My intro to RPGs was the commercial text-based multi-player MUD "The Scepter of Goth" in the early 80's, which I still feel was a superior gaming experience. A text-based MUD is to a graphical MMO as a novel is to a movie. Both have merits. But you know how a good book can be much deeper and more involving than its movie? Well I experience the same thing with a good MUD. Engaging your mind directly in the generation of the world is something that's difficult to compete with in silicon and source code.
I recently implemented this exact feature for my employer's image-based backup product for Windows systems. I hesitated to post this, at the risk of sounding like a commercial, but I think it's relevant.
The product itself (ShadowProtect) makes snapshot-based backup images. The relevant feature, called VirtualBoot, can be used to immediately boot a specified backup image within a Sun VirtualBox VM, without the need to restore the backup or to convert it to any other file format (lengthy operations). There are many use cases facilitated by this feature, and data longevity is one of them.
By preserving the applications and operating system, along with the data, the data's lifespan is significantly increased, particularly when data stored in proprietary formats (where the source apps are essential in order to consume the data).
BZFlag is a fun multiplayer tank game that you can jump right into and have fun but also has a lot of potential for skill growth. It works well on even crappy video cards.
I bought a Herman Miller Aeron a few years ago, however I've found that a $25 folding chair with fabric-padded seat from OfficeMax is actually more comfortable for long sessions. It just forces you to have good posture. I know it sounds kinda dumb that a cheepo chair could be better than the fancy expensive ones, but I've used one of these fold up chairs as my primary work chair for 3.5 years now without any back issue. Love it. The only problem is that I have to replace it about every two years as the feet (the plastic cap on the end of the metal tube which is the leg of the chair) wear out over time. One of our other engineers mentioned that he also prefers these fold up chairs over the fancy ones.
Yup, I have a version of that game which was ported to QNX 3.15f. I also have the source code for the "Scepter of Goth" BBS multiplayer fantasy game (basically it was one of the very first MUDs).
A while back (uh... 18 years ago) I was involved in a project that was an attempt to revive the Scepter of Goth multiplayer text game. I may be wrong here but I believe that "Scepter" was the first commercial multiplayer fantasy game. A few months ago when I was throwing out old boxes I ran across a 3.5" floppy with all of the Scepter source, and using VMs and an old build of QNX was able to extract it from an image of the floppy. Amazingly a QNX file system check of the floppy passed with no errors after all that time. I then forwarded it to the owner (who had long since lost it) and requested that he GPL the source and release it to the public for the purpose of historical preservation. Got no response though.:( Maybe he's not aware of the fact that there are thousands of free MUDs out there and so this old Scepter code has no real commercial value.
It's fairly important to determine your exact needs before selecting a backup solution. Home users who don't care about disaster recovery have many free backup options. Technical home users can cobble together enough free stuff to make a passable backup/disaster-recovery solution. Enterprises, generally, need to be far more cautious about the software they place on their servers, and should carefully evaluate the software for stability (does it deadlock your system? do its services hang or crash? do its device drivers cause blue screens or do they have any interop issues with other drivers?), data integrity (are the back up image files good even after thousands of incrementals and splits? does it corrupt original data?) performance (does it use a lot of memory, leak memory, hog CPU or interrupt any applications?), security (does it protect your data? How are its APIs guarded?), and maintenance (is it automated, scriptable, can it be controlled remotely, can one console GUI control an entire enterprise, etc). If you are an enterprise customer, or a very discriminating customer, it would be advisable to ask the backup solution vendor these pointed questions and do your own due diligence as well.
A side note: If you are evaluating criteria like the above, in relation to memory leaking you will find that the Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) on Windows XP has some bugs that will cause VSS requestor processes (VSS-aware backup applications) to leak memory on each snap/unsnap cycle. Also, on XP, on each snap/unsnap cycle the vssvc.exe service as well as a dllhost.exe process will leak a little memory. This is usually only an issue if you use a VSS-compliant backup application to automatically backup your data on regular intervals over a long period of time. These same leaks used to also occur on Windows Server 2003 however they have been fixed in a recent private (you must request it, KB923628, directly from MS support) hotfix for Windows Server 2003 only.
If you are an enterprise or extremely-discriminating user, the following may prove useful.
First let me warn you that I'm a bit biased on this topic (I'm an engineer who has worked on core components for a couple of the mainstream backup/disaster-recovery products out there, from competing companies). Also, my experience on this topic is limited to the Windows platforms.
I would recommend that you consider backup solutions that enable you to quickly recovery individual files, as well as to quickly recover from a full system meltdown (ie. a hard disk crash). In my mind there are currently only three products which can do this with any degree of reliability. They are (in no particular order):
These three products share several similar traits. They all create backup images files which represent the entire state of a logical volume's data, rather than backing up individual files themselves. This enables you to perform full volume restoration should a disaster occur, such as a hard drive failure. They also enable you to easily restore individual files by allowing you to mount/browse into the contents of a backup image file. They allow you to backup your volumes in a hot/in-use state, so you do not need to stop any of your work or close any of your applications when the backup is performed. They allow you to set up a backup schedule so that the backups are automated and no user intervention is required to ensure that backups are occurring. They allow you to perform "incremental backups" which means that when a backup occurs, it will only backup the changes which occurred since the previous backup. They all provide a bootable "recovery environment" CD which contains a bootable OS as well as tools that can be used to restore/recovery files and/or full volumes in the event that you are restoring to a machine which doesn't contain an OS, or if you are restoring an image file over your existing OS. They a
Man Walter, your compilers are sweet! I've been a fan of them since you single-handedly wrote Zortech C++ (the world's first native C++ compiler). I was VERY happy to abandon my Cfront preprocessor in favor of a native compiler. And Zortech was one speedy compiler too.
Has anyone out there been following Walter's new language: D
It also supports contract programming, as well as a host of other sweet features. Very nice!
First let me warn you that I'm a bit biased on this topic (I'm an engineer who has worked on core components for a couple of the mainstream backup/disaster-recovery products out there, from competing companies). Also, my experience on this topic is limited to the Windows platforms.
I would recommend that you consider backup solutions that enable you to quickly recovery individual files, as well as to quickly recover from a full system meltdown (ie. a hard disk crash). In my mind there are currently only three products which can do this with any degree of reliability. They are (in no particular order):
These three products share several similar traits. They all create backup images files which represent the entire state of a logical volume's data, rather than backing up individual files themselves. This enables you to perform full volume restoration should a disaster occur, such as a hard drive failure. They also enable you to easily restore individual files by allowing you to mount/browse into the contents of a backup image file. They allow you to backup your volumes in a hot/in-use state, so you do not need to stop any of your work or close any of your applications when the backup is performed. They allow you to set up a backup schedule so that the backups are automated and no user intervention is required to ensure that backups are occurring. They allow you to perform "incremental backups" which means that when a backup occurs, it will only backup the changes which occurred since the previous backup. They all provide a bootable "recovery environment" CD which contains a bootable OS as well as tools that can be used to restore/recovery files and/or full volumes in the event that you are restoring to a machine which doesn't contain an OS, or if you are restoring an image file over your existing OS. They are all "enterprise ready" as they allow you to remotely manage large networks from one GUI console, contain scripting support, and are integrated with platform technologies (such as Microsoft's Volume Shadow Copy Service - more detail below).
I'll discuss how these products differ in their offerings of these features.
Hot Backups: This is probably the most important aspect of these products because this feature allows you to backup your machine with zero down time. You don't (at least you shouldn't - keep on reading) need to stop any of your applications in order to capture a good clean backup. This feature is made possible by a sophisticated "snapshot" device driver which can instantly capture the state of a logical volume at a specified time and expose this captured state to the backup software. Although Windows XP and 2003 ship with a built-in snapshot device driver (volsnap.sys), it is somewhat lacking in features (especially on XP) and alltogether absent on Windows 2000. Therefore all of these products give preference to a proprietary snapshot device driver. The snapshot device driver used in Symantec's products is licensed to Symantec from StorageCraft (see the copyright file properties of pqv2i.sys or symsnap.sys). StorageCraft of course uses its own snapshot device driver (albeit a newer and better version) in ShadowProtect. Acronis also has its own snapshot device driver. There is a significant difference between the StorageCraft snapshot device driver and the Acronis device driver which results in a substantial difference in performance when incremental backups are created. StorageCraft's snapshot device driver is far more efficient and fast. This can be easily reproduce by creating a backup job and performing changes to many files after the first full backup and before an incremental backup. In this sense, Acronis is more of a desktop product as it simply consumes too much CPU and I/O bandwidth when taking incrementals which is less desireable on servers.
Scheduled Backups: The schedulers for these three products a
Slashdot Mirror
My intro to RPGs was the commercial text-based multi-player MUD "The Scepter of Goth" in the early 80's, which I still feel was a superior gaming experience. A text-based MUD is to a graphical MMO as a novel is to a movie. Both have merits. But you know how a good book can be much deeper and more involving than its movie? Well I experience the same thing with a good MUD. Engaging your mind directly in the generation of the world is something that's difficult to compete with in silicon and source code.
I recently implemented this exact feature for my employer's image-based backup product for Windows systems. I hesitated to post this, at the risk of sounding like a commercial, but I think it's relevant.
The product itself (ShadowProtect) makes snapshot-based backup images. The relevant feature, called VirtualBoot, can be used to immediately boot a specified backup image within a Sun VirtualBox VM, without the need to restore the backup or to convert it to any other file format (lengthy operations). There are many use cases facilitated by this feature, and data longevity is one of them.
By preserving the applications and operating system, along with the data, the data's lifespan is significantly increased, particularly when data stored in proprietary formats (where the source apps are essential in order to consume the data).
BZFlag is a fun multiplayer tank game that you can jump right into and have fun but also has a lot of potential for skill growth. It works well on even crappy video cards.
Here's an amusing Win32 error (error 4006) that a friend showed me. Execute the command for the error description.
C:\> net helpmsg 4006
I bought a Herman Miller Aeron a few years ago, however I've found that a $25 folding chair with fabric-padded seat from OfficeMax is actually more comfortable for long sessions. It just forces you to have good posture. I know it sounds kinda dumb that a cheepo chair could be better than the fancy expensive ones, but I've used one of these fold up chairs as my primary work chair for 3.5 years now without any back issue. Love it. The only problem is that I have to replace it about every two years as the feet (the plastic cap on the end of the metal tube which is the leg of the chair) wear out over time. One of our other engineers mentioned that he also prefers these fold up chairs over the fancy ones.
http://www.officemax.com/omax/catalog/sku.jsp?skuId=20169639&searchString=&category_Id=25
Yup, I have a version of that game which was ported to QNX 3.15f. I also have the source code for the "Scepter of Goth" BBS multiplayer fantasy game (basically it was one of the very first MUDs).
A while back (uh... 18 years ago) I was involved in a project that was an attempt to revive the Scepter of Goth multiplayer text game. I may be wrong here but I believe that "Scepter" was the first commercial multiplayer fantasy game. A few months ago when I was throwing out old boxes I ran across a 3.5" floppy with all of the Scepter source, and using VMs and an old build of QNX was able to extract it from an image of the floppy. Amazingly a QNX file system check of the floppy passed with no errors after all that time. I then forwarded it to the owner (who had long since lost it) and requested that he GPL the source and release it to the public for the purpose of historical preservation. Got no response though. :( Maybe he's not aware of the fact that there are thousands of free MUDs out there and so this old Scepter code has no real commercial value.
It's fairly important to determine your exact needs before selecting a backup solution. Home users who don't care about disaster recovery have many free backup options. Technical home users can cobble together enough free stuff to make a passable backup/disaster-recovery solution. Enterprises, generally, need to be far more cautious about the software they place on their servers, and should carefully evaluate the software for stability (does it deadlock your system? do its services hang or crash? do its device drivers cause blue screens or do they have any interop issues with other drivers?), data integrity (are the back up image files good even after thousands of incrementals and splits? does it corrupt original data?) performance (does it use a lot of memory, leak memory, hog CPU or interrupt any applications?), security (does it protect your data? How are its APIs guarded?), and maintenance (is it automated, scriptable, can it be controlled remotely, can one console GUI control an entire enterprise, etc). If you are an enterprise customer, or a very discriminating customer, it would be advisable to ask the backup solution vendor these pointed questions and do your own due diligence as well.
A side note: If you are evaluating criteria like the above, in relation to memory leaking you will find that the Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) on Windows XP has some bugs that will cause VSS requestor processes (VSS-aware backup applications) to leak memory on each snap/unsnap cycle. Also, on XP, on each snap/unsnap cycle the vssvc.exe service as well as a dllhost.exe process will leak a little memory. This is usually only an issue if you use a VSS-compliant backup application to automatically backup your data on regular intervals over a long period of time. These same leaks used to also occur on Windows Server 2003 however they have been fixed in a recent private (you must request it, KB923628, directly from MS support) hotfix for Windows Server 2003 only.
If you are an enterprise or extremely-discriminating user, the following may prove useful.
First let me warn you that I'm a bit biased on this topic (I'm an engineer who has worked on core components for a couple of the mainstream backup/disaster-recovery products out there, from competing companies). Also, my experience on this topic is limited to the Windows platforms.
I would recommend that you consider backup solutions that enable you to quickly recovery individual files, as well as to quickly recover from a full system meltdown (ie. a hard disk crash). In my mind there are currently only three products which can do this with any degree of reliability. They are (in no particular order):
1) StorageCraft's ShadowProtect
2) Acronis' True Image
3) Symantec's Ghost (for Desktops) and LiveState Recovery (for Servers)
These three products share several similar traits. They all create backup images files which represent the entire state of a logical volume's data, rather than backing up individual files themselves. This enables you to perform full volume restoration should a disaster occur, such as a hard drive failure. They also enable you to easily restore individual files by allowing you to mount/browse into the contents of a backup image file. They allow you to backup your volumes in a hot/in-use state, so you do not need to stop any of your work or close any of your applications when the backup is performed. They allow you to set up a backup schedule so that the backups are automated and no user intervention is required to ensure that backups are occurring. They allow you to perform "incremental backups" which means that when a backup occurs, it will only backup the changes which occurred since the previous backup. They all provide a bootable "recovery environment" CD which contains a bootable OS as well as tools that can be used to restore/recovery files and/or full volumes in the event that you are restoring to a machine which doesn't contain an OS, or if you are restoring an image file over your existing OS. They a
Man Walter, your compilers are sweet! I've been a fan of them since you single-handedly wrote Zortech C++ (the world's first native C++ compiler). I was VERY happy to abandon my Cfront preprocessor in favor of a native compiler. And Zortech was one speedy compiler too.
Has anyone out there been following Walter's new language: D
It also supports contract programming, as well as a host of other sweet features. Very nice!
First let me warn you that I'm a bit biased on this topic (I'm an engineer who has worked on core components for a couple of the mainstream backup/disaster-recovery products out there, from competing companies). Also, my experience on this topic is limited to the Windows platforms.
I would recommend that you consider backup solutions that enable you to quickly recovery individual files, as well as to quickly recover from a full system meltdown (ie. a hard disk crash). In my mind there are currently only three products which can do this with any degree of reliability. They are (in no particular order):
1) Symantec's Ghost (for Desktops) and LiveState Recovery (for Servers)
2) StorageCraft's ShadowProtect
3) Acronis' True Image
These three products share several similar traits. They all create backup images files which represent the entire state of a logical volume's data, rather than backing up individual files themselves. This enables you to perform full volume restoration should a disaster occur, such as a hard drive failure. They also enable you to easily restore individual files by allowing you to mount/browse into the contents of a backup image file. They allow you to backup your volumes in a hot/in-use state, so you do not need to stop any of your work or close any of your applications when the backup is performed. They allow you to set up a backup schedule so that the backups are automated and no user intervention is required to ensure that backups are occurring. They allow you to perform "incremental backups" which means that when a backup occurs, it will only backup the changes which occurred since the previous backup. They all provide a bootable "recovery environment" CD which contains a bootable OS as well as tools that can be used to restore/recovery files and/or full volumes in the event that you are restoring to a machine which doesn't contain an OS, or if you are restoring an image file over your existing OS. They are all "enterprise ready" as they allow you to remotely manage large networks from one GUI console, contain scripting support, and are integrated with platform technologies (such as Microsoft's Volume Shadow Copy Service - more detail below).
I'll discuss how these products differ in their offerings of these features.
Hot Backups: This is probably the most important aspect of these products because this feature allows you to backup your machine with zero down time. You don't (at least you shouldn't - keep on reading) need to stop any of your applications in order to capture a good clean backup. This feature is made possible by a sophisticated "snapshot" device driver which can instantly capture the state of a logical volume at a specified time and expose this captured state to the backup software. Although Windows XP and 2003 ship with a built-in snapshot device driver (volsnap.sys), it is somewhat lacking in features (especially on XP) and alltogether absent on Windows 2000. Therefore all of these products give preference to a proprietary snapshot device driver. The snapshot device driver used in Symantec's products is licensed to Symantec from StorageCraft (see the copyright file properties of pqv2i.sys or symsnap.sys). StorageCraft of course uses its own snapshot device driver (albeit a newer and better version) in ShadowProtect. Acronis also has its own snapshot device driver. There is a significant difference between the StorageCraft snapshot device driver and the Acronis device driver which results in a substantial difference in performance when incremental backups are created. StorageCraft's snapshot device driver is far more efficient and fast. This can be easily reproduce by creating a backup job and performing changes to many files after the first full backup and before an incremental backup. In this sense, Acronis is more of a desktop product as it simply consumes too much CPU and I/O bandwidth when taking incrementals which is less desireable on servers.
Scheduled Backups: The schedulers for these three products a