Is it commission based?
on
Disconnecting
·
· Score: 1
Perhaps the person at the end of the ISP's cancellation phone-line is actually paid the equivalent of a sales-commission for each person they manage to 'persuade' not to cancel?
Yeah, but who in their right mind would hire the average Slashdot poster anyways?;o)
2 Many DJs album
on
Mashed-Up Music
·
· Score: 2, Informative
The article states:-
the album, released as "2 Many D.J.s: As Heard on Radio Soulwax Pt. 2" [...] only able to clear the music on the CD for release in Belgium, Luxembourg and Holland.
You sound like you're getting a little paranoid there!!;o)
I never said anything about IIS, I never even said anything about why eBay had crashed -- I was simply making people aware of the fact that you, my friend, were in error: eBay has crashed.....and more than once.
That aside, IIS is probably ok if you run it on 60 servers -- some of them will be redundant, so there's plenty of room for failure there!..and it would've been planned that way too!;oP
Here's a brief summary of what eBay are currently running....
For the middle-tier and back-end they've got a couple of Sun Starfire E10K servers (with a third on standby for hot-swap fail-over). The back-end db is Oracle, most of the other software is by Veritas. This all uses a 400 disk RAID array (also made by Sun), which is also mirrored in real-time.
They're using seven Sun Enterprise ES450s to provide the iron for searching, and the web front end is served by sixty-or-so Compaq servers.
It seems impressive!....but it's worth noting that some of the above may be a bit out-of-date, as it's based on the info in these articles, which are quite old now:-
My question, does anyone see independent developers emerging for donloadable gaming or will this market be driven by the network operators / handset manufacturers?
My friend's company,:)Smilie, are an already existing independant developer for whom this kind of this is just their cup of tea. They are the kind of people who probably would download such an SDK. Their browser-based games site (warning: this site has Flash on nearly every page, and the games are Java - it's not meant to work in Lynx!;o) is full of the kind of simple games that people still like playing - and it's games of this kind that can easily be ported to devices with a small keypad and a tiny (monochrome) display.
There are many companies like Smilie, with a track record for games development on a variety of different platforms - wireless gaming is simply another development platform, with a different set of specs.
Gaming isn't about fancy hardware and good graphics (although they can help!;). Those who say 'people who want games will buy a PocketPC' (or similar) do make a valid point - but on the other hand, who here has played 'Snake' on a Nokia? Who's played Tetris on a Gameboy? -- neither of these games require powerful hardware, and both can be considered fun and (somewhat) addictive.
Regarding communities: A gaming community can still develop without immersive multiplayer games (in the sense of Q3A for example), it'd simply be a community of people who play the same game(s), and 'hang-out' together - whether in virtual space (eg: in a chat-room, via SMS, on mailing-list, in a forum) or in 'meat space'. SmilieGames for example has a large community - and not a first-person-shoot'er in sight!
Multiplayer gaming (of a few kinds) is still possible on low-bandwidth devices - don't think RocketArena Tournament: think Snake Tournament (or Tetris Tournament) - eg: two players are picked off of a queue, they start their game at the same time (synced by the server), and the final scores are then sent back to the server to decide who wins, (and to enter the global highscore table, etc) - I'm sure you get the idea....
All that said, it might not matter how good or bad the product is if it's marketed well, and backed by the right brand name (or a brand's character - such as that Pikachu thing), a lot of people will probably buy it anyway.
All IMHO anyway - I did develop games myself for a good few years..:o0 (don't anymore though)
It's quite likely that most real world Java
programs won't run on Jalepeno (aka: Jikes RVM) -- according to the Jikes RVM Q&A Overview
[...] The Jikes RVM is inadequate for programmers who need a complete Java platform, since it has incomplete functionality. The Jikes RVM does not support many libraries (e.g., AWT, Swing, J2EE), user-defined class loaders, security manager, bytecode verification, and many other features that need to be present in a production virtual machine.
[...] The Jikes RVM does not provide a complete platform that conforms to the Java Virtual Machine specification.
[...] It was not written to be a complete Java VM.
Whilst it would be possible to bring Jalepeno up to these standards of functionality with a team of open source programmers, in reality it was never designed to be a complete JVM (it's a research 'toy') - the work involved to make these changes would not be trivial.
That said, it is open sourced, and as the old addage goes "where there's a will there's a way".... so perhaps Jalepeno will (eventually) become a full spec JVM?
Reading the company's latest press release it all becomes much clearer:-
... announced that a greatly expanded version of the Cyc® Common Sense Knowledge Base will be made available in open access form under the name OpenCyc. In addition, Cycorp will, for the first time, provide the Cyc Inference Engine and a suite of tools for creating knowledge-based applications. OpenCyc 1.0 will be released on July 1, 2001.
It will be interesting to see exactly what they release in the way of tools to go with their inference engine, and what languages they are written in (or, support interfaces to) - and I am also curious to know what the licensing terms may be.
Ah well, we've got less than two weeks to wait - and then we'll know....
Like you say, this has absolutely nothing to do with the current DNS problems - although it is funny!
Hasn't this kind of DNS tomfoolery been covered here on/. before?...anyway, there was a hoax (or spate of mis-informed news stories, or a hack of somekind - whichever) focusing around this very issue a while back.
Zimmerman states that fixes to PGP 6.5.x will be available today, and that keyservers have been/are being modified to filter bogus ADK packets from public keys.
Another recent game to use voxels to (reasonably) good effect was the BladeRunner game - the scene/BGs were pre-rendered static images (each with a corresponding z-buffer), but the PC/NPC characters were all rendered into this scene in real-time using voxels.
The voxel stuff looked a bit blocky when close-up -- but the game ran very well on a P90 32Mb with no 3d hardware!!!
If I remember correctly, the Voodoo1 did not have hardware accelerated line drawing - it emulated this by using a squashed/deformed triangle for each line, hence the performance hit.
I have implemented a server-side dynamic HTML thingumy in the past which encoded sessionId stuff into the URL, and to allow people to browse off-site and return to the same session we dropped a cookie which also had the sessionId in it.
Our session management code took care of resolving any conflicts between the two sessionIds.
I've not got enough experience of WAP to be able make any useful comparisions yet.
Also, DirectHit is what's powering the beta version of HotBot - which incidently uses the Cyc Engine & KnowledgeBase.
The Cyc project seems very cool - but I've not even seen any of their stuff running yet. (Despite attempting to implement an inference engine myself around the core of their KB!)
Whilst we're on that subject, the core of their KB is available for free download & usage - even in commercial apps - providing you give them the necessary credit in the app (etc). Check out their website for full detalia...
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps the person at the end of the ISP's cancellation phone-line is actually paid the equivalent of a sales-commission for each person they manage to 'persuade' not to cancel?
That's a /really good/ letter!! :)
Yeah, but who in their right mind would hire the average Slashdot poster anyways? ;o)
So, is the article wrong, is this CD available here in the UK? or has it climbed to #4 solely as an import CD? Does anyone know?
If it's available off-the-shelf here in the UK, I might very well go and get myself a copy!
You sound like you're getting a little paranoid there!! ;o)
I never said anything about IIS, I never even said anything about why eBay had crashed -- I was simply making people aware of the fact that you, my friend, were in error: eBay has crashed... ..and more than once.
That aside, IIS is probably ok if you run it on 60 servers -- some of them will be redundant, so there's plenty of room for failure there! ..and it would've been planned that way too! ;oP
Here's a brief summary of what eBay are currently running....
For the middle-tier and back-end they've got a couple of Sun Starfire E10K servers (with a third on standby for hot-swap fail-over). The back-end db is Oracle, most of the other software is by Veritas. This all uses a 400 disk RAID array (also made by Sun), which is also mirrored in real-time.
They're using seven Sun Enterprise ES450s to provide the iron for searching, and the web front end is served by sixty-or-so Compaq servers.
It seems impressive! ....but it's worth noting that some of the above may be a bit out-of-date, as it's based on the info in these articles, which are quite old now:-
Article on Internet Week about eBay's steps to ensure performanceSun's page on what-they-do-for-eBay part way down the page, an article entitled: An Integrated, High Availability Cluster Solution)
eBay has crashed - and more than once. It's cost them a fair amount each time. Here's a couple of links
14hrs and 22hrs in 19992hrs and 5hrs in 2001
This was on the BBC website a short while ago, here are the links:-
Universe in 'endless cycle'
Q&A: The 'cyclic' Universe
Q&A2: The 'cyclic' Universe
..a more interesting headline to see would've been:
"Innsmouth student invents a Cthulhu leash"
(Sorry, perhaps I should've got more sleep last night?)
- Feb 2007: Mozilla reaches version 1.0
(Sorry, I couldn't resist!!Some one showed me this the other day - it's Zork implemented as a '404 not found' page!! :oD
Just had to share it..
My question, does anyone see independent developers emerging for donloadable gaming or will this market be driven by the network operators / handset manufacturers?
My friend's company, :)Smilie, are an already existing independant developer for whom this kind of this is just their cup of tea. They are the kind of people who probably would download such an SDK. Their browser-based games site (warning: this site has Flash on nearly every page, and the games are Java - it's not meant to work in Lynx! ;o) is full of the kind of simple games that people still like playing - and it's games of this kind that can easily be ported to devices with a small keypad and a tiny (monochrome) display.
There are many companies like Smilie, with a track record for games development on a variety of different platforms - wireless gaming is simply another development platform, with a different set of specs.
Gaming isn't about fancy hardware and good graphics (although they can help! ;). Those who say 'people who want games will buy a PocketPC' (or similar) do make a valid point - but on the other hand, who here has played 'Snake' on a Nokia? Who's played Tetris on a Gameboy? -- neither of these games require powerful hardware, and both can be considered fun and (somewhat) addictive.
Regarding communities: A gaming community can still develop without immersive multiplayer games (in the sense of Q3A for example), it'd simply be a community of people who play the same game(s), and 'hang-out' together - whether in virtual space (eg: in a chat-room, via SMS, on mailing-list, in a forum) or in 'meat space'. SmilieGames for example has a large community - and not a first-person-shoot'er in sight!
Multiplayer gaming (of a few kinds) is still possible on low-bandwidth devices - don't think RocketArena Tournament: think Snake Tournament (or Tetris Tournament) - eg: two players are picked off of a queue, they start their game at the same time (synced by the server), and the final scores are then sent back to the server to decide who wins, (and to enter the global highscore table, etc) - I'm sure you get the idea....
All that said, it might not matter how good or bad the product is if it's marketed well, and backed by the right brand name (or a brand's character - such as that Pikachu thing), a lot of people will probably buy it anyway.
All IMHO anyway - I did develop games myself for a good few years.. :o0 (don't anymore though)
Whilst it would be possible to bring Jalepeno up to these standards of functionality with a team of open source programmers, in reality it was never designed to be a complete JVM (it's a research 'toy') - the work involved to make these changes would not be trivial.
That said, it is open sourced, and as the old addage goes "where there's a will there's a way".... so perhaps Jalepeno will (eventually) become a full spec JVM?
A wise man once told me: "You can't retrofit quality to a product"
..and 10+ years of software engineering have shown me that this does indeed appear to be true.
Um.. they are.
I live in the UK, and the story above reads:-
The British Home Secretary is considering compulsory identity cards
I'm not actually frothing at the mouth about it though (well, not quite like you seem to be).
It will be interesting to see exactly what they release in the way of tools to go with their inference engine, and what languages they are written in (or, support interfaces to) - and I am also curious to know what the licensing terms may be.
Ah well, we've got less than two weeks to wait - and then we'll know....
Hasn't this kind of DNS tomfoolery been covered here on /. before? ...anyway, there was a hoax (or spate of mis-informed news stories, or a hack of somekind - whichever) focusing around this very issue a while back.
Those interested can read something about those events here: http://www.terrorists.net/hacked.htm
I have found Steve McConnell's books to be the only Micro$oft book's worth going back to, time & time again, year after year.
HTH,
fRoGG
An Aibo is for Christmas NOT for life!
.
(for those outside UK, this is a play on the tagline from the xmas RSPCA campaign in the UK ;)
Zimmerman states that fixes to PGP 6.5.x will be available today, and that keyservers have been/are being modified to filter bogus ADK packets from public keys.
HTH,
fRoGG
The voxel stuff looked a bit blocky when close-up -- but the game ran very well on a P90 32Mb with no 3d hardware!!!
fRoGG
If I remember correctly, the Voodoo1 did not have hardware accelerated line drawing - it emulated this by using a squashed/deformed triangle for each line, hence the performance hit.
Our session management code took care of resolving any conflicts between the two sessionIds.
I've not got enough experience of WAP to be able make any useful comparisions yet.
HTH,
fRoGG
Also, DirectHit is what's powering the beta version of HotBot - which incidently uses the Cyc Engine & KnowledgeBase.
The Cyc project seems very cool - but I've not even seen any of their stuff running yet. (Despite attempting to implement an inference engine myself around the core of their KB!)
Whilst we're on that subject, the core of their KB is available for free download & usage - even in commercial apps - providing you give them the necessary credit in the app (etc). Check out their website for full detalia...
HTH,
fRoGG