Assuming the retailer takes half, and half of what remains goes to paying the developer, for cheap 2.5 million dollar game to break even it needs to take in 10 million overall, or 5 million in the first two months. 5 million dollars is 100,000 copies during the first two months, assuming $50 per copy. Compared to movie tickets that's somewhat small, but for the pool of gaming that's pretty large.
No, it's about 500,000 copies during the first two months. Most games only make about $10-$15 per copy for the software house, once you roll in distribution and cost of goods.
Very true, just seems like apache/linux is tailored to handle these types of situations easier, well at least differently. It might not serve out pages during a slashdot effect, but the web server would still at least attempt to make connections and serve things out slowly... Their site is completely dead. As if they shut the box off. It responds instantly back that port 80 isn't even open.
Could just be that the Accept backlog is full, so it's not even responding to connection attempts. Or they're treating it as a D.O.S. One way to prevent flood attacks is to respond immediately that the port isn't open...
Port80Software has been slashdotted. As of 23:41 MTN Standardtime Nov 26th, 2003.. their box is completely down.
Wonder what they're running...
Probably not the same software that LinuxWorld was running when they got slashdotted.
Slashdotting a site is not a sign of server 'capability'. It just means that their bandwidth pipe is saturated. That's all. The server could be quite happily just sitting there running Unreal Tournament, and until the traffic died down, it wouldn't be able to honor pretty much any requests.
When directors make Shakespearian films, while they may play around with scenery and do weird things like setting Richard III in 1930's England, or Hamlet in 20th century America, they know enough not to touch the characters or dialog. Tolkien deserves the same sort of respect. Instead Jackson treated it the same way crappy source material from Stephen King or Tom Clancy is treated by directors -- that is as something where fidelity to the source is of no great matter.
You've not seen Scotland, PA, have you?
And even Richard III messed around with dialog - and scene ordering.
Only because the Open Office guys don't seem to understand how DLLs are loaded on Windows, and don't spend the appropriate time rebasing and binding their DLLs.
I'm not a journalist, and I don't have an agenda to push.
No, but your the sources you've quoted so far are journalists with agendas to push. Remember when the Columbia crashed? Same kind of deal. Wait for the official inquiry.
We have several clues. For example, on page 94 of the DOE report it states: "Many malicious code attacks, by their very nature, are unbiased and tend to interfere with operations supported by vulnerable applications. One such incident occurred on January 2003, when the "Slammer" Internet worm took down monitoring computers at FirstEnergy Corporation's idled Davis-Besse nuclear plant. A subsequent report by the North American Electric Reliability Council (NERC) concluded that, although it caused no outages, the infection blocked command that operated other powerutilities."
Now why would they make reference to the "Slammer" worm if we're talking about Unix?
See this link for more clues.
The link you provided is to the same kind of baseless supposition that the poster I responded to made.
And on page 99, they state:
"Although there were a number of worms and
viruses impacting the Internet and Internetconnected systems and networks in North America before and during the outage, the SWG's preliminary analysis provides no indication that worm/virus activity had a significant effect on the power generation and delivery systems. Further SWG analysis will test this finding. SWG analysis to date suggests that failure of a software program-not linked to malicious activity- may have contributed significantly to the power outage of August 14, 2003. Specifically, key personnel may not have been aware of the need to take preventive measures at critical times, because an alarm system was malfunctioning."
They mention the Slammer worm because there was a worm attacking systems attached to the 'net at the time, and they need to rule it out. It's referenced because that specific circumstance caused problems one time previously. That doesn't mean it caused them this time.
Answer: How can you say that? Consider from the ComputerWeek article:
"Carol Murphy, vice president of government affairs at the New York Independent System Operator, acknowledged that Blaster affected the utility but said the problem was handled quickly, with no impact on power restoration operations. Joe Petta, a spokesman for Consolidated Edison Company of New York Inc., said there were "absolutely no computer-related problems of any sort that delayed our restoration effort."
That isn't the utility plant that had the problem though. The blackout was caused by FE, not ConEd.
I am sure the Slashdot community welcomes your references concerning your assersion that the SADA software running the alarm control system was Unix based.
The report clearly states that the GE Harris XA/21 system was the one that failed first. That's running UNIX. Look at their website.
BTW: I'm sure the Slashdot community would welcome you actually using links that refer to the topic at hand, instead of to other power companies and problems.
A close inspection of the time lines presented on pages 22 and 23 of the DOE report reveals that the Emergency Management System alarm functions (SCADA) first fails at 14:14 EDT. These alarm monitoring systems are the computers running on the Windows Servers
And the reference to this in the paper itself is... where precisely?
Your conclusion is completely unsupported by the data in the paper. The paper's only reference to the operating system used in the SCADA system at that plant is to a GE XA/21 system running... UNIX.
Presumably you got all of his information re: the operating systems in use from the Computerworld article. Unfortunately, they make the assumption that the SCADA system is Windows based. In this case, it wasn't. It was entirely UNIX based.
It was a third-party-application issue, not an OS issue. Unix itself is not to blame.
Same thing with the aircraft carrier that was running NT - it was the third party application running on top of the database that was to blame. The OS didn't even crash; the app stopped responding until you changed a field back to a valid number.
Yet you still hear people claiming that Windows took down a Navy boat.
Funny how people start whining when the same tactics they use against others are used against their OS.
http://www.gepower.com/prod_serv/products/scada_ so ftware/en/downloads/xa21_overview.pdf">
Standards Standards benefit the vendor as well as the customer. XA/21? is built on a foundation of industry and de-facto standards: * UNIX(R) * ODBC * POSIX(R) * DNP 3.0 * UCA? * ICCP * MVME * SQL * DXF graphics exchange format * TCP/IP-based Networking * ANSI(R) C, FORTRAN * X Windows Systems * IEC(R) 870-6 TASE.2 * ELCOM 90
Recognizing the stupidest code that you could posibly write and get away with in under 8 seconds is one of the skills that I think a 'top coder' should have.
Sure. If you're writing bash scripts to administer user accounts, I'm sure that's perfectly fine. If you're writing hard realtime code to perform network transmission of data with 10ms latency max. and intelligent data throttling, it's not exactly up to snuff.
Guess. I'll give you a clue: it's quite similar to my handle here.
Clearly you are another clueless droid that thinks he knows what TopCoder is all about. I've learned a lot from the solutions that many of the top TopCoders have put forth to earn them their ratings.
Yes, absolutely. By golly, you're right. That must be why I get paid all that money to develop software. Because I'm yet another clueless droid.
If you want to see an example of my work, check out the.NET framework. Or a number of Sierra products. Or heck, even, if you want, you can read my article here:
NASCAR requires you to drive as fast as you can without regard to safety of others and has no relevance to real world driving situations. Therefore I would never be a NASCAR driver.
Stupid argument. Draw your own conclusions
Note that when you win NASCAR, the trophy you get isn't for "Safest Commuter Driver" either. TopCoder, however, supposedly ranks developers according to their talent and ability. This is not, however, what they are doing. They're ranking them by their ability to come up with quick hacky solutions - not real software engineering.
Maybe it's time to change the way you think about "solid code". What about this definition: 1. Passes all system tests 2. Runs within the required time limits ?
How can you tell how fast the code is going to run until you've written it at least once?
Yes, I know... this isn't meant to be real-world engineering. It's meant to be a coding competition. But that's my point in a nutshell.
When I came across a question asking me to determine how a table of data with three columns was sorted.
The way they wanted you to figure it out was to sort the data in every possible combination of ways, and then compare those combinations with the actual data.
Some of the others were of a similar nature. At which point, after spending the time to come up with an elegant solution and being ranked badly on time, I realized that I could have done it the "easy but completely assininely stupid in a real world scenario" way, and gotten high marks.
At which point, I decided that Top Coder wasn't worth playing with. Too frustrating when you make a living coming up with solid code.
The problem with TopCoder is that it emphasizes hacky brute force solutions over elegant / high performance ones.
Which is all well and good if you need to hack something out real quick, but if you need to get something stable, robust, high performance and high quality, you're talking about a whole different set of skills.
actually NT is partially based off of OS/2 for one and another OS which im too tired to think of(and its an obvious one so i feel stupid right now for not thinking of it right now but anyways).. which was stolen from ibm... its part of the reason ibm was kinda pissed at MS during the OS/2 times, not just because MS was supposed to make everything compatible with ibm but because the code that MS got from ibm to work on getting all software to work with OS/2 was stolen and turned into NT
Wrong.
OS/2's presentation manager layer was written by Microsoft. It also became part of Windows 3.1, and Windows NT.
You did know that OS/2 was a joing MS/IBM project, didn't you?
Slashdot Mirror
... Certified Linux Information Technologists.
Assuming the retailer takes half, and half of what remains goes to paying the developer, for cheap 2.5 million dollar game to break even it needs to take in 10 million overall, or 5 million in the first two months. 5 million dollars is 100,000 copies during the first two months, assuming $50 per copy. Compared to movie tickets that's somewhat small, but for the pool of gaming that's pretty large.
No, it's about 500,000 copies during the first two months. Most games only make about $10-$15 per copy for the software house, once you roll in distribution and cost of goods.
That is of course only revenue. Not profit.
Their wonderful IIS sure didn't stand up well to a Slashdotting.
... say... Linux World.
Remind me again why I don't switch from Apache?
Funny... Apache doesn't seem to stand up too well when Slashdot gets pointed at
Very true, just seems like apache/linux is tailored to handle these types of situations easier, well at least differently. It might not serve out pages during a slashdot effect, but the web server would still at least attempt to make connections and serve things out slowly ... Their site is completely dead. As if they shut the box off. It responds instantly back that port 80 isn't even open.
Could just be that the Accept backlog is full, so it's not even responding to connection attempts. Or they're treating it as a D.O.S. One way to prevent flood attacks is to respond immediately that the port isn't open...
Port80Software has been slashdotted. As of 23:41 MTN Standardtime Nov 26th, 2003.. their box is completely down.
...
Wonder what they're running
Probably not the same software that LinuxWorld was running when they got slashdotted.
Slashdotting a site is not a sign of server 'capability'. It just means that their bandwidth pipe is saturated. That's all. The server could be quite happily just sitting there running Unreal Tournament, and until the traffic died down, it wouldn't be able to honor pretty much any requests.
When directors make Shakespearian films, while they may play around with scenery and do weird things like setting Richard III in 1930's England, or Hamlet in 20th century America, they know enough not to touch the characters or dialog. Tolkien deserves the same sort of respect. Instead Jackson treated it the same way crappy source material from Stephen King or Tom Clancy is treated by directors -- that is as something where fidelity to the source is of no great matter.
You've not seen Scotland, PA, have you?
And even Richard III messed around with dialog - and scene ordering.
Maybe you could give them a hand? It would be greatly appreciated by all.
Why should I help them? It's all there - all they have to do is go up on MSDN and RTFM.
Well open office is dog slow on Windows.
Only because the Open Office guys don't seem to understand how DLLs are loaded on Windows, and don't spend the appropriate time rebasing and binding their DLLs.
I informed him that his OS, office suite, and antivirus would almost double the cost of his computer
Wow... so you can't install OpenOffice or StarOffice on Windows? No wonder they're not gaining much ground on MS Office.
And if you want an excellent cheap AV, look at www.my-etrust.com
I'm not a journalist, and I don't have an agenda to push.
No, but your the sources you've quoted so far are journalists with agendas to push. Remember when the Columbia crashed? Same kind of deal. Wait for the official inquiry.
The alarm control system, on the other hand, is a SCADA system almost certainly running on NT based on outside reports.
I'll wait for the official report from CERT and the ESWG, not rampant speculation from journalists with agendas to push.
Now why would they make reference to the "Slammer" worm if we're talking about Unix?
See this link for more clues.
The link you provided is to the same kind of baseless supposition that the poster I responded to made.
And on page 99, they state:
They mention the Slammer worm because there was a worm attacking systems attached to the 'net at the time, and they need to rule it out. It's referenced because that specific circumstance caused problems one time previously. That doesn't mean it caused them this time.
Answer: How can you say that? Consider from the ComputerWeek article:
"Carol Murphy, vice president of government affairs at the New York Independent System Operator, acknowledged that Blaster affected the utility but said the problem was handled quickly, with no impact on power restoration operations. Joe Petta, a spokesman for Consolidated Edison Company of New York Inc., said there were "absolutely no computer-related problems of any sort that delayed our restoration effort."
That isn't the utility plant that had the problem though. The blackout was caused by FE, not ConEd.
I am sure the Slashdot community welcomes your references concerning your assersion that the SADA software running the alarm control system was Unix based.
The report clearly states that the GE Harris XA/21 system was the one that failed first. That's running UNIX. Look at their website.
BTW: I'm sure the Slashdot community would welcome you actually using links that refer to the topic at hand, instead of to other power companies and problems.
A close inspection of the time lines presented on pages 22 and 23 of the DOE report reveals that the Emergency Management System alarm functions (SCADA) first fails at 14:14 EDT. These alarm monitoring systems are the computers running on the Windows Servers
And the reference to this in the paper itself is... where precisely?
Your conclusion is completely unsupported by the data in the paper. The paper's only reference to the operating system used in the SCADA system at that plant is to a GE XA/21 system running... UNIX.
Presumably you got all of his information re: the operating systems in use from the Computerworld article. Unfortunately, they make the assumption that the SCADA system is Windows based. In this case, it wasn't. It was entirely UNIX based.
It was a third-party-application issue, not an OS issue. Unix itself is not to blame.
Same thing with the aircraft carrier that was running NT - it was the third party application running on top of the database that was to blame. The OS didn't even crash; the app stopped responding until you changed a field back to a valid number.
Yet you still hear people claiming that Windows took down a Navy boat.
Funny how people start whining when the same tactics they use against others are used against their OS.
Product manual for the GE Harris XA/21 Power Management System SCADA unit:
_ so ftware/en/downloads/xa21_overview.pdf">
http://www.gepower.com/prod_serv/products/scada
Standards
Standards benefit the vendor as
well as the customer. XA/21? is
built on a foundation of industry
and de-facto standards:
* UNIX(R) * ODBC
* POSIX(R) * DNP 3.0
* UCA? * ICCP
* MVME * SQL
* DXF graphics exchange format
* TCP/IP-based Networking
* ANSI(R) C, FORTRAN
* X Windows Systems
* IEC(R) 870-6 TASE.2
* ELCOM 90
Correct. I couldn't be bothered after I played with the qualification round and did some of the practice competitions.
Recognizing the stupidest code that you could posibly write and get away with in under 8 seconds is one of the skills that I think a 'top coder' should have.
Sure. If you're writing bash scripts to administer user accounts, I'm sure that's perfectly fine. If you're writing hard realtime code to perform network transmission of data with 10ms latency max. and intelligent data throttling, it's not exactly up to snuff.
What is your TopCoder handle?
.NET framework. Or a number of Sierra products. Or heck, even, if you want, you can read my article here:
Guess. I'll give you a clue: it's quite similar to my handle here.
Clearly you are another clueless droid that thinks he knows what TopCoder is all about. I've learned a lot from the solutions that many of the top TopCoders have put forth to earn them their ratings.
Yes, absolutely. By golly, you're right. That must be why I get paid all that money to develop software. Because I'm yet another clueless droid.
If you want to see an example of my work, check out the
Code Project - Bip Buffer
NASCAR requires you to drive as fast as you can without regard to safety of others and has no relevance to real world driving situations. Therefore I would never be a NASCAR driver.
Stupid argument. Draw your own conclusions
Note that when you win NASCAR, the trophy you get isn't for "Safest Commuter Driver" either. TopCoder, however, supposedly ranks developers according to their talent and ability. This is not, however, what they are doing. They're ranking them by their ability to come up with quick hacky solutions - not real software engineering.
A good coder (both in real life and competitions) is able to estimate this accurately without having to write the program first.
Limits on data sets? Memory of the system it's running on? Architecture of the system it's running on? CPU power?
These can all define the algorithm you choose, because most algorithms can trade space for speed.
Those details are not provided.
Maybe it's time to change the way you think about "solid code". What about this definition:
1. Passes all system tests
2. Runs within the required time limits
?
How can you tell how fast the code is going to run until you've written it at least once?
Yes, I know... this isn't meant to be real-world engineering. It's meant to be a coding competition. But that's my point in a nutshell.
How did you come to this conclusion?
When I came across a question asking me to determine how a table of data with three columns was sorted.
The way they wanted you to figure it out was to sort the data in every possible combination of ways, and then compare those combinations with the actual data.
Some of the others were of a similar nature. At which point, after spending the time to come up with an elegant solution and being ranked badly on time, I realized that I could have done it the "easy but completely assininely stupid in a real world scenario" way, and gotten high marks.
At which point, I decided that Top Coder wasn't worth playing with. Too frustrating when you make a living coming up with solid code.
The problem with TopCoder is that it emphasizes hacky brute force solutions over elegant / high performance ones.
Which is all well and good if you need to hack something out real quick, but if you need to get something stable, robust, high performance and high quality, you're talking about a whole different set of skills.
actually NT is partially based off of OS/2 for one and another OS which im too tired to think of(and its an obvious one so i feel stupid right now for not thinking of it right now but anyways).. which was stolen from ibm... its part of the reason ibm was kinda pissed at MS during the OS/2 times, not just because MS was supposed to make everything compatible with ibm but because the code that MS got from ibm to work on getting all software to work with OS/2 was stolen and turned into NT
Wrong.
OS/2's presentation manager layer was written by Microsoft. It also became part of Windows 3.1, and Windows NT.
You did know that OS/2 was a joing MS/IBM project, didn't you?
How much is the annual market for cheap, no frills text editors, calculators, graphics programs, etc?
Pretty screwed since the OSS/GPL guys started going.