Sounds like a very cool implementation. The primary driver for us was applications that on average don't see very much usage, but on certain days can see that usage spike by up to 1000-2000% (think registration-type stuff)
So the site tends to be fairly static by the time of the crush, but we need to serve as many pages as possible in a matter of 5-10 minutes. For us, static html with only a few of the pages making any db calls at all allowed us to handle the crush and scale amazingly well.
The diversity of possible solutions a given problem is one of the things I really like about this industry:-)
HL2EP1 isn't really an expansion pack, as it doesn't require the purchase of the main game to play it.
You might be a bit lost in the storyline, bu there are websites that will help you catch up.
And I'm not quite sure I understand the "new game prices" thing either. I'm guessing you are referring to the $60 I'll spend if I buy all 3 episodes? In this respect, I think I'm a little bit better off paying in 3 $20 chunks rather than one $50 lump sum. What if I decide the story sucks after Episode 2? I'd be out an extra $10 if I had to buy all of it.
In the end, the voting people do with their dollars will be much more important than the kvetching seen here on slashdot. I voted with mine, and so far I've had a ball with the game.
I think the writing is pretty good in this one... I just about spit coke out my nose when the City 17 refuges were complaining about their lot in life: "We're down here starving and I bet Heddy is up there eating some Grade A head."
A shopping cart application where everything but the price and inventory levels are cached out to the web servers as static content. Then a small piece of javascript goes and pulls the inventory and the price and feeds them to the controls on the page.
Before AJAX, the entire page would be dynamically generated, meaning the database would have to supply the product description and all other content on the page. Now that information can reside in the database, but the app server first looks to it's local cache and serves that if it's available.
You reduce your database load _and_ your app server load, as delivering static html is the easiest on the webserver and can be scaled out to other load balancing devices as well.
Personally, I would prefer shorter, more engaging games at this stage in my life. There are just too many good games out there, and as I get older, I've got less and less time to play them all.
Combine that with the other things I'd like to be doing and it becomes more worth it to me to spend $20 on a solid 5 hours of gameplay that I can actually fit into my schedule than to spend $60 on a 40-60 hour epic (Yes, I'm looking at you Oblivion. Damn you and your open-ended game play making me skip sleep just to see what happens next)
Re:Jealousy is a terrible thing. In the meantime..
on
Boot Camp For Suckers?
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· Score: 1
Dell disagrees with you. Check out their "gamer" line and it all starts with nVidia 6600 cards until you hit the high-end (a $3800 base-price machine).
They bought alienware for a reason.
Re:Is there any objectivity where Apple is concern
on
Boot Camp For Suckers?
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· Score: 1
Yup, I got that far and realized the rest of the article was probably a joke, too.
Re:Jealousy is a terrible thing. In the meantime..
on
Boot Camp For Suckers?
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· Score: 1
Currently, all of Apple's Intel boxes are geared toward the low-end desktop or the high-end laptop market. Neither of these markets includes the hard-core gamer.
When the first Quad Intel Mac comes out with 2 Core Duo chips (or whatever is the next best thing) and a high end nVidia graphics card, I'll personally go weak in the knees over it.
And for now, the X1600 scratches my Oblivion itch just fine when I'm on the road away from main gaming rig.
Not to mention the use of audio from the broadcast without (I'm assuming) the express written consent of Major League Baseball (I always like that line best when it was spoken by Al Michaels)
There's a ton of copyright violations going on here, but anyone who sues over it will look like a major douchebag.
Re:Originality in a sea of numbers...
on
Both Sides of Wii
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· Score: 1
Think about some of the terms people use to describe playing videogames:
I'm gonna go play xbox (not I'm gonna go play microsoft)
He's playing playstation (not He's playing sony)
Sometimes you'll hear GameCube used like that, but most often you'll hear:
Look at those kids playing Nintendo.
As a company, their entire image is already games, games and more games. "DS"? horrible name. any other marketing department would have built on the GameBoy brand and called it the GameBoy DS (Microsoft would have called it the GameBoy Advance DS for Windows, Upgrade Edition). Hasn't hurt the sales of the thing one bit, though.
I seriously doubt the name will hurt sales. Gameplay and the ability to market the device will be what it lives or dies by.
I believe SuSE supports Bonjour out of the box, but it's been quite awhile since I made that discovery. The backstory is kind of fun, though.
We had a less-than-clueful consultancy come in to help us do an Active Directory installation on top of our NT4 domain. They suggested we use.local as the TLD for the AD domain. Wow, was that a mistake. All the macs on the network needed a user-created patch to enable.local DNS requests to pass through to an actual DNS server. I discovered the SuSE (at least I _think_ it was SuSE) "feature" when I tried to set up a box for play.
The machine boots into a boot loader that displays either the Apple logo or the Windows logo. You change back and forth between them with the up/down arrow keys. enter selects.
SideTrack 1.3.1 does not yet support the MacBook Pro introduced in February 2006. A MacBook compatible update is planned and will be released as soon as possible.
Ultima V had crappy graphics but it took 200 hours to beat.
OT but.. wha?? for someone who had played them from the beginning, no: V was awesome. And I'm talking about the apple// version, too.
Well, that could be it... IIRC the apple version of Ultima V looked much better than the PC version.
Even more offtopic... Origin games had a history back then of driving new hardware purchases for me. Ultima VI made me buy a VGA card and monitor. Wing Commander drove me to build my computer from scratch, to save as much money as I could on a 386sx rig. I was so poor, I didn't even buy a computer case for it, instead using a wooden crate someone had shipped a IBM PC to my workplace in. Classy!
It was either Space Quest or one of the Leisure Suit Larry games that made me acquire a used Roland MT-32 unit, though.
I don't think you run an OS under WINE, after all Wine Is Not an Emulator. Instead WINE allows you to run Windows Binaries under another OS, typically Linux.
DarWINE (an OS X port of WINE) is nearing 1.0 status, I believe. With any luck it will allow Windows games to run under OS X at roughly native speeds.
When the fastest (and most expensive) laptop in the line barely outperforms the cheapest desktop, that's a real problem, whether individual buyers noticed it or not. And from _my_ mac-loving friends, they noticed it.
The Power6 chip will compete against offerings from IBM rivals such as Intel, Advanced Micro Devices and Sun Microsystems...But the process also tends to make chips run hotter
So these are server chips. The area of Apple's lineup that was suffering the worst was their laptop line. These breakthroughs from IBM don't address that at all.
Slashdot Mirror
Sounds like a very cool implementation. The primary driver for us was applications that on average don't see very much usage, but on certain days can see that usage spike by up to 1000-2000% (think registration-type stuff)
:-)
So the site tends to be fairly static by the time of the crush, but we need to serve as many pages as possible in a matter of 5-10 minutes. For us, static html with only a few of the pages making any db calls at all allowed us to handle the crush and scale amazingly well.
The diversity of possible solutions a given problem is one of the things I really like about this industry
HL2EP1 isn't really an expansion pack, as it doesn't require the purchase of the main game to play it.
You might be a bit lost in the storyline, bu there are websites that will help you catch up.
And I'm not quite sure I understand the "new game prices" thing either. I'm guessing you are referring to the $60 I'll spend if I buy all 3 episodes? In this respect, I think I'm a little bit better off paying in 3 $20 chunks rather than one $50 lump sum. What if I decide the story sucks after Episode 2? I'd be out an extra $10 if I had to buy all of it.
In the end, the voting people do with their dollars will be much more important than the kvetching seen here on slashdot. I voted with mine, and so far I've had a ball with the game.
I think the writing is pretty good in this one... I just about spit coke out my nose when the City 17 refuges were complaining about their lot in life: "We're down here starving and I bet Heddy is up there eating some Grade A head."
How about this:
A shopping cart application where everything but the price and inventory levels are cached out to the web servers as static content. Then a small piece of javascript goes and pulls the inventory and the price and feeds them to the controls on the page.
Before AJAX, the entire page would be dynamically generated, meaning the database would have to supply the product description and all other content on the page. Now that information can reside in the database, but the app server first looks to it's local cache and serves that if it's available.
You reduce your database load _and_ your app server load, as delivering static html is the easiest on the webserver and can be scaled out to other load balancing devices as well.
Personally, I would prefer shorter, more engaging games at this stage in my life. There are just too many good games out there, and as I get older, I've got less and less time to play them all.
Combine that with the other things I'd like to be doing and it becomes more worth it to me to spend $20 on a solid 5 hours of gameplay that I can actually fit into my schedule than to spend $60 on a 40-60 hour epic (Yes, I'm looking at you Oblivion. Damn you and your open-ended game play making me skip sleep just to see what happens next)
Sadly, this failed for me on my Ubuntu 5.10 server (no gui installed)
dpkg failed with a message that the file system was read-only and wouldn't proceed.
Now I'm waiting for my cd image to finish downloading.
That's the first thing I thought of, too.
Dell disagrees with you. Check out their "gamer" line and it all starts with nVidia 6600 cards until you hit the high-end (a $3800 base-price machine).
They bought alienware for a reason.
Yup, I got that far and realized the rest of the article was probably a joke, too.
Currently, all of Apple's Intel boxes are geared toward the low-end desktop or the high-end laptop market. Neither of these markets includes the hard-core gamer.
When the first Quad Intel Mac comes out with 2 Core Duo chips (or whatever is the next best thing) and a high end nVidia graphics card, I'll personally go weak in the knees over it.
And for now, the X1600 scratches my Oblivion itch just fine when I'm on the road away from main gaming rig.
I'll give them $15 if it comes in collector's edition packaging.
I've an Xbox, a PS/2, a Gamecube, a DS, an Xbox360 and a PSP.
I'm apparently loyal only to the economy at large.
Not to mention the use of audio from the broadcast without (I'm assuming) the express written consent of Major League Baseball (I always like that line best when it was spoken by Al Michaels)
There's a ton of copyright violations going on here, but anyone who sues over it will look like a major douchebag.
Think about some of the terms people use to describe playing videogames:
I'm gonna go play xbox (not I'm gonna go play microsoft)
He's playing playstation (not He's playing sony)
Sometimes you'll hear GameCube used like that, but most often you'll hear:
Look at those kids playing Nintendo.
As a company, their entire image is already games, games and more games. "DS"? horrible name. any other marketing department would have built on the GameBoy brand and called it the GameBoy DS (Microsoft would have called it the GameBoy Advance DS for Windows, Upgrade Edition). Hasn't hurt the sales of the thing one bit, though.
I seriously doubt the name will hurt sales. Gameplay and the ability to market the device will be what it lives or dies by.
I believe SuSE supports Bonjour out of the box, but it's been quite awhile since I made that discovery. The backstory is kind of fun, though.
.local as the TLD for the AD domain. Wow, was that a mistake. All the macs on the network needed a user-created patch to enable .local DNS requests to pass through to an actual DNS server. I discovered the SuSE (at least I _think_ it was SuSE) "feature" when I tried to set up a box for play.
We had a less-than-clueful consultancy come in to help us do an Active Directory installation on top of our NT4 domain. They suggested we use
The machine boots into a boot loader that displays either the Apple logo or the Windows logo. You change back and forth between them with the up/down arrow keys. enter selects.
From the sidetrack site:
SideTrack 1.3.1 does not yet support the MacBook Pro introduced in February 2006. A MacBook compatible update is planned and will be released as soon as possible.
I'm anxiously awaiting this.
Ultima V had crappy graphics but it took 200 hours to beat.
// version, too.
OT but.. wha?? for someone who had played them from the beginning, no: V was awesome. And I'm talking about the apple
Well, that could be it... IIRC the apple version of Ultima V looked much better than the PC version.
Even more offtopic... Origin games had a history back then of driving new hardware purchases for me. Ultima VI made me buy a VGA card and monitor. Wing Commander drove me to build my computer from scratch, to save as much money as I could on a 386sx rig. I was so poor, I didn't even buy a computer case for it, instead using a wooden crate someone had shipped a IBM PC to my workplace in. Classy!
It was either Space Quest or one of the Leisure Suit Larry games that made me acquire a used Roland MT-32 unit, though.
I don't think you run an OS under WINE, after all Wine Is Not an Emulator. Instead WINE allows you to run Windows Binaries under another OS, typically Linux.
DarWINE (an OS X port of WINE) is nearing 1.0 status, I believe. With any luck it will allow Windows games to run under OS X at roughly native speeds.
Yeah, Suffering.
When the fastest (and most expensive) laptop in the line barely outperforms the cheapest desktop, that's a real problem, whether individual buyers noticed it or not. And from _my_ mac-loving friends, they noticed it.
The Power6 chip will compete against offerings from IBM rivals such as Intel, Advanced Micro Devices and Sun Microsystems...But the process also tends to make chips run hotter
So these are server chips. The area of Apple's lineup that was suffering the worst was their laptop line. These breakthroughs from IBM don't address that at all.
Oh, well done, sir. Well done.
:-)
If my mod points hadn't run out yesterday, you'd surely be +1 by now
Here's Steve Gibson's reasons for a start.
At one point, 250GB SATA drives could be had from newegg for about $120 each. That's pretty cheap.
I believe Buy.com has the 1TB version (~700GB usuable in a RAID 5 config) for about $700 as well.
I just convinced my boss to buy 2 of these for backups