Yeah that's what it sounds like. I posted a "burn in hell" comment that is likely to be deleted, but it doesn't matter.
This guy is a professional capitalist; out to make a buck apparently regardless of ethics or consideration for others. I hope I meet him on a PvP server some day.
Basically his statements on the economy in his responding comments essentially lead me to this conclusion:
Isolated economies in games are bound to be destroyed because people have excess wealth outside the game and means of transferring that wealth in game.
Yeah, I can see that. What I don't understand is why people don't understand that this is a game and should be treated as such. This is an opportunity for people without excess loot in the real world to compete based on their merits. That is what it is designed to do. If you don't like that, go to Second Life or another game which permits trading.
Don't invade the realms where the rules say you can't do that. We're happy with those rules and cheer Blizzard and other companies who back us up and enforce them.
I don't agree here; human 'civilization' is highly overrated in my opinion. We're on a path to wipe our own civilization out and take most of the Earth with us, because we can't be bothered to avoid dominating the earth instead of being a part of it.
Man needs to face up to the fact that he is not immune to or above the laws of nature; he will only be the end product of evolution if he manages to destroy the entire world before either he or other species evolve further.
I see no reason why we should move from world to world until we deal with the fact that we're destroying this one. What arrogance would lead us to believe we would not simply take our problems with us?
Die. Die. Die. This is yet another attempt to drag those of us who love Star Trek but recognize Enterprise for the putrid, stinking pile of dung it is back into our seats.
Thanks Berman, for destroying continuity and turning Star Trek into a "who will have sex with our vulcan this week" bordello. I don't watch your pile of crap and I seriously doubt I ever will.
The average is also driven up by company IT policy. A company worth its salt keeps a slush reserve of a few desktops that it can swap out with broken machines. Combine this with the fact that many IT departments are overworked, and you get a result where a single machine might actually be out of commission for days or even weeks. However, since there's another one to take its place, I don't think there's as much of a loss as the numbers might indicate.
I do know there are cases of accidental "mutation" in older.EXE/.COM infectors. This was believed due to inaccurate transmission over a modem line, flipping a bit or some such. Of course, most such viruses once damaged in this way don't work, but a few continued to do so with little change in their behaviour.
I would say the problem with applying real Darwin-like evolution in computer worms is simply that there aren't enough hosts. Therefore, I think it's probable that there's not enough room for random changes to be useful often enough for the evolution of new "species". My guess would be that computers compare well to cells in being attacked by virii/worms. Even a computer worm capable of infecting everything attached to the internet would only have a paltry 171 million victims to experiment with. In comparison, a single human has 6*10^13 cells potentially susceptable to living viruses!
Of course, the day when IPv6 & Bluetooth enabled nanobots are embedded in my deodorant may get us to a number of hosts sufficient for such experiments...
Welcome to the real world, my friend. No matter what your brilliance, your amazing talents, or your intimate knowledge of whatever it is you do for your company, you can and will be replaced on a whim.
Unions are merely a collective acknowledgement of this fact. While they do have their downsides, they help compensate for the "idiot-in-charge" phenomenon in place at many corporations.
We geeks seem to have an overactive imagination when it comes to how important we are to our jobs, the world, etc. I held the delusion that I was indispensable for a while, too. But, I realized two things at a previous software job I held:
1) I could be retrained to do almost any other software engineer's job in the company in a fairly short time. 2) Most of the software engineers in that company had similar capabilities in that regard.
In other words, yeah, I'm smart. But so are a helluva lot of other people. I'll bet you're in the same boat, you just haven't realized it yet.
>Best of luck to everyone. I have a lot of
> respect for a company that would use a program
> like Cerberus to stress-test its systems.
>where else can you buy hardware that you can
>count on not being crappy?
As the author and (still VA-employed) maintainer of Cerberus/VA-CTCS, this comment really made me feel better on a day of reckoning -- most of the SW group was hanging around a little depressed after the announcement and when I and my coworkers saw this post, I felt that maybe a FEW people understood why it was that VA's systems always seemed "overpriced".
We tried to change how PC hardware was manufactured. I developed automated factory quality control systems that enforced QA policies under Cerberus... while they were sometimes overridden for 'business reasons', the restrictions raised the bar for our products and made them more reliable per capita than anything else out there. A while back, I wrote an essay on "Microsoft Quality Hardware" published in the Linux Journal that described how I hoped Linux and Cerberus-like initiatives would save PCs from the scourge of the industry in quality.
And we punched some holes in the status quo. Beating the odds, we discovered problems in products from every big name in PCs (Intel, Adaptec, Tyan, Mylex, etc) before anyone else, and it is certainly no small thanks to VA's dedicated SW and HW engineering groups that modern server hardware works as well as it does under Linux.
I hope other HW vendors pick up the slack. With Linux and Open-Source drivers, it is _possible_ to prove conclusively if a piece of hardware is broken, and we can break the chain of component vendors pointing at Microsoft pointing at integrators, etc. Meaning that the PC industry can achieve the reliability of Sun at the price of Dell.
Some things are changing at VA, but Larry was right when he said in the press release that our software component really has always been our differentiator. I just wish that we would have figured that out sooner, sold that aspect to our customers, and avoided our current predicament.
Don't count VA out yet. There are a lot of smart people still here, and I think if VA can come out of this with morale intact and a concrete vision for the future, things will turn around.
I don't think most people overclock _servers_. CPU usage is going to be pegged at 100% regardless if you're playing Quake. In this case, that 10% extra performance can boost your framerate enough to be noticeable to experienced players. This is why the OCing/gaming community overlaps quite a bit.
To digress, though, small changes in CPU performance aren't totally irrelevant for servers. Faster transaction processing by a faster (overclocked, or otherwise) CPU can result in better interactive performance for things like dynamically rendered web pages, etc, even if you're not at 100% average utilization yet on your server.
The "CPU doesn't matter" crusade was a well-intentioned reaction to the "CPU is all that matters" marketing dogma of the early 90's but don't swing all the way over to that side. The CPU is just one component of a system, but it _IS_ a component.
The key to overclocking without blowing your hardware is to do it _conservatively_. Altering your CPU voltage in.5 V increments is likely to blow your CPU. Adjusting your FSB 1 Mhz at a time would be extremely unlikely to hurt anything (unless your CPU is already mostly toast) except stability, and you can always revert those changes when your system gets too flaky.
My suggestion to those who are interested in getting started is to get a motherboard with a good reputation in the OC space (Abit KA/KT7, actually, pretty much anything from Abit, recent Asus boards are also good) and READ. Read a lot. The Unofficial Abit KA7 FAQ and others like it for your mainboard will be invaluable sources of information. Like hacking software, overclocking will teach you a lot about your hardware. The idea of "overclocking safely" is simply to gain this knowledge without frying your hardware!
Once you're into it, you might find the Cerberus Test Control System useful for overclocking under Linux. (shameless-author-plug). It will ruthlessly beat your system into submission with tests that will stress the core system components most often tuned in overclocking.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah that's what it sounds like. I posted a "burn in hell" comment that is likely to be deleted, but it doesn't matter.
This guy is a professional capitalist; out to make a buck apparently regardless of ethics or consideration for others. I hope I meet him on a PvP server some day.
Basically his statements on the economy in his responding comments essentially lead me to this conclusion:
Isolated economies in games are bound to be destroyed because people have excess wealth outside the game and means of transferring that wealth in game.
Yeah, I can see that. What I don't understand is why people don't understand that this is a game and should be treated as such. This is an opportunity for people without excess loot in the real world to compete based on their merits. That is what it is designed to do. If you don't like that, go to Second Life or another game which permits trading.
Don't invade the realms where the rules say you can't do that. We're happy with those rules and cheer Blizzard and other companies who back us up and enforce them.
I don't agree here; human 'civilization' is highly overrated in my opinion. We're on a path to wipe our own civilization out and take most of the Earth with us, because we can't be bothered to avoid dominating the earth instead of being a part of it.
Man needs to face up to the fact that he is not immune to or above the laws of nature; he will only be the end product of evolution if he manages to destroy the entire world before either he or other species evolve further.
I see no reason why we should move from world to world until we deal with the fact that we're destroying this one. What arrogance would lead us to believe we would not simply take our problems with us?
Die. Die. Die. This is yet another attempt to drag those of us who love Star Trek but recognize Enterprise for the putrid, stinking pile of dung it is back into our seats.
Thanks Berman, for destroying continuity and turning Star Trek into a "who will have sex with our vulcan this week" bordello. I don't watch your pile of crap and I seriously doubt I ever will.
The average is also driven up by company IT policy. A company worth its salt keeps a slush reserve of a few desktops that it can swap out with broken machines. Combine this with the fact that many IT departments are overworked, and you get a result where a single machine might actually be out of commission for days or even weeks. However, since there's another one to take its place, I don't think there's as much of a loss as the numbers might indicate.
The fool, or the fool who follows him?
I do know there are cases of accidental "mutation" in older .EXE/.COM infectors. This was believed due to inaccurate transmission over a modem line, flipping a bit or some such. Of course, most such viruses once damaged in this way don't work, but a few continued to do so with little change in their behaviour.
I would say the problem with applying real Darwin-like evolution in computer worms is simply that there aren't enough hosts. Therefore, I think it's probable that there's not enough room for random changes to be useful often enough for the evolution of new "species". My guess would be that computers compare well to cells in being attacked by virii/worms. Even a computer worm capable of infecting everything attached to the internet would only have a paltry 171 million victims to experiment with. In comparison, a single human has 6*10^13 cells potentially susceptable to living viruses!
Of course, the day when IPv6 & Bluetooth enabled nanobots are embedded in my deodorant may get us to a number of hosts sufficient for such experiments...
Welcome to the real world, my friend. No matter what your brilliance, your amazing talents, or your intimate knowledge of whatever it is you do for your company, you can and will be replaced on a whim.
Unions are merely a collective acknowledgement of this fact. While they do have their downsides, they help compensate for the "idiot-in-charge" phenomenon in place at many corporations.
We geeks seem to have an overactive imagination when it comes to how important we are to our jobs, the world, etc. I held the delusion that I was indispensable for a while, too. But, I realized two things at a previous software job I held:
1) I could be retrained to do almost any other software engineer's job in the company in a fairly short time.
2) Most of the software engineers in that company had similar capabilities in that regard.
In other words, yeah, I'm smart. But so are a helluva lot of other people. I'll bet you're in the same boat, you just haven't realized it yet.
> respect for a company that would use a program
> like Cerberus to stress-test its systems.
>where else can you buy hardware that you can
>count on not being crappy?
As the author and (still VA-employed) maintainer of Cerberus/VA-CTCS, this comment really made me feel better on a day of reckoning -- most of the SW group was hanging around a little depressed after the announcement and when I and my coworkers saw this post, I felt that maybe a FEW people understood why it was that VA's systems always seemed "overpriced".
We tried to change how PC hardware was manufactured. I developed automated factory quality control systems that enforced QA policies under Cerberus... while they were sometimes overridden for 'business reasons', the restrictions raised the bar for our products and made them more reliable per capita than anything else out there. A while back, I wrote an essay on "Microsoft Quality Hardware" published in the Linux Journal that described how I hoped Linux and Cerberus-like initiatives would save PCs from the scourge of the industry in quality.
And we punched some holes in the status quo. Beating the odds, we discovered problems in products from every big name in PCs (Intel, Adaptec, Tyan, Mylex, etc) before anyone else, and it is certainly no small thanks to VA's dedicated SW and HW engineering groups that modern server hardware works as well as it does under Linux.
I hope other HW vendors pick up the slack. With Linux and Open-Source drivers, it is _possible_ to prove conclusively if a piece of hardware is broken, and we can break the chain of component vendors pointing at Microsoft pointing at integrators, etc. Meaning that the PC industry can achieve the reliability of Sun at the price of Dell.
Some things are changing at VA, but Larry was right when he said in the press release that our software component really has always been our differentiator. I just wish that we would have figured that out sooner, sold that aspect to our customers, and avoided our current predicament.
Don't count VA out yet. There are a lot of smart people still here, and I think if VA can come out of this with morale intact and a concrete vision for the future, things will turn around.
To digress, though, small changes in CPU performance aren't totally irrelevant for servers. Faster transaction processing by a faster (overclocked, or otherwise) CPU can result in better interactive performance for things like dynamically rendered web pages, etc, even if you're not at 100% average utilization yet on your server.
The "CPU doesn't matter" crusade was a well-intentioned reaction to the "CPU is all that matters" marketing dogma of the early 90's but don't swing all the way over to that side. The CPU is just one component of a system, but it _IS_ a component.
My suggestion to those who are interested in getting started is to get a motherboard with a good reputation in the OC space (Abit KA/KT7, actually, pretty much anything from Abit, recent Asus boards are also good) and READ. Read a lot. The Unofficial Abit KA7 FAQ and others like it for your mainboard will be invaluable sources of information. Like hacking software, overclocking will teach you a lot about your hardware. The idea of "overclocking safely" is simply to gain this knowledge without frying your hardware!
Once you're into it, you might find the Cerberus Test Control System useful for overclocking under Linux. (shameless-author-plug). It will ruthlessly beat your system into submission with tests that will stress the core system components most often tuned in overclocking.