When I pay an NPC to train me, would it have to pay taxes too? What sort of rights and obligations does an NPC have then? If its a tax paying NPC, then maybe it deserves protection under the law too, right? So does that mean that whenever a Horde player runs into town and kills an NPC, we should call the cops? Its murder!
And if WoW gold actually has a fair market value, then isn't blizzard printing money every time a wolf respawns in the forests of Goldshire?
check out the latest issue of Home Power Magazine. There is an article about biodiesel production. A Volkswagen TDI Golf and bio-diesel sounds like an excellent alternative fuel vehicle.
I am not sure of the details, but I have some region-free discs (which I suspect are hong-kong knock-offs) that won't play in my toshiba but will play in my Apex. A sales-rep at FutureShop claimed that to be region free they had to be unencrypted, but I don't trust people paid minimum wage + commision to have a clue. My understanding was that no region really meant "all regions".
Macrovision played with the colour, not SYNC. They compressed the dynamic range of the colour signal, then tacked on some bogus signal that maxed out the range. VCRs that tried to automatically adjust the colour gain would overcompensate, and you'd end up with a very dim image on tape, almost unwatchable. (rent and try to copy "Back to the Future" to see what its like). TVs don't autogain, so there is no problem watching it, and the super-bright stuff is carefully placed so it is off-screen.
I wonder if modern LCD and Plasma screens have trouble with macrovision.
I read somewhere of a study that showed that pot-heads were less-likely to get into car accidents than clean-and-sober people. I don't know how that works, and I wish I could refer people to the study, but I cannot.
One attempt is not a statistically valid sample set!!!
I've had hemp beer (passable). Cookies made from Hemp Flour (Excellent, although they could have used a better grinder). Hemp seeds as cereal (mmm.). Hemp oil for cooking (pretty good. Higher smoke point than olive oil, IIRC). I've heard that it makes a good salad too, but you then have to be careful you're dealing with a strain that produces little-to-no THC.
For the un-initiated: NOT ALL HEMP IS A DRUG. The active ingredient in pot is THC, and it is only produced in the flowers, and tends to collect on the surface of the flower and leaves. Seeds can be washed, and then have a zero-THC content. Hemp is easier to grow than soy, and has comparable fat and protien content, making it among the best food sources known to man! There are also strains bred for industrial applications that are good for cloth and rope, but would at best give you a head-ache if you smoke it!
Mythical Man-Month. By throwing out enough programmers and replacing them with inexperienced programmers unfamiliar with the projects, they essentially put the entire US high-tech industry behind by many months, even if they allow MORE new H1Bs in than they kick out.
The web pad was about 8.5 by 11, and had no keyboard. it had a one inch frame, and the rest was a touchscreen. it looked about one inch thick. The model was using some sort of stylus on the screen, and it had a drop down virtual keyboard. Otherwise, it looked like a busy KDE or Gnome environment. They were really showing off the web-browsing more than the environment. I never heard any details about how the device connected to the net either.
The specifics as I remember it are: NT 3.1 (not 4) is C2 secure rated when not connected to a network, on approved hardware.
The important point about the hardware is that it must be physically secure, so that you can't rip out the harddrive and mount it somewhere else, and it must be configured so that you cannot boot from floppy (which also means that there is a secure bios password).
Presumably, the NSA contract would include certification of the distribution, or else the NSA plans to do a certification of every machine deployed (which makes more sense, IMO. A secure distribution could be opened up through bad system administration.)
Not that I'm going to claim that WarGames was consistent, but in fact there were devices for automating dialing with acoustic couplers. It was a box that sat between the phone and the line, and was controlled through an RS232, and basically could only do on-hook/off-hook. That's enough to dial though...
Actually, I don't think that Microsoft gains anything by skewing the results through "newbies" that give up easily. Take it to the extreme: The newbie sees that first boot screen, and says "Its not even graphical for god's Sake!" and immediately aborts. Then microsoft never gets a decent review of what it was like to install Mandrake 6.1 with KDE and Koffice and use it, and then they'll be caught with their pants down, totally unprepared for the rest of the world coming to the conclusion that the Linux as a Desktop system is useable and pleasant.
We use exchange for about 500 users, and it works pretty well for us, but I won't claim to be estatic. We felt that we needed 2 DEC Alpha boxes (dual cpu, 533MHz) to make it happen, and we're using big-time RAID: DEC HZ70 dual controllers.
Problems: If you don't buy the enterprise version, you have a limit of (I think it was) 17Gig TOTAL of mail... Which came out to about 40 users on our system until we started bitching at people to delete old mail. It really bites because exchange shuts down with no warning when you hit the limit. If you must use exchange, get the enterprise edition, which has no database size limit.
Exchange's database under 5.0 is guaranteed to corrupt eventually. You need to shut down regularly (at least once a month) and do an ISINTEG, or you get fun things like the President's email being delivered to the Janitor with a header from the Lawyer. 5.5 is a lot more stable, but I still don't trust it enough to not want to run ISINTEG once in a while. To date though, 5.5 has yet to corrupt.
Make backups!
Consider a massive farm of smaller Exchanges rather than one large box, and reserve one day a month of downtime for maintenance BEFORE deploying users.
If you go for a unix box, I'll give you my metric. While working at an ISP, we had a limited budget due to accounting problems (ie: no accountant, so we didn't know how much cash we had. *SIGH*), and we had a unix box in desparate need of upgrading, but it still ran:
486DX2 66MHz
narrow SCSI-1 drives
FULL news feed
400 domains
2000 mailboxes locally
routing mail for another 2000
web server
shell accounts
anonymous FTP
96 modems doing SLIP, and PPP at 28.8
Accounting
logging
and to add insult to injury, it was SCO!
I wouldn't ask that much out of ANY single machine if I had the choice, and it was SUCH a relief when we got 4 Alphas running OSF/1 (and some telebits) to replace the tired SCO, but you know it can be done with a solid OS. So a 486 properly configured with fast disk and lots of RAM should be able to handle 2 to 4 thousand users. Use of Cyrus or similar types of software will drag that number up, otherwise large mailboxes drag that number down (LARGE POP3 mailboxes on IO bound machines can actually take too long to scan. If POP3 doesn't report the number of messages fast enough, POP3 clients will time out).
Today, if I were you, I'd get a Sun Netra T1, and add a FibreChannel RAID card, with as much ram as you can cram in (on the motherboard AND the RAID card). That should handle your 25k users on one box in a pinch, but use two at least. Spreading the people out makes everyone breathe easier.
Blackberry most definitely does NOT run Win/CE. Win/CE was determined to be too big and with insufficient Real-time support to do what blackberry needed at the time. BlackBerry runs a completely in-house OS.
"Enterprise Server" is PHB language, as far as I'm concerned. There are two kinds of redirectors for blackberry. One runs on a Win95 box and will work for a single pager, the other runs as part of an Exchange server and can in theory act as a redirector for as many users as the exchange server can handle.
its not feasible to port Linux YET. The big problem is that since there is a radio transmitter in this puppy: there are much stricter controls on getting FCC aproval, and the software that it runs is significant. I'm sure RIM would love to have a linux port on their product, but if RIM did just a straight port, the FCC license would only be valid for the version compiled by RIM... The whole thing would be a gross violation of the GPL to satisfy the FCC.
Being a convert and a user of the blackberry, I can tell you that it is ABSOLUTELY not an over-glorified alphanumeric pager. This thing is running an embedded intel 386, with a DSP for the radio.
And WRT typing, its designed for the THUMBS, not the fingers. Its quite well designed and easy to type with. Once I learned the short-cuts, typing felt like it started to approach the speed with which I type on a full sized keyboard.
Versatility? It has some limitations compared to the Palm: the platform is not as open as the palm, but it is just as programmable. RIM has software emulators for prototyping, and you can upload applications to the pager.
The claims of battery usage are real, but its like any bench mark: real world usage will vary. I get about 25 days out of one AA battery (not AAA), but you could get better life time by living somewhere with better coverage, or by not sending so much email from the blackberry (transmitting is what kills it)
As for the bottom line, having had a blackberry for a year now, I don't even care about the palm anymore. Who needs it?
MTO
Of course I have a biased outlook, I work for RIM!
Well, the Cisco Catalyst 6500 series can scale to up to 256Gbit on the backplane. The thing is that you wouldn't want all 2000 machines in a single broadcast domain anyhow. Which would mean that you'd make like a spoke and hub arrangement: Perhaps 100 nodes in a broadcast domain, with a gigabit uplink. High end switches can do almost 300 100M ports, so you'd put 2 to 3 VLANs on a single switch, with 2 Gig uplinks to a core switch. 10 such switches would do you well... The numbers are kinda stagering though. 200 ports on a cat5500 is like 250k, and you need 10, and you'd need a 6500 class switch to concentrate all those gig uplinks. That's another 300k , so were' up to 2.8Mil. And then about 2000 computers. At 1k per computer, that's another 2 million. 6 million, and you might need more on racks, and I dunno how much that scale of UPS or generator would cost... But then Extreme Linux is just 50 bucks.NT would be more like another million. And they said that Linux has a higher TCO? heheheheheheheheh
Let's be honest... What is so bad about a communist state? And I do mean communist, not the fascist totalitarian nightmare that Russia was.
People working with their neighbors, not against them. The OSS community is all about such communism. Everyone according to his ability. Everyone according to his need.
I'll admit that humanity is not ready for total communism yet. There are too many lazy sods out there who whould try to just live off the system, be parasitic rather symbiotic. But the fact of the matter is that we've made a prototype, and its working! Now all we need to do is figure out how to make it spill over into the rest of the world!
Unfortunately, I think the NMPA is right here... Technically, the site is making money, through the banner ads, and that's where the problems are.
That said, I take issue with reflexively charging people with theft because they're doing it. A child who sings a Barney tune on some talent show might be violating all kinds of laws, but that doesn't mean that Barney Int'l SHOULD press charges. The question is, who is harmed, and how much. The recording industry is not making money distributing lyrics, are they? And the site makes no attempt to try to claim that THEY wrote the lyrics. Quite the opposite, by definition of the site's purpose, they credit the authors.
Now, the NMPA claimed that they tried and failed to get in touch with the web site's authors. Assuming that is true, then they may make a quite reasonable settlement. Say, all proceeds of banner adds go to NMPA, but they pay all the sites fees. That way, the site meets its stated goals, with no profit, and the NMPA knows it. That works, more or less (it leaves the independants out in the cold, but some solution should be workable from there)
Of course, we'll know the real agenda when the NMPA makes its offer. I kinda doubt it will be reasonable.
I regularly set up small, cheap machines for a specific task, running linux. I don't do it because linux has problems multitasking, or at least keeping different servers on their respective sides of the couch (unlike NT), but because when there are problems, it makes debugging that much faster. You're less prone to cascade failures, and you know exactly what resources are used for what.
For that reason, I think its kinda unfair for people to go on about the inflated NT sales. I doubt that Linux is much different, and if linux had licensing similar to NT, I'd be guilty of buying many copies of Linux where one could have sufficed.
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When I pay an NPC to train me, would it have to pay taxes too? What sort of rights and obligations does an NPC have then? If its a tax paying NPC, then maybe it deserves protection under the law too, right? So does that mean that whenever a Horde player runs into town and kills an NPC, we should call the cops? Its murder!
And if WoW gold actually has a fair market value, then isn't blizzard printing money every time a wolf respawns in the forests of Goldshire?
check out the latest issue of Home Power Magazine. There is an article about biodiesel production. A Volkswagen TDI Golf and bio-diesel sounds like an excellent alternative fuel vehicle.
I am not sure of the details, but I have some region-free discs (which I suspect are hong-kong knock-offs) that won't play in my toshiba but will play in my Apex. A sales-rep at FutureShop claimed that to be region free they had to be unencrypted, but I don't trust people paid minimum wage + commision to have a clue. My understanding was that no region really meant "all regions".
Macrovision played with the colour, not SYNC. They compressed the dynamic range of the colour signal, then tacked on some bogus signal that maxed out the range. VCRs that tried to automatically adjust the colour gain would overcompensate, and you'd end up with a very dim image on tape, almost unwatchable. (rent and try to copy "Back to the Future" to see what its like). TVs don't autogain, so there is no problem watching it, and the super-bright stuff is carefully placed so it is off-screen.
I wonder if modern LCD and Plasma screens have trouble with macrovision.
I read somewhere of a study that showed that pot-heads were less-likely to get into car accidents than clean-and-sober people. I don't know how that works, and I wish I could refer people to the study, but I cannot.
One attempt is not a statistically valid sample set!!!
I've had hemp beer (passable). Cookies made from Hemp Flour (Excellent, although they could have used a better grinder). Hemp seeds as cereal (mmm.). Hemp oil for cooking (pretty good. Higher smoke point than olive oil, IIRC). I've heard that it makes a good salad too, but you then have to be careful you're dealing with a strain that produces little-to-no THC.
For the un-initiated: NOT ALL HEMP IS A DRUG. The active ingredient in pot is THC, and it is only produced in the flowers, and tends to collect on the surface of the flower and leaves. Seeds can be washed, and then have a zero-THC content. Hemp is easier to grow than soy, and has comparable fat and protien content, making it among the best food sources known to man! There are also strains bred for industrial applications that are good for cloth and rope, but would at best give you a head-ache if you smoke it!
Mythical Man-Month. By throwing out enough programmers and replacing them with inexperienced programmers unfamiliar with the projects, they essentially put the entire US high-tech industry behind by many months, even if they allow MORE new H1Bs in than they kick out.
The web pad was about 8.5 by 11, and had no keyboard. it had a one inch frame, and the rest was a touchscreen. it looked about one inch thick. The model was using some sort of stylus on the screen, and it had a drop down virtual keyboard. Otherwise, it looked like a busy KDE or Gnome environment. They were really showing off the web-browsing more than the environment. I never heard any details about how the device connected to the net either.
The important point about the hardware is that it must be physically secure, so that you can't rip out the harddrive and mount it somewhere else, and it must be configured so that you cannot boot from floppy (which also means that there is a secure bios password).
Presumably, the NSA contract would include certification of the distribution, or else the NSA plans to do a certification of every machine deployed (which makes more sense, IMO. A secure distribution could be opened up through bad system administration.)
Not that I'm going to claim that WarGames was consistent, but in fact there were devices for automating dialing with acoustic couplers. It was a box that sat between the phone and the line, and was controlled through an RS232, and basically could only do on-hook/off-hook. That's enough to dial though...
Actually, I don't think that Microsoft gains anything by skewing the results through "newbies" that give up easily. Take it to the extreme: The newbie sees that first boot screen, and says "Its not even graphical for god's Sake!" and immediately aborts. Then microsoft never gets a decent review of what it was like to install Mandrake 6.1 with KDE and Koffice and use it, and then they'll be caught with their pants down, totally unprepared for the rest of the world coming to the conclusion that the Linux as a Desktop system is useable and pleasant.
Problems: If you don't buy the enterprise version, you have a limit of (I think it was) 17Gig TOTAL of mail... Which came out to about 40 users on our system until we started bitching at people to delete old mail. It really bites because exchange shuts down with no warning when you hit the limit. If you must use exchange, get the enterprise edition, which has no database size limit.
Exchange's database under 5.0 is guaranteed to corrupt eventually. You need to shut down regularly (at least once a month) and do an ISINTEG, or you get fun things like the President's email being delivered to the Janitor with a header from the Lawyer. 5.5 is a lot more stable, but I still don't trust it enough to not want to run ISINTEG once in a while. To date though, 5.5 has yet to corrupt.
Make backups!
Consider a massive farm of smaller Exchanges rather than one large box, and reserve one day a month of downtime for maintenance BEFORE deploying users.
If you go for a unix box, I'll give you my metric. While working at an ISP, we had a limited budget due to accounting problems (ie: no accountant, so we didn't know how much cash we had. *SIGH*), and we had a unix box in desparate need of upgrading, but it still ran:
486DX2 66MHz
narrow SCSI-1 drives
FULL news feed
400 domains
2000 mailboxes locally
routing mail for another 2000
web server
shell accounts
anonymous FTP
96 modems doing SLIP, and PPP at 28.8
Accounting
logging
and to add insult to injury, it was SCO!
I wouldn't ask that much out of ANY single machine if I had the choice, and it was SUCH a relief when we got 4 Alphas running OSF/1 (and some telebits) to replace the tired SCO, but you know it can be done with a solid OS. So a 486 properly configured with fast disk and lots of RAM should be able to handle 2 to 4 thousand users. Use of Cyrus or similar types of software will drag that number up, otherwise large mailboxes drag that number down (LARGE POP3 mailboxes on IO bound machines can actually take too long to scan. If POP3 doesn't report the number of messages fast enough, POP3 clients will time out).
Today, if I were you, I'd get a Sun Netra T1, and add a FibreChannel RAID card, with as much ram as you can cram in (on the motherboard AND the RAID card). That should handle your 25k users on one box in a pinch, but use two at least. Spreading the people out makes everyone breathe easier.
Blackberry most definitely does NOT run Win/CE. Win/CE was determined to be too big and with insufficient Real-time support to do what blackberry needed at the time. BlackBerry runs a completely in-house OS.
"Enterprise Server" is PHB language, as far as I'm concerned. There are two kinds of redirectors for blackberry. One runs on a Win95 box and will work for a single pager, the other runs as part of an Exchange server and can in theory act as a redirector for as many users as the exchange server can handle.
its not feasible to port Linux YET. The big problem is that since there is a radio transmitter in this puppy: there are much stricter controls on getting FCC aproval, and the software that it runs is significant. I'm sure RIM would love to have a linux port on their product, but if RIM did just a straight port, the FCC license would only be valid for the version compiled by RIM... The whole thing would be a gross violation of the GPL to satisfy the FCC.
Its not that new, and this product is not attempt number one... it is possible to get it right second time around...
And WRT typing, its designed for the THUMBS, not the fingers. Its quite well designed and easy to type with. Once I learned the short-cuts, typing felt like it started to approach the speed with which I type on a full sized keyboard.
Versatility? It has some limitations compared to the Palm: the platform is not as open as the palm, but it is just as programmable. RIM has software emulators for prototyping, and you can upload applications to the pager.
The claims of battery usage are real, but its like any bench mark: real world usage will vary. I get about 25 days out of one AA battery (not AAA), but you could get better life time by living somewhere with better coverage, or by not sending so much email from the blackberry (transmitting is what kills it)
As for the bottom line, having had a blackberry for a year now, I don't even care about the palm anymore. Who needs it?
MTO
Of course I have a biased outlook, I work for RIM!
Well, the Cisco Catalyst 6500 series can scale to up to 256Gbit on the backplane. The thing is that you wouldn't want all 2000 machines in a single broadcast domain anyhow. Which would mean that you'd make like a spoke and hub arrangement: Perhaps 100 nodes in a broadcast domain, with a gigabit uplink. High end switches can do almost 300 100M ports, so you'd put 2 to 3 VLANs on a single switch, with 2 Gig uplinks to a core switch. 10 such switches would do you well... The numbers are kinda stagering though. 200 ports on a cat5500 is like 250k, and you need 10, and you'd need a 6500 class switch to concentrate all those gig uplinks. That's another 300k , so were' up to 2.8Mil. And then about 2000 computers. At 1k per computer, that's another 2 million. 6 million, and you might need more on racks, and I dunno how much that scale of UPS or generator would cost... But then Extreme Linux is just 50 bucks.NT would be more like another million. And they said that Linux has a higher TCO? heheheheheheheheh
People working with their neighbors, not against them. The OSS community is all about such communism. Everyone according to his ability. Everyone according to his need.
I'll admit that humanity is not ready for total communism yet. There are too many lazy sods out there who whould try to just live off the system, be parasitic rather symbiotic. But the fact of the matter is that we've made a prototype, and its working! Now all we need to do is figure out how to make it spill over into the rest of the world!
Well, I'm gonna try to not toot my own horn too much, but how about a palm-sized 386:
http://www.rim.net
Complete with wireless networking.
Unfortunately, I think the NMPA is right here... Technically, the site is making money, through the banner ads, and that's where the problems are.
That said, I take issue with reflexively charging people with theft because they're doing it. A child who sings a Barney tune on some talent show might be violating all kinds of laws, but that doesn't mean that Barney Int'l SHOULD press charges. The question is, who is harmed, and how much. The recording industry is not making money distributing lyrics, are they? And the site makes no attempt to try to claim that THEY wrote the lyrics. Quite the opposite, by definition of the site's purpose, they credit the authors.
Now, the NMPA claimed that they tried and failed to get in touch with the web site's authors. Assuming that is true, then they may make a quite reasonable settlement. Say, all proceeds of banner adds go to NMPA, but they pay all the sites fees. That way, the site meets its stated goals, with no profit, and the NMPA knows it. That works, more or less (it leaves the independants out in the cold, but some solution should be workable from there)
Of course, we'll know the real agenda when the NMPA makes its offer. I kinda doubt it will be reasonable.
For that reason, I think its kinda unfair for people to go on about the inflated NT sales. I doubt that Linux is much different, and if linux had licensing similar to NT, I'd be guilty of buying many copies of Linux where one could have sufficed.