Because Blizzard views it's job not only as selling a product but as providing a game. Blizzard doesn't think that a secondary (real-money) market in game characters and items is a good thing for the gameplay of WoW. Think about your basic tabletop RPG and wonder if it would really be better if you could by stuff by slipping the GM a fiver.
That's a really inaccurate analogy.
It's more like what would it do to your tabletop / paper and pencil RPG if the players could pay each other in dollars to buy things from the other players.
The GM [WoW/Blizzard] has alrady put the item out there. This is a playerplayer issue, not a playerGM issue.
I actually tested their tool for my previous employer against a library of several hundred pornographic and non-pornographic images. My employer was excited about the opportunity to integrate the functionality into some sort of webfilter.
Except for the fact that the free software community is not a particularly innovative one.
Regardless of how many people trump out the "one click patent" strawman, creating patentable technology isn't trivial or something you can throw brute force of many coders or many at.
"I am trying to build a large home drive array on the cheap. I have 8 Maxtor 250G Hard Drives that I got at Fry's Electronics for $120 apiece. I have an old 500Mhz machine that I can re-purpose to sit in the corner and serve files."
I just setup a very similar system on an Asus A7N8XE Deluxe nForce 2 motherboard. I have 6 200GB PATA IDE hard disks, 2 on the mainboard IDE, and 2 each on Promise Ultra133TX2 IDE cards, 1GB RAM, and a Duron 1800MHz CPU.
The board rocks. Onboard USB2, Firewire, SATA, PATA, Gigabit Ethernet + 100MB Ethernet, and dual banked DDR RAM for extra speed. It runs just fine with a stock kernel and no binary drivers.
Software RAID is fine for personal systems (which mine is). I'd use an Escalade or similar card for a business system. It simply wasn't in the home budget which is prioritized for the wife, 2 year old and 3 month old instead of leet rigs.
Unfortunately I have no idea how hard software RAID is to setup on a Slackware type box. I switched over to Red Hat in the mid 90's when other things were drawing more of my time and interest than maintaining packages. Fedora Core 2 has a point and click RAID creation facility during installation but even as a GUI tool it's real drudge work to setup (unless you just make 1 giant partition)
A few lessons I learned:
*** RUN BADBLOCKS ON YOUR DISKS BEFORE USING ***
I skipped doing this and lost a few hundred gigs of replaceable data that nevertheless i'm not looking forward to replacing. I know backup backup backup. Easier said than done at those volumes. You need to run badblocks in one of the write modes because IDE hard disks will not remap bad sectors unless they're written to first.
Let it run overnight. Before running badblocks one of my drives kept eating my data, and it would not pass a SMART test. I was ready to RMA it before I stumbled on the fix. After running badblocks on all drives once all night long I've been rock steady. I now run SMART tests periodically and use smartd.
Between 2.6.5 (Fedora Core 2 install kernel) and 2.6.8-1 Linux changed the order that the drive devices are enumerated, which caused weird boot problems until I figured out that it was trying to boot drives off my SATA controller that I don't have when it suddenly made the SATA/dev/hda-/dev/hdd instead of/dev/hdm-/dev/hdo.
I chose to use REISERFS. The people at namesys are great, and I don't have to worry about having 964GB of space and no inodes left.
I initially had 4 drives on my Promise card. I was less concerned about speed and more about space since this is a personal server. I had tons of interrupt errors and it turns out the Promise 133TX2 cards can't really handle 4 DMA100 drives, breaking the drives up to multiple cards made a big difference.
Incidentally - I'm running about 3GB of SWAP (I currently have 1GB of RAM - but I saw no performance difference when it had 256MB), with a 4GB root partition, and the rest is under/mnt/data1.
Heat is another HUGE problem when we have this many drives. In my initial setup I figured just having fans was enough. When my internal case temperature hit 160+ degrees I reconsidered. I now run the case open with a fan blowing across it.
I swear I remember programs using it for HTTP access, but I must have been confused.
Thanks for the clarification.
BTW - I do believe the substance of what you said is correct. I suspect that too many developers are too possessive, too parochial and too shortsighted to collaborate and produce a standardized solution.
Instead we end up with 50 partial non compatible implementations of the same thing. I believe this is a major contributing factor that will keep Linux and Unix based systems from regaining a significant hold on the desktop.
Until the developers can learn to subordinate themselves to someone else and contribute to a larger, coherent framework then we're going to end up with a different kind of DLL hell. This is most noticeable to me with the Windows Managers.
Unix people like to say that the diversity of applications is a strength, and to some degree it is, but the same is much less true of the underlying infrastructure.
*really* wish that more people working on protocols would do this - right now, several HTTP libraries are available but developers refuse to settle on one - I hope apr solves this once and for all. I don't want to worry as a developer about the idiosyncracies of apr, libwww, and others when developing a web app.
APR is a platform abstraction library, not a HTTP protocol library. APR is more of answer to Cygwin.
The fact that you got scored interesting shows just how culturally distanced the slashdot crowd is from reality.
GPL isn't against profits. BSD isn't against profits. Many people choose the BSD license because they don't agree fully with the GPL agenda.
People choose the BSD license because they are truly giving the software away without conditions and stipulations. They do understand that, and they don't mind if someone else turns a profit on it.
If you've ever given someone money for a gift, do you complain when they don't spend it back on you???
Sure, zombie relays can be setup on any port, but they can't connect to any mail server directly on any port, they have to relay through Comcast.
This is nothing different than any commercial network does. If you need to send email through your workplace server, then have your IT dept get you a VPN client, that's what I do for my users. Works like a charm.
Score: 4, Interesting Score: 5, Fails to Understand Networking
Except for the fact that I simply don't even remotely see the US expanding the way the Roman empire did upon it's downfall, or the British Empire, or the German 3rd Reich or whatever.
We are certainly touching many places around the globe, but we're still pretty much cemented here between the well defined lines of Canada and Mexico.
Not to say that the US won't have it's fall, just that the comparisons are badly flawed.
Interesting, yet so Cold War oriented. This will stop terrorists, how?
The US Navy does not stop terrorists. Contrary to that current myopic focus, terrorists aren't our only problem, and Russia was never our only problem.
The US Navy shows our flag around the world and provides a projection of power reminding other countries that we are there protecting the SLOC's (Sea Linesof Communication) and our interests.
The easy way to 5, insightful on Slashdot is posting something obvious, before anyone else does it.
To clarify I have funny negatively meta modded down - nothing worse than geek humor.
I quite often DO pick up interesting things from people who post and are highly modded, but you're right most of the highly modded posts are just groupthink.
Slashdot is not just for those who are pretty smart. It's primarily for those who want to bathe in the group meme, patting each other on the back repeating the same tired chestnuts.
I read slashdot with my filters cranked up high only because they do a decent job collecting often interesting news. The comments with exception of a small few are usually pretty worthless retreads.
Slashdot is for the most part, the ultimate pickmeup for the members of the herd when the individual members feel insecure, and need a pickmeup that's only a few clicks away.
If you're going to be successful in life, discipline is one of the more important skills you can develop. You can't learn it, you have to nurture it.
In my experience, pretty average people with good discipline can work wonders. Bright people without discipline don't usually amount to much unless they get lucky as well.
I should have mentioned. I have Cox Cable High Speed Internet (I've had dialup, Roadrunner, Pacbell DSL, IDSL, and Cox Business Service). Cox Cable is by far the best experience I've had. I use a Dlink wireless router and had no real problems with Vonage.
Someone else mentioned and I have to agree that the web console for Vonage is awesome, as is getting your voicemails sent as mp3 to the email address of your choice.
If you DO need to get hold of a living breathing human being at Vonage it's not easy, but by in large I've not had a need to.
Slashdot Mirror
This works too for Windows users...
m /p thalo/us/win/QuickTimeFullInstaller.exe
http://appldnld.m7z.net/qtinstall.info.apple.co
Because Blizzard views it's job not only as selling a product but as providing a game. Blizzard doesn't think that a secondary (real-money) market in game characters and items is a good thing for the gameplay of WoW. Think about your basic tabletop RPG and wonder if it would really be better if you could by stuff by slipping the GM a fiver.
That's a really inaccurate analogy.
It's more like what would it do to your tabletop / paper and pencil RPG if the players could pay each other in dollars to buy things from the other players.
The GM [WoW/Blizzard] has alrady put the item out there. This is a playerplayer issue, not a playerGM issue.
They don't need MySQL to compete with them.
They have Oracle and to some degree MS-SQL as competition.
WOW did it right.
I actually tested their tool for my previous employer against a library of several hundred pornographic and non-pornographic images. My employer was excited about the opportunity to integrate the functionality into some sort of webfilter.
It wasn't remotely accurate.
WOW did it right.
WOW did it right.
Except for the fact that the free software community is not a particularly innovative one.
Regardless of how many people trump out the "one click patent" strawman, creating patentable technology isn't trivial or something you can throw brute force of many coders or many at.
The community needs inspiration first.
"I am trying to build a large home drive array on the cheap. I have 8 Maxtor 250G Hard Drives that I got at Fry's Electronics for $120 apiece. I have an old 500Mhz machine that I can re-purpose to sit in the corner and serve files."
/dev/hda-/dev/hdd instead of /dev/hdm-/dev/hdo.
/mnt/data1.
I just setup a very similar system on an Asus A7N8XE Deluxe nForce 2 motherboard. I have 6 200GB PATA IDE hard disks, 2 on the mainboard IDE, and 2 each on Promise Ultra133TX2 IDE cards, 1GB RAM, and a Duron 1800MHz CPU.
The board rocks. Onboard USB2, Firewire, SATA, PATA, Gigabit Ethernet + 100MB Ethernet, and dual banked DDR RAM for extra speed. It runs just fine with a stock kernel and no binary drivers.
Software RAID is fine for personal systems (which mine is). I'd use an Escalade or similar card for a business system. It simply wasn't in the home budget which is prioritized for the wife, 2 year old and 3 month old instead of leet rigs.
Unfortunately I have no idea how hard software RAID is to setup on a Slackware type box. I switched over to Red Hat in the mid 90's when other things were drawing more of my time and interest than maintaining packages. Fedora Core 2 has a point and click RAID creation facility during installation but even as a GUI tool it's real drudge work to setup (unless you just make 1 giant partition)
A few lessons I learned:
*** RUN BADBLOCKS ON YOUR DISKS BEFORE USING ***
I skipped doing this and lost a few hundred gigs of replaceable data that nevertheless i'm not looking forward to replacing. I know backup backup backup. Easier said than done at those volumes. You need to run badblocks in one of the write modes because IDE hard disks will not remap bad sectors unless they're written to first.
Let it run overnight. Before running badblocks one of my drives kept eating my data, and it would not pass a SMART test. I was ready to RMA it before I stumbled on the fix. After running badblocks on all drives once all night long I've been rock steady. I now run SMART tests periodically and use smartd.
Between 2.6.5 (Fedora Core 2 install kernel) and 2.6.8-1 Linux changed the order that the drive devices are enumerated, which caused weird boot problems until I figured out that it was trying to boot drives off my SATA controller that I don't have when it suddenly made the SATA
I chose to use REISERFS. The people at namesys are great, and I don't have to worry about having 964GB of space and no inodes left.
I initially had 4 drives on my Promise card. I was less concerned about speed and more about space since this is a personal server. I had tons of interrupt errors and it turns out the Promise 133TX2 cards can't really handle 4 DMA100 drives, breaking the drives up to multiple cards made a big difference.
Incidentally - I'm running about 3GB of SWAP (I currently have 1GB of RAM - but I saw no performance difference when it had 256MB), with a 4GB root partition, and the rest is under
Heat is another HUGE problem when we have this many drives. In my initial setup I figured just having fans was enough. When my internal case temperature hit 160+ degrees I reconsidered. I now run the case open with a fan blowing across it.
- Dave
So my advice to you is to install a lot of RAM in this system, whatever the motherboard allows. At least one gigabyte, but preferably two or more.
There's a reason this is posted anonymously. It's absurdly incorrect. Disregard and move on.
Everyone has an opinion.
I don't see why you think you can weigh in on an issue like this. Everyone thinks they are an expert.
Sheesh.
Ah!
I swear I remember programs using it for HTTP access, but I must have been confused.
Thanks for the clarification.
BTW - I do believe the substance of what you said is correct. I suspect that too many developers are too possessive, too parochial and too shortsighted to collaborate and produce a standardized solution.
Instead we end up with 50 partial non compatible implementations of the same thing. I believe this is a major contributing factor that will keep Linux and Unix based systems from regaining a significant hold on the desktop.
Until the developers can learn to subordinate themselves to someone else and contribute to a larger, coherent framework then we're going to end up with a different kind of DLL hell. This is most noticeable to me with the Windows Managers.
Unix people like to say that the diversity of applications is a strength, and to some degree it is, but the same is much less true of the underlying infrastructure.
- Dave
*really* wish that more people working on protocols would do this - right now, several HTTP libraries are available but developers refuse to settle on one - I hope apr solves this once and for all. I don't want to worry as a developer about the idiosyncracies of apr, libwww, and others when developing a web app.
APR is a platform abstraction library, not a HTTP protocol library. APR is more of answer to Cygwin.
- Dave
No, in Soviet Russia, Tokamaks use YOU.
You mean like Area 51?
The fact that you got scored interesting shows just how culturally distanced the slashdot crowd is from reality.
GPL isn't against profits. BSD isn't against profits. Many people choose the BSD license because they don't agree fully with the GPL agenda.
People choose the BSD license because they are truly giving the software away without conditions and stipulations. They do understand that, and they don't mind if someone else turns a profit on it.
If you've ever given someone money for a gift, do you complain when they don't spend it back on you???
Chicken Little.
Sure, zombie relays can be setup on any port, but they can't connect to any mail server directly on any port, they have to relay through Comcast.
This is nothing different than any commercial network does. If you need to send email through your workplace server, then have your IT dept get you a VPN client, that's what I do for my users. Works like a charm.
Score: 4, Interesting
Score: 5, Fails to Understand Networking
200,000 pieces of spam a week here (75 user corporate mail server) to a domain that's about 10 years old.
I did the exact same thing -- post Postfix in front of Exchange and setup filters to block just as you did. Got the exact same results too.
Except for the fact that I simply don't even remotely see the US expanding the way the Roman empire did upon it's downfall, or the British Empire, or the German 3rd Reich or whatever.
We are certainly touching many places around the globe, but we're still pretty much cemented here between the well defined lines of Canada and Mexico.
Not to say that the US won't have it's fall, just that the comparisons are badly flawed.
Interesting, yet so Cold War oriented. This will stop terrorists, how?
The US Navy does not stop terrorists. Contrary to that current myopic focus, terrorists aren't our only problem, and Russia was never our only problem.
The US Navy shows our flag around the world and provides a projection of power reminding other countries that we are there protecting the SLOC's (Sea Linesof Communication) and our interests.
Grow up.
The easy way to 5, insightful on Slashdot is posting something obvious, before anyone else does it. To clarify I have funny negatively meta modded down - nothing worse than geek humor. I quite often DO pick up interesting things from people who post and are highly modded, but you're right most of the highly modded posts are just groupthink.
Slashdot is not just for those who are pretty smart. It's primarily for those who want to bathe in the group meme, patting each other on the back repeating the same tired chestnuts.
I read slashdot with my filters cranked up high only because they do a decent job collecting often interesting news. The comments with exception of a small few are usually pretty worthless retreads.
Slashdot is for the most part, the ultimate pickmeup for the members of the herd when the individual members feel insecure, and need a pickmeup that's only a few clicks away.
...you're undisciplined and a little arrogant.
If you're going to be successful in life, discipline is one of the more important skills you can develop. You can't learn it, you have to nurture it.
In my experience, pretty average people with good discipline can work wonders. Bright people without discipline don't usually amount to much unless they get lucky as well.
I should have mentioned. I have Cox Cable High Speed Internet (I've had dialup, Roadrunner, Pacbell DSL, IDSL, and Cox Business Service). Cox Cable is by far the best experience I've had. I use a Dlink wireless router and had no real problems with Vonage.
Someone else mentioned and I have to agree that the web console for Vonage is awesome, as is getting your voicemails sent as mp3 to the email address of your choice.
If you DO need to get hold of a living breathing human being at Vonage it's not easy, but by in large I've not had a need to.