This sounds very unlikely unless you are claiming that every app is already written to take advantage of multithreading. (apart from the trivial speedup gained by letting a few operating system functions run on the 2nd processor)
I don't believe it. And most apps on Linux or solaris don't benifit from a 2nd processor either.
I always wondered why they didn't just put three or four processors on a single chip and have instance multiprocessing. I'm sure they would be able to share some of the components that way and reduce the transistor count below what several separate cpus would costs.
And interprocessor communication and cache coherency control would all be on the same chip and so probably easier than normal multiprocessor design.
There is probably a good reason I don't know about so it's a good thing I don't design cpus for a living.
When they say that they will make this but hope never to turn it on, I can't believe they mean they will put it into the chips but disable it, but that's what it sounds like.
Presumably they mean that they would have the design ready to add to the chips very quickly should it prove commercially necessary.
It's nice to hear they have a backup plan. I've always liked intel chips better than AMD for some reason. (Yes I know I'm probably the only one, and I know there isn't any good reason to so don't flame me for that).
It has always had more depth of play than simple shooters, but now requires a reasonably high end computer to be able to play. I upgraded to a Geforce 3 Ti 200 for it and it made a nice difference to my frame rate.
So there are games out there which have some depth, and are starting to use the graphics capabilites. They'll probably never be as fast or nice looking as a single player shooter, but they are trying to solve other problems.
The only mac address they could see without some kind of intrusive "trick" is the one of the router as that is the only "computer" that is connected to their network.
This is totally wrong.
The mac address is not sent as part of the tcp/ip packets. There might not even be one. tcp/ip works on all kinds of networks, not just ethernet. The ARP protocol is used to map mac addresses to IP addresses but that can't possibly be detected except on the same local network.
The gateway does not use the to map packets back. Generally they either trap outgoing requests on a port and map incoming data to that same port back to the same computer / port, or understand the higher level protocols and fake the data. (Ftp is an example where that is necessary, unless PASV mode is used).
Please try to get your facts right if you are going to post such a statement.
Well there are probably a few people who had enough spare money to buy one when they came out. But most people will need to save up for a few weeks or months to afford one, so I wouldn't expect a sudden huge number.
There are about 40 servers now, and prices vary between them. It would be interesting to see an analysis of this - to see if things end up differently although the game is the same. Of course the ecomony is so differnt from a real one that it probably isn't very useful, but it might be interesting to see.
For example, I play on "Antoinus Bayle". Which is the only server outside of the USA (it's in the UK) and people transferred to it from all of the existing servers. The economy on there is now weird with prices fluctuating dramatically from day to day. I suspect because people have different ideas of what things are worth brought with them from their old server.
An interesting question would be how has the introduction of horses affected the economy.
For those that don't know, the latest upgrade (Shadows of Luclin) introduced horses to the game. You can buy a horse which lets you travel fasters. (And look cool).
The thing is, they are *very* expensive. The cheapest one is about 10000 platium for a slow horse going up to well over 100,000platinum for a fast one.
Even the cheapest one is more than the vast majority of players can afford and the expensive ones only a few people can affort at the moment.
I'd be interested to see how this affects the economy.
Obviously it's a huge money sink, which should reduce the prices of things. (If people have spent all their money, they won't pay so much when they want to buy things)
But also, it means that many people have got all the old junk they had in the bank and started selling it. So does this reduce prices as there are more for sale, and people want whatever they can get, or does it increase prices because people want the money to buy a horse and so are unwilling to part with items for a bargain price.
But the main reason for *deflation* is that fact that items that were rare, and therefore people would pay a premium for become more common over time, and therefore lose their value.
Prices become cheaper over time, not more expensive. Money needs taking out of the system to make prices stay *up* not to reduce them. This works because if people need money more, they are more likely to sell their stuff. Otherwise people don't bother.
First they go offline for days with no information available about why. Then they say they are coming back on line after a "hack" but that they will have to put their prices up. Finally they just appear to just give up and shut down.
In the UK, I think that ADSL is available to around half the population and cable modems to about 30%. In many places the two overlap though as they both tend to be available in big towns, and neither in smaller places.
I have BT Openworld ADSL. It costs £39.99 per month for 512Kbit/s incoming/256Kbit/s outgoing and there are no limits on the amount of data transfered, or on running servers.
Quite a few people seem to complain about it, but in my experience it works well, and is reasonable value if you can get it.
Cable modems cost less (maybe something like £29.99 per month) and have 128K outgoing, and have slightly more restrictive agreements on what you are alowed to use them for (they are not so keep on servers, although I believe NTL do allow you to run them, but reserve the right to tell you to stop).
Hmm, you're right, I missed that when I read it somehow. Although when you compare those prices with the prices for the storage systems on the other web page, i'm a little dubiuous.
Amazingly a slashdot comment which made me suddenly stop and think about things I'd taken for granted in the past. You are right, in this case it *did* work. Doesn't invalidate my original point that it's really easily bypassed, but it looks like this did help to catch some stupid terrorists.
That was my point. Or that not all encryption originates in the USA. Or that you can download many implementations already. Or that you could go to the USA, buy a product with encryption and upload it to a server for download in the rest of the world. Or buy a book on encryption and write your own. It's not exactly a secret how most of it works. Or just use the 128 bit encryption that came with your copy of windows...
The point is that it will make no difference to "evil" people but will annoy the law abiding majority.
Didn't say all my programs are crashing, or ever that they crash often. I said that they are not as reliable as they should be.
There are some great, reliable programs out there too, but I just get the feeling that quality of many of the *applications* is going down recently. And if the applications are not reliable, then it probably doesn't matter too much if the kernel crashes every few months...
Well yes that would be pretty bad. Shame I can't read the article as it's a.ps file which I have no way of reading.
But I can think of a number of ways to help with this.
For example, set up a new set of root name servers. Make sure that the database is duplicated to those machines at more or less the same time as the original machines, and then pursade of of the big providers. AOL or someone to use those as their root name serves instead. They would get better service, having dedicated machines, and it would lessen the load on the existing servers.
Not an ideal solution, but I'm sure it would work to reduce the load for a while.
Kernel is ok, biggest problem is the applications
on
2.4, The Kernel of Pain
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Some people have already mentioned this in passing, but I think its an important point to make.
I've found that the kernel is pretty stable for me. I use my system mostly for code development and as a server for files and web pages.
I find that the kernel itself is pretty stable, although as the article says, it does seem less stable that 2.2 series did. But even so it's not bad for the use I've made of it.
The old style applications are also very good. The command line tools, and the development tools (gcc etc) are all totally solid and are why linux gained it's early reputation for reliability.
*BUT* I find that much _new_ software. Both gnome, kde and others GUI software to be terribly unreliable. Say what you like about microsoft outlook but it rarely just crashes. On the other hand, every "modern" mail program I've used on linux tends to end with a crash eventually. And it's not just mail programs. I find that many of the programs I would use tend to crash quite a lot. Not all the time, but just once is too much.
It's rather sad in my opinion that such a solid base of reliable code is being let down by the stability of some of the more modern software. Frankly it doesn't matter how stable the kernel is if the programs that run on it crash.
This isn't indended to be a complaint, and I realise that before applications can be considered reliable the kernel needs to be, but it does concern me that the overall reliability of linux systems does seem to be going downwards.
But if one server went down wouldn't the requests just go to the other root servers instead? Isn't that how DNS works?
So presumably they've got decent machines and power supplies and connections for each server. And so the chance of one going down is quite low. The chance of enough of them going down at the same time to cause disaster has to be vanishingly small. If it's too big, add a few more servers.
Unless they include the possibility of them being hacked I suppose. But then they could just use several different operating systems and name server software to hugely reduce the chances.
I'm not sure I'm convinced that this is really the reason they won't give any guarantees, it seems like a reasonably safe thing to do to me.
Slashdot Mirror
This sounds very unlikely unless you are claiming that every app is already written to take advantage of multithreading. (apart from the trivial speedup gained by letting a few operating system functions run on the 2nd processor)
I don't believe it. And most apps on Linux or solaris don't benifit from a 2nd processor either.
I always wondered why they didn't just put three or four processors on a single chip and have instance multiprocessing. I'm sure they would be able to share some of the components that way and reduce the transistor count below what several separate cpus would costs.
And interprocessor communication and cache coherency control would all be on the same chip and so probably easier than normal multiprocessor design.
There is probably a good reason I don't know about so it's a good thing I don't design cpus for a living.
When they say that they will make this but hope never to turn it on, I can't believe they mean they will put it into the chips but disable it, but that's what it sounds like.
Presumably they mean that they would have the design ready to add to the chips very quickly should it prove commercially necessary.
It's nice to hear they have a backup plan. I've always liked intel chips better than AMD for some reason. (Yes I know I'm probably the only one, and I know there isn't any good reason to so don't flame me for that).
And also there are games like EverQuest.
It has always had more depth of play than simple shooters, but now requires a reasonably high end computer to be able to play. I upgraded to a Geforce 3 Ti 200 for it and it made a nice difference to my frame rate.
So there are games out there which have some depth, and are starting to use the graphics capabilites. They'll probably never be as fast or nice looking as a single player shooter, but they are trying to solve other problems.
Yes you are pretty much correct.
The only mac address they could see without some kind of intrusive "trick" is the one of the router as that is the only "computer" that is connected to their network.
This is totally wrong.
The mac address is not sent as part of the tcp/ip packets. There might not even be one. tcp/ip works on all kinds of networks, not just ethernet. The ARP protocol is used to map mac addresses to IP addresses but that can't possibly be detected except on the same local network.
The gateway does not use the to map packets back. Generally they either trap outgoing requests on a port and map incoming data to that same port back to the same computer / port, or understand the higher level protocols and fake the data. (Ftp is an example where that is necessary, unless PASV mode is used).
Please try to get your facts right if you are going to post such a statement.
Well there are probably a few people who had enough spare money to buy one when they came out. But most people will need to save up for a few weeks or months to afford one, so I wouldn't expect a sudden huge number.
There are about 40 servers now, and prices vary between them. It would be interesting to see an analysis of this - to see if things end up differently although the game is the same. Of course the ecomony is so differnt from a real one that it probably isn't very useful, but it might be interesting to see.
For example, I play on "Antoinus Bayle". Which is the only server outside of the USA (it's in the UK) and people transferred to it from all of the existing servers. The economy on there is now weird with prices fluctuating dramatically from day to day. I suspect because people have different ideas of what things are worth brought with them from their old server.
An interesting question would be how has the introduction of horses affected the economy.
For those that don't know, the latest upgrade (Shadows of Luclin) introduced horses to the game. You can buy a horse which lets you travel fasters. (And look cool).
The thing is, they are *very* expensive. The cheapest one is about 10000 platium for a slow horse going up to well over 100,000platinum for a fast one.
Even the cheapest one is more than the vast majority of players can afford and the expensive ones only a few people can affort at the moment.
I'd be interested to see how this affects the economy.
Obviously it's a huge money sink, which should reduce the prices of things. (If people have spent all their money, they won't pay so much when they want to buy things)
But also, it means that many people have got all the old junk they had in the bank and started selling it. So does this reduce prices as there are more for sale, and people want whatever they can get, or does it increase prices because people want the money to buy a horse and so are unwilling to part with items for a bargain price.
It's interesting. But I have no answers.
You get money when you kill things, yes.
But the main reason for *deflation* is that fact that items that were rare, and therefore people would pay a premium for become more common over time, and therefore lose their value.
Prices become cheaper over time, not more expensive. Money needs taking out of the system to make prices stay *up* not to reduce them. This works because if people need money more, they are more likely to sell their stuff. Otherwise people don't bother.
So the article says in one place that they wrote their own operating system, and in another that they use linux (or BSD, I forget which).
So which is it?
First they go offline for days with no information available about why. Then they say they are coming back on line after a "hack" but that they will have to put their prices up. Finally they just appear to just give up and shut down.
It all seems very strange to me.
In the UK, I think that ADSL is available to around half the population and cable modems to about 30%. In many places the two overlap though as they both tend to be available in big towns, and neither in smaller places.
I have BT Openworld ADSL. It costs £39.99 per month for 512Kbit/s incoming/256Kbit/s outgoing and there are no limits on the amount of data transfered, or on running servers.
Quite a few people seem to complain about it, but in my experience it works well, and is reasonable value if you can get it.
Cable modems cost less (maybe something like £29.99 per month) and have 128K outgoing, and have slightly more restrictive agreements on what you are alowed to use them for (they are not so keep on servers, although I believe NTL do allow you to run them, but reserve the right to tell you to stop).
Hmm, you're right, I missed that when I read it somehow. Although when you compare those prices with the prices for the storage systems on the other web page, i'm a little dubiuous.
8k for the equipment but how much does a bottle of hydrogen cost? I can't find that information anywhere.
Hmm you are right.
Amazingly a slashdot comment which made me suddenly stop and think about things I'd taken for granted in the past. You are right, in this case it *did* work. Doesn't invalidate my original point that it's really easily bypassed, but it looks like this did help to catch some stupid terrorists.
That was my point. Or that not all encryption originates in the USA. Or that you can download many implementations already. Or that you could go to the USA, buy a product with encryption and upload it to a server for download in the rest of the world. Or buy a book on encryption and write your own. It's not exactly a secret how most of it works. Or just use the 128 bit encryption that came with your copy of windows...
The point is that it will make no difference to "evil" people but will annoy the law abiding majority.
Yeah because prohibiting the export of this will prevent anyone evil from getting hold of it...
Any other everquest players thing of someone else whenever they read the name "Fiorina"?
Just me then...
As with software, they can have whatever policies they like but they still have to give a refund if the product they sell you doesn't work.
Didn't say all my programs are crashing, or ever that they crash often. I said that they are not as reliable as they should be.
There are some great, reliable programs out there too, but I just get the feeling that quality of many of the *applications* is going down recently. And if the applications are not reliable, then it probably doesn't matter too much if the kernel crashes every few months...
Well yes that would be pretty bad. Shame I can't read the article as it's a .ps file which I have no way of reading.
But I can think of a number of ways to help with this.
For example, set up a new set of root name servers. Make sure that the database is duplicated to those machines at more or less the same time as the original machines, and then pursade of of the big providers. AOL or someone to use those as their root name serves instead. They would get better service, having dedicated machines, and it would lessen the load on the existing servers.
Not an ideal solution, but I'm sure it would work to reduce the load for a while.
Some people have already mentioned this in passing, but I think its an important point to make.
I've found that the kernel is pretty stable for me. I use my system mostly for code development and as a server for files and web pages.
I find that the kernel itself is pretty stable, although as the article says, it does seem less stable that 2.2 series did. But even so it's not bad for the use I've made of it.
The old style applications are also very good. The command line tools, and the development tools (gcc etc) are all totally solid and are why linux gained it's early reputation for reliability.
*BUT* I find that much _new_ software. Both gnome, kde and others GUI software to be terribly unreliable. Say what you like about microsoft outlook but it rarely just crashes. On the other hand, every "modern" mail program I've used on linux tends to end with a crash eventually. And it's not just mail programs. I find that many of the programs I would use tend to crash quite a lot. Not all the time, but just once is too much.
It's rather sad in my opinion that such a solid base of reliable code is being let down by the stability of some of the more modern software. Frankly it doesn't matter how stable the kernel is if the programs that run on it crash.
This isn't indended to be a complaint, and I realise that before applications can be considered reliable the kernel needs to be, but it does concern me that the overall reliability of linux systems does seem to be going downwards.
DNS servers cache requests so the vast majority of requests are probably to a few common addresses and never see the root servers.
So the bandwidth is probably not too bad.
But if one server went down wouldn't the requests just go to the other root servers instead? Isn't that how DNS works?
So presumably they've got decent machines and power supplies and connections for each server. And so the chance of one going down is quite low. The chance of enough of them going down at the same time to cause disaster has to be vanishingly small. If it's too big, add a few more servers.
Unless they include the possibility of them being hacked I suppose. But then they could just use several different operating systems and name server software to hugely reduce the chances.
I'm not sure I'm convinced that this is really the reason they won't give any guarantees, it seems like a reasonably safe thing to do to me.