take care of that itself with the new expansion. It drove enough players to realize "this game is stupid and takes too much time" that people are quitting in droves.
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Umm... WebDAV?
Regardless of the fact that it is available, 64 bit Windows is not designed as a home user OS. It's designed as a high-performance purpose-built workstation and server OS. Driver compatability is bad with all vendors, not just Apple. Doesn't it seem a bit odd to complain about lack of driver support in an OS that basically comes with a warning label that says "Many device drivers are not supported."
XP Pro costs the same as Vista Business.
Oh, we here in the US can visit Cuba as well, we just have to fly to Mexico first.
The US embargo of Cuba is not something people in the US take seriously. One of the "perks" of going to Mexico is bringing back a bottle of Cuban rum or a box of cigars. Most of us are mystified why the embargo wasn't lifed in 1991; engagement works better against communism than isolation (see: China.)
Some airports have smoking lounges... though I think it depends mostly on local laws at this point.
More likely, what happened was Take Two went to Microsoft and Sony, and said "We're doing GTA4 on both systems, but only one gets downloadable content. So people who buy a system for this game will buy the system that has downloadable content. Shall we start the bids at $10 million?"
Seeing as GTA is a system seller for a lot of people, the argument makes sense. That $50 million will sell more consoles than $50 million in advertising, so they still probably come out ahead.
It's rev 1 Apple hardware, I don't want it anyway.
Besides, my company pays for my BlackBerry, and a lot of companies have invested in BES infrastructure, so they won't be moving to the iPhone any time soon. We have yet to see anything from Apple about how the iPhone will tie into an existing personal database (like Exchange/outlook, for example) and manual sync, even over Bluetooth, just won't cut it for people used to the BES implementation.
Because some of us may be "hardcore into games" but not feel the need for the latest-and-greatest?
A laptop will run WoW, C&C3, Counter Strike, Half Life 2 and any game more than a year or two old as well as a reasonably new desktop. And it will run them at native resolution and 4xFSAA just fine.
The only reason you actually need a massive gaming rig anymore is if you're running a massive display (24" or larger) off of it. Otherwise, anything better than integrated graphics will probably do just fine at 1280x900.
Hell, there are plenty of college-age Linux nerds here in Austin who would likely be willing and able to do this as a project on an unpaid summer internship.
It does, because you can strip out the stuff you don't use. But if you're trying to run the whole shebang on old hardware, yeah, it's gonna be slow. Fedora and Ubuntu include a lot of stuff that just isn't gonna run well on an older machine. Something like slackware or debian is more appropriate for a smaller machine, because they're designed to be more compatible.
Agreed 100%. With a decent iSCSI offload card, a single server can saturate one of these arrays without breaking a sweat.
It's ok for a file server, or for storing backups, or for storing large files in a small environment. But it's still SATA, you see almost exclusively fiber channel in this space for a reason.
On sheer size, yeah, you can cram a lot of drives into it and SAN them together, but I think you're going to find the performance of a low-end iSCSI SAN to be lacking. I use one as the disk storage component of a disk-to-disk-to-tape backup system, and even then it can be a performance bottleneck. It was a $3000 array loaded with $1200 worth of drives, so I'm not complaining, but if you're looking for blazing fast storage, DAS USCSI360 or SAS is gonna whoop its ass.
In other words: You get what you pay for. Capacity, reliability, speed. Pick any two or be prepared to pay 10 times as much.
Farming is a necessary part of any MMO; but I think what people take issue with is professional farmers who sell in-game money for real-world cash.
In a game like World of Warcraft (where many people seem to take issue with) the ability to craft top-end items are completely out of reach of many players, so they resort to buying what they can, which drives up the market on crafting materials and fees by the few who can actually craft the items.
WoW has very little player-controlled economy. The servers are actually far too small to allow it and the economic choke points are far too concentrated (there are maybe 5 items that are used in about 90% of the crafted weapons/armor) so it's pretty easy for one person to corner the market on a specific item/kind of materials.
EvE seems like the game was designed around the economy, which is why the economy is good. WoW was designed around dungeon crawling and combat, and the economy serves only as motivation for more combat. If all you did in WoW was play the economy, you'd be really bored after a week, hence the amount of gold farming and gold-for-cash sales (because after playing the game for 2 years, you REALLY have no interest in the economy.)
It's not enough to create a package repository system; that much has been done before (Cygwin uses one, for example, and you could pretty easily port apt-get and throw a GUI on it.)
The hard part is creating the package repositories and keeping them up to date, and that's a job that just requires a lot of manpower. A repository system without any repositories is pretty worthless.
Aah, well 6 is pretty nice, especially with respect to BMR on Windows. It actually makes me not want to slit my wrists every time I have to migrate a Windows box between hardware. Though I do have to say the support has gone downhill since Symantec took over...
Um, what? I run NetBackup Server (version 6) on RHEL 4 (kernel 2.6.9) just fine. I have NBU clients running on RHEL 5 (kernel 2.6.18.) You just need compat-libstdc++-296 and compat-libstdc++-33 installed. It even tells you that in the manual.
No idea if earlier versions of NBU work on 2.6, but v6 is old enough now that it can be considered stable.
And 64-bit Flash (Not that I really want such a thing), why is that taking so long? Sick of the 'blip' noise with every page I hit with 64-bit IE wanting me to install flash to see some lame ad. And you click on it and "There's no 64-bit Flash, but you can run Flash on a 32-browser running on your 64-bit OS" And Why The Fuck would I want to do that?
I believe we call that a "feature."
Extended warranties are a ripoff -- on everything *except* laptops. On laptops, the cost of one repair is generally more than the cost of the warranty, and they're almost guaranteed to break within 3 years.
Are you gay? No? Then homosexuality doesn't affect you.
Are you or your girlfriend/wife planning on having an abortion if she gets randomly pregnant? Honestly it's none of my fucking business. That's a decision you and your wife/girlfriend need to make.
The federal government needs to stay out of both these issues. Patent reform is an area that we expect the federal government to regulate and in fact, need them to regulate. The current system will only continue to stifle an expanding economic force and our current patent system, while great for the era of mechanical invention, is too cumbersome for a time when information and ideas are a more valuable commodity than tangible goods.
Patent reform is honestly a more pressing issue than gay marriage or abortion, and those have been at the forefront of election politics for the past 20 years.
I'll second this... Also, responsiveness starts to severely bog down when you have 8-10 VM instances on a box; I use it for testing AJAX web applications and we really can't rely on it for speed because the latency gets pretty bad at that level. I've used Virtuozzo's commercial product in the past, and you can indeed cram ridiculous numbers of VMs per box. We had modest Dell rackmount servers hosting 80-150 VMs and response times were still decent. The migration tools available on their commercial product are also great.
My new Nissan 350z (base model) has a fuel mileage guage. Though regardless of how hard I drive it, the fuel mileage still sucks.
No statistics or numbers (Vivendi holds those tight to their chest) but anecdotally (which ordinarily is not good evidence but it's the best we have,) there aren't very many new players and even older servers that used to be overcrowded seem pretty empty. Newer servers are total wastelands. I'd quote numbers but things like Wowcensus and the like never were very accurate and only Blizzard knows the real subscriber numbers. Even if people aren't cancelling their subscriptions, they're playing a whole lot less than they used to, which leads to cancellation eventually. The magic is sure gone for me, and many others I play with seem to agree.
Those are for production environments; in other words, a bunch of users.
Their testing environment specs are much easier to attain (1G ram, 1.5 gHz machine, RAM is cheap enough that even your "old box server" should have a gig.) If you just want to do something like this in a small environment, a reasonably new old box with $100 of memory should do the trick.
WoW seems to have managed to take care of that itself with the new expansion. It drove enough players to realize "this game is stupid and takes too much time" that people are quitting in droves.