I have never seen a company that believed standardization of language was an important issue and stayed in business longer than 3 years.
That said, you are already probably doing something at where you work. The new guys should conform to what everyone else is doing. If they want to do something different, they should be the ones to provide evidence that the new way will be better.
People have long paid more money to make more long distance calls, that only makes sense. Why not for heavier internet usage? It makes sense that heavier users pay higher fees.
Not necessarily. I'd expect to pay more to deliver two packages than one, but I wouldn't expect to pay more for a garden hose I was planning on using 24/7 than one I was only going to use on weekends.
So is internet connectivity more like a pipe, or like a package delivery service? IMO, it's more like a pipe, and more importantly, it will be more and more pipe like in the future.
As I've said; as others have said. More IP space = more problems. This isn't speculation; it's common sense.
I don't know what tests you've done, but I'd suspect you work for someone who has a vested interest in not seeing RBLs work, because they do, and they're far more reliable than content-based filtering.
SA is not much of a solution without the use of RBLs within it, or any spam filter. However content-based spam filtering is counterproductive. I do not want to have to pay more of my own money for more resources than is necessary to handle legit mail because I need to analyze the contents of spam. RBLs work best; they don't waste system resources and bandwidth. IPv6 will make things a zillion times worse until the authorities take action against the small number of spam gangs that are responsible for about 70% of the spam online.
Lot's of people said rockets work better in air than in a vacuum, that didn't make it so.
I've heard lots of claims about the effectiveness of various RBLs too.
But as I said before, when I actually test them, they're pathetic. Most block less than 10% of the spam, a few got as high as 50%, and even the most aggressive couldn't match greylisting (which blocked 85% when I first tested it, and is currently down to about 80%). The most aggressive ones typically had a false positive rate above 5%, which I personally consider unacceptable, though YMMV. The spam-test I usually perform BTW, is to check every IP that hits one of my spam traps to see which ones are actually being caught. Though I currently get over 100,000 spams a day, I usually only check a small subset of a few thousand each day.
What tests have you performed (or seen the results of) that makes you believe RBLs are effective?
If you know of an RBL that lists better than 80% of spam sources, and has less than a 2% false positive rate, I'd like to know about it.
RBLs do reduce load, unlike content based filtering which increase it. I personally care less about work and more about accuracy, but again, YMMV.
We can't move to IPv6 until the spam problem is solved. With the additional address space that IPv6 offers, spam will increase by a googol if the spam gangs are not stopped. More spam is stopped because of RBLs now than any other method. IPv6 would make that obsolete.
Even assuming that were true, it would just mean that we couldn't move email to IPv6. The amount of spam being sent is unlikely to change because of IPv6. In test after test, I've found RBLs far less effective at stopping spam than spam assassin, grey listing, or address validation, and the false positive rates for RBLs are considerable worse as well. IPv6 would not obsolete blocking by IP, it would simply mean you need to block a larger range of IPs. In fact, it's likely that IPv6 would make RBLs more effective, since it would be much more difficult for spammers to get new address space, as no reasonable case can be made for needing more than the minimum/64 allocation.
Communicating the primary role of the class to the player is also important.
Archetypes also make communicating the primary role of the class to other players easier. When your group is a warrior, archer, and thief, you know you'd be stronger with a priest, witch doctor, or physician. When your group is Bob, Ted, and Alice, you're not sure if you be better with Charlie or Frank. You could figure it out, and some of the play might be in figuring, but generally players don't want to spend their time that way. "40 Healer LFG" is already more than most seem willing to type.
You need plausable denyablity. I.e. the back door has to look like enough like a bug that finding it won't cause people to immediately realize that you're installing back doors intentionally.
Something like a buffer overflow in the TCP stack that only happens with packets of an exact size (off by one in some checking routine.)
I think they have already proven that there is not enough sun energy per square yard of surface area on the earth to meet even a small percentage of our yearly hydrocarbon energy consumption.
Who ever told you that was wrong.
With special care, algae can produce 50 grams of oil per square meter per day. But with more typical care, algae produces about 5 grams of oil per square meter per day. Even using that typical figure, you could still produce the trillion gallons of oil needed annually with an area only slightly larger than the Great Sandy.
In other words, not only is there enough sun light hitting the earth, there's enough sunlight hitting in the earth in places were plants aren't currently growing.
Over 100000 users, it's free, and the users spend an average of 4 hours a day playing.
Am I the only one who's suspicious of these numbers? I know several people who have a free account, and they don't even play 4 hours a week. Perhaps, of the people who played at all last month the average is 4 hours a day, but I'd be skeptical of even that claim.
I wonder if there's any way to determine the numbers independently?
...another example, rare patterns that are placed on the auction house for obscene amounts. How can sellers do this? Easy, the cost to place the auction is based on what the vendor would pay for the item, usually a pittance, and not what the person selling it put it up for. As a result they can create artificially high prices because there isn't a penalty for doing so.
Prices are high because (some) people are willing to pay those prices. Even accepting that prices of rare items are "artificially" high, it doesn't follow that the reason they are is because the auction house doesn't penalize you for selling things at higher than NPC price. It might be the case that people are willing to pay those prices because of the ease with which they can get gold (i.e. by buying it online). IMO it's more likely that the perception of what the price "should" be is wrong.
Setting the in-game listing fee higher wouldn't help. If the penalty for putting an item up for sale in the auction house is too high, then a market for the items will develop outside the auction house. (You can already trade US dollars for items on several web pages.) The designers would need to eliminate direct player-to-player trading too (or charge auction house rates for it), as well as every other method of trading.
And how would this affect the GPS satellites, which are not in geosynchronous orbit?
Oops. A slight modification then, but the basic principle is still the same - launch the marbles in the same orbit as the satelite you want to take out, but rotating the opposite direction. (Six bags of marbles, with one chance every 6 hours of a hit for the current crop of GPS satellites)
Satellites are extremely vulnerable. If any power decided they wanted to shut them down, all they would need to do is launch a ton of marbles in a counter geosynchronous orbit. Give them a little push after launch, and you've got thousands of objects moving at a relative velocity of 13,500 MPH. If they miss on the first pass, then they get another chance every 12 hours, and the field slowly widens. You can't even launch new satellites, because the garbage will stay up for years.
If there ever is a space war, there will be no winners.
Such actions can severely impact the economy of a realm and the overall game enjoyment for all players.
Wow! 0.36% of users were earning enough to severely impact the economy? I've observed market fluctuations of more than 25%, and I never considered it abnormal. I guess those farmers were earning over 50 times the normal rate.
Seriously, I've heard lots of people complain about "farmers", but I think mostly they're confusing them with run of the mill jerks.
Most farmers (toons) play 24/7. Farmers are going to be level 60, and farmers are going to farm valuable stuff. If you see someone camping a level 20 named, they're either a jerk or an idiot, not a farmer.
I know that already. But people still teach lies just as you've pointed out and I did before you. Isn't it better to show it's fake?
As I read your previous post, you state that "people used to believe the world was flat" as if it were a fact. I object to the hidden assertion "people used to believe the world was flat". I assert that (most) people have always believed the world was round.
It's certainly possible to construct a theory about what people used to believe, but you'd need to define terms like "used to" and "people" a lot better if it's going to end up as science classroom example of a wrong theory. It didn't seem to me that that was what you had in mind.
So that means we can't mention people believed the world is flat at one time and their theories behind it?
"people believed the world is flat" is a myth made popular by Washington Irving. The anchient greeks not only thought the world was round, they had really good estimates of it's overall size.
Farmers in online games don't just "give people a chance to experience stuff they normally wouldn't be able to." They wreck the in-game economy and then charge you real money to be able to play the game like you should.
IMO most game economies are "wrecked" in their fundamental design. WoW, for example, forces players to create items to skill up. Players want to skill up quickly, so they are willing to pay for the privilege of making stuff. Thus, two effects; the price of raw materials becomes higher than the price of finished goods, and there is a glut of finished goods making the price even lower. Gold flows in faster than it flows out, thus inflation. Professional farmers might increase the speed with which this happens, but there aren't that many pros, and overall their effect isn't that great. To use the line analogy, since farmers are only 10% of the people in the park, they can't make the lines more than 10% longer.
Do you want to know why that sword hasn't dropped after 100 kills? It's because some jerk item farmer kills 10,000 every single week, and the developers have had to drastically reduce the droprate to prevent the item from being common. You know why you can't afford to buy that pair of boots? Because gold farmers have driven the price of all items way up past what a normal player can afford.
Doubtful. The designers are far more likely to make the sword no-drop/bind on pickup if they even bother to do anything at all.
The closest extrasolar planet is (according to this) Gliese 876. It's situatet 15 lightyears from us which works out to 15years*300000km/s*86400s*364.25days=472068000km. The planetary radius is 0.1 times the solar radius (our sun). Which gives a diameter of (according to wikipedia) 1392000km*0.1=139200km. Thus (according to Python) the angle is; atan(139200km/472068000km)~2.9*10^-4 radians, which is ~0.017 degrees. A supprisingly big number in my opinion.
I think you dropped a 300,000 km/s.
15 years * 300000 km/s * 86400s * 364.25days != 472068000km, it's 141620400000000km (should probably use 365.25 days per year, not 364.25, but that's minor) atan(139200km/141620400000000km) is ~ 0.00000005 degrees according to my calculator, which seems a lot more astronomical.
Maybe Diebold has already been paid for the machines, and there contract idemnifies them from having to return payment if there is a problem. If the state has to pay for a whole new bunch of machines, after already paying for Diebold machines, it could cost the state a lot of money, and so seriously be a threat.
If they're currently running on windows boxes, then it's just a small matter of programming to create a linux version. Lots of programmers would be willing to write one from the ground up (OS and all), for a lot less than a law suit costs.
Athlon 64 consumes about the same amount of power as a Pentium M - even before you add in the chipset consumption.
I'd like to see the tech. specs for that claim. Last I checked, the power consumption of the Pentium M was much lower than the Athlon 64. Even with the extra chips, it's on the order of 30 watts vs. 80 watts, but a "fair" comparison isn't really possible since the M isn't a 64 bit processor.
But when a white LED delivers 15-19 lumens per watt, its about the same as a 100W incandescent and five times worse than a fluorescent.
And when a white LED delivers 86 lumens per watt, it's the same as a fluorescent.
Specifing Seasonic power supplies for all computers is going to do a lot more for most server rooms than redesigning the airflow possible could. And while totally heatless computers isn't possible, computers that don't require special cooling because they generate so little heat or because they can run a lot hotter certainly is.
...what your management was thinking. I mean, I can't imagine a storage requirement that large that you can build in a distributed model that would beat on price per GB an EMC or Hitachi or IBM or whomever SAN solution. The administration and DR costs alone for something like this would be astronomical. There just isn't really a way to do something this big on the cheap. I mean, this is what SANs were developed for in the first place. Its cheaper per GB than distributed local storage ever could be.
Checking prices at outpost.com, a 300 gig SATA drive is $150, a pc that can hold 6 of those drives is $250, and 3, 2 port SATA controller cards is $150 ($50 each). The parts costs is therefore $1,300 per 1.8 terabyte node of networked storage. You could easily get 15 systems assembled and tested for under $25,000, which would be over 25 terabytes, with some redunancy. A comparable EMC system would be about $100,000.
Management is probably thinking that $75,000 is more than enough to make those parts work, and even if it isn't, the potential $3,000,000 in savings for the 1 PB version is. Now they could be wrong, but you're going to need a hell of a lot better argument than "it's really hard to do" or "those EMC guys know what they're doing and we don't" to overcome $3,000,000 in savings.
Slashdot Mirror
First a comment;
I have never seen a company that believed standardization of language was an important issue and stayed in business longer than 3 years.
That said, you are already probably doing something at where you work.
The new guys should conform to what everyone else is doing.
If they want to do something different, they should be the ones to provide evidence that the new way will be better.
Ask them for it.
-- Should you believe authority without question?
Not necessarily.
I'd expect to pay more to deliver two packages than one, but I wouldn't expect to pay more for a garden hose I was planning on using 24/7 than one I was only going to use on weekends.
So is internet connectivity more like a pipe, or like a package delivery service?
IMO, it's more like a pipe, and more importantly, it will be more and more pipe like in the future.
-- Should you believe authority without question
Lot's of people said rockets work better in air than in a vacuum, that didn't make it so.
I've heard lots of claims about the effectiveness of various RBLs too.
But as I said before, when I actually test them, they're pathetic.
Most block less than 10% of the spam, a few got as high as 50%, and even the most aggressive couldn't match greylisting (which blocked 85% when I first tested it, and is currently down to about 80%). The most aggressive ones typically had a false positive rate above 5%, which I personally consider unacceptable, though YMMV.
The spam-test I usually perform BTW, is to check every IP that hits one of my spam traps to see which ones are actually being caught.
Though I currently get over 100,000 spams a day, I usually only check a small subset of a few thousand each day.
What tests have you performed (or seen the results of) that makes you believe RBLs are effective?
If you know of an RBL that lists better than 80% of spam sources, and has less than a 2% false positive rate, I'd like to know about it.
RBLs do reduce load, unlike content based filtering which increase it.
I personally care less about work and more about accuracy, but again, YMMV.
-- Should you believe authority without question?
Last I checked, newspapers don't pay for the quotes they publish either.
Isn't news supposed to be the reporting of facts, not a creative work?
-- Should you believe authority without question?
Archetypes also make communicating the primary role of the class to other players easier.
When your group is a warrior, archer, and thief, you know you'd be stronger with a priest, witch doctor, or physician.
When your group is Bob, Ted, and Alice, you're not sure if you be better with Charlie or Frank.
You could figure it out, and some of the play might be in figuring, but generally players don't want to spend their time that way.
"40 Healer LFG" is already more than most seem willing to type.
-- Should you believe authority without question?
You need plausable denyablity.
I.e. the back door has to look like enough like a bug that finding it won't cause people to immediately realize that you're installing back doors intentionally.
Something like a buffer overflow in the TCP stack that only happens with packets of an exact size (off by one in some checking routine.)
Who ever told you that was wrong.
With special care, algae can produce 50 grams of oil per square meter per day.
But with more typical care, algae produces about 5 grams of oil per square meter per day.
Even using that typical figure, you could still produce the trillion gallons of oil needed annually with an area only slightly larger than the Great Sandy.
In other words, not only is there enough sun light hitting the earth, there's enough sunlight hitting in the earth in places were plants aren't currently growing.
Over 100000 users, it's free, and the users spend an average of 4 hours a day playing.
Am I the only one who's suspicious of these numbers?
I know several people who have a free account, and they don't even play 4 hours a week.
Perhaps, of the people who played at all last month the average is 4 hours a day,
but I'd be skeptical of even that claim.
I wonder if there's any way to determine the numbers independently?
-- Should you believe authority without question?
Could you write off part of the debt each year?
Say, 1 billion each year?
Prices are high because (some) people are willing to pay those prices.
Even accepting that prices of rare items are "artificially" high, it doesn't follow that the reason they are is because the auction house doesn't penalize you for selling things at higher than NPC price. It might be the case that people are willing to pay those prices because of the ease with which they can get gold (i.e. by buying it online). IMO it's more likely that the perception of what the price "should" be is wrong.
Setting the in-game listing fee higher wouldn't help.
If the penalty for putting an item up for sale in the auction house is too high, then a market for the items will develop outside the auction house.
(You can already trade US dollars for items on several web pages.)
The designers would need to eliminate direct player-to-player trading too (or charge auction house rates for it), as well as every other method of trading.
-- Should you believe authority without question?
Oops. A slight modification then, but the basic principle is still the same - launch the marbles in the same orbit as the satelite you want to take out, but rotating the opposite direction.
(Six bags of marbles, with one chance every 6 hours of a hit for the current crop of GPS satellites)
-- Should you believe authority without question?
Satellites are extremely vulnerable.
If any power decided they wanted to shut them down, all they would need to do is launch a ton of marbles in a counter geosynchronous orbit.
Give them a little push after launch, and you've got thousands of objects moving at a relative velocity of 13,500 MPH.
If they miss on the first pass, then they get another chance every 12 hours, and the field slowly widens.
You can't even launch new satellites, because the garbage will stay up for years.
If there ever is a space war, there will be no winners.
-- Should you believe authority without question?
Wow! 0.36% of users were earning enough to severely impact the economy?
I've observed market fluctuations of more than 25%, and I never considered it abnormal.
I guess those farmers were earning over 50 times the normal rate.
Seriously, I've heard lots of people complain about "farmers", but I think mostly
they're confusing them with run of the mill jerks.
Most farmers (toons) play 24/7.
Farmers are going to be level 60, and farmers are going to farm valuable stuff.
If you see someone camping a level 20 named, they're either a jerk or an idiot, not a farmer.
-- Should you trust authority without question?
As I read your previous post, you state that "people used to believe the world was flat" as if it were a fact.
I object to the hidden assertion "people used to believe the world was flat".
I assert that (most) people have always believed the world was round.
It's certainly possible to construct a theory about what people used to believe, but you'd need to define terms like "used to" and "people" a lot better if it's going to end up as science classroom example of a wrong theory.
It didn't seem to me that that was what you had in mind.
"people believed the world is flat" is a myth made popular by Washington Irving.
The anchient greeks not only thought the world was round, they had really good estimates of it's overall size.
No it doesn't.
"begs the question" has more than one meaning.
Get over it.
Maybe when it's sophisticated enough, you don't see it. I.e. they're out there, they just haven't been detected.
Really? I'd like to read that, instead of the fluff piece linked to in this article.
IMO most game economies are "wrecked" in their fundamental design.
WoW, for example, forces players to create items to skill up.
Players want to skill up quickly, so they are willing to pay for the privilege of making stuff.
Thus, two effects; the price of raw materials becomes higher than the price of finished goods, and there is a glut of finished goods making the price even lower.
Gold flows in faster than it flows out, thus inflation.
Professional farmers might increase the speed with which this happens, but there aren't that many pros, and overall their effect isn't that great.
To use the line analogy, since farmers are only 10% of the people in the park, they can't make the lines more than 10% longer.
Doubtful.
The designers are far more likely to make the sword no-drop/bind on pickup if they even bother to do anything at all.
-- Should you believe authority without question?
I think you dropped a 300,000 km/s.
15 years * 300000 km/s * 86400s * 364.25days != 472068000km, it's 141620400000000km
(should probably use 365.25 days per year, not 364.25, but that's minor)
atan(139200km/141620400000000km) is ~ 0.00000005 degrees according to my calculator,
which seems a lot more astronomical.
If they're currently running on windows boxes, then it's just a small matter of programming to create a linux version.
Lots of programmers would be willing to write one from the ground up (OS and all), for a lot less than a law suit costs.
I'd like to see the tech. specs for that claim.
Last I checked, the power consumption of the Pentium M was much lower than the Athlon 64.
Even with the extra chips, it's on the order of 30 watts vs. 80 watts, but a "fair" comparison isn't really possible since the M isn't a 64 bit processor.
-- Should you believe authority without question?
And when a white LED delivers 86 lumens per watt, it's the same as a fluorescent.
Specifing Seasonic power supplies for all computers is going to do a lot more for most server rooms than redesigning the airflow possible could.
And while totally heatless computers isn't possible, computers that don't require special cooling because they generate so little heat or because they can run a lot hotter certainly is.
-- Should you believe authority without question?
Checking prices at outpost.com, a 300 gig SATA drive is $150, a pc that can hold 6 of those drives is $250, and 3, 2 port SATA controller cards is $150 ($50 each).
The parts costs is therefore $1,300 per 1.8 terabyte node of networked storage.
You could easily get 15 systems assembled and tested for under $25,000, which would be over 25 terabytes, with some redunancy.
A comparable EMC system would be about $100,000.
Management is probably thinking that $75,000 is more than enough to make those parts work, and even if it isn't, the potential $3,000,000 in savings for the 1 PB version is.
Now they could be wrong, but you're going to need a hell of a lot better argument than "it's really hard to do" or "those EMC guys know what they're doing and we don't" to overcome $3,000,000 in savings.
-- Should you believe authority without question?